Alligator Candy (19 page)

Witt's complications followed him into his marriage at the age of twenty-one to Donna, a woman one year younger who had a two-year-old boy, Troy, from a previous marriage. Donna was prone to depression and felt ignored by Witt. She often wanted to go out, but he wouldn't take her. One night he went to a movie by himself, and she was so upset that she overdosed on aspirin. After having her stomach pumped, Witt had her committed to a mental institution for a few days, a move, she thought, that was done simply to get rid of her—especially when the hospital doctors told her she was fine. “It seemed to me like he wanted me out of the way,” she told the police later.

Donna had reason to believe this. She discovered that while she was in the hospital, Witt had been out with her best friend. One night, coming home from a bar with him, Donna confronted him about her jealousy. Witt, who'd been drinking, began choking her. He was now five foot eleven, 155 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes. Witt grabbed her hands and began squeezing them until they bled. Another time, he got so angry that he drove his fist through the headboard, breaking his thumb.

Witt soon got into the refrigerator repair business with his father, but the pressure of working together often got the better of him. Witt became prone to outbursts around his house, tossing over the kitchen table, and throwing plates and food around the room. Witt would storm out of the house, only to return and claim that he didn't remember his rampage. When Donna, who worked for an answering service, suffered a miscarriage, Witt became even more despondent, as medical bills piled up.

The stress grew worse when Troy, then seven, and another young boy were walking down a sidewalk when Troy darted across the street suddenly and was struck by a car. He was thrown seventy feet before coming to a rest. His shoes were knocked off his feet. The injury was so severe it left him brain damaged with a metal plate in his head. Donna had to quit her job to care for him while he spent several months learning to walk and talk again. I was shocked to read that Troy's accident occurred on October 28, 1971, two years to the day before he and Tillman killed my brother. There was never any indication as to whether this was a motivation for Witt that day, but either way, it filled me with a sense of fear and foreboding.

Witt, who had often spanked his stepson in the past, didn't change his behavior after the accident, according to Donna. One day, Witt came home and told the boy not to wake him if his boss called, then went to sleep. But Troy woke him anyway when the phone rang, and Witt's employer was on the line. Witt grabbed the boy angrily, and, when Donna found out afterward, she berated him. If the metal plate moved in Troy's head, she said, it could kill him. Witt stopped spanking Troy then, but he soon found someone who shared his temperament: Gary Tillman.

With a father who spent two decades in the army and air force, Tillman, as I read in articles and court documents, grew up on the move, shuttling between military bases across the South. Often the new kid in town, Tillman became known as a loner who dreamed of living on a mountaintop as a forest ranger. By ninth grade, his parents noticed that there was something amiss in their son, who “would say things that would maybe not sound right,” as his father recalled. “There were other things that just didn't add up to normal thinking.” Friends said he had a “keen interest” in poisons, gasses, torture, and other people's suffering.

Tillman was failing classes, lashing out at his father for being too strict, and claiming that he was, as a psychologist noted later, “the king of a secret society.” After a childhood friend died, he would regularly march into the woods to play trumpet in tribute to her. In 1971 seventeen-year-old Tillman was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and briefly institutionalized—until he ran away from the facility. The family continued with outpatient treatment and, later that year, moved to Tampa, where Tillman's father had taken a job as an airline pilot. After graduating high school, Tillman took a menial job at a local shrimp processing plant, where his supervisor found him a slow learner who “seemed uneasy in trying to carry on any other type of conversation” than talking about his favorite hobby: archery.

Tillman soon found someone who shared his passion: Witt, whom he called J.J. They met in 1973 at Tampa Technical Institute, where Tillman was studying drafting and Witt was pursuing electronics. Known around the school as a quiet pair of poor students, the two became friends, and began going hunting together using bow and arrows. Witt enjoyed archery, joining the Gasparilla Bowman's club on a ranch. He went there for tournaments, and began collecting a variety of arrows around the house. They never came home with any game, though. As far as his wife knew, the only thing he shot was an armadillo. The owner of another archery shop frequented by Witt and Tillman told police later that Witt's “hands seemed to be dirty all the time.”

