Flying Shoes (35 page)

In my investigation, I’ve determined that Jeffrey Zepf has been the primary suspect in 125 cases of the sexual molestation of children in several states, of the murder of Steven Rhinehart in 1966, and convicted of the attempted murder of Frederick Brickle in 1967, for which he was incarcerated for only three days.

His lips pressed together grimly, Stith closed the report folder and added, “And of course we will probably never know how many other victims there were, most of whom would not have been attacked if Zepf had been caught and convicted of killing Stevie, or if he’d been appropriately sentenced for his attempt to kill Freddy Brickle.”

“
Suspect
?
Suspect
? Are you fucking kidding me?” Nick was going Sicilian and practically shouting.

“When did
loud
ever help anything,” Mary Byrd said, channeling Charles. But she also wanted to shout something; she couldn’t think what. She looked over at her mother, whose tanned face was pale.

“It’s a good thing Pop died,” their mother said. “If he’d known this creature was out there, and all these . . .
mistakes
had been made, there’s no telling . . .” she trailed off, shaking her head. “Poor Pop.” She began crying.

“Ma,” said Mary Byrd, putting her arm around her mother’s shoulders. But it was true. Pop would have wanted William’s flame thrower, too. And he would have used it on Zepf
and
the police. But not on her—she was free of that now, at least, it suddenly occurred to her.

James rose and walked stiffly to the window, his broad swimmer’s shoulders and back ropey with muscle and tension. “So,
now
game over?” he said quietly. “He’s already in jail.”

“Yes, he’s in jail now,” Stith said. “But that nine-year sentence is nearly over.”

James turned to face him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean: Jeffrey Zepf is eligible for parole.” Stith knocked a fist on his desk. “In April. Two months from now.”

Nick threw his hands in the air. “And you people know all this about him, and someone’s going to
let him out
?”

“It’s hard to believe, but those two Internet convictions are all we’ve got. That’s all that’s ever stuck to him. But
this
is why we’re doing this.
This
is why I’ve been in such a hurry. We have to go forward with this information and try to get a conviction in Stevie’s case. If we do, he will never be released. It may be hard without the physical evidence, which would contain the DNA to make an unquestionable ID on Zepf, but I’m committed, and absolutely determined, to keep this guy locked up. At the very least. And to give y’all some closure.”

“What do you mean, ‘without the physical evidence’?” James said. “What about the towel and the . . . other stuff?”

Stith’s face sagged, and he shook his head. “The physical evidence—the towel, Stevie’s clothes and fingernail scrapings, the knife from the Brickle arrest, Zepf’s polygraph results—it’s all missing.”

“How could that happen? How could that happen?” Nick said, dazed.

“No wonder,” Mary Byrd’s mother said. “We . . . I should have paid more attention. I should have been asking more questions. I was just . . . I don’t know.” She dropped her head and cried again.

Oh my
god
, can this get worse? Mary Byrd reached for her mother’s hand. “Mom, don’t.” She selfishly wanted to know if the diary was gone, too.
It’s not about me.

“You mean the evidence and the polygraph results were lost, or they were ‘disappeared’?” asked James.

“At this point, I don’t know. That part of it will be an ongoing investigation, and is one reason I needed to know what, exactly, you all were shown, or told, in nineteen sixty-six. If the evidence was tampered with, or if the judge was influenced in some way in the Brickle case, or if any department guys or Chuck Richards were involved in a cover-up of the lost evidence, I’m going to get to the bottom of it.” Stith stepped back from his desk and opened the middle drawer. “But we do have this.” He took out a Baggie with a small object and held it out in his long, pale palm. A small green and yellow metal dump truck worn to the metal. “Do you recognize it?”

Mary Byrd closed her eyes, feeling tears. “That . . . that was Stevie’s Tonka truck. Or he had one like that. Same colors, and beaten up like that.”

