Alligator Candy (22 page)

“I think there's a couple of spots of blood in the rubber raft that's in the car,” he said. The more they talked, the more nervous Witt became. He told her how he had felt the night before when she had talked about joining the search for the boy. “Can you imagine how I felt,” he said, “you setting there on the floor talking about going on the hunt for him, my own wife?”

Witt grew anxious about being caught. “If any chance they ever find out that I did it,” he told her, “if they ask you anything, I never told you nothing. You know what they'd do to you. You'd be in trouble too.” He said he was worried about Tillman turning them in, and suggested he might do something drastic to Tillman if necessary to keep him quiet. Witt sat back in his chair and laughed disturbingly as he enlisted Donna in a plan to see how resolved Tillman was to stay silent. “When Gary comes home, do you want to shake him up a little?” he said.

Donna was nervous now, and humored him. “Sure,” she said.

“Well, we have to think of something to ask him to let him know that you know without panicking.”

“What do you want me to do?” she asked. “You want me to ask him about the candy?” She couldn't believe that Witt was telling her the truth. It was too outrageous. Her mind immediately went to the alligator candy that she had eaten the week before. The thought that it had come from the murdered boy sickened her. “That's when I asked about the candy,” she told the cops later, “because that was all that stuck in my mind because I ate some of the candy. You know. It's hard to take.”

But Witt had other plans. “No, don't ask about that,” he said, and then picked up the knife. “Tell him how much this knife cost. Tell him the next time to use a shovel.”

A bit later, Tillman returned, and Donna played along. She walked over to the TV and picked up the knife, letting out a nervous laugh. “By the way, this cost me thirteen dollars,” she said to Tillman out of the blue, “Next time, use a shovel.”

Tillman looked surprised as he glanced over at Witt, wondering what was going on. As Donna headed down the hall to the bathroom, she could hear Witt continue to play along. He was trying to cover up the fact that he had confessed and instead make it look like Donna was on to them. “The FBI and everything else is out looking for him,” he told Tillman. “But who finds out? My wife.”

When Donna came back from the bathroom, Witt and Tillman were sitting quietly. Unsure of what to do, Donna sat beside them in silence. When she glanced up, they were eyeing her. Unable to take it anymore, she pushed herself up and muttered an excuse, the first thing that popped into her mind. “I have to have some candy,” she said, and walked off to make fudge in the kitchen. “I was just mixed up,” she told the cops later.

As Donna lay in bed watching TV later in the night, Witt came in and punched her lightly in the shoulder. “What's the matter?” he said.

“Nothing,” she replied. “I'm just watching TV, and I'm tired, you know.” He climbed into bed beside her.

“Well,” she said, “what did Gary say about me knowing?”

Witt told her that Tillman got the message—that Donna could be trusted. But what about Tillman turning them in, Donna wondered. “You don't think he'll tell on you?” she asked.

“Let's forget about it,” he said. “It's old business.” Then he rolled over and went to sleep, as Donna lay awake the rest of the night, pondering what to do. The next morning, she fixed Witt breakfast as usual and told him she had errands to run: take Troy to school and then stop at the bank. “I'll be gone for quite a while this morning,” she said.

Witt didn't make anything of it and went off to work. As soon as he left, Donna left her boy in the kitchen with breakfast and went outside. Popping open her trunk, she took out the raft and dragged it into her bedroom, shutting the door behind her. Donna began looking for spots of blood, taking a wash rag and rubbing off a few stains to see if they were red. Then she went into Tillman's things and began searching for the patch. Troy came up behind her. “What are you looking in there for?” he asked.

B
Y NOVEMBER
5, now eight days after Jon vanished, we were losing hope. The organized search of the area, after extending so far from where Jon could have been, was called off. The investigation continued, but we were on the verge of becoming another statistic, another family who would have to bear the unbearable possibility of having no resolution at all—a fate perhaps even more difficult than finding that a child had been killed. Without answers, one can imagine anything, and that is a hell all its own.

