Wasted (3 page)

Today, she didn’t.

With that one move away, Anita Morales knew something was wrong. And she suspected Kim LeBlanc.

Kim knows how much Regina means to me.
That was all Anita could think.

 

 

LeBlanc got up and left. She went to the Dairy Queen to get something to eat. Then she went back to Bastrop County and her boyfriend, Justin Thomas. She wasn’t worried one bit. Anita had been nice and understanding.

That’s what she told Justin.

“Oh, my, God, she’s in jail.”

It was early in the morning on Wednesday, July 5. Jeremy Barnes was on his way to work when he dropped by Regina Hartwell’s apartment to feed Spirit. He glanced over at her caller ID and noticed several new calls on it, two of them from the Bastrop County Sheriff’s Department. That was when he gasped, “Oh, my, God, she’s in jail.” Then he sighed with relief. “She’s alive.”

His heart pounded as he quickly picked up Hartwell’s phone and called Bastrop County. “I know this is going to sound really stupid.” He tried to joke away his anxiousness. “But I have a friend who may be in jail, and somebody has called her home, twice. Her name is Regina Hartwell. I want to find out if she’s in jail, and how much it’s going to take to get her out of jail.”

Barnes was near breathlessness as he was placed on hold. He started to shake as he was transferred two, three times. Finally, investigator Don Nelson got on the line. “Who are you?” said Nelson.

“Jeremy Barnes. I’m one of Regina’s best friends.”

“Well, uh,” said Nelson, “we have a Jeep that has been burned. And there has been a female body found in the Jeep. We cannot say who it is for sure because we don’t have any dental records. Where are you?”

“Actually, I’m in Regina’s apartment.” Barnes rubbed his hands along the kitchen countertop that he’d scrubbed spotless just days before.

“Whatever you do, don’t touch anything.”

“Well, uh, I’ve, uh, already cleaned it. I’ve already done everything.”

“Don’t touch anything else.”

“I have Regina’s dog.”

“Take the dog, leave the apartment immediately, lock the door, and go back to your apartment. What is your phone number?”

 

 

Before Barnes reached his apartment, he heard his phone ringing. He ran in and answered it, practically numb. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Well, we have linked the Jeep to Regina Hartwell.”

Jeremy freaked. He felt, but he didn’t feel. Not at all. That’s the way the shock was.

 

 

At nine-thirty a.m., Austin Police Department Detective David Carter was in the field, conducting a follow-up on an old murder case when he received a page from APD homicide supervisor Sergeant Hector Reveles.

Over cellular phone, Reveles advised Carter, who was up as primary investigator on the next homicide in the capital city, that the Bastrop County Sheriff’s Department had discovered the body of a white female, burned in a Jeep in Bastrop County some days earlier.

Carter, a tall, lean, handsome, blue-eyed man who could easily play a television detective, returned to APD headquarters. There, he was further informed that APD had taken a missing-person report on Regina Hartwell the previous day and that people were currently at her apartment, which may or not be a crime scene.

Carter immediately spoke to Patrol Sergeant Tom Owens and made arrangements for those at Regina Hartwell’s apartment to be transported to homicide detail for interviews. He also made arrangements with Owens for the apartment to be secured.

 

 

Jeremy Barnes phoned Anita Morales. “Come over.” He wept as he circled his apartment, unable to sit, unable to be still with death. “They think Regina is dead.”

 

 

Morales hung up the phone. Shaking, she grabbed her bag. Her roommate Carla Reid watched. “Well, you’re not going by yourself.”

They didn’t speak a word as they drove to the Château.

 

 

Jeremy Barnes phoned Ynema Mangum at work, and she phoned the sheriff in Bastrop. “I want to see the body.”

“No, you can’t,” said the deputy.

“I want desperately, desperately to see the body,” begged Ynema. “I can tell if it’s Regina.”

“No, you can’t,” he said again. “There’s not that much left.” The deputy didn’t tell Mangum that the left side of Hartwell’s body was burned away, that her brain had been cooked into Jell-O.

A bone, a hair—Ynema felt she could recognize Regina from those. “I know I can.”

“We need dental records to identify the body.”

 

 

At 10:30 a.m., APD Detective Douglas Dukes was also informed by Sergeant Reveles about the Bastrop County body and Jeep, that Bastrop Deputy Don Nelson had spoken with a male at the phone number of the apartment listed for the Jeep’s Vehicle Identification Number, and that Nelson was en route to APD.

Since two different counties were involved in the homicide, Dukes phoned the Texas Rangers—Texas Ranger L. R. “Rocky” Wardlow. Wardlow was known to work closely with the Bastrop Sheriff’s Department.

Upon Wardlow’s and Nelson’s arrivals in Austin, Nelson briefed the APD detectives and Texas Ranger.

 

 

Ynema Mangum phoned Officer Timothy Pruett. “A lot of money’s missing from Regina’s account,” she said. “Just last February she had $3 million dollars. Look, Officer Pruett, we don’t like the way Kim was acting yesterday. This is all really suspicious.”

 

 

“I checked Reg’s messages,” said Barnes to Morales and Reid. “I saw a Bastrop number and called it. It was the sheriff’s department. They told me that Reg’s car had been found, and there was a burned body in it.”

“No!” Anita cried.

Jeremy reached out to hug her, but she shoved him away.

The police officers arrived, and Morales believed there was no time for sorrow. She had to talk to the police. She had to remember what had happened during the past few days. She had to call Regina’s friends. There was just too much to do to cry. Not then. She wouldn’t let herself.

 

 

APD cordoned off the area, stringing yellow tape. Between cops and friends, approximately twenty people were wedged into Jeremy Barnes’s apartment.

