Alligator Candy (18 page)

I sought more understanding and awareness, a fuller sense of how I came to be the person I was, how my family struggled and endured, and, perhaps most of all, a fuller sense of this person who had such a profound influence on my life. A therapist I had been seeing pointed out that I was also writing about how trauma affects a child, something I hadn't really thought about consciously before. It was true that adults seemed to, out of protectiveness, perhaps, almost discount the feelings of young children experiencing trauma, as though before a certain age a person is somehow inoculated from grief and suffering. But as I learned myself, kids feel and remember more than adults might think.

I was interested in how this story transcended me, how, while our experience of death was unique, the experience of grieving, of living with grief, of living with death, was universal. I was isolated by my grief for many reasons—my age, the circumstances, the mystery—but I had come to see how everyone is isolated by grief; how grief sends you spiraling inside yourself and how only you can find a way out. And the way out, as my parents discovered, was by finding support and community in other people.

Part of me regretted that I hadn't pursued this earlier; that I wasn't writing the book while my father was alive and could participate. But things happen in life when the time is right, I believed, and perhaps my starting this book now was my father's final gift to me. Perhaps I had to experience his death, his passing, the gathering of the people at our house for shiva, before I could fully connect and be present to write the book on Jon. Though I longed for my father to be here, to share his memories, I appreciated that he had set me on my way.

My family and friends supported my writing the book, but they would often remark how hard they thought it would be for me to pursue. I never really thought of it as so foreboding, though. To me, I had lived with the story, the mystery, for so long that I was grateful to have the opportunity to do this at all. While some of the woods where Jon disappeared remained, the specific path he went down was long gone, along with the 7-Eleven. But I would be, figuratively at least, going back down the dark path of the woods now. Going there had always felt like some kind of inevitability, something I would do at some point in my life, and now, I knew, the time had come.

My main concern, really, was for my mother and brother. I had always felt a bit protected by the fact that I was so young when Jon died. My memories of that period were a blur, while, for them, they were fully formed because they were so much older. I felt protective of them and didn't want them to suffer again unnecessarily as I dug the story up again. “Just because I'm going into the woods,” I told them, “doesn't mean you have to follow me there.” But just as my father had given me his blessing to write the book, my mother and brother were there with me too. And so, with my tape recorder and notebook in hand, I got to work.

Over the years, my mother and I had spoken tentatively about Jon, largely because of my own tentativeness around the subject. But as we sat on the couch leafing through the photos, we could focus on the moment. While we both knew the ending of Jon's story, the fate that awaited him, we could now separate his death from his life, and focus on the life—the sweet life—he had.

Though I knew the contours of my family's story, my mother brought it to life more vividly. I realized that as much as we think we may know about our families, the more questions we ask, the more we learn about ourselves. For days, I sat with my mother and brother in our house, listening to their stories of our family's early life together: the days in the desert, the arrival in Tampa, Jon's struggles. “I always had a worry about him,” my mother recalled. “I was not quite sure how he was going to make it. He was very affectionate and very sweet, and I felt protective of him.”

I tracked down Jon's former teachers at IDS. One of them, Sandra Parks, the mother of one of Jon's friends, whom I met one day for breakfast, described him as a “gentle soul.” She said, “Jonathan was a humble kid; he didn't need to push kids around. Fifth-grade boys would be interested in showing off, but he was not like that.”

“He seemed like a gentle person,” recalled Jim Bradley, the former principal of IDS, when I phoned him. He was retired out of state. “He wasn't going to hurt anybody else,” recalled his wife, Patricia, who also worked at the school. “I do remember that was the feeling: a sweet boy,” she said.

John Wing, Parks's son, told me of the time he fell from a tree at IDS, and how Jon was the only kid who stayed around to make sure he was all right. “He said, ‘You're okay, just breathe deep,' ” Wing recalled. “ ‘You just got the wind knocked out of you.' That was what I remember about Jonathan . . . I thought about that a lot when he was missing; that was the image that I held on to and to this day.”

