INFAMY

From the front page of The Daily Press, Tuesday, April 14, 1992:

YEARS AFTER SLAYING, MAN SURRENDERS

Almost nine years after police found the partially clothed and strangled body of a 13-year-old Hampton boy, a 25-year-old Newport News man turned himself in to police Monday. But he didn’t say why he waited so long.

Michael Scott Bottoms, of the ____ block of Main Street, was charged with murdering ________ on June 10, 1983.

He is being held without bond in the Hampton jail, said Sgt. _____ M_______.

Although investigators interviewed more than 200 people at the time of the killing, Bottoms was never a suspect until he phoned police Monday morning and said he wanted to talk about the slaying, ________ said.

______’s partially clothed body was found a day after he disappeared in 1983 walking to a friend’s house in Powhatan Park. He was discovered on the wooded path near what was then road construction for Powhatan Parkway extension. The area is now part of that road. An autopsy revealed that ______ was sexually assaulted and strangled, apparently with one of his own socks.

An Eaton Junior High eighth-grader, ______ probably died within 30 minutes after he left home that afternoon, police say. Bottoms was not interviewed during the investigation because he didn’t live in the area, said _______. Bottoms, 17 at the time, lived in Poquoson.

On Monday morning Bottoms phoned Newport News police from a Newport News business and said he wanted to talk about the case.

Newport News sent investigators and contacted Hampton police. “After the interview we had enough evidence to charge Bottoms,” _______ said.

Police refused to say whether Bottoms confessed to the crime and said he was not specific about his reasons for calling police. “They were not friends,” _______ said of Bottoms and the youth.

Police are also looking at other unsolved slayings to see if Bottoms might be connected, he said.

Bottoms is unemployed and lives with several people in a house in the Hilton area.

______’s father, _________, said he didn’t think Bottoms was a friend of his son’s.

_______ said he was reluctant to speak about the arrest Monday: “I hope it’s the guy. It’s something that I want to make sure there are no mistakes.”

It was big news. The sensationalism of it—the nine-year-old murder of a child solved—overwhelmed the lead of the news cycle for more than a week, my brother’s name, my name, coming out of the television like a knife. His face, bloated and unshaven, shadowy and full of malice—a character seemingly special-ordered to run with an article about murder and rape—also filled the top half of the front page of the paper.

I saw the picture, but didn’t, couldn’t, read the story, couldn’t muster the strength it would have taken to perform that monumental task. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t even hold the paper.

I stared at his picture that day, into the eyes—black, empty, full of pain. I knew this was my brother, in a way, but, again, and especially now, it was all taking place at a certain remove. There was a part of me, a flash in my memory, that knew my real brother was just some kid, lost somewhere between this world and the next, still eight or nine years old, running through a front yard, holding a football, telling me to go long, go long, smiling with his crooked smile and gap teeth and wearing his favorite Levi’s jean jacket. Could he be that person and this one? I wondered. Could, over time, this type of metamorphosis actually take place?

When I saw my brother’s face—a mug shot complete with numbers—on the TV news for the first of many times that morning, I became violently ill from nerves. With that televised image it became real, out in the world, twisted and official, part of a collective knowledge and never, ever retractable. I was losing my mind a little and I believed, somehow, that by not reading the article in the paper I could keep this away from me. But not now, not with the television blaring my name into the room. Perceptions were made. Before I thought they—the cops, the media, the doctors, someone—would figure it out. Surely they would see the misunderstanding here, that the person they had in custody was insane, was having long talks with demons and angels, could put a cigarette out on his forearm with a deranged smile on his face.

The story was the lead on every local morning news program—murder solved. I remember very little of the day. I remember how I felt but I don’t remember many of the specifics that triggered these feelings beyond the images of my brother. I sat on my parents’ new couch, remote in hand. Aunts and uncles were there, my parents’ friends, my grandmother, but they were like furniture to me; I could have been sitting there alone.

