The Whole Truth (21 page)

"If dinosaur DNA can keep in amber for millions of years," Katherine said to Jack Lawrence, "surely my son's DNA can keep in a plastic Baggie for only twenty-two years." At least, she prayed that it could, although anybody who knew anything about DNA could have warned her that she shouldn't absolutely count on it. DNA "keeps" in amber because no oxygen can reach it. Over the years, not realizing it might ruin her chances of ever knowing, Katherine had many times removed the precious lock of soft hair from the plastic and held it, caressed it, pressed it to her cheek, to her lips to kiss it, and she had also handied the tiny tooth, crying over it, remembering the pillow under which it had lain, the dime she had substituted for it, and the excitement of the little boy when he found the shiny treasure left by the tooth fairy while he slept. In so doing, she might have destroyed the DNA, or irretrievably mixed it with her own.

"I'm not hopeful about the tooth and hair DNA," Jack Lawrence admitted to Kim, but not in such direct words to Katherine. He couldn't bring himself to tell her that the artifacts were probably useless by now. It wasn't as if they had been kept in laboratory conditions; hell, back in 1976 when Johnnie disappeared, deoxyribonucleic acid was still a relatively new toy for crime labs. Rapists were languishing in prison who might one day be freed, based on the DNA evidence of their semen. And as far as comparing the DNA of mother and son, Jack wasn't even sure whether the courts could—or would—require Ray to submit to DNA testing, in order to establish his identity, if he refused to cooperate. Did he have a constitutional right to refuse? Back in Kansas, Jack Lawrence set himself the task of calling judges to find out.

DNA testing takes awhile, sometimes weeks, and naturally the family wanted to know sooner than that. They wanted to know immediately. They wanted to know right now. But it seemed nothing, not even Kim's trip to Arlington, could give them irrefutable proof beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Kim Kepler jokes that she puts on all of the weight that her mother takes off. While it's true that thirty-year-old Kim is one inch shorter and thirty pounds heavier than her mother, she looks great. With her wide brown eyes—like her father's, she says—and her dark brown hair curled around her face, she is a dead ringer for the former movie star and U.S. diplomat, Shirley Temple. She also has the same intelligent look in her eyes that Katherine has, and the same merry lift to her frequent smile. There's definitely an intensity about her, too, that reminds the rest of the family of Katherine. Both of them appear nice, even soft, but give them some purpose to hold to—such as doing everything you can to look exactly the same for twenty-two years!—and you soon sense the determination within. "A goer and a doer" is how Kim, known as Kimmie to her family, describes herself, and everyone who knows her seems to agree with that assessment. When Kimmie Kepler's around, things get done.

Kim dresses beautifully—lovely suits and blouses every day to work—and carries herself with a head-high dignity that would put a diplomat to shame. Her emotions, nonetheless, are almost always close to the surface.

"I cry at movies," she says. "But I'll also laugh at any excuse."

Likable is the word to use in summing up Kimmie Kepler's appearance to other people. That, along with sin-cere. And responsible. And brave.

"Oh, I'm just a Girl Scout at heart," she says, with a laugh. 'Just don't ask me to light a fire by rubbing sticks together."

That would seem a highly impractical request to Kim, who always carries a little Swiss Army knife and a packet of matches in her purse, because you never know what you might need or be called upon to use in the campground of life.

And don't ask her to talk about her father, either.

"Dad left," she says succinctly.

They are two little words of one syllable each, spoken with clipped efficiency. Dad left.

Her mother doesn't say much more on the subject, adding only a few extra, careful, one-syllable words. "It was too hard for him," Katherine says, if asked . . . why.

Her other remaining children, Kim's older brother and younger sister, are not so reticent on the subject.

"When Johnnie disappeared, it destroyed our family at the time," says Christie Kepler Warneke, herself now the mother of three. At twenty-five, she's the baby of the Kepler family. "I guess you could say we've rebuilt it, Mom, Kimmie, Cal, and me, but it took a long time and we had to do it without Dad."

So, where is Frederick James Kepler, now sixty-three years old?

Where did he go?