I found Jon's old friends Doug Chisholm and Paul Siddall. They were men now, weathered and aged, but still had sparks of precociousness as they recalled their childhoods with my brother. “Back then parents would say, ‘Get out of the house,' and we'd be gone for two or three hours,” Chisholm told me. “There was no restrictions,” Siddall added. “You had no worries.” Even the one alligator rumored to be in the lake, Big George, wasn't a threat. Neither was the trail to the store. “We used to sneak off to go to 7-Eleven,” Siddall went on. “We'd go under the bridge and straight down the trail.” They'd sneak off during physical education class to go there from school too. “If we wanted to and we weren't supervised we'd go to 7-Eleven and get candy,” he said. “By the 7-Eleven, people would dump things,” Chisholm said, “like mattresses in the woods.”

Parents knew their kids went into the woods, and mine were no different. They didn't worry about abductions. “There was no sense of fear at all,” my mother recalled. We had gone through all the albums—the photos of Jon and me playing; of Andy and Jon and me in front of the fireplace; of Jon with the faraway look in his eyes at Andy's bar mitzvah in his wide-collared suit.

I always felt a weird sense of an impending storm as we progressed through the pages, as the year 1973 approached. The closer we got to that time, the more I began to read into the expressions on Jon's face, the look in his eyes, the slackened jaw, the rest of us smiling. My mother saw this too. Perhaps we were reading into everything. Maybe it was just our brains seeking to make sense of what was coming. But we both had the feeling that it was almost as if Jon himself knew that his days were numbered.

The photo album from 1973 went up through the summer, when Jon flew alone to visit his grandparents in Minneapolis. There are photos he shot of the clouds below. Then the photo album stops, and the rest of the pages are blank.

O
N ANOTHER
afternoon in Tampa, I went to the library downtown to look at the microfilm from 1973. The last time I had done that was in junior high, when I spent a week at lunch looking over the articles, trying to piece together the story that I was afraid to discuss at home. As I sat at the microfilm machine now, I felt a different sense of urgency. I wasn't just there reading the stories about the search for Jon and the subsequent case. I was looking at everything—the ads, the football scores, the comics—soaking up the information in an effort to put myself back into the moment, to re-create the times.

Once again, my brain began seeing strange patterns, began making connections in a way that felt almost improper or egocentric. I was not one to think that things were meant to be, that the universe somehow aligned its exterior world to reflect the experiences of individuals. The rain that seemed to always fall on two lovers in a sad scene was just movie rain. And yet, when I looked at the Sunday
Tampa Tribune
that sat on our kitchen table the morning Jon disappeared, I was struck by what I saw.

An article headlined “What Are Our Children Missing?” opened with a quote from a local art teacher and mother of two. “Children today have been shortchanged,” she told the reporter. “When I was young, we could wander in the woods, we could breathe and run free.”

She and other parents didn't think that life in the early seventies was as adventurous as it seemed. Kids were getting overscheduled, they believed, confined by a regimen of after-school activities that was curtailing their independence and exploration. Children were watching too much television and doing drugs when they should have been adventuring outside, parents lamented. To drive home this point, the article was accompanied by an illustration of a happy, barefoot boy in a straw hat fishing with a line on a broken stick. What kids were missing, the picture implied, was this: wandering in the woods, breathing, and running free.

When parents pine for the good old days, they often pine for the same thing: the days when kids would be playing out in the woods. What was so compelling about this in the first place? Perhaps it was just an extension of the country's pioneering spirit. Kids, boys in particular, seemed expected to be outside with a pocketknife and a fishing pole, fending for themselves in the woods in preparation for their hunting and gathering to come as men.

Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn roamed the woods along the Mississippi River. So did the kids of the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina, on
The Andy Griffith Show
. The woods promised adventure and discovery. Jim Hawkins sailed off to Treasure Island in Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 adventure novel. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew solved crimes in the thickets. The woods held mystery and possibility, secret caves and forts, tree houses and buried fortunes,
Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
. Maybe most important, the woods were where kids could get away from adults.