People brought food as if for a funeral. We watched television all day, waiting for the next news break, blank-faced, the phone ringing and ringing and none of us daring to answer it, knowing it was a journalist. Cars inched slowly around the circle in front of my parents’ home. The phone wouldn’t stop.

I think part of me believed it—murder wasn’t beyond Michael. I remembered all the beatings, remembered his words: Start the mower. Or I will kill you. I went over the details of the time when the murder took place. He was seventeen in 1983, experimenting sexually. Since then he had had violent sexual encounters, both heterosexual and homosexual. I'm fairly certain he had participated in at least one rape while in Florida, and he had been raped at least twice. All of this, though, happened later.

It wasn’t beyond him now to simply say he did it. His sensibility had shifted so drastically in the years since that time; 1983 would have been about the time he killed all his snakes, about the time he was at his most violent, at least toward me. I didn’t know what to feel or how to respond. I was numb at the idea of Michael as a murderer, but then I thought, Of course, if anyone is a murderer it is my brother, and I am now the brother of a murderer and my life is over.

I'd seen him fold under sadness and confusion—moments that produced a great sadness and sympathy in me—but I'd also seen something in his eyes just before he threw me against a wall long ago, just before he let out a string of furious expletives at my mother, something dark and implacable. Maybe he did it, I thought. Maybe he didn’t. For days after this, I weighed the pros and cons for his innocence and guilt, as the story in the local media took on a life of its own.

Anchors read the story at every news break; it was the top of the morning and noon news. As the day progressed, I started to become angry. How hard was it, I wondered, to find out and report that Michael was an acute paranoid schizophrenic who had just jumped the fence of a psychiatric-care facility? I didn’t expect them to say he was innocent, to blow off a signed confession, but I did expect them to report all the facts. I just wanted someone—anyone—to mention that he was severely mentally ill.

“Bottoms is unemployed and lives with several people in a house in the Hilton area,” wrote the reporter. For God’s sake, I thought, he left a nuthouse. An unemployed man admitting to a murder and an acute paranoid schizophrenic who was AWOL from a psych ward admitting to a murder are different narratives indeed. The former is a better scoop, certainly, but leaving out the latter is almost—whether from incompetence or laziness or stringent deadlines or whatever—a subtle form of lying. I don’t know what happened, don’t know how that fact could have been left out of every story. Maybe the journalists didn’t talk to the cops, or the cops didn’t mention that one thing; maybe the journalists had a story and ran with it because it was a great story and their time to research it was limited; maybe they simply weren’t competent; maybe someone in my family should have answered the phone and told whoever was on the other end how sick Michael was, how he'd drunk Drano, how he'd been homeless, how he heard messages from God in the Robert Tilton show.

Watching people talk about you on TV was like staring into a lake at your own reflection and watching it walk away as you stood there. At the end of each televised segment on my brother (fifteen seconds that felt like hours, that stretched out in elongated dream time), you would be convinced that he had been free and raping and murdering children for the last decade, his mug shot up in the corner of the screen, over the pretty anchor’s shoulder, her expression momentarily serious before she changed moods, face breaking into a smile, for the great spring weather.

My father had gone down to the police station the night before, immediately after he and my mother had returned home and I'd told him about my conversation with Sergeant M. Before he left, he looked at my younger brother, mother, and me and said that we needed to prepare ourselves. With glazed over eyes, he said—and I remember this perhaps more clearly than anything in my life—Michael may have done this. Then he turned around, picked up his car keys, and left.

When my father arrived at the station, Michael refused to talk to him. When he left, crying, someone outside took his picture, filling up his eyes with white-blue dots. That was one of the worst things, he told my mother, worrying about what would become of that picture, what story would run below the image of him with tears in his eyes.

From the local section of The Daily Press, Wednesday, April 15, 1992:

SUSPECT CALLED SWEET, TROUBLED

NEWS OF MAN’s ARREST ASTONISHES NEIGHBORS

The man who turned himself in Monday in the slaying of a 13-year-old boy almost nine years ago lived near the victim for several years and is remembered by neighbors as both “a wonderful sweet boy” and a troubled teen.

