Wages of Sin (20 page)

“Mike told me that his roommate dated strippers and that two strippers had stayed overnight with his roommate one day.”

“When was the last time you saw Chris?”

Like Brian, Hatton related the tenth of January, when Chris’s truck died. “When he got his truck started, he told me that he was going to his friend Glenn’s house and talk to him about getting the brakes on his truck fixed. When Mike left the car wash, which was about seven
P.M
., this would be the last time that I would see him.”

 

 

After a week of trying to reach William Earls, Detective Mark Sawa finally made contact with the Yellow Rose patron. The forty-two-year-old fan of Stephanie Martin’s wasn’t as talkative as he had been a week earlier.

“I heard Stephanie was arrested for murder and I wrote her a letter while she was in Del Valle,” said Earls. “Stephanie called me while she was in jail on the evening of January 22, 1995.” Sawa glanced over at a calendar. January 22 meant Earls had heard from Martin just the day before.

“I spoke with her and gave her my support.”

“Did she tell you anything?”

“She didn’t discuss any aspects of the murder case with me.”

 

 

“I think she was involved with this guy; she was getting raped; and she did kill him,” Robert Martin heard his attorney tell him. “The confession was real.”

“No way,” Robert Martin bit back. He glared into Ira Davis’s moustachioed face. “That is so far off base,” Martin fired.

Six months before, Stephanie Martin had walked the Martin neighborhood for three hours, knocking door-to-door, trying to learn why the family cat had cuts all over it. His daughter was a protector, not a killer. “I know my daughter. She did
not
have a relationship with this man. She did
not
get raped. And this is a cover-up.”

Robert Martin was as hot and relentless as the West Texas wind. “She’s never even fired a BB gun, and you’re gonna tell me she goes in there and she’s being raped and she knows where the gun’s at and she gets the gun out of where it’s at and she . . . first of all, you’ve gotta tell her how to pull the trigger or cock it. She doesn’t know any of this stuff. It’s a bunch of bullcrap. It’s BS. It’s a cover. You’d better start looking and checking.”

Ira Davis hired private investigator Drew McAngus, a devout, born-again Christian. Maybe he could relate to Stephanie Martin in a way Davis couldn’t, thought the attorney.

 

 

Mancias reached over his desk and took a 1994 weekly pocket calendar from the hand of Realtor Marion Marshall.

“It belongs to Stephanie Martin,” said Marshall, sitting down. “About one or two weeks prior to November eighth, I showed Martin several apartments . . . and one of those was at the Villa La Costa.” And that, she explained, was how she came into possession of Martin’s calendar—Martin had left it in the Realtor’s car.

After Martin had moved into the Villa La Costa on November 8, 1994, Marshall had tried time and again to return the calendar. “I left several messages for her, but she never returned the calls. When I saw the news and heard about Martin, I decided to turn the calendar over to you, in case it was important.”

Marshall shifted in her chair. “One time, while I was showing her an apartment, a conversation about safety came up. She made the comment that she had a gun and that she wouldn’t have a problem shooting someone if she had to. I thought the comment was somewhat out of place, especially while she was trying to rent an apartment.”

 

 

On Thursday, January 26, 1995, a “wholly destitute” William Busenburg received a court-appointed attorney, Christopher Gunter, the same attorney the court appointed to represent serial killer Kenneth McDuff, a man who would be put to death.

Mancias learned that the corrections officer who had removed Busenburg’s clothing in the wee hours of Sunday, January 15, 1995, had remembered seeing some of Hatton’s credit cards and ID mixed in with Busenburg’s possessions.

Mancias called Ray Busenburg. It took a while for Mancias to reach Raymond Busenburg, who then hesitantly denied having any of Chris Hatton’s possessions.

“If you locate something later, would you please contact me?” said Mancias.

Mancias called Will Busenburg’s new attorney, Chris Gunter, and explained the situation to him.

Not long thereafter, Gunter phoned Mancias. “Mr. Busenburg has all the items but the Sears credit card. You can meet Mr. Busenburg at my office tomorrow at five
P.M
., and he’ll turn everything over to you.”

 

 

“I have some information about Will Busenburg you might need to know,” Beckwith Steiner, an assistant manager at Cinemark Movies, where Busenburg had once worked, told Mancias on the phone.

Mancias invited the man to TCSO headquarters to talk.

After Will left the company, said Steiner, he still dropped by to watch movies. “It was during this same time that Will introduced me to his girlfriend. I don’t remember the girl’s name,” said Steiner, “but I recognized her as being the same girl that got arrested with Will.

“When Will introduced me to his girlfriend, he told me that she worked as a dancer at the Yellow Rose.” Busenburg, he said, invited him several times to the Rose with the intention of introducing Steiner to some dancers. Steiner always declined. “I’m not into that type of entertainment.”

