Twenty-six
On Friday, January 17, 1997, two years and three days after Will Busenburg and Stephanie Martin had been arrested, Frank Bryan, Allison Wetzel, their investigator John Phillips, and Chris Gunter sat down with Busenburg at the Travis County jail.
The prosecutors were there to hear in person, for the first time, Busenburg’s side of the story. They were there to prepare for Stephanie Martin’s trial. Busenburg was ill, Wetzel was pregnant, and neither one of them wanted to be breathing across from each other in that cramped interview room.
Busenburg lowered his head as he spoke. “I met Stephanie in early October at the Yellow Rose. Chris was with me that night. Stephanie came up and started talking to me. A week later, I saw her again at the Rose. She asked me if I wanted to go to breakfast. We went to the Magnolia Cafe, and after that we were always together.”
“What about that first night? What’d you talk about?”
“The first night at the club, Chris and I were kind of playing a game, telling all kinds of wild stories. He said he was a Navy SEAL. I said I was in the CIA. We laid it on pretty thick.”
“Had you ever told that story before?”
“No, but Steph was into it. She was excited. She said she liked to wave pistols in her apartment and pretend like she was shooting people. She thought it was neat that I was part of a sniper group.”
“How long did you talk?”
“About an hour, an hour and a half. When I saw her about a week later, I had some buddies from work with me. But when we went to breakfast, it was just Stephanie and me.” She stayed with him, he said, at his apartment.
“How did Stephanie get along with Chris?”
“She thought he was a hick, that he talked country, acted country.” His words fired right out of his mouth. “There was animosity between Stephanie and Chris because he thought she was a gold digger. But it didn’t bother him that she was a topless dancer.”
The prosecutors knew that contradicted what the Conways would testify to.
Busenburg talked about Hatton’s breakup with Lisa Pace and how she came over to the apartment. “She and I were pals in school,” he said.
Bryan and Wetzel made note again: That’s not what Lisa Pace thought.
Busenburg claimed that he had been the ROTC commander in high school and that Hatton had been depressed about getting discharged from the Navy. “He was a rush junkie,” he said. “He was always taking risks. He was drunk all the time.”
The Conways and Hattons had given affidavits stating otherwise.
“I had to wake him up in the mornings, and he was hard to wake up. He was always late for work. He drank lots of Jim Beam, but as long as he hit most of his stores, his boss wouldn’t notice.”
“Why’d you decide to move out?”
“Stephanie said Chris was a bad influence, and I was staying with her most of the time, anyway. I moved my bed to Steph’s right before Thanksgiving. By then, I was seeing her every day. I told her the rescue story about getting my buddy out of Colombia.”
“Where’d you get your stories?”
“From memories of movies on TV and books.” Busenburg and Wetzel couldn’t handle the conversation anymore. He was too ill; she couldn’t chance getting ill. A half hour after the conversation began, it ended.
On Wednesday, January 22, 1997, the same group gathered at the county jail, with Busenburg feeling better.
Allison Wetzel pulled out her legal pad. Frank Bryan reached for his lucky Pentel pen. The young Republican didn’t believe he could win a case without it. “What did Stephanie say about wanting to be involved in a mission?”
“From the very beginning,” Busenburg answered, “she was as excited as she could be. She would get mad at someone and say she wanted to kill him. She would get mad at Chris and say she wanted to kill him. I just started out this mission stuff as a game. I was just trying to impress this girl in a bar. I didn’t think it was going to turn into a relationship.”
But once it became a relationship, he said, he didn’t want to keep talking about the missions. “I tried to avoid talking about it. But she was into it.”
Then he emphasized, “Whenever she got mad, she always said, ‘I should kill that guy.’ A week before the murder, there was a guy at the gas station who wouldn’t take her check. She was really angry and talked all night about wanting to kill him.”
Busenburg stopped and returned to Martin and Hatton. “At first it was like a joke saying she wanted to kill Chris. Then I got used to hearing her say it.”
By January 1995, he told the prosecutors, he was living with Martin, and because of that, he didn’t pay any of the rent at Aubry Hills. Hatton, though, phoned Busenburg’s mother, he said, and asked her for the rent money.
