The Confession (4 page)

The town of Slone, Texas, population forty thousand, once cheered wildly when Donté Drumm roamed the field as a fearless linebacker, but now it nervously awaits his execution.

Donté Drumm was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1980, the third child of Roberta and Riley Drumm. A fourth child arrived four years later, not long after the family moved to Slone, where Riley found a job with a drainage contractor. The family joined the Bethel African Methodist Church and are still active members. Donté was baptized in the church at the age of eight. He attended the public schools in Slone, and by the age of twelve was being noticed as an athlete. With good size and exceptional speed, Donté became a force on the football field, and at the age of fourteen, as a freshman, was starting linebacker for the varsity at Slone High School. He was named all-conference as a sophomore and junior, and had verbally committed to play for North Texas State before a severe ankle injury ended his career during the first quarter of the first game of his senior year. Surgery was successful, but the damage was done. The scholarship offer was withdrawn. He did not finish high school, because he was incarcerated. His father, Riley, died of heart disease in 2002, while Donté was on death row.

When Donté was fifteen years old, he was arrested and charged with assault. It was alleged that he and two black friends beat another black youth behind the gymnasium at the high school. The case was handled through juvenile court. Donté eventually pleaded guilty and was given probation. When he was sixteen, he was arrested for simple possession of marijuana. By then, he was an all-conference linebacker and well-known in town. The charges were later dismissed.

Donté was nineteen years old when he was convicted in 1999 for the abduction, rape, and murder of a high school cheerleader named Nicole Yarber. Drumm and Yarber were seniors at Slone High School. They were friends and had grown up together in Slone, though Nicole, or “Nikki,” as she was often called, lived in the
suburbs while Donté lived in Hazel Park, an older section of town that is primarily black middle-class. Slone is one-third black, and while the schools are integrated, the churches and civic clubs and neighborhoods are not.

Nicole Yarber was born in Slone in 1981, the first and only child of Reeva and Cliff Yarber, who divorced when she was two years old. Reeva remarried, and Nicole was raised by her mother and stepfather, Wallis Pike. Mr. and Mrs. Pike had two additional children. Aside from the divorce, Nicole’s upbringing was typical and unremarkable. She attended public elementary and middle schools and in 1995 enrolled as a freshman at Slone High. (Slone has only one high school. Aside from the usual church schools for kindergartners, the town has no private schools.) Nicole was a B student who seemed to frustrate her teachers with a noted lack of motivation. She should have been an A student, according to several summaries. She was well liked, popular, very social, with no record of bad behavior or trouble with the law. She was an active member of the First Baptist Church of Slone. She enjoyed yoga, water-skiing, and country music. She applied to two colleges: Baylor in Waco and Trinity in San Antonio, Texas.

After the divorce, her father, Cliff Yarber, left Slone and moved to Dallas, where he made a fortune in strip malls. As an absentee father, he apparently tried to compensate through expensive gifts. For her sixteenth birthday, Nicole received a bright red convertible BMW Roadster, undoubtedly the nicest car in the parking lot at Slone High. The gifts were a source of friction between the divorced parents. The stepfather, Wallis Pike, ran a feed store and did well financially, but he couldn’t compete with Cliff Yarber.

In the year or so before her disappearance, Nicole dated a classmate by the name of Joey Gamble, one of the more popular boys in school. Indeed, in the tenth and eleventh grades, Nicole and Joey were voted most popular and posed together for the school yearbook. Joey was one of three captains of the football team. He later played briefly at a junior college. He would become a key witness at the trial of Donté Drumm.

Since her disappearance, and since the subsequent trial, there has been much speculation about the relationship between Nicole Yarber and Donté Drumm. Nothing definite has been learned or confirmed. Donté has always maintained that the two were nothing more than casual acquaintances, just two kids who’d grown up in the same town and were members of a graduating class of over five hundred.
He denied at trial, under oath, and he has denied ever since, that he had a sexual relationship with Nicole. Her friends have always believed this too. Skeptics, however, point out that Donté would be foolish to admit an intimate relationship with a woman he was accused of murdering. Several of his friends allegedly said that the two had just begun an affair when she disappeared. Much speculation centers upon the actions of Joey Gamble. Gamble testified at trial that he saw a green Ford van moving slowly and “suspiciously” through the parking lot where Nicole’s BMW was parked at the time she disappeared. Donté Drumm often drove such a van, one owned by his parents. Gamble’s testimony was attacked at trial and should have been discredited. The theory is that Gamble knew of Nicole’s affair with Donté, and as the odd man out he became so enraged that he helped the police frame their story against Donté Drumm.

Three years after the trial, a voice analysis expert hired by defense lawyers determined that the anonymous man who called Detective Kerber with the tip that Donté was the killer was, in fact, Joey Gamble. Gamble vehemently denies this. If it is true, then Gamble played a significant role in the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of Donté Drumm.

Nicole disappeared on Friday night, December 4, 1998. She had spent the evening with girlfriends at a cinema in the only mall in Slone. After the movie, the girls—four of them—ate pizza at a restaurant that was also in the mall. Entering the restaurant, the girls chatted briefly with two boys, one of whom was Joey Gamble. Over pizza, the girls decided to meet at the home of Ashley Verica to watch late-night television. As the four girls left the restaurant, Nicole excused herself to use the ladies’ room. Her three friends never saw her again. She called her mother and promised to be home by midnight, her curfew. Then she vanished. An hour later, her friends were concerned and were making calls. Two hours later, her red BMW was found where she’d left it in a parking lot at the mall. It was locked. There was no sign of a struggle, no sign of anything wrong, no sign of Nicole. Her family and friends panicked, and the search began.

The police immediately suspected foul play and organized a massive effort to
find Nicole. Thousands volunteered, and through the days and weeks that followed, the city and county were scoured as never before. Nothing was found. Surveillance cameras at the mall were too far away, out of focus, and of no benefit. No one reported seeing Nicole leave the mall and walk to her car. Cliff Yarber offered a reward of $100,000 for information, and when this sum proved ineffective, he raised it to $250,000.

The first break in the case came on December 16, twelve days after her disappearance. Two brothers were fishing on a sandbar in the Red River near a landing known as Rush Point, when one of them stepped on a piece of plastic. It was Nicole’s gym membership card. They poked through the mud and sand and found another card—her student ID issued by Slone High. One of the brothers recognized the name, and they immediately drove to the police station in Slone.

Rush Point is thirty-eight miles due north of the city limits.

The police investigators, led by Detective Drew Kerber, made the decision to sit on the news about the gym membership and ID cards. They reasoned that the better strategy was to find the body first. They conducted an exhaustive, though futile, search of the river for miles east and west of Rush Point. The state police assisted with teams of divers. Nothing else was found. Authorities as far away as a hundred miles downriver were notified and asked to be on the alert.

While the search of the river was under way, Detective Kerber received an anonymous tip implicating Donté Drumm. He wasted little time. Two days later, he and his partner, Detective Jim Morrissey, approached Donté as he was leaving a health club. Several hours later, two other detectives approached a young man named Torrey Pickett, a close friend of Donté’s. Pickett agreed to go to the police station and answer a few questions. He knew nothing about the disappearance of Nicole and was not concerned, though he was nervous about going to the police station.