When Mary Byrd woke on Monday morning she had to think to remember where she was. Her mother’s rose-colored, frilly guest room. Recalling that, and what her mother had told her Saturday night, and what the day had in store for her, she closed her eyes and drew herself up into a ball. Her heart pounded and goosed up her pulse so that she knew she wouldn’t be going back to sleep, which was all in this world she wanted. From the wicker nightstand she reached over and pinched up the Xanax half she’d left there the night before and swallowed it with a swig of water. Later, she promised herself, she’d take another. When she got back home she’d ask Ernest for some more.
Outside the guest room came the sounds of her mother bustling around, talking to the cats over Howard Stern’s annoying yammer. Her mother and James loved Howard Stern, but whenever she listened to him it was always about big tits or his small dick. Now she heard the back door and heavy footsteps in the kitchen. Mary Byrd rolled over and looked around the room. Her mom had good taste but it had started getting Target-ish. Maybe when you got old you just lost the will to be original and went instead for easy and inexpensive. Your things just became a pain in the ass. She was already feeling it sometimes with her own stuff, which was about to bury her. Her grandmother went around labeling things with masking tape so the family knew who got what, but if she could make you take it now, she would. “My life is over, my children are gone,” she’d say. “I can’t take it with me. No ice buckets in heaven. Maybe you can use it.” To which Mary Byrd’s uncle would tease, “Jesus, Mama. What makes you so sure you’re going to heaven, anyway?” and Nonna would pretend to be hurt.
Sunday with her family had passed peacefully. They had been sad, and tense, but glad enough to have some time together. The ordeal before them hadn’t been brought up, and they had treated each other politely, if not tenderly. Mary Byrd and Nick had been careful to avoid politics or current events. They had reminisced, telling the same old funny family stories, and Stevie and Pop had come up in some of them, but it was as if they were like Pete: alive and well, just off someplace else, just not with them at the moment.
In the afternoon while the boys watched sports, Mary Byrd had walked around the yard and had listened to her mother talk about her plants and her birds, and then in the kitchen they’d cooked and talked recipes. They ate the delicious but random dishes their mother had made—no main dish, but a little of this, a little of that—something to please each of them. They had talked about their children and what they were up to, and watched tapes of their favorite old Twilight Zone and Little Rascals episodes on the new VCR they’d given their mother for Christmas, laughing as if they hadn’t seen them dozens of times before. They’d teased their mother and mocked her admonishments, given out as if they were still children: “Handwashing is very important.”
As Mary Byrd had lain in bed afterward, she’d thought about how they had so little in common with one another, family anecdotes, mom-mocking, and TV shows aside. They didn’t see each other often, and her brothers weren’t married, although Nick had been, briefly, and had only one child—a great kid in spite of being smothered and overprotected. There was no tribe of cousins like she and her brothers had grown up with. She’d wondered how different things would be if they’d grown up more normally. Or more happily. But there were no normal families, were there. Why hadn’t Stevie’s death brought them closer together? She thought that it must be true that happy families are all alike. If a family didn’t have a dead child, why wouldn’t it be happy?
Monday, Monday. Mary Byrd’s mother rapped on the door and Mary Byrd cringed. “I’m up!” she called. One of the demented cats was yowling somewhere down the hall. On Cherry Glen Lane in the mornings, her mother had awakened Mary Byrd to get a head start in the bathroom before the boys by banging the broom handle on the kitchen ceiling, which had been right under Mary Byrd’s bed. The sound she hated most in the world, that broomstick reveille, and now she meanly used it on William and Eliza.
“The boys are here,” her mother called. “It’s seven thirty. We need to leave the house in an hour.”
“Okay, I’m coming. I hope there’s coffee,” she yelled back. Somehow she was the only person in the family who drank it. She wished she could say, “If there’s not coffee, I’m not going” or “I can only go if there’s an original Chanel suit, navy blue bouclé shot through with white, size two, hanging in the closet for me,” but she shuffled out barefoot, her black curls all wacky, wearing the old flannel nightgown she kept at her mom’s, to greet her brothers, drink coffee, and sit with them silently for a few minutes until it was time to dress and go downtown and talk to some strangers about the murder of their brother and stepson.
The four of them sat in a dingy police waiting room. A little dulled out from the pill, Mary Byrd wished for more coffee to face whatever this meeting was going to be. While they waited, the boys looked at leftover Times-Dispatches and a smattering of testosterone publications. Varmint Masters. Guns and Ammo. “Couldn’t they at least have some fishing magazines?” Nick said.
“Not enough blood,” said James.
Their mother silently crocheted a granny square. She’d made dozens of afghans—they each had several—and they were the only pretty ones Mary Byrd had ever seen. The yarn was getting fuzz on her mom’s navy blue Chanel suit, size zero, and Mary Byrd picked it off. She smoothed her own suit—her black Banana Republic she wore to funerals and meetings.
A police lady came in. “Y’all can just go on in and take a seat. Detective Stith will be right with you.”
Detective Stith wasn’t in his office when they sat down. Mary Byrd looked around for some clues about the guy. Other than a big piñata—a Halloween spider that hung in the window—there wasn’t much: a stack of Sports Illustrated and another of Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair? she wondered. Must be because they had all those great murder investigations and muckraking articles cleverly stashed in between the reeky perfume and celebrity gossip. Or maybe Stith was into perfume, fashion, and celebrity gossip. Her head started to hurt. On the wall behind the desk hung some certificates and diplomas, and she rose and leaned forward to make them out. UVA BA, UVA Law, Virginia Institute for Criminal Justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Crime Scene Academy, something from Penn, something from the FBI, blah blah.
All were awarded to Sooraji Mehta Stith. An Indian guy? But if he was a Stith, there ought to be an ancient FFV connection. William Byrd had had a friend named Stith back in the day. A small, framed piece of needlepoint was propped on the console behind him. It read: a stith in time saves nine. A funny guy, too. He’d better get his smart, funny ass in here.
The door opened and in walked a handsome black guy with a bright, bruisey complexion. His lips were purple and his ears stuck out boyishly, framed by hair clipped so close it made his head appear to be flocked. Mary Byrd was intrigued by the mix of people he seemed to be.