At one point, my parents agreed to let the psychic come to the house, despite their skepticism. “I said ‘Fine,' and I talked to her,” my mother recalled, “and it was like anybody come in. ‘You got a Seeing Eye dog, bring him in!' Anything.” The psychic said she thought Jon had been taken by four men as vengeance for some kind of drug deal. When she said she sensed hope, my brother greeted the news not just with skepticism but also fury. “I was feeling hopeless and angry,” he recalled.

In Jon's room, my father drew the blinds shut, something we rarely did during the day. My mother, still trying to cling to hope, reacted with dismay. “When your dad would do that, I would never want him to do that,” she recalled. “I would want him to open blinds and not be a house of mourning.” But we were running out of light. On the evening of November 4, my father went on the local news to plead for information. Maybe someone would finally step forward.

The next morning, Deputy Walker was at the Hillsborough Sheriff's Department when a woman called saying she had information on the Kushner boy. After a week of fruitless leads, he wasn't optimistic. But when he saw the expression on the cop who was fielding the call, he knew this one was different. “I remember sitting and seeing the intensity on his face,” Walker recalled. “I knew it was important.”

The woman said that her husband had made a drunken confession about killing the missing boy, and that there was evidence in her trailer: candy and a Camp Keystone patch. To aid the investigation, the police had refrained from releasing certain details about the case—such as what Jon had bought at the 7-Eleven and the patch on his shorts. This way, if a caller mentioned these items, they would know the call was legit.

“I just got to find out two things,” the woman went on. “About the candy, because he had emphasized that's where the candy came from. The type. I knew what type I ate, and that's why I called. I wanted to know about it. And I wanted to know about the patch because he said it belonged to the little boy.” The more she spoke, however, the more nervous she seemed to become. The cops, who couldn't trace the call, feared she might panic and hang up, and they struggled to ascertain her location.

“Where you at?” the cop on the phone asked.

She told him an intersection in West Tampa, and the cops sped on their way. When they arrived, however, she was gone—along with their first, and only, tangible lead all week. They feared the worst as they searched the area to no avail, and began driving away. But as they went down the road, they noticed a car broken down on the side of the street. When they pulled over to help the person, they realized it was their caller. Her name was Donna Witt. “Just to show you how the Lord works,” the cop later recalled “she tried to leave, but she had a flat tire. Had she been gone, we might not have ever solved that one.”

That afternoon, Sheriff's Major Heinrich told Stan Rosenberg he had a run to make, and asked if he'd like to tag along. “Sure,” Stan replied, always eager to learn more about policing. “I'm enjoying riding with you.” The two had become unlikely friends over the week, and Heinrich showed his appreciation by letting Stan call him by his first name. At one point, Heinrich had walked up to Stan and squeezed his arm. “Ah, you'll do fine,” he said and then walked away. “I didn't know what he was talking about,” Stan recalled. But he found out in the weeks to come. After our case, Heinrich offered Stan the opportunity he'd long wanted: to become a cop and come work for him. With his wife's blessing, Stan accepted. As they rode off in Heinrich's police car on November 5, Stan asked about the destination. “Where we going?”

“Well,” Heinrich replied, “I think we got one of the guys.”

They arrived at the Shady Grove Mobile Home Park in Thonotosassa, and walked inside a beige trailer with brown trim and a TV antenna on top. Tearfully, Donna Witt told them everything she knew, and the police knew they had found their men. They seized evidence: two stains scraped from the trunk of the Plymouth, one stain cut from the trunk mat; one rusted bowie knife; one long drill bit; forty-six arrows, four bows, one crossbow; a book,
Engineering Drawing and Design
, with the Camp Keystone patch between pages eight and nine; a two-man yellow and blue raft; and two Snappy Gators, one red, one blue.

At two thirty, police cars pulled up to the Singleton Shrimp Company in Tampa, where they found Gary Tillman in the employees' locker room and arrested him. At three thirty, Heinrich, two other police officers—Lieutenant Arnie Myers and Roebuck—as well as members of the FBI, and Rosenberg pulled up to the Burger Chef fast-food restaurant, where they had been told Witt was working. Roebuck climbed a ladder in the back and spotted the suspect working on an air-conditioning unit on the roof. Witt, seeing the officer with a gun at his side, stood quickly and raised his pipe wrench over his head.