On Friday, January 13, 1995, said Steiner, around 9
P.M
., Busenburg and his girlfriend came to the theater. “Will asked me if our company had any theaters in Colorado. I told him that I didn’t think so, but that I would look at our company list.” He looked, and told Will there weren’t any, said Steiner.

“Will then told me that he and his girlfriend were thinking about moving out of state and that they were thinking about moving to Colorado.” They talked more, said Steiner. “And it was then that I mentioned to him that my truck had broke down. Will then told me that he had an older truck that he was thinking about selling. I told him that I already had a car lined up.”

Busenburg told Steiner that he needed some cash and asked if Steiner knew anyone who wanted to buy a VCR or TV. “I told him that I did need a VCR, but I didn’t have any money.” Busenburg asked Steiner to contact him if he ran across anyone who wanted to buy the items.

“After Will left that night, I didn’t see him again until I saw him on the news a few days later. I didn’t think anything about my conversation with Will the last time I spoke to him, until I received a phone call from his mother, Fran, at my work. I didn’t speak to her directly because she had left a message for me to call her. When I called her later, she told me that Will wanted to speak with me and if it would be okay for him to call collect. I was sort of stunned by the fact that he wanted to speak to me, but I told her that it would be all right. I have yet to hear from him.”

 

 

The
Round Rock Leader
ran a story headlined: “
FOSTER FAMILIES RECALL BUSENBURG
.” In the story,
Round Rock Leader
publisher Ken Long, Busenburg’s foster parent just prior to the Children’s Home, said he remembered Busenburg as being manipulative.

“ ‘He orchestrated everything for his benefit,” Long said.... ‘He took over everything,’ including his son’s room and his daughter’s television set.”

Long added, “ ‘If anything, we knew some of what his home life was like, but we would never have thought he was capable of this.’ ”

Busenburg’s Children’s Home houseparents were kinder in their words to the
Leader.
“ ‘I think what has happened is really tragic,’ Kay Williams said. ‘We still care about Will.’ ”

On January 27, 1995, Detective Mancias and Sergeant Gage drove the few blocks from TCSO to Chris Gunter’s office, a quaint old house within walking distance of the courthouse. At 5
P.M
., they collected Chris Hatton’s credit cards and ID from Raymond Busenburg.

“So were you shocked when you heard the news?” Stephanie Martin wrote a letter to Lynn Carroll, as she sat in the county jail. “They’ve really painted a nice picture of me and Will, haven’t they?” It was the first few days of February, and she was writing Carroll an eight-page letter. “Well, I know you’ve only known me for a short time, but I’d hope you realize I could never murder anyone intentionally. Neither could Will.

“Surprise, surprise, he’s not really in the CIA or the Army or anything! He completely fooled me, and you too! He’s never hurt anyone and he never could!” Martin wrote that Busenburg knew some karate, that his father abused Busenburg and the entire family, “and I don’t know what exactly happened to his dad.

“He’s only 21 years old! Isn’t that crazy? He was so insecure and felt like nobody when he met me, so he decided to create a big story about himself, not knowing he would see me again. So, then he digs his own grave, watches everything he says, and is stressed out all the time, because he had fallen in love with me, and didn’t want me to know he was a nobody! Isn’t that sad? My mom and dad say he’s crazy and that I should hate him, but I just can’t.”

Martin wrote Carroll about Hatton allegedly taking Busenburg’s money, and she slowly began her story about going to see Hatton about the money.

“You remember how we would make jokes about Will killing Chris to put him out of his misery? Well, Will wouldn’t hurt a flea.” But Hatton, wrote Martin, had tried to rape her. “So I manipulated him into thinking I would be with him, something I can’t believe I actually had the capability to do in total fear. Then I got on top of him, he looked delirious and confused, so I grabbed his gun, cocked it, and shot him.

“It was dark in the room, so I couldn’t see where I had shot him. I almost fainted after I shot him. I sort of blacked out. I was in shock. I couldn’t believe I had shot him without even hesitating.”

She had waited for someone to come, she said. When no one did, she phoned Busenburg. Later they burned the body, she wrote. “Well, Will had really never done anything like that, he probably read it in a book! Neither one of us used our brains in the whole situation.”

She pointed out, “Oh, and we did not mutilate his body, that was an extra the media threw in.... I told the detectives what happened, they believed me, so I thought.” Three days later, she said, she and Busenburg were facing a murder charge.

“Anyway, my parents got me a lawyer, he was really expensive. Will had to have a court-appointed attorney since his mom and uncle don’t have much money.”

Martin still didn’t know that Will’s “uncle” was his father.