One day, Tillman called the Witts and told Donna that his parents were throwing him out of the house. Tillman had left a note on his pillow that morning for his mom and dad. “Since I was asked to leave, I have,” he wrote. “You can probably guess where I'm at.” Tillman took his calico cat Tiny and began sleeping on the couch at Witt's trailer in Thonotosassa, a rural area north of Tampa.

It didn't take long for Donna, who was now working as a lab technician at Tampa General Hospital, to notice that her husband's young friend displayed odd outbursts. One day Troy accidentally knocked down a model airplane, and a little piece broke off. When Tillman saw this, he picked up the plane and began tearing it into shreds. “Give it to me!” the boy pleaded.

“Any time something of mine is torn up,” Tillman said, “I just tear it up.” He had done the same thing when the cat knocked over a model car and broke off a wheel. Yet another time, when Donna moved one of Tillman's arrows to a corner, the feather accidentally got mashed down. Tillman picked up the arrow and snapped it in half. He became even more despondent when his cat Tiny was stolen out of his car one day.

Witt was still acting out too. Donna had a black cat that always greeted her at the front door when she came home. One day before going to work, the cat had been jumping at their pet bird, which had flown out of its cage. When Donna came home that day, her cat wasn't there to greet her. Donna began searching around the house, with the help of her son, to no avail. She saw that Witt had left a big foam target in the kitchen, which he had been shooting with his bow and arrows. Donna had a bad feeling and called her husband at work. “John,” she said, “where's my cat?”

“I'm sorry, baby,” he replied.

“What did you do? Kill it?”

“Yeah.” He told her he'd choked the animal and then shot it with an arrow. Donna could still see the bloodstain on the carpet.

Witt seemed to be growing more indifferent to her recently. The couple had gone from having sex almost daily to nothing at all for the past month. Donna didn't know what to make of it. Witt was increasingly introverted and preoccupied. Unbeknown to Donna, Witt and Tillman had hatched a plan: to go, as Tillman put it later, “people hunting.” According to the police, “Their prey were human beings.”

Witt had killed before, Tillman claimed later, though there was never any evidence to support this. Tillman said Witt had told him that he had killed a man and buried him on a construction site that was later paved over. Witt recalled how the pavement buckled up because of the bloated corpse and needed to be steamrolled back down.

The two drove around town, picking up female hitchhikers—one of whom dove out the window at a red light when she had grown scared. They began heading out to different locations around town, forgetting which they'd been to before, but never found a good victim or didn't have the right opportunity. In mid-October Witt drove to the patch of woods near a 7-Eleven, which was across the way from an archery range they frequented. As he waited in the woods, he saw a young girl playing alone. Witt later told police that he “ran a little girl away from the area I was in; I told her she might get hurt, to leave.” Perhaps he feared what he might do to her.

But he returned with Tillman later and told him he thought it looked like “a good spot to hunt.” Shortly after, the two came back to the location, as Tillman recalled later, and parked their car while waiting for a girl to come through the woods. That day, however, they failed to find a girl by herself and, after four hours of frustration, gave up and left. The next week, the week before Jon disappeared, they returned to the 7-Eleven again in Gary's car. “They were stalking for young girls,” the police report read, “and again they were disappointed after not being able to have a good opportunity taking one.”

But they decided to go back one more time. Sunday morning was Witt's regular day to go hunting and, on Sunday, October 28, he gathered his bow and arrows to shoot on a target range. Witt said he had seen an old, abandoned flat-bottom boat last time he was there, and was hoping he might be able to retrieve it, put some fiberglass back on the boat, and reuse it. Tillman rose from the couch and said he wanted to practice for a turkey shoot that was coming up. Witt agreed to take him along.