“Hi,” he said, tossing a pack of Marlboro Lights on the desk. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Got that Marlboro monkey on my back.” Good old Philip Morris. Keeping Richmond, doctors, and hospitals everywhere afloat and population numbers down.
He loped easily to the window where a coffee pot sat on a mini-fridge. “Coffee? Or a Coke?” He popped open a can of Diet Dr. Pepper, taking a sip and raising it to them.
“Nothing, thanks,” her mother said. Mary Byrd resisted her own desire for coffee. She’d only have to go to the bathroom.
James said, “We’re good.”
Stith was a skinny guy, or poor as a snake, as Teever might say. A dark red sweater, navy corduroy jacket, and khakis gave him a little gravitas, but he still looked way too cool and way too young to be a detective who had a clue about anything. She didn’t know what she’d expected—someone off the TV, past his prime, seedy, cockeyed, gimpy or bald. A gut, crappy clothes. She thought of the detective who’d questioned her the day Stevie died. Had he been the one who’d suggested the connection between her and Ned Tuttle, and asked for her diary? She couldn’t remember. They’d all seemed creepy.
“Diet Dr. Pepper?” she asked him, wrinkling her nose.
“Diabetic.” He smiled. “Dr. Pepper is like me: ‘so misunderstood.’ A cold-case guy isn’t the most popular guy on the force.” Quickly, all business again, he said, “I want you to be comfortable with this. I won’t keep you long, and I don’t want this to be too much of an unpleasant experience.”
She felt a smirk twitching at the corners of her mouth. “Is there the possibility that this could be pleasant?”
“It can be really unpleasant, stressful, and pointless, or it can be not too bad, and useful.” He sat back in his chair and looked at her—what? Reprovingly? “Your call.”
“Let’s do this,” said James. “We’re ready.”
“I could have explained a lot of this when I called each of you last week,” Stith said, “but the department is trying to keep these cards close to our chest. For this to have the best . . . the most productive outcome, I figured that to have you all here at once would be the way to go. I hope you agree.”
Mary Byrd spoke up again. “But isn’t this mostly so y’all don’t get scooped by that reporter and look lame and inept? You must know about her, right?” She knew she was being a jerk and needed to stop. Let Nick be the asshole.
Somewhere outside the door, men laughed and walkie-talkies crackled. “This is not exactly going to be a great chapter in the history of our police department. Maybe in the Annals of Great RPD Bungles of the Twentieth Century. But we need to be the ones to solve it, make it public, and get it right. Then she—or anyone—can do what they want with the story. Reporters are not the law, and can’t bring this case to a resolution. We can, though, and I think we will.”
A policeman in uniform opened the door and said, “Hey Sunshine—oops! Sorry, Raji. Want anything from the Sonic?”
“I’m good, thanks,” Stith said. The cop left.
“Sunshine?” asked Nick.
“Yeah,” he smiled. “My motto around here is ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant.’ It beats being called ‘Mud’ I guess.”
They didn’t smile. They were focused on the word bungles. James shifted uncomfortably on his small chair and said, “I have to admit that I feel a huge amount of anger at you guys—not you, but all these people who were involved then, and never figured this out, and here we are again. Or at least, here are most of us.” He gestured at Mary Byrd, Nick, and their mother. “I was only three, and our brother Pete was just a baby.”
“I was in diapers myself when this happened,” Stith said. “But I sure heard about it all my childhood. My mother never let me or my brother out of her sight. The boogeyman was still out there. That has something to do with why I’m personally so interested in this case.” He paused. “I certainly understand how you feel. You’re entitled to that,” he went on. “We—”
“Really? You think you really do understand?” Nick said. His eyes narrowed and his jaw worked.
“Look. Balls were dropped, and a lot was overlooked, for sure. I can’t explain exactly how or why. Not everything, anyway. The guys who were working on this case then are dead or retired, or clueless; their memories can’t be trusted. But that’s my job now—to clean up some old messes. I was brought back down here from New York, where I worked on the Etan Patz case, and I worked the Southside Strangler case, if you remember that. We finally got that . . . taken care of. That dude is gone.”
“They did a great job on Etan Patz,” Mary Byrd sniped. “When was that? The seventies? and this is nineteen-ninety-six.” She had avoided knowing much about the case, but she remembered that the little New York boy had never been found.
“That case is still open, it’s true, and the investigation is ongoing.” Stith lifted his chin slightly, looking pissed. “But we’ve got DNA now, and all kinds of forensic technology and labs and computers, even here in Richmond. We can do a lot now that we couldn’t do then. In Steve’s case, most of what was needed was all right here, in these files. In most cold cases, that’s true; you just have to start over and review everything. Somehow, through negligence or stupidity or oversight, or, I’m sorry to say, deliberate obstruction—and I think it was all those things—nothing happened. Until now.” Stith picked up a pencil and drummed impatiently on the pile of old, discolored folders in front of him. “So bear with me, okay? That’s why you’re here, so let’s just get to it.”
“Obstruction?” James asked.
Ignoring James, Stith went on. “There are some pro forma things that we need to take care of first before I can discuss any new information. I want to be absolutely sure everything is done by the book this time—no fumbles or mistakes that can prevent prosecution and conviction to the fullest extent of the law. Which is why I don’t want this going public just yet. I’ll ask questions; just tell me what you remember.”
He opened a binder from the pile in front of him and placed his right hand on a tape recorder. “I’ll be taping our conversation. Mainly because my handwriting’s too sloppy and my typing’s too slow.” He grinned, a challenging display of teeth. “That okay with everybody?”
Nobody said anything.
“Okay then,” Stith said. “Rolling.”
Stith spoke for a few minutes, recounting the day of the murder, finding the body the following day, questioning the neighbors, and, Mary Byrd was shocked to hear, Eliot Nelson. Finding the body. Dear god, don’t let him bring out any pictures of that little body, Mary Byrd prayed. Did any of them have any information they hadn’t revealed at the time? They all shook their heads, and he carefully looked at each of them.