But as much as kids were encouraged to venture into the woods, parents had their concerns. Fables and fairy tales warned what could happen to wandering kids in enchanted forests. Little Red Riding Hood met the murderous talking wolf; Hansel and Gretel, the child-eating hag. In the
Tampa Tribune
article, parents said that their kids' imaginations were starting to run wild from all the violence on TV. “You should trust your children, and I trust mine,” said one parent, “but I'm afraid of what other people might do to them.”

The kids who flipped to the comics page in the
Tribune
that morning found strips that, coincidentally, played on these fantasies and fears. In
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith
, Lukey warned Loweezy of trouble in the trees. A “mean ol' wild boar is out yonder in them, an' he's on th' rampage!!” Lukey said. Just below that strip, Archie was telling his dad how he and Jughead found a secret cave in the woods hidden behind bushes by the river. Hearing that the cave was covered in mysterious writings, Archie's dad rejoiced, telling the boys that his paleographic society had spent months searching for “the lost cave tribes,” and this must be it. The punch line came when his dad ventured into the cave—only to see that the ancient writing was modern-day spelunker graffiti.

Jon, an Archie fanatic who collected
Archie
comic books, may have read that strip that morning. And if he did, perhaps his mind might have filled with images of the caves that were supposedly hidden in the woods across from our house. The fact that no one had actually found any caves didn't seem to matter, nor did the specter of wild animals in those woods—not boars, but pygmy snakes and water moccasins. The fact was, the majority of parents where we lived, despite what the article said, didn't keep their kids from wandering in the woods at all. Kids were trusted and unleashed, set loose to disappear on their bikes, to breathe and ride free.

That's exactly what Jon intended to do that day. When I spoke with Andy and my mother about that morning, they both recalled it with their own filters of guilt. Andy was still haunted by what would have happened had he not skipped the ride to the synagogue and need Mom to take him. “I had guilt that if I hadn't done that, she wouldn't have gone, and he wouldn't have gone,” Andy recalled. “We're looking for a sense of control.”

“And blame,” my mother said.

“We're trying to bring control—even in a negative, blaming way—to a situation that was out of control.”

“And if you had been home,” my mother told Andy, “maybe you would have gone with him. There are a lot of what-ifs about what could have happened.”

“The ifs are literally infinite,” Andy said. “It's so random.”

“We all live with it,” she said

But there was more to the story that neither of them could tell me, the parts that I, for reasons unique to me, needed to know: the story of Jon's killers, how the community came together, the story of everything. And, after many months of research, reading the court documents, and tracking down family friends, the police, and volunteers, the missing pages I'd been seeking my entire life finally appeared.

T
HE PROBLEMS
with Johnny Paul Witt began at the start. Born on January 13, 1943, he grew up a troubled boy. His father, John H. Witt, thought his son showed signs of mental and emotional problems by the age of seven, often “nervous, disturbed, and confused.” The boy was placed under psychiatric care. Witt's alcoholic father, however, was part of the problem. According to Johnny's wife, Donna, Witt Senior would tell the boy that “he was no good and would never amount to anything.”

Witt's difficulties grew worse when, around age eighteen, he had a head injury during a car crash. Following this accident, his father thought that his son was even more challenging to control. Witt later entered the US Marines, where he was a private first class. But his troubles continued. As a psychiatrist determined later, Witt suffered from “emotional instability reaction, chronic severe; manifested by history of unstable family background and home environment (alcoholic father), difficulties in adapting to figures of authority and school, chronic headaches and feelings of tension and anxiety, and recent impulsive antisocial behavior; predisposition, lifelong history of emotional instability under minimal stress; precipitating stress, routine stress of military duty at the present time.” Witt was ultimately deemed unfit for duty and discharged from the marines.