Why did he leave them?"

"I used to fantasize," says Christie, "that Dad took Johnnie. That this was just a custody case, where Mom and Dad couldn't get along and so he left and took one of the boys with him."

For years, little Christie had herself convinced of that, that Johnnie was safe and loved somewhere with Daddy. It didn't keep her from missing her father desperately, but it kept her fear down quite a bit. A psychologist would probably call it a "coping mechanism." And quite an effective one, at that.

"If my brother was with my father, then the world wasn't such a scary place," Christie says, remembering the hopeful, impossible dream of her childhood. "If Dad took him, then the worst that could happen was that he was fine—even if he missed us—and we'd probably get to see them both again someday. And the world wasn't full of evil cruel strangers who could snatch me and take me away forever."

The factual problem with that clever theory, unfortunately, was that her brother disappeared in 1976 and her dad left home in 1979.

To this day, Christie still has a favorite fantasy.

In the current one, the reason Fred Kepler left in 1979 was to spend his life, if need be, searching for his lost son.

"It could be true," she says, defensively, heatedly, although everybody else in her family scoffs at her ideas. "I mean, it could! It's not like Dad ever told us exactly why he left us!"

Her mother's eyes mist over when she hears that. Fred's leaving may not have been accompanied by a torrent of explanatory words or even letters after the fact, but it was not exactly mysterious either. At least, it wasn't a mystery to his wife. She says that Fred withdrew more and more from interactions with her and the children he had left. He refused counseling. He dropped out of their church. Finally, he quit his job and began drinking heavily nearly every day with people Katherine didn't know, in parts of town she'd never been.

Then he asked for a divorce. Nothing else. No division of property, no custody, no visitation rights, nothing but the divorce. She gave it to him without contest. By then, she was fed up with him, he was "more trouble than he was worth," as his remaining son now describes him.

"Dad was a mess after Johnnie left," says Calvin, who goes by Cal. "I guess anybody would be, but he never was a particularly strong character. Kind of a weak man, I guess. Mom has always been our pillar of strength."

He thinks that over, this thirty-four-year-old, handsome man whose little brother was his mirror image. One wonders, seeing Cal now, if—all things being different—the two of them might have grown up to look nearly like twins. Having thought over his last words, which he seems to recognize as a cliche, a superficial response, Cal corrects himself, with a slight air of surprise. "Or, maybe Kimmie was. I don't want to take anything away from Mom, but maybe it was all she could do to keep herself standing. Kim kept the rest of us going, I'd have to say."

Calis known for being plainspoken. "Rude," his youngest sister calls it; "blunt," his other sister says. "Truthful," is what he says he always aims to be. He follows up many of his statements with the phrase "I'd have to say."

Fred Kepler never again surfaced in their lives, not even during all of the publicity attendant to their reunion with John/Ray. Searches were newly made for him. Nothing was found, and nothing in the media brought him forth again.

"He could be dead," his firstborn son says, and then Cal adds firmly, "That's how I think of him. Of both of them. Those people I knew—my little brother and my dad—they're dead. They died a long time ago. I'll never get them back again. I've adjusted. That's how I see it."

And that's why Cal refused to go along with his mother's and his sisters' idea to fly to Bahia Beach to try to get in to see "Raymond Raintree" once he was captured, and in custody again.

"That's not my brother," he says, almost angrily. "I don't want anything to do with that person, and he doesn't have any claims on me. I have to say I'll be ashamed if it turns out we actually share the same blood."

Kim tried to change Cal's mind about it, but their mother spoke up, saying, "Let Cal be, Kim. Let it be."

People, Katherine Kepler believes, have different limits, and we reach those limits at different times from one another. "Maybe it's easier," she says, "for a mother to love all of her children, exactly as they are, than for them to love each other."

They were four siblings, on the eve of possible reunion. And what were they . . . "exactly" ... at that moment? Well, Kim was excited, hopeful, tearful, full of nervous energy to go there and meet him and help him. Christie was apprehensive of the reunion, scared of what she'd heard about her brother, and she was having nightmares. Cal was embarrassed and angry and rejecting. And John was . . . evil. At least, that's how Katherine saw her kids, at that moment. "You have the children you have," she says, simply, "not necessarily the ones you thought you were going to have. You've just got to accept them as they really are, and love them any way you can."