That morning, Witt knew that there was usually a work detail at the archery range at this hour, so he pulled up on a riverside trail to hunt cows for a bit until the workers went away. As they were heading through the pasture, however, they heard voices and went to investigate. Spotting a man and his son through the mangroves, they followed quietly behind them, hoping they were on to a deer. To keep their cover, Witt and Tillman slipped into their camouflage outfits, and continued on after them for a bit before growing bored and moving on.

With still more time to kill before the archery range opened, the two drove to another pasture, shot arrows at cans and bottles, and tried to hit a few squirrels. They heard voices again out there, and saw three boys coming across the woods. Witt and Tillman stalked the boys, as the kids dug by the trees looking for rifle bullets from stray hunters. When the boys spotted the two, Witt and Tillman returned to their car.

As they drove off, Witt had the idea to head off to Saint Petersburg, about forty-five minutes away, but he didn't think they had enough gas in the car. So he continued on to the archery range to see if the old boat was still around. When he and Tillman arrived, the bugs were biting them up in force, so they packed up their gear and drove across the street to the 7-Eleven, where, as they discovered, my brother was heading that day.

B
Y THREE O'CLOCK
on the afternoon of October 28, I learned, Jon still wasn't back, and the fear began to take hold. My dad went out into the woods, combing the area with several friends. They called my brother's name, and drove around in every direction as the sky grew dark and a heavy rain began to fall. After two hours of panicked and fruitless searching, my dad called the police. The missing-person report was filed at the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department:

Subject's Name: Kushner, Jonathan Mark.

Date and Time Subject Left Home: 28 Oct 73, 12:30.

Location Last Seen: 7-11.

School Attendance: IDS.

Grade: 5th.

Height: 4 foot, 8 inches.

Weight: 85 Pounds.

Build: Slender.

Money Carried: $2.00.

Personal Habits: Nature Lover.

The police came to the house and made the following notes about my dad's account of what had happened: “Kushner did not witness victim leaving home. His 4 yrs old son David did. He told w/m Kushner that the victim said that if it rained he would call home for a way back. It rained, but the victim never called.”

By the time Andy biked home later that afternoon, cops were parked all outside the house. They proceeded to the 7-Eleven to interview the clerk, a young woman named Ms. Perkins. She recalled seeing Jon in the store earlier. He was “outstanding,” she said, “due to his pretty hair and appearance.” She even remembered what he had bought: “about 30 cents' worth of plastic alligator bubblegum type candy,” the report read. “. . . it was noted to be a plastic alligator snapping head and inside was filled with round tiny pieces of bubblegum.”

By seven o'clock, the 7-Eleven had been transformed into a command post. The clerk told the police that there were several other kids there too. A brush fire had broken out next to a motorcycle shop across the street, and the kids had run off to see it. She told them kids always came through the woods: kids on bikes, kids barefoot, teenage girls, a girl in braces on horseback who wore a halter top and “bikini jeans.”

The police investigators began calling on Jon's friends to see if they knew anything. The phone rang at the home of Paul Siddall. Jon's friend from school. “Have you seen Jonathan?” the policeman asked. Word was spreading around the neighborhood, and now it was reaching the kids. Paul's father took him in the car, and they roamed the vacant lots with a flashlight looking for his friend. Jon's friend Doug Chisholm recalled, “I cried my heart out and had a feeling that if he didn't come home, he was gone.”

As night fell, the cops searched IDS and the surrounding area. They looked on the roof of a nearby elementary school and trailed up and down the path from the 7-Eleven to our house. An officer said it took him six minutes to walk down the four-hundred-yard path. They also searched Jon's room for clues. A cop found a watch on Jon's dresser, and a wallet containing two dollar bills and thirty-seven cents in change. They looked through his school papers to see if perhaps a bad grade had sent him running way, but found nothing to suggest this.

The search continued, even with my brother Andy taking part. “I was scared to death of finding something,” he later told me, “but also it was a sense of purpose.” Andy looked around to see people from all walks of life: farmers, professors, hippies, cops, neighbors, kids. “I had no idea that humanity comes together like that,” he recalled. “This sense of community in Tampa—it blew my mind.”