Stith seemed deliberately casual, almost uninterested, like a doctor asking about your bowels or libido, but was he looking more pointedly at her? Was it about her diary, and Tuttle? Remembering standing in the Cherry Glen Lane living room, answering that smarmy detective’s questions, she felt her face go hot. Blushing wasn’t something she did often.
Stith picked up a folder. “Photos. Let’s review some of the things I believe you looked at in 1966. You don’t need to look at anything graphic. Unless you want to.”
“No!” said Mary Byrd, looking over at the others, hoping they’d say the same.
James hunched his shoulders and said, “I don’t think we need any of that.”
Stith held up a photograph of a dirty, striped beach towel. “Is—was—this towel familiar to you?”
Nick spoke up. “It’s familiar only because they showed it to me and Mary Byrd then. They said it had blood and semen on it. It didn’t belong to us. I think someone in the neighborhood said they thought they’d seen it hanging on the Tuttles’ clothesline. I’m not sure.”
“I guess I remember that,” Mary Byrd said miserably.
“I never saw anything,” their mother said. “They hardly talked to me at all.”
“What about this footprint?” Stith held up a photo of a mold of an unclear footprint with treads that looked like they’d been made by a tennis shoe.
Nick looked at Mary Byrd. “No,” he said. “I don’t think I saw that. But what would we recognize? It’s not like sneakers now— they were all alike back then.”
Mary Byrd shook her head.
Stith flipped open a notebook of five mug shots, men in their thirties or forties. “Do you remember looking at these before?”
“Yes,” she and Nick said at the same time. They remembered all too well.
Nick said, “These were the known sex offenders in Richmond then, right? Potential suspects?”
“Right,” Stith said. “You should see how many there are now—two whole binders, at least, and more in our new computer files.”
“But isn’t that because you lump twenty-two-year-old guys who’ve been seduced by seventeen-year-old girls in there, too? Those guys are not pedophiles and they’re not dangerous.” Nick’s voice was thick with disgust.
“We’re not here to open up that can of worms right now,” Stith said dismissively. “But were these five mug shots shown to you then?”
“I remember that Nick and I were freaked out because the guy in the bottom left corner was Mr. Canter, who was a married guy in the neighborhood with kids,” Mary Byrd said. “But these guys were eliminated because they’d figured out, I think, by the footprints that the . . . the murderer was a younger guy wearing smaller tennis shoes?” She was getting slightly queasy. Maybe she should have eaten a bagel. No crying, no throwing up.
The detective held up another photo. “From the old filing system, F-B-six-seven-A,” he said to the recorder. “What about this one? Were you ever shown this?”
Before them was a photo of an older teenager, ordinary looking except for a vicious case of acne, the kind people didn’t get anymore. What kids used to call a pizza face.
They all looked, and shook their heads. “No. Don’t know him,” said Nick. He passed the photo back.
Stith coughed and shuffled through the folder, drawing out a small photo. He said very clearly, “S-R-six-six-B,” and came around his desk, stopping in front of Mary Byrd. “This one?” he said to her.
Her face burned. They all turned to look at her. “That . . . that was my boyfriend,” she said. “Eliot.”
“You gotta be kidding,” Nick said angrily. “Where the hell is a mug shot of Tuttle?”
Stith asked, “So you weren’t told anything about Eliot being a suspect?”
“Why are we talking about these guys?” James spoke up. “Can we cut to the chase?”
“I’m getting there,” Stith said. “Eliot Nelson—”
“Eliot Nelson?” their mother said vaguely. “He seemed like . . . a lovely kid.” She looked at Mary Byrd, who crumpled into herself, horrified.
“Eliot and the other guy I showed you were suspects along with Tuttle. I’m not sure why you weren’t informed of that. Eliot wasn’t a sex offender, but the lead detective had determined that he was homosexual, and he had an . . . incident in his history.” Stith leaned over his desk, retrieving another photo. He held it up. Tuttle. The sad, moon face stared dully out at them. “S-R-six-six-A,” he said.
“Finally,” said Nick.
“Yes, finally, Ned Tuttle.” Stith took a deep breath and continued. “His tennis shoes match the footprints, the stained towel was thought to be from his family, and, although he passed a lie detector test, his father had dosed him with Valium when he took it. I’m guessing you weren’t told that?”
They shook their heads. Nick, pissed off, said “No. We weren’t.” Mary Byrd’s heart beat crazily. She was confused—what was he saying? Eliot? Tuttle? Either way, she was afraid awfulness was about to crash down on her.
“And of course, there’s the odd letter he sent Mrs. Thornton after Steve was killed,” Stith said. “Which Tuttle dated so it would appear that he was away at school and couldn’t have been involved.”
Mary Byrd tried to control the shaking that seized her. James’s knee was bouncing up and down. He said, “So. Game over? The rest of the physical evidence seals the deal on Tuttle, right?”
“There’s a couple more things I need to show you.” Stith leaned back to grab his Dr. Pepper. He took a long drink. Putting the Tuttle photo down, he picked up a page with a transparent plastic covering, saying, “S-R-six-six-C-O-M-P. Is this familiar?”
It was an amateurish composite sketch in pencil. Nick rubbed his face with his hands and said, “I don’t remember it, but it doesn’t look much like Tuttle.”
Stith moved closer. He had the composite and another sheet in his hands. Not saying anything, he held them up side by side. Then he said quietly, “That’s because it isn’t. This is the guy. This is Steve’s killer.”
They were stunned and speechless. To the recorder Stith said, “We’re looking again at F-B-six-seven-A, with the composite.” It was the unnamed suspect that Stith had shown them before Eliot. In the inept composite, the size and shape of the head, and the eyes, nose, and mouth, looked similar to the photograph, but could be anyone. But the violent acne in the photo and the drawing were unmistakably alike. Mary Byrd looked more closely. The expression on the face in the photograph was blank, but as she focused on his eyes, she thought she could see that they were not quite empty. There was a pinprick of something there, something she couldn’t interpret or give a name to, maybe because she’d never seen it before. The silence was long as they all leaned forward, staring.
Nick was the first to speak. “How? How is he the guy?”