The week before the murder, he went back to Aubry Hills to get his belongings, he said. “Chris was drunk and in a bad mood, so I left. I went to my mom’s.” That’s when he learned that Hatton had phoned her asking for rent money, he explained. “I got mad about that and told Stephanie. She said, ‘We should kill him,” and she kept saying it over and over again.”
He told the prosecutors that he had paid all the Aubry Hills deposits and the first, second, and third months’ rent. “Chris had only paid his share twice.”
Busenburg explained about the missing check that Martin had claimed was the cause of much of the fuss. “It was for the down payment on my truck,” he said.
He said he had purchased a cashier’s check to make the down payment, but the dealership had wanted two separate cashier’s checks, not one. He returned to the bank, got two new cashier’s checks, and the teller returned the original to him, which he placed in his lockbox. “I thought Chris had taken the check.”
The prosecutors hadn’t been able to find anyone who had actually seen that check.
Busenburg next stated that he and Martin had regularly batted about the pros and cons of various ways to murder Chris Hatton.
“Why did Stephanie want Chris dead?”
“Part of it was the thrill,” he answered. “Part of it was the dispute about the money. And the more we talked about it, the more normal it seemed.”
“If that’s why Stephanie wanted him dead, what about you?”
Busenburg shrugged. “Just meanness.”
The prosecutors looked up. Busenburg seemed a bit embarrassed by his comment. The attorneys were beginning to believe his story, the way he implicated himself, the way Martin had refused to implicate herself at all. It made sense to them.
“The plan was that we would poison Chris so that there wouldn’t be any mess. We would take him out to a remote area and burn his remains. His body would disappear and people would think that he had joined the Foreign Legion.”
The first step they took toward that path was to purchase sleeping pills from two different grocery stores, he said. One store was an Albertsons grocery store, but Busenburg couldn’t remember which location. The other store, he said, “was the Randalls by the Yellow Rose on Lamar.”
He digressed and emphasized, “When Steph always talked about killing people, it was always about killing men. She never talked about killing women. Stephanie loves women more than I do.”
He moved on and told Bryan and Wetzel that he and Martin bought kitchen gloves, sleeping pills, lighter fluid, and several times they bought firewood. “On Sunday we bought some kind of poison—either ant, mouse or rat.” He was “pretty sure” they’d bought it at Albertsons. For certain, he knew he made two trips to the grocery store with Martin and both times he wrote checks.
One of the firewood purchases, said Busenburg, wasn’t intended to be used to burn the body. But the other purchases—two, in fact—were to be used to burn the body, he said.
The prosecutors looked at the receipts for firewood that sat before them, receipts that predated the murder. Inside, Bryan and Wetzel nodded; their theory that the murder had been premeditated had just been reinforced.
“We used one bundle of wood at my mom’s house. That was either Friday or Thursday [before the murder]. I’d just gotten off work. Stephanie had gone to work. My mother was in Utah. Stephanie met me in Round Rock after she got off from work. Then we went to have a night by the fire. I got there about midnight. She got there about one.”
Quickly the prosecutors moved on. “Then what happened?” They didn’t want to think about what “a night by the fire” entailed.
“The next morning we woke up and went back to Austin. I picked my mother up at the airport on Sunday. I got my paycheck at work on Friday, January thirteenth.”
“Was Stephanie with you when you got your paycheck?”
“Probably.” Busenburg said they went to a couple of ATM machines on January 13. “She made a deposit of one hundred dollars.” He deposited his paycheck and got $170 in cash. “We went to the Seven-Eleven on Manchaca to check my balance. Then we went to the Albertsons on Slaughter to check the balance. I remember we went to a lot of different ATM machines.”
“Saturday,” he said, “I went to the apartment to get my computer desk. I needed Chris’s drill, and the door to his room was locked. On Sunday I came back and got a drill bit. Stephanie found a lockbox in Chris’s closet.”
Chris, he said, had a camera and some of Will’s clothes. They took Hatton’s credit cards and went to Levitz, where they used Hatton’s credit card to buy the couch and table and chairs. They took the table and chairs with them and went back on Wednesday for the couch. “We knew we were gonna kill Chris when we used the credit cards.”