It was a noble aim, born of never-flagging love and hope, and it would prove extremely difficult to achieve, for how can even the most loving, longing mother accept the Devil as her child?

7

Raymond

On my way to the Bahia Beach airport, I stop at the home of Susan and Anthony McCullen. I don't want to forget them or their daughter in my pursuit of this story. Sure, I may be on my way to meet Ray's mother, but -what about Natty's mom? I'm worried about how the McCullens are enduring this second search for her killer.

Tony opens the door to me, and says, "Why the hell didn't she kill him, Marie?"

"It sure would have made things easier," I agree. "How are you, Tony? How's Susan?"

"Come on in." He steps aside so I can enter the foyer of their beautiful, and now tragic home.

"I don't want to bother you, Tony. I just came by to say hello."

"Susan!" He yells toward the back of the house. "It's Marie Lightfoot!"

In a moment, Susan McCullen rushes toward us, wiping her hands on a dish towel. "I'll be so glad when he's dead," are her first words, which are identical to what I've heard the families of other victims say. "It's unbearable to think of him walking around out there like any other person. I can't stand it if I had to think of him . . . alive ... for the rest of my life."

"The only thing that would make me happier," Tony chimes in, "would be to kill him myself." He is dressed in black boxer swimming trunks that hang loosely on his six-foot frame, which has visibly dropped quite a few pounds over the past few harrowing months. It is no longer so easy for people to look at him and think, "ex-fighter." But at the moment he says that, I think that he looks pugilistic right down to the balled fists at his sides. "They oughta give us families the choice. Let us flip the switch. Or drop the pellet."

"Or inject," Susan says fiercely. "I'd do that."

"You would?" I ask her.

Natalie's mother nods her head until her hair bounces. When I saw Susan in the courtroom hallway on the first day of the trial, I thought the bereaved young mother looked as pretty as the beauty queen she used to be. She has blue eyes, like Natalie, and streaked blond over brown hair, cut blunt at the shoulders and worn with bangs just like her daughter. Back then, I thought Susan was already way too thin for good health; since then, grief has wasted her away. Now it appears that the only thing that keeps her standing is fury, and I wonder how long that will last. Until Ray is dead? If I were to make a prediction based on the experience of other families I've known, Susan will feel a little relief at Ray's death, and then she'll collapse.

And only then may come the long, long healing.

"You bet I would," Susan answers me while Tony stands, swaying like an old fighter, exhausted but ready to fight somebody. "In a minute. Let me fill the syringe. Show me the vein to hit." She makes a furious jabbing motion with her right hand, as if poking a needle into Ray Raintree. Her lips thin and tighten into a grimace as she does it.

With a shock, I realize that Susan is not beautiful anymore. Her skin is grayish now, like a cancer victim, and her complexion is blemished. Every day she went to the courthouse her physical appearance seemed to slip a little more, until it was obvious to anyone who was looking at her daily. And everyone was. Not just looking, either, but staring. They were staring discreetly—the kind ones—but all eyes were on "the parents," all the same.

Susan and Tony experience those stares as accusing.

To Susan, those staring eyes say: There she is, the mother who wasn't watching her child. And to Tony, they shout: There he is, the father who didn't lock the back door before he went to bed.

I believe that most of the people who look at Susan and Anthony are feeling horror and sympathy. There they are, the ones whose little girl got killed. Oh, poor things! That's what they say in quiet, sympathetic tones behind the parents' backs. There is a universe of sympathy available to Natalie's parents, but the young couple is having a hard time believing it, or accepting it, because their own sense of guilt is so enormous. They simply can't believe that other people don't hate them as much as they hate themselves.

Tony is constantly in agony, thinking, Why didn't I lock the door!

And Susan's obsession is, I should have known something was wrong, I should have dreamed it, or heard a sound when she went outside, I should have known and gone to check on her! I'm her mother, I should have known!