“I feel very bad for Will. He has been charged with murder and he doesn’t deserve it. And I don’t deserve it. It should be involuntary manslaughter. But, see the bad thing about this case is that people only ‘see’ the burned body after the incident. They focus on that only and assume that Will and I are morbid human beings.”

Martin wanted to know if Carroll thought she was a murderer. “Well, I hope not. My lawyer may ask you to tell the court how believable Will was, and how I looked up to him and trusted him. And how he was unstable and could easily make a bad decision in this incident—covering up the shooting.

“I know you don’t know me that well . . . but I may need your help. But I don’t want to push you. My trial won’t be for months. I’ll be out on bail in a few weeks. My dad had to take out loans. They had to raise $40,000 for the attorney, and $15,000 for my bail.”

Martin wrote about how much Busenburg loved her.

“Well, you can write me back if you want. It’s your choice. If I never hear from you again, I hope our friendship meant something to you and that you can live your life happy.”

Martin signed the letter with a heart for love.

On Tuesday, February 7, 1995, Lynn Carroll phoned Detective Mancias.

“I got a letter from Stephanie,” she said. “I don’t want to communicate with Stephanie or her family.”

“Can I get a copy of the letter?” said Mancias.

 

 

Every chance they got, usually once or twice a week, the Martins drove the hour from Round Rock to Del Valle to see Stephanie. Every day they wrote their daughter a letter.

Stephanie wrote letters, too. There wasn’t much else to do in county jail other than watch soap operas, make collect phone calls, and write letters.

“Mother,” she wrote, “I just sit here and think about my life and what I had compared to 99 percent of the people here. They don’t have anybody. They didn’t have a good home.” Constantly Stephanie told her mother how much she appreciated her family.

She also explained the circumstances of her confession, how she hadn’t said a thing until they told her Will said she’d shot Chris.

“Okay, did he try to rape you?” she wrote to her mother that the detectives had asked her. “That’s when I said, oh, Will’s come up with a story. That’s what our story’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to say that.”

Stephanie Martin told her father that as she and Will Busenburg sat in the detective’s car, waiting to be transported to the sheriffs station, she and Will discussed the rape story.

“Stephanie,” he said to his daughter, “you’re past gullible. Everything you’ve got is what you deserve because you’ve gone beyond being comprehensive gullible. I don’t know how you could have ever believed that this guy was trying to help you in any way in this process. You’re actually helping him. Look at what all you had to do.”

At 1
P.M
., February 8, 1995, Lynn Carroll dropped by TCSO headquarters. “Stephanie’s mother called my home number and asked to talk to me. My father told her that I don’t want to speak to them. I still don’t believe everything that happened, not the way Stephanie tells it in her letter.”

Carroll handed Mancias the original letter. “You can have it,” she said.

 

 

On Valentine’s Day, 1995, Detective Manuel Mancias met with Chuck Register, the TCSO officer who had found Hatton’s mutilated corpse—the man who worked at the same Del Valle jail facility as Bill Hatton, the same facility that currently held Stephanie Martin.

A lovelorn Stephanie Martin sat in county jail writing Will Busenburg a letter that same Valentine’s Day.

“Tell me if you think like I do,” she wrote. “I go to sleep and have nice dreams about you and forget about the reality that you’re away from me and locked up in a hellhole. Then I hear, ‘Wake-up call ladies, come and get chow!’ I then wake up to the reality that I’m in jail and the huge difficult road that lies ahead of us. When I think about our hearing and our trial, I get butterflies in my stomach and I feel sick.

“Did you know that we are going to be at different trials? I don’t know if I like that or dislike it. I really don’t want to see you in the courtroom and not be able to touch you, wondering if we’re going to be taken away from each other forever. That’s a morbid thought, isn’t it? I’m sorry.

“If we were together today I would make love with you on a bed of roses. This is the first Valentine’s day you’ve ever had someone to love and love you, and yet we can’t be together. I can’t explain to you how sorry I am.”

Martin said she had to think positive thoughts and enumerated the positive—they would be able to see each other, she would get out on bail, they could hear each other’s voices, they could hold each other.

“God brought us together and he will bring us back together, I just know it. Life isn’t this unjust. We’ll make it through this together.”

 

 

Her parents’ home, she wrote, would be hers and Will’s home.

“I love you forever, Steph.”

Her parents sat across the glass partition pleading with Stephanie. “What he told you, it’s not true.” He had ulcers, said her mother, but no incurable, deadly disease.

“But, Mother, he had no reason to lie to me.”

He didn’t kill his father, said Mrs. Martin, he’s alive and living in Jarrell. He didn’t inherit millions, she told her daughter, he got his money from a back injury he suffered. There was no $6,000 check. There was a $5,700 check to GMAC.