Six years before the slaying, Michael Scott Bottoms, now 25, lived with his family in the same Hampton Terrace subdivision as _________. In 1983 _____’s partially clothed body was found in a woods not far from the neighborhood.

“He had lived in that general area prior to the attack and was familiar with the area,” Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Christopher W. Hutton said Tuesday.

Bottoms, who moved to Poquoson with his family in late 1977, often returned to visit old friends and neighbors, sometimes staying overnight, several former neighbors say.

The news of Bottoms’ arrest Monday, almost nine years after searchers found the boy’s body, astonished some of Bottoms’ former neighbors.

“It puzzled me because I never would have expected him,” said Wesley R. Drew, a Prince James Drive resident, who lived a few doors from Bottoms and his family. “I’ve known him since he was a small boy. He always struck me as real nice. This is a big shock to me,” Drew said.

Bottoms called Newport News police Monday morning, saying he wanted to talk about the June 10, 1983, unsolved Hampton murder. Newport News police interviewed Bottoms, then contacted Hampton detectives.

Bottoms, a resident of the _________ Home for Adults [on] Main Street, was formally charged with murder at 1:40 p.m. A Hampton juvenile court judge Tuesday appointed local attorney Lacy L. Scoggin to represent Bottoms.

Scoggin declined to comment about the case and denied a request to allow his client to be interviewed. Bottoms remains in the Hampton jail without bond.

He faces a preliminary hearing in juvenile court on May 21, Hutton said.

A woman promptly hung up the telephone when the family home was called Tuesday.

Police declined to say why Bottoms decided to come forward after almost nine years.

Drew and three other former neighbors, who spoke on condition their names not be used, recalled Bottoms as a bright, playful young boy who wrestled on the same youth team, the Hampton Cubs, as _______’s younger brother and swam at the neighborhood pool.

Drew said Bottoms used to ride three-wheel all-terrain vehicles with him and his children on the dirt paths that connected Hampton Terrace with the Powhatan Park subdivisions. The body was found near the site of the Powhatan Parkway highway extension.

“All the kids used to play there. We used to ride our bikes on the trails and go hunt for snakes and lizards,” said one former resident who lived a few doors from the Bottoms family.

City records indicate that the Bottomses lived on Prince James Drive in Hampton, about a block and a half from the ________, from September 1965 until November 1977. Bottoms was a fourth-grader at Lee Elementary School about the time his family moved, a Hampton school official said.

Several of Bottoms’ new neighbors on Rue Degrasse in Poquoson recalled Michael Bottoms as a troubled teen-ager who seemed lost.

“He was a wonderful sweet boy. I don’t know what happened,” one of the Poquoson neighbors said.

Hampton neighbors agreed that as a younger boy Bottoms was outgoing and friendly but he changed as a teen.

“He just wandered aimlessly. He apparently went to different places. After he moved to Poquoson he kept coming back, almost like he was lonely and missed it,” a Hampton Terrace resident said. “He was getting to the point where he was becoming pathetic. He was obviously having trouble adjusting and had gotten in with the wrong crowd.”

Bottoms graduated from Poquoson High School in 1986. Principal Don Bock said Bottoms was not pictured in the yearbook that year.

Police and court records show the only conviction against Bottoms was a minor traffic offense in York County in December 1984.

Some former neighbors questioned why Hampton detectives never questioned Bottoms earlier in the investigation. But Hampton police spokesman Sgt. _____ M_______ said, “There was nothing in the beginning to lead us to him.”

Sergeant M didn’t understand my brother—how could he?—and I imagine he was the kind of guy—a good cop, a guy who went by the book—who believed there was no side beyond the obvious victim’s, the poor kid—a thirteen-year-old, for God’s sake—who'd been raped and murdered. They had good reason to think Michael was guilty. Even though my brother was raving mad at this point, his confession was elaborate and full of details “unknown to the general public.”