Mary Byrd couldn’t take her eyes off the simple, plain face in the photo, with its terrible, baroque eruptions. “How is it not Ned Tuttle?”
“It was never really Ned Tuttle. But I want to—”
“Is acne supposed to be some kind of proof?” James interrupted. “Why didn’t you just show us this guy from the first?”
Nick said loudly, “What do you mean? Tuttle . . . he’s the only person the cops ever told us about.”
Stith went back around his desk and put the composite back in the folder, leaving the photo on the desk in front of them. “I realize that now. I didn’t really get that until I started going through files and I found . . . things that were actually from other cases, both before and after Steve was killed.” He took a deep breath. “I needed to show you the other photos to determine what you hadn’t been told. This will be clearer to you in a minute, I hope, as I explain.”
They waited for Stith to go on. Their mother whispered, “Dear God in Heaven.”
“Ned Tuttle was almost immediately discounted as a prime suspect even though some things pointed to him. The police were aware of this other guy, and all suspicion became focused on him, but they didn’t know who he was. I can’t explain why your family wasn’t told about this, or why the papers never picked up on it. I do have some ideas, which—”
“Ideas?” said Nick, his voice rising. “Are we still going to be talking about ideas?”
Stith rubbed his skinny neck, like he had a crick. “Look,” he said, “I know this is shocking. But I’m laying it all out, if you’ll let me. And I’m going to tell you right now, it’s gonna get worse. But let’s try to get through it. I’ll try to answer any questions you might have. If I can. But there are things I don’t have any answers for; at least not yet. Can I go on?” He looked at them flatly. “Please.”
Nick sat back, arms folded. James’s leg began jiggling again. Mary Byrd wished desperately that she was anywhere but trapped in the dreadful room.
Stith said. “Here are the facts.”
They sat, tense but quiet, while Stith began to unscroll for them the truth—finally, the truth—of how Stevie had been molested and murdered; the technical details of exactly how the delicate little machine that was Stevie had been stopped: stabbed in the neck with a four-inch knife blade more than twenty times, he had choked on his own blood. His shorts—Mary Byrd remembered the kind he wore; baggy brown or navy blue ones with elastic waists, saggy because of all the junk he kept in his pockets—and his underwear had been pulled down around his ankles. Although the coroner hadn’t been able to find evidence of penetration, dark head and pubic hairs had been found on the beach towel, stained with blood and semen, on which Steve had lain. Scrapings from under Steve’s fingernails had been taken.
“Here,” Stith said, “is where Steve’s story ends. Until now. The known pedophiles were discounted and Tuttle was dropped as a suspect, which you were never told: the physical evidence didn’t match up. He never really was the prime suspect. But this man, Jeffrey Zepf, was. Is.”
Stith continued. “They hadn’t been able to catch Zepf—they knew he was out there, but they didn’t have a name for the face at this point—but they pretty quickly figured out that Steve’s killer was the same person who’d molested a series of boys over the previous year, right up to a few weeks before Steve’s murder. The composite was made then, before Steve. All the attacks were in woody areas within a mile of Cherry Glen Lane, and those victims—at least the little boys who dared to come forward—all reported that in spite of knowing better, they’d gone with Zepf, who had said he was looking for his lost bike. He’d offered them a reward. Once he got the boys to a secluded spot, they would be molested at knifepoint. Although none of those boys had been hurt—”
James interrupted, saying sarcastically, “You mean by hurt that none of them was slashed or stabbed?”
The detective said evenly, “Yes. Of course that’s what I mean.”
Mary Byrd could see that James, easily angered but who’d learned better than his brother or sister how to rein it in, was bowing up. Poor James. He’d just been the clueless old baby at the time, but Stevie’s death had haunted him like it had haunted the rest of them. She put her hand gently on his thigh to stop his jitters.
“All the boys reported that the guy had a bad complexion,” Stith said.
Her mother spoke up. “If all this had happened—if this Zepf person was loose in our neighborhood—why wasn’t there some kind of alert? I can’t get over this. We never heard a thing about this going on. Were the schools told? There was an elementary school and a public playground nearby. We never heard anything. All we knew about was Ned.” She began sniffling and rooted in her bag for a Kleenex. “Ned. Poor child.”
Stith looked tired. “I’m guessing that the families of the boys who’d been molested didn’t want anything made public, to protect the boys. A couple parents didn’t come forward until after Steve’s murder. There were almost certainly other boys who never told anyone at all. These incidents are so traumatic for families. Maybe if more parents and more boys had spoken up, maybe if the department had insisted, as it should have, that every attack be made public, things might have been different. Everybody wants to talk about getting mugged, or their home being robbed, but nobody wants to talk about a sex crime. Victims and families just want to forget about it and go on with their lives, as you know too well.”
Mary Byrd felt shame at how she had balked about coming to Richmond to deal with this. Pale at no crime.
“In fact, one victim—he was thirteen at the time but looked younger—could never get over what had been done to him, and later killed himself,” Stith said.
“But Stevie was the only boy this guy killed?” Nick asked.
“Up to that point. Steve—Stevie, if I may—apparently resisted Zepf and struggled, or angered or threatened him in some way.” It was weird to hear Stith say Stevie, like he’d known him.
“But if it wasn’t Ned Tuttle, what about the N on Stevie’s shoulder?” blurted Mary Byrd.
“It wasn’t an N,” Stith said. “It was a Z. I don’t quite know how the guys on the case fumbled that. Stevie and Zepf lay on their sides, Zepf behind Stevie, his left arm under Stevie to hold him, and with his right hand, he clumsily slashed the Z. If Stevie had been upright or flat on his stomach during an autopsy, the slashes would have appeared to make an N, unless you considered the position they’d been in. The coroner blew that. And other stuff.”
Mary Byrd shuddered; so that had been done when Stevie was still alive. How could they even be just talking about it.
“Jesus Christ,” said Nick. “Who was the coroner? Helen Keller?”
“If you want names, that’s your prerogative,” Stith went on. “Like I’ve said, most of the department guys who worked this case are gone, or clueless. So let’s just—”
Nick interrupted again. “They were clueless, all right. Is this asshole still out there?”
