Seventeen-year-old Robert Burns Springsteen IV had lived in Austin less than four months. Born in Chicago and raised by his mother and grandparents in Cross Lanes, West Virginia, after his parents divorced, he’d called his father late that August to ask if he could live with him for a while; he was having trouble getting along with his new stepfather. Robert Burns Springsteen III didn’t immediately concur. He had to talk with his girlfriend first, especially since the two condos they lived in were in her name.
Known in West Virginia as “Robby,” the boy had dark, darting eyes, a notable widow’s peak, devilish eyebrows and a habit of carrying his chin cocked to one side, as if to indicate his readiness to take on all comers. Quick-tempered and boastful, he seemed too swaggery for his own good. In junior high he’d been characterized by teachers and school administrators as a misfit who wore out his welcome in a hurry wherever he went. Because of his temper, his absences and an attitude of unearned and unapologetic entitlement, he’d been assigned to an alternative-learning center with other disruptive students. Counselors also singled him out for sporting weird clothes to get attention—a Nehru jacket one day, a bandanna around his head the next—though this complaint might say more about the town than the boy. Nobody called him bad, exactly. He had roots in Cross Lanes, and his mother worked hard and was respected. He was just one of those boys.
When his father and his partner agreed to convert the second condo, which they’d been using as a guest and family room, into temporary quarters for Rob, he traveled to Austin and moved in. The condos were small—maybe 750 square feet—but Rob would have his privacy, and his father agreed to give him some slack when it came to discipline. His plan was to see what the boy could handle and then start applying some rules.
A week or so later, Rob registered for the fall semester at McCallum High, and since he needed to repeat a grade, he’d be a sophomore. Tall and somewhat athletic, he turned out for football but in no time got into a squabble with the coach and quit before making a down. “Me and him,” he said later, “didn’t see eye-to-eye.” Not long after that, he became involved in a lunchtime scrap at a nearby McDonald’s. When words were exchanged, Rob pulled a knife.
Because of this incident and his poor attendance record, teachers and counselors wanted to send him to their own alternative school, but the McCallum principal overrode them. He was a new student, Penny Miller explained to her staff, the semester had barely begun, and he’d written a letter of apology about the knife, which he said belonged to somebody else. She executed this decision with stipulations: Rob had to be where he was supposed to be—in class—and follow administrative rules and show signs of academic progress.
When he quickly resumed his habits, Miller ordered him to the alternative-learning center. In December, when an APD cop asked how long it was since he’d been to class, Rob drew a blank. “A week? Two weeks? I don’t know…probably at least a month. Maybe a month and a half or two months….Because they sent me [there] and that’s when I just quit. I was like, Screw this.”
In late November, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, when Rob asked if his friend Mike Scott could move in with him, his father was skeptical. But Rob assured him that Mike was a good guy and would be no trouble at all; besides, he had a situation at home.
Robert Burns Springsteen III decided to trust his son’s judgment, and his girlfriend agreed to go along on one condition: If the boys quit school, they had to get jobs. Both of them agreed. The truth is, they’d probably already stopped attending class. In 1999, Mike Scott will say that by December of that year, he hadn’t attended class once since September 30. He will contradict this statement a number of times, however, and in the end, when it comes to Springsteen père et fils and Mike Scott, there is so much Who knows? to their stories we have to take it as a given that whatever has been said or attested to, whatever has been vowed, promised or testified under oath, might or might not be actual fact. This goes for cops as well, who in the interest of collaring the boys will tell them they know things they don’t and warn them of consequences that will never occur. We have to swing with that and depend to some extent on what in the detective business is called “heuristics”: rule of thumb, instinct, a hunch, likelihoods based on given assumptions.
Located about three miles from McCallum and seven from the ICBY shop and Northcross Mall, the condominiums where the Springsteens and Mike Scott lived are well maintained and attractive. Two-story, built of local stone, with landscaped surroundings and carefully placed rocks and boulders, they are shaded and quiet, far enough from the university to lack the beer-party atmosphere that often rules in many apartment complexes in Austin.
When he called Teleserve, on the morning of December 6, to report that his son was missing, the elder Springsteen, a contract computer programmer, was between jobs and therefore was at home a good bit of the time, and he might’ve noticed if the boys weren’t going to school. When called to the stand, he will testify that he has no memory of making the call. And when the chief prosecutor hands him the incident report taken by Teleserve officer Mary Ann Hueske, he will sit there looking at it and still claim not to remember.
When, in 2010, I visited Rob in West Virginia and asked where he’d been those nights his father claimed he was missing, he waved the question away. “Oh,” he said, “my dad. My dad and I don’t get along too well.”
But if he had been gone for two nights, where might he have been?
He shrugged. On some friend’s couch, maybe playing video games all night. He did that a lot. Maybe…oh, who knows? He stayed away from home quite a lot in those days and had no idea why his father had made the report.
“I may have been gone,” he concluded. “But I wasn’t missing.”