Hard Case Crime: Witness To Myself (21 page)

And hovering over everything, as if she were a solid presence in the car, were so many thoughts of Susheela.

Dawn was breaking, and he stopped once for gas and then stopped again, later, to ask something of two people he saw walking. And not long afterward he was parked in front of a house he’d been directed to. He stared at it from the car, scared again — the fear had receded for a long while as he drove. Fighting for calm, he got out and walked up the few steps and rang the bell.

He had to ring twice before someone came to the door.

He said, “Mr. McKinney?”

“Yes.”

He said, “Mr. McKinney? My name is Alan Benning. I’m Alan Benning, and you’ve been looking for me.”

McKinney looked puzzled.

“I don’t understand. Who are you? What do you want?”

“Let me talk to you. I killed someone. I killed Susheela Kapasi.”

Only a slight lifting of his heavy eyebrows revealed anything of what McKinney felt. He stepped back, and after Alan walked in and he’d closed the door, he gestured him to a chair, as if Alan were any guest in his home. Alan was still nearly frozen with fear but he felt it easing a little. The man looked almost gentle, dressed in rumpled trousers, a sweater and slippers. The living room had things of the sea on the walls, a fisherman’s net, a large glossy fish, a painting of two geese flying over water.

On one of the lamp tables was a portrait of his daughter.

McKinney asked him his name again, where he lived, what was his work, did he have a lawyer.

“No, and I don’t want one. I just want to plead guilty.”

“You still have to have a lawyer.”

“Then I’ll get one.”

“By the way, are you hungry, thirsty?”

“I could use a drink of water. Thank you.”

McKinney left, and soon afterward his wife came into the room, in a bathrobe, and nodded at Alan. It was a few minutes before he was back, with a glass of water. After Alan finished it, he noticed that she was gone.

“So tell me more about yourself,” McKinney was saying. “Are you married?”

“No, I’m not.”

It continued like this, as if it were any conversation between friends, until the doorbell rang. McKinney stood up and went over to open the door. And the whole room seemed to change as South Minton’s captain of detectives and two uniformed officers strode in.

A minute later Alan’s hands were behind his back in handcuffs. And now hard fingers were gripping his forearm, leading him down the front steps and over to a police car.

And already alerted and waiting outside the police station was the first of what was to be an endless horde of TV cameramen and reporters. A reporter, a young man, walked along near him, calling, “Did you kill her? Did you kill her?”

The captain, a husky man with a buzz haircut, seemed a little startled. He had read Alan his Miranda rights and Alan had answered, “It doesn’t matter, I don’t want a lawyer, I just want to tell it.”

The officer said, “I don’t have to say this, but are you sure?”

He nodded. They were in a small room in the police station, Alan and the captain seated at a table, a uniformed officer standing by the wall. Alan’s heart was racing. Gone was the near calm he had begun to feel at McKinney’s. In fact he’d half expected him to be here too, though he knew McKinney wasn’t on the police force.

The captain, whose name was Johnson, said, “We’d like to tape record this, okay?”

“All right.” His voice sounded hollow to him, as if his ears were stuffed.

“All right, now tell me.”

All at once Alan was confused about where to begin. He put his fingers in his hair as if he could feel coherent thoughts. “I was on this path at the beach and I saw her and she’d lost her kite.”

The captain looked at him as his voice trailed off. He said, “Why don’t you tell me what you were doing there in the first place?”

Alan had to go back in his mind, and finally he began to tell him about his mother and father and the motor home, and then his going to the beach with them and then jogging by himself in the woods. And after he told him that he’d touched her on the outside of her bathing suit, the captain said, “You’re not telling me everything. You touched her underneath her suit too, didn’t you?”

Alan rubbed his forehead, surprised he knew, and then nodded. It was as though touching her there was the thing he was most ashamed to talk about.

“Are you saying you did?”

“Yes.”

After Alan told him everything he could remember, the captain said, “Why didn’t you give yourself up long before this?”