 

 

Attorney Ira Davis and private investigator Drew McAngus walked into the Del Valle jail facility on February 17, 1995. Davis was his thin, dapper self. McAngus was a former deputy sheriff dressed in cowboy clothes replete with silver belt buckle. Slightly overweight, with a drawl and a pickup truck, he was the stereotypical Texan.

He was also a Christian Texan who continually and fervently searched for ways to witness to others, including taking mission trips to Romania and Mexico. McAngus had prayed for discernment the entire time he had driven his pickup truck to Del Valle. His job, he believed, was not to decide guilt or innocence, but to be a finder of facts.

He’d studied the Busenburg and Martin statements, and talked to friends of Busenburg’s and Martin’s. He’d done some background work on Busenburg and talked with Martin’s father to get background on Stephanie.

Robert Martin and McAngus had met at Stephanie’s apartment, where McAngus had looked around for anything that might help his seeking of the facts. He had punched the button on Stephanie’s caller ID and had written down every single phone call. He hadn’t known why he had done that; he just knew he had.

Later, he had crisscrossed the numbers to learn who had phoned his client and from where. His discerning gut had told him that he and Davis didn’t have the entire story.

All of that led him to Stephanie Martin’s new home at the Del Valle jail where on that mid-February day, McAngus sat down for the first time with his client, the slim, young stripper from the Christian family in Round Rock.

McAngus pulled out his notepad. Davis sat nearby, planning on just listening and letting the hired investigator do all the questioning.

“We may be here for thirty minutes or four hours. Whatever it takes, we need to get as specific details as we can.” He wanted as much minute-by-minute detail as possible—from the day before the crime to the day after the crime—to later compare to the evidence. He knew if there was a gap in Stephanie Martin’s story, there would be a reason for that gap.

Stephanie began to speak. As she did, in his thin script, McAngus began to take notes. Martin took a while to get her thoughts together, but McAngus just concentrated on his notes.

Her story was still consistent with her statement. Drew McAngus still believed there was more. He pondered the way she told him that she’d shot Hatton and then had called Busenburg to come get her at the Aubry Hills Apartments.

“Stephanie, where did you call him from?”

“Oh, it was a phone in the apartment.”

“Stephanie,” his voice was slow and deliberate, “that’s impossible.”

McAngus knew that there was a phone call to her own apartment at approximately the same time she claimed that she’d called Busenburg. But he knew that call hadn’t come from the Hatton apartment. The crisscrossing he’d done showed the call had come from a phone near the swimming pool and laundry room of the Aubry Hills Apartments.

“Oh, it was the phone out at the bus stop out on Lamar,” she replied.

Again he told her she was wrong.

She said it was the phone at a nearby convenience store.

He told her it wasn’t. McAngus now knew why he had written down those phone calls. He looked his client straight in the face. His lips barely moved as he spoke, “Stephanie, you don’t know what phone this call was made from, do you?”

Stephanie Martin froze.

McAngus watched her. He believed she was stumped and startled by the question. He saw it on her face. Drew McAngus stared his client square in her hazel-green eyes. “Stephanie, when did you leave your first love?”

The room went quiet. Davis looked up. McAngus still stared at his client’s eyes. She stared back. Drew McAngus, the witnessing Christian, was talking about her love for Jesus Christ. Martin began to cry. Tears the size of an Oklahoma thunderstorm began falling in the Texas jailhouse.

“Drew, you’re a Christian, aren’t you?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Oh, my gosh. I’ve been praying about this.”

“Stephanie, whether you want to tell us the truth, God knows the truth. And from knowing your background and your history, I understand that you had a relationship with Him at one time, but you’ve left your first love.”

“I’ve been praying that God would intervene. Maybe this is it.”

“I’m not God. I’m really a nobody. I’m a little peon who knows the Lord. You know, Stephanie, it’s time that the truth comes out. And if what you’re telling is the truth, great. Stick to it. If it isn’t, then we need to know this.”

She broke down. Martin told McAngus that Will Busenburg had shot Chris Hatton and Will Busenburg had been the one to make the phone call from the Aubry Hills Apartments complex.

When she told about deciding to burn the body and cut off the hands of Chris Hatton, to McAngus, Martin seemed uneasy, perhaps embarrassed.

Stephanie Martin’s change in confession came so rapidly that Drew McAngus hadn’t had time to write down another word. He had only half a page of notes. He sensed a peace in Stephanie Martin and believed it was the relief one felt after confessing to the Lord and asking His forgiveness.

Three or four hours after they had walked into the Del Valle interview room, Stephanie Martin was led back to her cell, and Ira Davis and Drew McAngus left.

“I can’t believe what just happened,” said Davis to McAngus. “This was unbelievable.”

McAngus smiled. He believed it was a witnessing time for Jesus to attorney Ira Davis, too.

There was still one heavy question puzzling the mind of McAngus, and that one question absolutely would not leave his thoughts.