Roebuck told him to drop the tool, but Witt still held it, looking around nervously. Again Roebuck told him to drop it, but to no avail. Heinrich, who had climbed up to the roof as well, then ordered Witt to drop the wrench or he could get hurt. Finally, Witt complied, and as soon as they got him down the ladder, he was cuffed and advised of his constitutional rights. “That was the first time in my career that I wanted to pull my gun and kill somebody,” Heinrich told Stan later.

When Walker heard of the arrests, he knew that all their hard work, all the media attention, and the actions of the community had helped to wear down Witt and, ultimately, his wife. What seemed like “an impossible” task, as he put it, was not insurmountable after all. “His wife saw that it wasn't going to go away,” Walker recalled. “We were going to keep the intensity, and no matter how insignificant the lead was . . . that had a lot to with her coming forward.”

After Tillman led the cops to the crime scene, the case against him and Witt moved quickly. Now in custody, Witt asked the lieutenant to tell his wife he loved her, then he sat down to write his confession. He ran out of paper and asked for more so that he could continue. He asked how to spell
definite
, and
decision
, and
bicycle
. Finally, he set down his pen and began to cry. “Why didn't the boy wait ten minutes?” he said. “I was getting ready to go home.”

The cops asked Witt if he and Tillman had planned to kill someone that day. Witt said they had planned to do this, but, as the police report explained, “not anyone in particular, as they were just hunting and that when rabbit hunting, you don't pick a certain rabbit to kill, but rather take what comes along.” Later he asked to talk with the jail chaplain, who came in and offered to share a prayer. “I don't believe I'm worthy of a prayer because of what we did,” Witt said.

“Let the Lord be your judge,” the chaplain replied.

Tillman, for his part, put the blame on Witt. “I do what John tells me,” he told the police, “because he is a friend; he will not tell me to do anything that is wrong.”

Witt and Tillman were soon taken to the Hillsborough courthouse for their hearing. Heinrich dispatched a decoy car there, to divert the throng of reporters and onlookers who had gathered for the hearing. But with the case having received so much attention, a crowd of sixty people gathered outside to leer and jeer. Heinrich led Witt, who was dressed in his white short-sleeve air-conditioning-company shirt, from the car. Witt shuffled inside in his shackles, sullen and pallid. Tillman, dressed in a long-sleeve Yamaha motorcycle shirt, was led in behind him, as the police warded off the crowd.

“Hanging is too good!” shouted one man.

“Dirty creep!” a woman yelled. “They ought to shoot ya!”

Inside, after a five-hour hearing in which the two pled not guilty, a Hillsborough grand jury indicted Witt and Tillman for the murder of my brother. The court clerk burst into tears while she was reading the indictment and had to have the circuit judge continue for her. An FBI agent was seen later at a church pew, pale and forlorn, his eyes welling. “You just won't believe it when you hear the whole story,” he told a reporter. “It's incredible.”

Witt and Tillman were tried separately. After being interviewed by psychiatrists, Witt was found to have a “long-standing personality disorder” including “extreme sexual perversion,” but was not deemed insane. Psychiatrists found, however, that he had, according to court documents, “an incurable propensity to commit future violent crimes,” and that he was a “menace to society” and “a sexual pervert.”

During Witt's trial in February 1974, his attorney tried to pin the murder on Tillman, who had struck and gagged my brother. “My client is guilty of sexual perversion,” he conceded. “It's shocking. It's gruesome. It's filthy. It's abominable. I shudder at the thought when I think of my three boys. I'm not asking you to forget it. I'm asking you to remember when the boy died and to try and show intent in relation to these events. It has nothing to do with if Johnny Paul Witt intended to kill this boy . . . you don't get electrocuted for sexual perversion, and you can't kidnap a dead person.”

But the assistant state attorney who handled the prosecution wasn't having any of it. “He [Witt] knew that whoever was coming down that path was a dead man,” he said. “He knew that from the beginning. I will submit it was a partnership with one common plan: to kill Jonathan Kushner. Afterward there was a constant intent to conceal a crime, a very good plan, and not a man who was panicked.”