“I really kidded myself into thinking maybe I hadn’t killed her.” Alan was looking at him earnestly.

“How could you think that? Her neck was almost broken.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Did you want to rape her?”

“No! No! I don’t know what happened, I just wanted to touch her.”

“You didn’t stop because you heard her father calling her?”

“No. I never heard him.”

“Come on, the truth.” It was the first time the officer’s voice became stern.

“It is the truth. I swear.”

“And you killed her so she couldn’t talk?”

“I just couldn’t stand everyone knowing.”

“You could have just run away. You say you were parked a half-mile away. Your parents wouldn’t have known.”

“I know. I didn’t think. I keep telling myself that over and over again.”

“Why did you give yourself up now?”

“It was either that or kill myself. I didn’t want to die.”

The officer looked at him quizzically. Alan could almost read his thinking: But you were able to kill her, weren’t you? Instead he said, “Let me ask you this. Why did you go to McKinney?”

For a few moments he couldn’t think why this would matter. Then he remembered the newspaper story denying there was any friction between the two men.

He said, “I don’t know.” But actually he didn’t want to tell the truth. It would have sounded phony, and anyway he wasn’t sure how to say it. That it had something to do with the old officer having lost his daughter, that it was as though he owed him something.

In any event, Alan was never to talk with McKinney again.

In a cell for the first time, he had to struggle against the feeling that not enough air was coming through the bars. He sat on the edge of the hard cot, trying to calm himself and to concentrate only on breathing. It was the police station lockup, and no one was in the two other cells. In the silence he was thinking of how news of his arrest must be spreading; he even began picturing a mob gathered on the sidewalk outside. But never for a second did he regret confessing or not waiting until he had a lawyer.

I was the first person from his old life to see him. He looked at me dazedly when he was brought into the room where they let me meet him. He turned his head away quickly, and I said, “Alan, don’t,” and he looked back, tears in his eyes. I couldn’t help it, but though I was still in shock and dismay at what he’d done, I began to cry too, not much but enough that I had to bring my wrist to my eyes to wipe away tears.

The first thing he said to me was he was sorry about pulling a gun on me.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “I don’t.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“I said don’t think about it. I mean it. I understand. I came on so strong.”

“Tell me how my mother is.”

“She’s okay. My mother went to see her. She’s the same.”

“She can’t know, can she?”

“No, not at all. Don’t worry about that. Look, I hear you don’t have a lawyer.”

“No, and I don’t want one.”

“Alan, you’ve got to have one.”

“I really don’t want one.”

He never asked me about anyone other than his mother, or if I’d talked with Anna, which I hadn’t, or if I had been in touch with anyone else he knew. It was as if that life was already over for him. I’d been told we couldn’t touch each other, so I don’t know if he would have let me embrace him. I know he didn’t try to embrace me.

Walking out of the room, my legs were shaky. I would have gladly leaned against a wall in the corridor, but I didn’t, just kept going till I was outside.

He never changed his mind about not wanting a lawyer, but I spoke with a member of his old law firm and he got one on the Cape to represent him. She was young, bright and tough — especially with Alan, when he told her he just wanted to plead guilty, didn’t even want her to try for bail. But since that meant life without parole for first-degree murder, she hoped to convince him to go to trial.

Much was made in the news about his being a vice president of the Foundation, that he had saved a life, that he’d given himself up. I was interviewed several times by reporters, and I spoke of his character, of growing up with him, everything I knew of the person within him. There were also interviews with Elsa Tomlinson, who spoke kindly of him, and with Gregg Osterly and a few other friends, who had only good things to say. The reporters heard of Anna, but they couldn’t reach her: She had left her job, and her family claimed not to know where she was.