When the two Newport News police officers answering the call on Monday, April 13, had spoken to Michael outside of the 7-Eleven, where he waited for an hour for them to arrive and arrest him, they thought it was a prank; they thought, in fact, that he was homeless. They smiled at Michael and one even told him he should just go home now, that calling the police department was not a joke and there were actually penalties for that, including jail time.

Then Michael told them he could prove his guilt. He begged them to believe he was a murderer. He would show them. They listened, saw the absolute sincerity in his face, the way he stared at the ground, embarrassed, blinking back tears, and then they took him to the Hampton police department. Once there, my brother not only confessed; he bolstered his confession by offering a wide range of intricate circumstantial evidence against himself. He made it nearly impossible for the police not to believe him.

The old neighborhood had changed. A highway cleaved the forest where I used to play, where S was found. Traffic roared where woods once were. New subdivisions had sprung up over the years, each house a near replica of the next.

My brother, in the backseat, had guided Sergeant M and his partner through the city in a brown unmarked Aries K car (in my imagination, all detectives drive these cars), past malls and fast-food joints, under billboards, into and out of the smell of processing plants and seafood plants and shipbuilding yards and government housing projects. Sergeant M and his partner listened, bewildered, only half believing it was worth their time, neither of them completely familiar, yet, with the old murder. It didn’t help that Michael looked like such a stereotypical lunatic.

But my brother insisted. He took them to the exact spot where the body was found, told them how it had happened, what he had done. He had used a sock. There were clothes, a shirt over there, on a branch. He had liked doing it; at first he didn’t think he could, you know, really kill someone, really send his soul on to the next world, but when he did it, man, he felt a hundred feet tall and made of nothing but blood and muscle. He told them how snakes ate mice and it was like they were absorbing their essence. They stared at him.

They took in the show, his unbelievable insistence. He was obviously unstable, probably just bullshitting. But they took him back to the station anyway, just to be sure, to check, even though crazies admitted to stuff like this at least a few times a year.

Later that afternoon, Michael sat in an office at the police station. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, going through a pack in a couple of hours, asking for another, rocking, the room filling with smoke. He sat by himself, the door closed, mumbling, moving his lips to form words, tapping his feet, rubbing his hands through his hair, exhaling in exaggerated bursts.

And the cops must have searched through computer files—or, better yet, they went digging through old file cabinets, like Kojak used to, like Baretta used to, in manila folders, trying to figure this out. Somebody. A kid, maybe eleven, twelve. No, thirteen. S. June 10, 1983. Sexual assault after the fact. Some seriously fucked-up stuff. Sodomy. First- or second- degree murder. Unsolved.

Sergeant M began matching the story he had just been told with the known facts of the case in the old, dusty folder. Every one matched, right down to exact location, wounds, the positioning of the body, the color of the sock. The officers couldn’t believe it. The whole thing, the fact that Michael had decided to call from a 7-Eleven, was the stuff of legend, of late-night, booze-filled stories with other officers. You just didn’t get this lucky in police work. That should have been their first clue that something was amiss.

They moved Michael to a private cell.

The phone rang at my parents’ house while I sat, alone, drinking a beer.

Hello, I said.

I gave up my apartment and stayed at my parents’ house during the four months that Michael was awaiting trial for the murder of S. He was moved to a psychiatric hospital, two hours west of Hampton. The information had finally sunk in with the police that he was schizophrenic once my mother produced documentation, though this information, once proven, didn’t change the fact that Michael knew far more than he should about the murder. And there had been cases of paranoid schizophrenics killing neighbors, roommates, friends, their entire families. If anything, his illness made him fit the profile even better.

My mother and my father spent many afternoons with his public defender, discussing his illness, the case against him, quietly wondering if they shouldn’t take out a loan to get another attorney, someone with more experience.

My mother, by now, knew her son hadn’t done it. When she asked him over the phone why he had admitted to the murder, he'd said, Dad thinks I did it.