Stith looked down. “Please. I’m going to give it all to you.” Mary Byrd could see that he was struggling to be patient. This must really suck for him, too. What a fucked-up job: digging up old dirt and bones and awful tragedies and department mistakes.
They sat stonily—even Nick seemed deflated—and listened to Stith tell them more about Jeffrey Zepf.
“Even though they knew this guy was out there, and they had a pretty good description of what he looked like from victims, and all the attacks were in the same area, he still wasn’t caught. Since there was no publicity about any of the attacks before Stevie, there wasn’t much to go on. Even the FBI had gotten involved—because they investigate all kidnappings—but nobody could ID him. At that point.”
“We had to move,” her mother said quietly. “I—we were all terrified of Ned. Some of the neighbors moved, too.”
Mary Byrd remembered that James, a solemn little guy, had become silent and angry. Her mother and Pop had never let the boys out of the house alone that summer, before they were able to move, and had monitored them every minute. They had been afraid of Tuttle, and they’d been just as afraid of the closed door of Stevie’s room. Only Pete the baby had seemed okay.
Stith gave them a breather, drinking from his Dr. Pepper. He walked from his desk to the window, touching things. Mary Byrd knew he wanted a smoke. She did, too.
He resumed. “About a year to the day of Stevie’s murder, there was a break in the case,” he said. He puffed out his cheeks in frustration and exhaled. “Look, I’m just going to read all this to you, as I’ve written it up and summarized for your family. You’ll each get a copy. Nobody here except the chief has seen this. Let’s be careful; I can’t emphasize how important it is that we not let this get out just yet. There are sensitive legal issues involved here, and what we don’t need is reporters and publicity complicating things, or scaring off the people we need to interview before we can get to them.”
Mary Byrd was sure Stith was only thinking about his department saving face. He picked up a blue folder and said, “Okay. Here’s the rest.” He began reading, his voice businesslike and clipped.
Sometime in May 1967, eighteen-year-old Jeffery Zepf first noticed fourteen-year-old Freddy Brickle, a boy who appeared to be two or three years younger than his actual age. Over the next several weeks, Zepf began following Freddy home from school and hiding beneath an open kitchen window at the Brickle house. By eavesdropping, Zepf learned all about the comings and goings of the Brickle family, and especially about Freddy—his schedule, interests, and when he would be alone in the house. On the evening of June 12, knowing Freddy’s parents were going out and leaving him to babysit his younger sister, Zepf phoned Freddy. Knowing Freddy’s hobby was building and flying radio-control model airplanes, Zepf pretended to be a member of a radio-control airplane club and convinced Freddy to meet him in an empty lot several houses away to look at some planes and discuss Freddy’s possible membership in “the club.” Excited, Freddy left his house at dark, about 8 p.m. Arriving at the empty lot, he found nobody there. Turning to leave, he suddenly felt something painfully sharp poked into his back. Zepf told him to keep quiet and still or he’d be killed. Zepf then blindfolded Freddy with a bandana and dragged him into the shrubbery, and lay him on top of a sleeping bag. Freddy’s pants were taken down and Zepf lay down behind him and began fondling him.
Stith paused. He looked them over quickly. Nick’s jaw was working again and James cracked his knuckles, but they sat quietly listening.
Zepf told Freddy that he’d been stalking him and said he couldn’t help himself because he was attracted to blond, blue-eyed young boys. Freddy, thinking quickly, told Zepf that he had VD, something he had recently learned about in health class. Zepf went no further than fondling, but kept Freddy for approximately an hour. Still blindfolded, Freddy could not see Zepf, lying behind him, but he reported that he could feel Zepf’s rough acne as Zepf rubbed his cheek against his.
Mary Byrd shivered, feeling the flesh of her arms tightening into goose bumps.
Zepf proceeded to tell Freddy that he had no friends his age, he was the “black sheep” in his family because they knew about his homosexuality and that his only friend was an older man named Chuck Richards, an attorney. Zepf told Freddy he would release him, but said, “I’ve killed before and I’ll kill you if I find out you told anybody.” Zepf then commanded Freddy to count to 1,000 before removing the blindfold, and he fled the scene.
The detective stopped again, and Nick burst out, “And why do we have to hear details about other disgusting things this son of a bitch did?”
“Nick,” their mother said.
Stith raised a palm—just hold on a minute—and continued.
Freddy Brickle’s parents called the police. Lacking a good physical description, except for a report of acne, detectives told the Brickles that if Zepf should again contact Freddy, Freddy should arrange another meeting whereby police could immediately apprehend Zepf. Zepf did phone Freddy again later that summer, telling him, “I feel bad about what happened and want to make it up to you. You like firecrackers, right? I’ve got some really cool ones for you.” Police were notified, a sting was set up, and Zepf was arrested at the scene on August 3, 1967. He was carrying a four-inch knife and in his car police found rope, a sleeping bag, and a toy truck. He was found to be wearing size eight tennis shoes, the size of the footprint found at the scene of the attack on Steve Rhinehart.
Jeffrey Zepf was charged with the sexual assault and the attempted murder of Freddy Brickle. One of the arresting officers punched Zepf and Zepf used a bandana to stop the bleeding from his nose. During initial questioning at the station that night, Zepf admitted to stalking Freddy. Detective Fahey, now deceased, told one of the officers to discard the bloody bandana. When it was suggested by other officers that immediate comparisons should be made between dark brown hairs found at the scene of both Steve’s and Freddy’s assaults, and between Steve’s fingernail scrapings and the blood on Zepf’s bandana, Detective Fahey disallowed this, puzzling the arresting officers. The officers declined to challenge a superior, assuming there was a legal explanation for Fahey’s decision. Jeffrey Zepf went to trial for the sexual assault and attempted murder of a minor, Freddy Brickle, on April 2, 1968. His attorney was Zepf’s aforementioned “only friend,” Chuck Richards, soon to become a U.S. District Court judge.