On their first attempt to kill Hatton, said Busenburg, Martin went over to Hatton’s. “She was going to say she was looking for me. I was waiting in the parking lot. The plan was that Stephanie would wait with Chris and have a drink. She came out about two or three in the morning and said that she’d put the sleeping pills in his Jim Beam but he didn’t go to sleep.”
Bryan and Wetzel made a note: Martin’s story had been the opposite; Busenburg had gone in, while she stayed outside.
Busenburg explained that the couple had broken apart the capsules. “And she said when he left the room, she put them in his drink.” They thought that would be enough to kill him, said Busenburg. “Then the plan was that she would come and get me and we’d burn the body. She poured the powder in his drink when he went to the bathroom.”
“On Sunday, we went back to get the computer table. I was taking it apart, and Stephanie was going through Chris’s stuff. I told her Chris had stolen my check,” said Busenburg, referring to the cashier’s check. “I knew the check was worthless.”
The prosecutors’ hands stopped writing; they were confused by Busenburg’s check story, but they understood the bottom line: Will Busenburg had never been out $5,700. Busenburg had only used that check to make Stephanie Martin angry at Chris Hatton.
“Why did you keep encouraging her in this fantasy?”
“Because I was scared I was gonna lose her. That was her attraction to me. I put her on a pedestal. She was pretty, a rich girl, and too good for me.”
He then said they got Hatton’s credit limit raised while they were at Levitz.
“How’d you do that?”
“We just talked to a salesman at the store.”
After the Levitz trip, said Busenburg, he went to the airport to get his mother, went out to eat, and then drove over to Martin’s apartment, got her, and drove out to Lynn Carroll’s house. They stayed at Carroll’s until 9:30 or 10
P.M
., then went to Albertsons. “We bought rat poison and sleeping pills.”
“How’d you pay for it?”
“With a check.”
“Then what?”
“We went to a Taco Cabana and bought a burrito.” They returned to Martin’s apartment, he explained. “We crushed rat poison into the burrito. Then I went to Chris’s apartment by myself.” Hatton wasn’t at home, he said, so Busenburg waited an hour with the intention of giving the poisoned burrito to his friend. “Stephanie was at home, and I was going to call her after Chris was dead.”
There was a point, he noted, when he thought Martin was losing her confidence. “After using the credit cards, I knew I was going to have to kill him.” Busenburg left Hatton’s apartment for a couple of hours, then returned, only to find Hatton still not at home, he said.
“On Monday morning, we went to the mall and went to Sears, Kay Jewelers, and Montgomery Ward.” At Wards, he mentioned, they purchased a camera and a battery. “That night, Stephanie dropped me off at work. I worked until eleven and went straight over to Chris’s.” They then went to Hatton’s workplace and stole Hatton’s bicycle by cutting the lock.
“Why did you steal Chris’s bike?”
“Just out of spite.”
When Busenburg finally saw Hatton, Hatton wasn’t jumpy or suspicious, said the inmate. “He was extra nice and seemed to have cooled off from the week before.... We sat and had a drink.”
Busenburg then returned to Martin’s and reported to her Hatton’s demeanor. “So Stephanie wanted to do it again.” He followed Martin back to Hatton’s apartment, he said. “I thought that the food thing would make him throw up.”
The prosecutors looked at Busenburg, believing he’d thrown that little tidbit in to make himself look better—as though he thought Hatton had a chance of living if he’d thrown up, despite telling them he knew Hatton was going to die after they used his credit cards.
“On Monday we went to Chris’s in two vehicles. We decided Stephanie would go in, because she had a better excuse to show up. She was gonna say she was at work and got bored. I waited outside in the parking lot. Then she came outside about two or three o’clock. She was kinda excited, like she was in shock, and said, ‘He’s dead. I shot him.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Because I thought it would please you.’ ”
“Did you hear a shot?”
“No, I didn’t. She told me that Chris had gone to bed, but she went into Chris’s room and shot him. The only gun in the apartment was Chris’s.”
The prosecutors asked Busenburg about the various guns.