Roy Bruster, too, had disappeared: He moved out of the house he’d been renting and I was never able to find him. From what I heard, he did indeed have a hard life. His father took off before Bruster was born, and his mother died when he was about four. He lived in a series of foster homes, and went for a long while to a school for disturbed children. He managed to go to college and get married, but though he taught high school math for several years, he was let go for some unrevealed reason and then held a scattering of jobs, mostly as a salesman. Then, just a year before his suicide attempt, his wife took off with their two children. And then there was the diabetes.

Alan received a stream of letters of support, of prayers for him, and a few that came close to marriage proposals. But there were many more of another type.

There was story after story about Susheela, about the brilliant student and kind and lovely young person she’d been. Her murder was blamed for the deaths of her parents: Her mother’s heart attack, of course, and it was even suggested that her father’s automobile accident might have been suicide. And something came out that the police had never revealed before, that when they’d examined the body they’d found a fresh, long scratch on her groin, which seemed to confirm that Alan had intended to rape her before either being interrupted or, if you were disposed to be charitable to him, changing his mind.

And there were other things. One was his “temper” — the fight he’d had with the fellow in the parking lot, how he was “forever” threatening his next-door neighbor for playing music above a “whisper.” A few of his neighbors and colleagues, sudden stars on TV, even spoke of things he’d never thought about himself, such as his being “aloof,” “argumentative.” Why, even his working for the Foundation came under some attack, like he’d stained it, like he was a hypocrite, had used it to try to cleanse himself. And then there was the interview with his old friend from childhood, Will Jansen.

Alan remembered him as a fairly tall, skinny kid like himself, but now in his early thirties he turned out to be only five-seven and heavy and almost completely bald.

Will told of so many good things, about them going to the woods and the creek together, building model airplanes, doing homework together, never having a quarrel. But he also told of them “kidnapping” that little boy and sending him for “pigeon milk.”

“He talked me into doing it,” Will said, “and I did. But I never felt the same about him after that.”

Many if not most of you know something of what happened afterward. But certainly not all of it — far from all of it. One of the things you may know is that, since Alan was fifteen at the time of the crime, his lawyer tried but failed to have the case handled in juvenile court. At his trial he was found guilty of second-degree murder, which carried a life sentence but he would be eligible for parole after fifteen years.

Anna came to see him in prison as soon as she was allowed to after he was sentenced. They looked at each other through the glass that separated them, phones to their ears but not speaking right away. She was wearing, as he was to tell me, a light blue raincoat, and her blond hair had a faint glisten of rain to it. Her face, always pale, was never more so. Her eyes immediately filled up, and his started to also.

“How are you doing?” she managed to say.

“Okay. Just fine. I’m doing fine.”

“Are you, are you telling me the truth?”

He was sure she was referring to the hard time that sex offenders, particularly the murderers of children, go through in prison. “Yes, I’m telling the truth.”

“Do they let you see any counselors?”

“Not yet, but I think they may.”

“Do you go to church services?”

“No.” But he would soon, off and on. He then said, “Anna, this is a long trip for you.”

“I don’t mind. Alan, I love you.”

“Oh Anna.” He felt himself tearing up again. He wanted to cry out I love you too. But, he thought, how can I? How dare I?

“You try to take care of yourself,” she said. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you. I will.”

She stood up, held up her palm and smiled. And then left.

He wrote to her soon after the visit, telling her in the most painful letter he’d ever written to go on with her life, that he had too many years here ahead of him. Perhaps the letter did it. Perhaps it was pressure from her family. Perhaps she found someone else. Perhaps all of it. Anyway, he never saw or heard from her again.

I know all this because years later, after a lot of red tape was cut, I was able to meet with Alan enough times for him to tell this story. It was his idea, and once he started it just about poured out of him, as if he’d held it in too long. To be honest I must admit that I often wondered, listening to him, how much of what he was saying was self-serving, until one day he said, leaning forward, his hands clenched on his knees, that no one but himself was to blame for him committing murder.

“A lot of guys have parents who’re uptight about sex,” he said to me, “who never talk to them about it, but they don’t go on to do what I did.”