Despite the strong case presented by prosecutor Bill Cates, Judge Thomas Fairborn sentenced Zepf to a two-year suspended sentence and two years’ probation. Freddy Brickle’s parents were so shocked by the lenient verdict that they told their son that Zepf would be “imprisoned for many years” and would not be a threat to him any longer. Inexplicably, the arrest and trial of Zepf were not reported in the Times-Dispatch, allowing Freddy to believe this.
“Jesus,” James said. “We weren’t told about Brickle? It wasn’t in the papers? Zepf gets a slap on the wrist for attempted murder of a child? How can this be? Why wasn’t somebody raising hell? Inexplicably?”
Nick said, “That’s what Linda Fyce plans to do. It will sure be in the papers now.”
Stith said evenly, “I’m sorry. Let me go on.” He glanced at his watch. Poor guy, thought Mary Byrd. He should get one of those new nicotine patches. She had begun to feel sorry for him—for the ugliness of what he was having to do. Stith—the whole RPD—would become another circle of victims in the whole tragedy. Crime upon crime, infecting more and more lives, on and on. The ruining that keeps on ruining. Detective Fahey—that name suddenly was familiar to Mary Byrd. She was sure he was the one who’d questioned her that day. She was glad to hear he was dead; she hoped he’d died from quartan fever or the bloody flux. And the Brickles—god. Would her mother and Pop have been able to come forward like that, if Stevie had only been molested? Pop was from an old-school Irish family in a hard-scrabble steel- and mine-worker neighborhood in Pittsburgh. If Stevie had been Freddy, could Pop have let what happened be public, or offered him up for a sting? A more chilling thought came to her: what would she and Charles have done if it had been William? She wiped her clammy hands on the coat in her lap, catching a whiff of sweat from her sweater. Stith picked back up with his report.
For as yet undetermined reasons, Zepf spent only three nights in jail for the attack on Brickle. Later in 1968, Zepf moved to Bloomington, Illinois, supposedly to attend college there. In 1977, Bloomington police were looking for the murderer of a young boy whose sexually molested body had been found in a cave near railroad tracks. The details of the crime were very similar to those of the two assaults in Richmond. Bloomington police were unaware of Zepf and the fact that he lived six blocks from the child’s house and one mile from the murder scene. There were no leads in that crime until June 1986, when Zepf was arrested and charged with molesting a young boy he was babysitting. At the same time, an RPD detective began reopening and reviewing all cases, including Steve’s, around Richmond involving unsolved sex crimes against children and repeat sex offenders.
Stith looked up to say, “That detective, by the way, was my predecessor and is deceased.”
Learning that Zepf had relocated to Bloomington, the detective called police there to inquire about any crimes involving young boys. It was only then that Zepf was connected to the 1977 murder there. The RPD detective flew to Illinois to interrogate Zepf regarding Steve’s case. Zepf denied involvement in Steve’s case, and passed a polygraph test, although the polygraph technician determined that Zepf had been coached on manipulating results by altering his breathing patterns. There were no arrests in the Bloomington murder or in Steve’s. On November 8, 1986, Zepf received twelve months’ probation and paid a $375 fine for molesting the child he had babysat in Bloomington. For reasons unknown, none of these facts was made public by the Bloomington police, or again in Richmond.
Around this time, Zepf moved to the San Francisco area where he sold drums and gave music lessons to young boys. There he was a suspect in numerous other sex crime investigations, none resulting in convictions. Zepf returned to Virginia and began using Compuserve to seek out and arrange meetings with underage boys. According to a 1987 chat log between Zepf and a sixteen-year-old boy, Zepf wrote, “I hope you don’t tell anyone I’ve sent you these pictures. I don’t ever want to go to jail and be Bubba’s love slave.”’ In July 1987, Zepf initiated contact with an FBI agent posing online as a fourteen-year-old boy. Zepf was arrested in December 1987 and charged with crossing state lines to engage in sex with a minor. Zepf pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court and was sentenced to eighteen months in jail. FBI agents searched his home and found more than six thousand pornographic images, many involving boys, enabling the FBI to build a second case against Zepf, who admitted to having sex with a thirteen-year-old boy, photographing him, and sending the photos from his computer. For this second charge, Zepf was sentenced to nine years in the federal penitentiary at Butner, North Carolina, where he is today. These two cases mark the first and only time Zepf was actually incarcerated for his many actions as a child molester and suspected murderer.
In my investigation, I’ve determined that Jeffrey Zepf has been the primary suspect in 125 cases of the sexual molestation of children in several states, of the murder of Steven Rhinehart in 1966, and convicted of the attempted murder of Frederick Brickle in 1967, for which he was incarcerated for only three days.
His lips pressed together grimly, Stith closed the report folder and added, “And of course we will probably never know how many other victims there were, most of whom would not have been attacked if Zepf had been caught and convicted of killing Stevie, or if he’d been appropriately sentenced for his attempt to kill Freddy Brickle.”
“Suspect? Suspect? Are you fucking kidding me?” Nick was going Sicilian and practically shouting.
“When did loud ever help anything,” Mary Byrd said, channeling Charles. But she also wanted to shout something; she couldn’t think what. She looked over at her mother, whose tanned face was pale.
“It’s a good thing Pop died,” their mother said. “If he’d known this creature was out there, and all these . . . mistakes had been made, there’s no telling . . .” she trailed off, shaking her head. “Poor Pop.” She began crying.
“Ma,” said Mary Byrd, putting her arm around her mother’s shoulders. But it was true. Pop would have wanted William’s flame thrower, too. And he would have used it on Zepf and the police. But not on her—she was free of that now, at least, it suddenly occurred to her.
James rose and walked stiffly to the window, his broad swimmer’s shoulders and back ropey with muscle and tension. “So, now game over?” he said quietly. “He’s already in jail.”
“Yes, he’s in jail now,” Stith said. “But that nine-year sentence is nearly over.”
James turned to face him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean: Jeffrey Zepf is eligible for parole.” Stith knocked a fist on his desk. “In April. Two months from now.”
Nick threw his hands in the air. “And you people know all this about him, and someone’s going to let him out?”