Carla Reid stared at the production, the hysteria, the show. “Well, Regina,” she said, “you did it again. You just had to do it your way. No one else’s way.” Regina Hartwell always wanted to be the star of the show.

 

 

Texas Ranger Rocky Wardlow prepared a search warrant for the Hartwell apartment, and District Judge Jon Wisser signed the warrant. It was 3:42 p.m. Wardlow and Detective Dukes met the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Lab team at the South Lamar apartment. Dukes, in his own words, spent much of the time “holding up a wall” while the Crime Lab team collected evidence.

 

 

Ynema Mangum closed Hartwell’s bank account so that no more transactions could be made. There was only $8,000 left in the account.

 

 

Wardlow wrote down the approximately sixty phone calls on Hartwell’s caller ID. There were two calls from Bastrop County—the first at 11:28 p.m. on June 30th, the second at 8:13 a.m. on July 5th. There was also one on July 5th from the residence of James Thomas.

Continually, Wardlow heard the names Kim LeBlanc and Justin Thomas. He obtained LeBlanc’s pager number, dialed it, and tapped in the phone number of Regina Hartwell. When the phone rang at Regina’s, the number that came up on the caller ID was that of James Thomas.

Sgt. Reveles crisscrossed the name and number and got an address on Whirlaway Drive in Garfield, Texas in Bastrop County.

APD had transported Anita Morales, Carla Reid, Jeremy Barnes, and Brad Wilson, another Château resident, to headquarters, and Detective Carter interviewed Barnes for, what seemed to Jeremy, like hours. He was scared to death. Since he had scoured clean the apartment, he was terrified that the police would think he was involved.

“Jeremy, we know you’re not involved. We don’t suspect you.”

But Barnes was intimidated as hell. His thought was,
You’re not a suspect, but
. . . . Barnes had a police record.

“We know, Jeremy, that you’re not involved. We don’t suspect you of anything, but . . . .”

There was that “but . . .” he feared. Barnes sighed. He’d worked so hard to get his life together since his arrest.

“I threw some things out of the apartment. Drugs. Paraphernalia. I cleaned up blood. It was everywhere.”

Detective Carter noted Barnes’ sincerity and that he was cooperating. He knew, as Jeremy relayed his story, that there was clear evidence of foul play at Regina Hartwell’ s apartment.

“Tell me about Regina . . . her history.”

“Reg is in love with this girl named Kim LeBlanc. But Kim dates this guy named Justin. Justin deals drugs, runs guns. Regina’s fronted him money. He’s nothing but trash. Kim and Regina had a fight the other night about Justin.”

Carter knew he needed to talk to Kim LeBlanc.

 

 

After the police finished interviewing Anita Morales, they drove her home. They checked all of her locks on her doors; then the officer asked her to do him a favor. “Would you page Kim and ask her to meet you at Regina’s?”

Anita paged Kim from the police car. “We found out some stuff about Regina,” she said. “Can you please meet me at Regina’s?”

“Mom?” Kim LeBlanc said into the phone. Her heart raced so that she felt like it was going to beat right out of her chest. It was like a horse after it had run the Kentucky Derby and then dropped dead after crossing the finish line, bathed in a white lather of sweat, foaming at the mouth. That’s the way Kim felt—like she was about to drop dead with a heart attack.

“Can you meet me at the Circle K, like at 6:30?” The horse fell on Kim’s chest. It was lying there now. She couldn’t see. Everything was dark. It was as though she were dead. God, she was scared. She started crying. She knew that if her mother saw her, she’d know she was messed up and would help.

“Yes,” said Cathy LeBlanc.

Kim hung up the phone, then phoned Anita back. “My mother is coming to pick me up, then I’ll be there.” She started crying again, hysterically, that scared little girl who always appeared with Kim’s tears. Her face turned as red as the roses around that dead Derby winner’s neck.

“I knew you couldn’t handle this,” said Justin Thomas. He lay in bed with her. “We’ll just go to sleep.”

LeBlanc sighed and took a Valium. It was a long time ’til 6:30.

The Thomas house was quiet with the passed-out sleep of drugs.

 

 

Anita Morales sat in her apartment and wrote neat, detailed notes, recalling everything that Regina Hartwell had told her just before she died, remembering everything that had happened since Regina had disappeared. She knew that, one day, she would have to remember, perhaps testify.

 

 

The detectives decided that Kim LeBlanc just might not show up in response to Morales’s page and phone call, so they decided to send officers after her. Detective John Hunt, Deputy Nelson, and two Travis County deputies left for the James Thomas house in Garfield, a tiny community in Bastrop County, near the Colorado River.

Drowsy on Benadryl, J. R. Kelly, James Thomas’s nephew, was sacked out on the couch. Earlier, J. R. had climbed a tree to tie a rope around one of its big, thick limbs so that they could swing out over the Colorado River during the Fourth of July celebration. The tree was full of poison oak.

Now J. R. was covered in poison oak and crashed on Benadryl. Barking dogs woke him—the Rottweilers, he slowly realized as he moved from deep sleep to awareness and finally to alertness. He jumped up. He looked out the window. “Oh, my God!”

He counted five police cars parked in the yard, and a handful of cops were honking horns and spraying chemical Mace in the Rottweilers’ faces. J. R. ran out the door.

“Is Kim LeBlanc here?” shouted Detective Hunt.

The dogs barked and yelped.

Hunt stayed in his car.

J. R. Thomas grabbed the dogs. “Yeah.” He hemmed and hawed. “She was, but she left a while ago.”

“When?”

“Noon, maybe.”