“Definitely,” Nick said. “‘Pickin’ up dirt . . . Brrrrooom . . . dump truck.’ That’s what he’d say. He played with that thing all the time.”

Their mother said, “Yes. That’s his truck. I don’t know how many times I had to take it out of his pants pocket when I did his laundry.”

“Even I remember that truck,” James said, surprised. “Sometimes he let me play with it.” He smiled a sad little smile.

“So you feel sure it was his?”

Mary Byrd reached for it and he allowed her to take it. “Please don’t take it out of the bag.”

She thought of William, who always seemed to have a few of his tiny war machines in his backpack, or parked neatly in front of his plate at meal times. “Yeah,” she said softly. “It was like a good luck charm. He loved to load it up and make it dump stuff.” Like English peas he didn’t want to eat—William had tricks for that, too—or roly-polies, or Japanese beetles her mother paid him a penny apiece to pick off her roses. Pumpkin seeds. Her eyes and nose watered and she sniffed hard.

“It was evidence from Freddy Brickle’s case,” Stith said. “Those clowns hadn’t even inventoried it or cross-indexed it with Stevie’s file. It wasn’t Freddy’s, so I had a hunch that it must have been Stevie’s. Zepf kept it as . . . a kind of trophy, I guess. But if you’re sure it was Stevie’s it’s going to be a very important piece of evidence.”

She squeezed the little truck in the bag with her sweaty palm and moved its tiny dumper thing.

“I . . . I actually have a picture of him with it. And some of his other trucks,” she said. “I was looking at it the other day.”

Stith’s eyebrows rose. “I really need to have that photo, if you’ll send it as soon as you can.”

“Okay.” Mary Byrd handed back the bag. She wondered if they’d ever see it again, or if they wanted to.

James, at the window with his back turned, gave the hanging spider a push. “What is it that you think might have happened to the other stuff?”

“There are a number of possibilities. One is that the evidence was lost innocently enough, however ineptly, by Detective Danvers, who transferred it from the RPD to the FBI, which at that time made its labs and forensic experts available to small police departments. You know—left in a box in someone’s trunk, or in a locker and accidentally thrown away. The records here show the evidence being signed out and signed back in to the department, but they might have been altered. Fahey, the lead detective, knew the evidence for Stevie’s case was lost—or was ‘disappeared,’ as you say—but wanted to cover up that fact, therefore disallowing comparisons between Stevie’s fingernails and Zepf’s hair and blood when he assaulted Brickle. That’s why Fahey had the bandana discarded. And there’s the possibility that there was something even more . . . criminal going on.”

James gave the spider a harder push—a punch. Stith looked over but went on.

“Possibly one or more of the detectives involved were . . .
encouraged
in some way to lose the evidence, although we have no proof to that effect. Zepf’s father was a wealthy developer and his uncle was a county executive. Both were large contributors to the local Republican Party. Judge Fairborn was appointed by Nixon. Chuck Richards, Zepf’s ‘best friend,’ who was Zepf’s defense attorney in the Brickle trial, later received an appointment as a U.S. District Court judge, also from the Nixon administration. It’s also possible that Richards and Zepf had a sexual relationship, which of course Richards, who was married with a family, would have made every effort to conceal. Some or all of these things could account for what did, or did not, happen, including why no one in the Zepf family was ever questioned in either of the two boys’ cases, and why your family and the public were never made aware of Zepf. Why, when Stevie’s case was reopened when Zepf was a suspect in Illinois, these . . . injustices weren’t discovered, and why no reporters were made aware of these events, particularly Zepf’s trial for the attempted murder of Freddy, and why the prosecutor put up with being prohibited from connecting Freddy’s case to Stevie’s. It’s also true, but no excuse, that by 1987, everyone around here was . . . preoccupied with the Southside Strangler. There’s some stuff we’ll probably never be able to know. I, speaking personally and as a member of the department, could not be sorrier. I hope that eventually an official apology will be made to all of you, and to the public, for what’s been a tragic failure to protect this community, and other communities, from crimes like this, for what that’s worth. Although those other communities—in California and Illinois—need to face up to their own failures as well.”