“It’s hard to believe, but those two Internet convictions are all we’ve got. That’s all that’s ever stuck to him. But this is why we’re doing this. This is why I’ve been in such a hurry. We have to go forward with this information and try to get a conviction in Stevie’s case. If we do, he will never be released. It may be hard without the physical evidence, which would contain the DNA to make an unquestionable ID on Zepf, but I’m committed, and absolutely determined, to keep this guy locked up. At the very least. And to give y’all some closure.”
“What do you mean, ‘without the physical evidence’?” James said. “What about the towel and the . . . other stuff?”
Stith’s face sagged, and he shook his head. “The physical evidence—the towel, Stevie’s clothes and fingernail scrapings, the knife from the Brickle arrest, Zepf’s polygraph results—it’s all missing.”
“How could that happen? How could that happen?” Nick said, dazed.
“No wonder,” Mary Byrd’s mother said. “We . . . I should have paid more attention. I should have been asking more questions. I was just . . . I don’t know.” She dropped her head and cried again.
Oh my god, can this get worse? Mary Byrd reached for her mother’s hand. “Mom, don’t.” She selfishly wanted to know if the diary was gone, too. It’s not about me.
“You mean the evidence and the polygraph results were lost, or they were ‘disappeared’?” asked James.
“At this point, I don’t know. That part of it will be an ongoing investigation, and is one reason I needed to know what, exactly, you all were shown, or told, in nineteen sixty-six. If the evidence was tampered with, or if the judge was influenced in some way in the Brickle case, or if any department guys or Chuck Richards were involved in a cover-up of the lost evidence, I’m going to get to the bottom of it.” Stith stepped back from his desk and opened the middle drawer. “But we do have this.” He took out a Baggie with a small object and held it out in his long, pale palm. A small green and yellow metal dump truck worn to the metal. “Do you recognize it?”
Mary Byrd closed her eyes, feeling tears. “That . . . that was Stevie’s Tonka truck. Or he had one like that. Same colors, and beaten up like that.”
“Definitely,” Nick said. “‘Pickin’ up dirt . . . Brrrrooom . . . dump truck.’ That’s what he’d say. He played with that thing all the time.”
Their mother said, “Yes. That’s his truck. I don’t know how many times I had to take it out of his pants pocket when I did his laundry.”
“Even I remember that truck,” James said, surprised. “Sometimes he let me play with it.” He smiled a sad little smile.
“So you feel sure it was his?”
Mary Byrd reached for it and he allowed her to take it. “Please don’t take it out of the bag.”
She thought of William, who always seemed to have a few of his tiny war machines in his backpack, or parked neatly in front of his plate at meal times. “Yeah,” she said softly. “It was like a good luck charm. He loved to load it up and make it dump stuff.” Like English peas he didn’t want to eat—William had tricks for that, too—or roly-polies, or Japanese beetles her mother paid him a penny apiece to pick off her roses. Pumpkin seeds. Her eyes and nose watered and she sniffed hard.
“It was evidence from Freddy Brickle’s case,” Stith said. “Those clowns hadn’t even inventoried it or cross-indexed it with Stevie’s file. It wasn’t Freddy’s, so I had a hunch that it must have been Stevie’s. Zepf kept it as . . . a kind of trophy, I guess. But if you’re sure it was Stevie’s it’s going to be a very important piece of evidence.”
She squeezed the little truck in the bag with her sweaty palm and moved its tiny dumper thing.
“I . . . I actually have a picture of him with it. And some of his other trucks,” she said. “I was looking at it the other day.”
Stith’s eyebrows rose. “I really need to have that photo, if you’ll send it as soon as you can.”
“Okay.” Mary Byrd handed back the bag. She wondered if they’d ever see it again, or if they wanted to.
James, at the window with his back turned, gave the hanging spider a push. “What is it that you think might have happened to the other stuff?”
“There are a number of possibilities. One is that the evidence was lost innocently enough, however ineptly, by Detective Danvers, who transferred it from the RPD to the FBI, which at that time made its labs and forensic experts available to small police departments. You know—left in a box in someone’s trunk, or in a locker and accidentally thrown away. The records here show the evidence being signed out and signed back in to the department, but they might have been altered. Fahey, the lead detective, knew the evidence for Stevie’s case was lost—or was ‘disappeared,’ as you say—but wanted to cover up that fact, therefore disallowing comparisons between Stevie’s fingernails and Zepf’s hair and blood when he assaulted Brickle. That’s why Fahey had the bandana discarded. And there’s the possibility that there was something even more . . . criminal going on.”
James gave the spider a harder push—a punch. Stith looked over but went on.
“Possibly one or more of the detectives involved were . . . encouraged in some way to lose the evidence, although we have no proof to that effect. Zepf’s father was a wealthy developer and his uncle was a county executive. Both were large contributors to the local Republican Party. Judge Fairborn was appointed by Nixon. Chuck Richards, Zepf’s ‘best friend,’ who was Zepf’s defense attorney in the Brickle trial, later received an appointment as a U.S. District Court judge, also from the Nixon administration. It’s also possible that Richards and Zepf had a sexual relationship, which of course Richards, who was married with a family, would have made every effort to conceal. Some or all of these things could account for what did, or did not, happen, including why no one in the Zepf family was ever questioned in either of the two boys’ cases, and why your family and the public were never made aware of Zepf. Why, when Stevie’s case was reopened when Zepf was a suspect in Illinois, these . . . injustices weren’t discovered, and why no reporters were made aware of these events, particularly Zepf’s trial for the attempted murder of Freddy, and why the prosecutor put up with being prohibited from connecting Freddy’s case to Stevie’s. It’s also true, but no excuse, that by 1987, everyone around here was . . . preoccupied with the Southside Strangler. There’s some stuff we’ll probably never be able to know. I, speaking personally and as a member of the department, could not be sorrier. I hope that eventually an official apology will be made to all of you, and to the public, for what’s been a tragic failure to protect this community, and other communities, from crimes like this, for what that’s worth. Although those other communities—in California and Illinois—need to face up to their own failures as well.”
“Eventually?” Nick said. “There’ll be an apology in another thirty years maybe?”