She said, No, Michael, Dad doesn’t think that. Dad loves you. You didn’t do this.

Dad thinks I did, he said. I know he does. He thinks I'm a murderer. He thinks I'm a very bad person.

She was hoping that everything would be found out and that this, finally, would be enough to have him institutionalized in a state facility. But getting through this wasn’t going to be easy.

I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I lost fifteen pounds, my clothes hanging off me. I dropped all pretense of attending university, briefly took a job landscaping, thinking the hard work would do me good, get my mind off things, but I quit when the boss said my name sounded really familiar to him, that he'd heard it somewhere recently—not the kind of name you forget—and if he thought of where, he'd let me know.

I stayed in Michael’s room, the only room with a bed upstairs, because mine had been turned into a den. I lived out of a single duffel bag full of books and jeans and T-shirts. I stayed up all night some nights, my eyes a couple of circles stubbed out into my head, reading, listening to music. Not only could I not eat, but now I had insomnia. I spoke to no one but my family and a few friends. The case was in limbo. They would keep Michael until DNA tests came back, then proceed accordingly.

Journalists called constantly in the first few weeks, hundreds of calls in a day. We let the answering machine catch everything. I often wish that I had spoken, that I had had the nerve to explain his illness, his delusions, but I didn’t. And what if he'd done it? Unlike my mother, I wasn’t at all sure he was innocent. Not yet, anyway. Was I willing to try to justify him, if a part of me doubted his innocence, if a part of me had always feared that he was capable of just such a grisly act?

I found Michael’s Bible in a drawer of his desk one night. Over the next few weeks I read the New Testament, beginning to end, twice. He had written things in the margins, particularly those of Corinthians and Revelation. Sometimes there was just one word: past or father or luxury. Other times, fragments of sentences: path to glory is sacrifice, death is beginning. It was hard to make sense of it; it was muddled, sloppy, haphazard. No narrative arose in the margins, but I often read passages within the Bible text that I thought might have elicited his response.

According to Kierkegaard, it is only when one has lost everything, has been defeated so utterly by life that he can no longer function, that he might, from the true bottom of his existence, make a bid for Christian faith and the hope of salvation through the teachings of Christ. Michael and I found an interest in God in the same way: from looking up out of the bottom of our existence, two losers making a last bid for meaning.

I was stunned by the Bible on my first reading, how poetic it was, especially the Gospel of John and the Song of Solomon and Revelation; and how cautionary, how packed with tragedy and sacrifice. It was full of brutality and taboos. It seemed open to endless interpretation. Every passage was terse on the page but expansively aphoristic when you stopped and thought about it. I found it funny that anyone would profess to know the full meaning of it, especially someone as evidently dense as, say, Robert Tilton.

“And immediately I was in the spirit,” begins a passage, “and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.” (Revelation 4: 2­3) It struck me as astoundingly beautiful and creepy at once. I needed to know this stuff, it was where Michael was coming from. It was metaphorical to such an extreme that it seemed at times inscrutable, leading you toward ideal or Platonic truths, like Romantic poetry or even the more abstruse passages of Joyce, but not literal truth. It made me think that the small number of Christians I had listened to didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, were in fact so ignorant of the book they professed to know and live by that I felt offended.

The Bible was by turns preposterous, entertaining, and profound. It was weird and beautiful, dated and new, murky and clear, sometimes on the same page. It felt like the truth in some way—it still does—but read like a fairy tale. I read and reread the Gospels of Christ in my schizophrenic brother’s seared-smelling room. I sat in an old chair and looked at his posters—Bruce Lee was still up, as was the American Pop film poster. There was the aquarium where the snakes had lived, the window where God’s face had shone. It was all here, his life was all here, and I wanted more than anything to understand it, to see it from the inside, no matter the cost.