“Eventually?” Nick said. “There’ll be an apology in another thirty years maybe?”

“We need a conviction first, right now,” Stith said. “And look, in no way do I want to be defending the officers involved, but I’ve got to say that at the time, in 1966, the RPD was a podunk operation. These guys didn’t have adequate training in homicides and forensic science. Most small police departments still don’t have access to proper training and facilities. This is a personal soapbox of mine. We’ve come a long way. Now there’s the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and John Jay College’s Crime Scene Academy.”

James interrupted, “And that helps us how?”

Stith was unflustered. “Unfortunately, these crimes will not stop happening, but the more we know, the more we can prevent them.”

“Maybe even in this century,” Nick said. He cleared his throat, and Mary Byrd hoped he wouldn’t spit.

Their mother picked up her crochet bag and started fiddling in her purse for her keys. She was done. They all were.

Stith wasn’t, and preached on. “Things move too slowly because the legal system is overwhelmed. There’s a big difference between a child taken by a parent and one snatched by a predator, and there’s a difference between real predators and a nineteen-year-old kid who has sex with a sixteen-year-old girl, as Mr. D’Abruzzi pointed out, and the law needs to catch up. I say this somewhat lamely because I know that nothing can bring Stevie back. I am so, so sorry for what you’ve been through. I have children. If we can keep Zepf behind bars, and I think we can, maybe that will be some comfort to you.” Stith looked exhausted and genuinely sad.

Except for their mother rattling her keys, they sat limply while Stith briefly laid out the plan to retry Zepf. He asked them to be patient and wait a little longer, saying again that he hoped they would resist talking about it. They had his promise that he was doing everything he could to stop Zepf’s release, but if he failed, they could—should—go public with their story in any way they wished. It was their story, after all.

“One more question,” Nick said, standing to go. “Can this guy still get the death penalty?”

“It’s not likely,” Stith said. “But it’s a possibility you might want to think about.” He reached over and snapped off the recorder.

They left the room wasted and sad, their tough mother forging ahead, Stith following them. Like a beaten dog, thought Mary Byrd. He rushed ahead of her to speak to her brothers and mother. She lagged behind, struggling with her coat.

Stith waited for her to catch up. “Can I talk to you a sec?”

“Okay,” she said doubtfully. What fresh hell?

He smiled gratefully and held the door open. “I could use a smoke.”

Outside he said, “Wow! Pure, frigid oxygen!”

“Let’s ruin it. What I
really
need is a drink,” Mary Byrd said, taking the Marlboro and the light he offered. She sucked in the soothing smoke. “Have y’all ever thought of putting in a bar? It might help with confessions. Let a detective pose as the bartender.”

Stith looked surprised. “I’d expect you to be a little more . . . circumspect, at the moment.”

“What should we be doing? Ululating? Tearing out our hair and beating our breasts?”

“I’m sorry you had to come so far to do this, but your mother insisted you’d want to.”

“My mom is great at deciding how I feel,” Mary Byrd said.

Stith smiled, but said apologetically, “This had to be . . . grim.”

“It couldn’t have been very fun for you, either. And I’m guessing it’s going to get worse when everything is out there.”

“It’s what I was hired to do.” Stith shrugged. “There’s some satisfaction in it.”

“How do you
do
this stuff, day in and day out?”

“Somebody has to,” he shrugged again. “Maybe it makes me a better person, if that makes sense. Like, if you can understand—or I guess
confront
is a better word—the worst in people, you’re better able to appreciate the best? I admit there’s a rush when you solve a case. I’m no superhero, but I’d
like
to be one.” He grinned. His teeth looked perfect and white; weird for a smoker.

“I sometimes think about how . . . lucky we are, because at least Stevie was found the next day. I can’t imagine how the families whose children are never found get through life.”