“We need a conviction first, right now,” Stith said. “And look, in no way do I want to be defending the officers involved, but I’ve got to say that at the time, in 1966, the RPD was a podunk operation. These guys didn’t have adequate training in homicides and forensic science. Most small police departments still don’t have access to proper training and facilities. This is a personal soapbox of mine. We’ve come a long way. Now there’s the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and John Jay College’s Crime Scene Academy.”
James interrupted, “And that helps us how?”
Stith was unflustered. “Unfortunately, these crimes will not stop happening, but the more we know, the more we can prevent them.”
“Maybe even in this century,” Nick said. He cleared his throat, and Mary Byrd hoped he wouldn’t spit.
Their mother picked up her crochet bag and started fiddling in her purse for her keys. She was done. They all were.
Stith wasn’t, and preached on. “Things move too slowly because the legal system is overwhelmed. There’s a big difference between a child taken by a parent and one snatched by a predator, and there’s a difference between real predators and a nineteen-year-old kid who has sex with a sixteen-year-old girl, as Mr. D’Abruzzi pointed out, and the law needs to catch up. I say this somewhat lamely because I know that nothing can bring Stevie back. I am so, so sorry for what you’ve been through. I have children. If we can keep Zepf behind bars, and I think we can, maybe that will be some comfort to you.” Stith looked exhausted and genuinely sad.
Except for their mother rattling her keys, they sat limply while Stith briefly laid out the plan to retry Zepf. He asked them to be patient and wait a little longer, saying again that he hoped they would resist talking about it. They had his promise that he was doing everything he could to stop Zepf’s release, but if he failed, they could—should—go public with their story in any way they wished. It was their story, after all.
“One more question,” Nick said, standing to go. “Can this guy still get the death penalty?”
“It’s not likely,” Stith said. “But it’s a possibility you might want to think about.” He reached over and snapped off the recorder.
They left the room wasted and sad, their tough mother forging ahead, Stith following them. Like a beaten dog, thought Mary Byrd. He rushed ahead of her to speak to her brothers and mother. She lagged behind, struggling with her coat.
Stith waited for her to catch up. “Can I talk to you a sec?”
“Okay,” she said doubtfully. What fresh hell?
He smiled gratefully and held the door open. “I could use a smoke.”
Outside he said, “Wow! Pure, frigid oxygen!”
“Let’s ruin it. What I really need is a drink,” Mary Byrd said, taking the Marlboro and the light he offered. She sucked in the soothing smoke. “Have y’all ever thought of putting in a bar? It might help with confessions. Let a detective pose as the bartender.”
Stith looked surprised. “I’d expect you to be a little more . . . circumspect, at the moment.”
“What should we be doing? Ululating? Tearing out our hair and beating our breasts?”
“I’m sorry you had to come so far to do this, but your mother insisted you’d want to.”
“My mom is great at deciding how I feel,” Mary Byrd said.
Stith smiled, but said apologetically, “This had to be . . . grim.”
“It couldn’t have been very fun for you, either. And I’m guessing it’s going to get worse when everything is out there.”
“It’s what I was hired to do.” Stith shrugged. “There’s some satisfaction in it.”
“How do you do this stuff, day in and day out?”
“Somebody has to,” he shrugged again. “Maybe it makes me a better person, if that makes sense. Like, if you can understand—or I guess confront is a better word—the worst in people, you’re better able to appreciate the best? I admit there’s a rush when you solve a case. I’m no superhero, but I’d like to be one.” He grinned. His teeth looked perfect and white; weird for a smoker.
“I sometimes think about how . . . lucky we are, because at least Stevie was found the next day. I can’t imagine how the families whose children are never found get through life.”
“They hope,” he said. “Even when they know, they hope.”
“What about Tuttle? He’s been blamed all these years.”
Stith nodded. “I’m going to try to locate him and set that straight.”
No telling how Tuttle’s life had been fucked up. Mary Byrd shook her head, stepping on her cigarette butt, then picked it up and put it in her pocket. “Well, we all thank you very much, even if we seemed to be hating your guts.”
Stith smiled. “When we no longer need the little truck, would you like to have it?
“Oh. Yes, sure.” She wasn’t at all sure.
“I just offered to send it to your mom or brothers, but they didn’t want it; they said you might because you have a little boy. And your mother said, ‘Yes, she’ll want it. She’s a terrible hoarder.’”
“Guilty,” Mary Byrd said. “I like little things.” She felt tears. “My son might like it, but he’s more into tanks and planes. But thanks. I would really like to have it. And I’ll send you that photograph of it as soon as I get home.”
“There’s something else.” Stith drew something from his pocket. “They’re yours.”
He handed her a small green book with gold edges, and an envelope.
“Oh, jeez,” she said, recognizing her ancient, pitiful diary. Embarrassed, she could only think to say, “Thank you.”
“I don’t know why they were never returned,” Stith said. “Or why they were asked for. They were never needed.”
Seeing the old envelope addressed to her in Tuttle’s boyish scrawl, she said, “I don’t think I want this.”
“It’s yours to destroy.”
“They told me . . . Did they ever even really think that Ned Tuttle had killed Stevie to get back at me?”
Stith looked puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“That’s what a detective told me. That’s why they took the diary.” She wondered if Stith had read it.
“Are you sure you’re remembering that right?” Stith asked. “Sometimes, when people are so traumatized . . .”
“I’ve been remembering it correctly for thirty years. It’s not something a girl would forget.” Eliza would kill anyone who looked at her diary.
Stith put his hands in his pockets and looked down. “I would let that go. I’m just glad you have your things back.”
He raised his head and looked her in the eye, honest and stern, like a dad. Or a shrink.
Mary Byrd made up her mind to do what he said. It was time.
They shook hands. She noticed his nice wrists. What was wrong with her? Stith said he would stay in touch until it was over. Mary Byrd ran to catch up with her family, who she knew would be fuming in the car, pissed off at her for keeping them waiting, her big, middle-age brothers crammed and doubled up in the backseat, her pipsqueak mom at the wheel, insisting on driving in spite of the gouty tophus, taking the lives she’d given them back in her bony little hands.