I never visited him at the psychiatric hospital. I was too frightened, embarrassed, unconvinced of his innocence, paralyzed in my own disbelief and belief. But during this time I got to know him, as much as one could know Michael. I began to understand how he thought, how his mind worked, and where the essence of many of his thoughts came from, through reading scripture. I began then to try to understand his demise, and still later I tried to understand the facts of his disease, the sickness itself, through the metaphors of Christianity. I began to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the Soul, because I needed to. I began to believe in the power of forgiveness and in the humble place of the individual in a grander, unknowable scheme. I began to believe in God in my own, very personal, way and to understand not only the power but the necessity of forgiveness.

It was all here, ready to be unlocked. The Gospels of Christ spoke of the ills of judgment, the necessity of humility, the frailty and sanctity of all human life. Jesus was a seditious radical of the first order. He was sorrowful and full of rage for this life; he buzzed with an intense humanity. He loved everyone, forgave everyone, and these thoughts, in this world, are radical. His people were the sick, the broken, the deranged—whores and lepers and orphans and thieves and, I suspect, the insane—those who went through life in pain, unloved, and he took them in, all of them, and, wiping their tears away, he said, You are my brother.

Michael was in the psychiatric hospital for four months and six days. My parents visited him once a week or so, and usually he didn’t speak; sometimes he wouldn’t even look up from the floor as he sat in an orange plastic chair in the middle of a white room. My mother asked the nurse if he was taking his medication, which he was, but he refused showers (he said he didn’t trust the water).

It took all of my parents’ strength to get out of bed on the days they were to go there. Every time they drove into the compound, they were afraid of being attacked by journalists, though journalists were never there because it was surrounded by a gate and security guards.

This was all unbelievable, beyond imagining, that this had become their lives, driving past guards and through high, gray metal security gates, but every day there it was—a fact: Their son had admitted to a particularly heinous murder and rape of a child; everyone knew their name.

In the third month of Michael’s incarceration he was put in a new, private cell with a bunk bed. He was glad to be alone. In his private cell, he took off his orange standard-issue overalls, tied the left leg of the overalls around his neck, the right leg to the top of his bunk bed, and attempted to hang himself. A guard found him just after he had passed out, naked except for his underwear. Another minute would have killed him. Michael’s knees were on the ground and he did it by simply falling forward, his sheer will to die.

The next day a facility psychiatrist prescribed a new psychotropic drug and stronger antidepressants. A week after the new prescription, Michael told the guards he had just been kidding, that he didn’t really kill S, and he didn’t know who did. He said he'd like to have his mother pick him up now.

Three weeks later, the DNA tests came back. As I’ve said, there had been a lot of evidence at the scene of the crime: skin, blood, semen, hair. The murder itself seemed unplanned, a scene of reckless carnage and brutality. The test results concluded that it was impossible that my brother had killed or sexually molested S.

During two psychological evaluations while in the hospital, Michael couldn’t name the president, the year, or his date of birth. Yet he could remember every detail of the crime, down to the color of the sock used to strangle S. He could also remember things my father had said to him when he was a child, the kind of petty cruelties most of us are lucky enough to forget. From sparse details, memory, and continuous emotional trauma, he had created a wholly credible memory of himself as rapist and murderer. Then he remembered, a little late, that it was possibly a false memory.

When my parents went to pick him up, petrified, my mother shaking—once again, the state set him free, and free meant home—he recanted his innocence. As he walked down the hallway toward the outside and the waiting car, he insisted, despite the evidence, that he had done it. He then went on to explain how he had come up behind S in the woods, how S’s breath was fast and hard, and he had strangled and raped him.

Nothing appeared in the paper about Michael’s exoneration and release, the fact that he had invented the whole thing. I looked for this, and I’ve gone back through archives since then. Nothing. For years, when I saw people from my past while visiting my mother, I could always tell that they wanted, more than anything, to ask me about my brother the murderer, who had been released on one of those terrible technical legal glitches that entire television shows are based upon. Once you’ve been branded guilty by the press, you’re guilty, period, despite any evidence to the contrary. If I didn’t know this before, I know it now.