Twenty-seven
Busenburg calmly explained to the prosecutors that he and Martin wrapped Hatton’s body in covers and dragged it into the bathroom. Then, said Busenburg, he sent Martin home.
“Why?”
“Maybe to get cleaning supplies.” He called her at her apartment and left a message asking her where she was, he said. “She pulled up right when I was talking to the machine. That night was the only remorse by her that I saw. The rest of the week she teased me and said I was a ‘puss.’ ”
The prosecutors thought that over. Sure, it explained the call on Martin’s ID, but they still didn’t have proof positive as to who dialed that number. “How did she know how to use a gun?”
“I taught her how to use a shotgun with my Mossberg.” His shotgun, he pointed out, was bigger than Hatton’s. Hatton, he said, always kept a shell loaded in the chamber.
Busenburg explained that as he sat outside of the apartment, he saw the lights go out in Hatton’s and thirty minutes later, Martin came out. “I thought about going up. I even started to go up, then I changed my mind.
“On Thursday,” he said, “she came up with the whole story about the rape. We thought we had gotten away with it, and she said, ‘If we do get caught, we’ll say he raped me.’
“The night of the shooting, I cleaned up the apartment for maybe an hour before I called her and said, ‘Where the hell are you?’ When she came back, she was crying, and I was totally calm. As soon as I saw the body, I knew what had to be done. Later I got antsy, and she was ribbing me about it.”
The plan, he said, was to clean the apartment, then move the body. They decided to move the body into the bathtub so that it could drain of blood, he explained.
The following morning, Tuesday, Martin drove back to Hatton’s apartment. “I was still in bed.” When Martin returned, said Busenburg, she was bubbly and excited and carrying a doughnut box filled with a diamond engagement ring, five watches, a couple of necklaces, a class ring, and Busenburg’s camera.
“I think she talked to a friend in Las Vegas. I got dressed and went to work and tried to be normal. I went to see my mom. She could tell that something was wrong. I called Stephanie to tell her to get a tarp.”
“How did y’all get rid of the body?”
“I couldn’t lift his body alone, so I needed Stephanie’s help. We laid the body on the tarp and wrapped it up. She helped carry the body to the truck. She told me she knew of an old deserted campground. We drove around and couldn’t find it.”
Martin knew of another place, he said. It was Pace Bend Park, so they drove there.
“I backed the truck into the firepit and pulled the body out of the truck. She made the fire. We both put the body on the fire—put the torso on the fire—and kept squirting fire juice over the body.
“She kept asking if she could dissect the body. I said, ‘No, we don’t have time.’ She said, ‘The hands are not burning.’ ” It was important for the hands to burn, he stated, so that the body couldn’t be identified.
Busenburg had his hacksaw with him, he told the prosecutors, because a couple of days before the murder, he and Martin had discussed hacksawing the body.
The prosecutors still wondered if Busenburg had bought the hacksaw with the sole intention of cutting up Hatton’s body. “Where and when did you buy the hacksaw?”
“Sears. Last August.” While watching the fire and body, “I said, ‘Just cut his hands off. We can’t have any prints.’ She cut off his hands. I sat on a bench and watched.
“The first hand, she had a hard time with it. It took her about four to five minutes to get it off. The second hand, she cut through just like butter.”
“Just like butter,” the prosecutors repeated in their minds.
“She still kept talking about wanting to do an autopsy. She reached down with plastic gloves and pointed out a certain feature of his brain.”
Tonya Williams, the name flashed in Bryan’s and Wetzel’s thoughts: Martin had pointed to a feature in Hatton’s brain. Maybe that’s what Stephanie Martin’s former cellmate had meant when she said Martin had stuck her hand in Hatton’s head.
“Stephanie said some sick prayer over the body and asked me, ‘Would it excite you if I had sex with the body?’ She wanted to look at his genitals, and she squirted the lighter fluid on his genitals. I thought I heard something in the woods. It spooked me.”
They left.
“I followed Stephanie down the road.” He was in Hatton’s truck. She was in her car. “She was swerving all over the road.” They stopped at a gas station, then went to another station and left the truck there, he recalled. Busenburg stuffed everything, including the tarp, in the cab of the truck. By that time, it was five or five-thirty in the morning and still dark, he said. Then he drove them home in her car.
“I called in sick the rest of the week. On Wednesday we went to Levitz and picked up the couch. Her dad came over and helped.”
Later that night, said Busenburg, they returned to Hatton’s to clean the apartment. “We found blood under the bed and dumped the mattresses.” On Thursday, he said, they went back and cleaned for a couple more hours. “Stephanie got some paint from her mother’s. We couldn’t get the blood out of the carpet. One day during the week, I can’t remember which one, we took the day off and didn’t go over to the apartment.”
“Took the day off.” The phrase reverberated in the prosecutors’ heads. “Took the day off.” Just like it was from a job.
He said they also went to the pawnshop that week.
“Whose idea was that?”
“I’m not sure. The pawn people gave us seventy dollars for one ring. I remember talking to Beck.” He meant Beck Steiner, his boss at the movie theater. They talked about leaving town, he said. “He showed us a list of different theaters where I could work. Money wasn’t a problem for Stephanie. She could be a stripper anywhere. She could make between three hundred and five hundred dollars in a night.
“We took pictures of cleaning up the apartment.” He couldn’t remember whether they finished the roll or if the film was left in the camera. “There were a half a dozen rolls of film that I don’t think ever got developed.” They included his and Martin’s trips to Houston and San Antonio, he said. “Pictures of her naked and pictures of me on the couch.”
The prosecutors had in their possession topless photos of Martin, photos that were home snapshots, not photos from her Yellow Rose shoot. “What was in the pictures y’all took when you were cleaning up in the apartment?”
“There was one of her on her hands and knees scrubbing Chris’s carpet with a brush,” Busenburg replied.
“What’d you do with the camera?”
“We took it back to Stephanie’s apartment, or maybe we left it in the car. Her father picked up a lot of stuff in the apartment and in her car.” He described the camera as a black or gray, long, flat camera.
Busenburg went on to say that he kept all of Martin’s letters but one and that he told the police he was born in 1972 because that was the date on his license.
“I tried to sell Chris’s truck. I asked Beck if he knew anyone that wanted to buy an old truck, TV, or VCR.”
“Did Stephanie know you were out of money?”
“No, she thought I was rich. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have stayed around.”
“How’d you meet Chris?”
“Through ROTC in ninth or tenth grade. I graduated from Skyview High School in Billings, Montana, in 1992.”
“What about any presents you gave her?”
“For Christmas I got her a TV. I put it on my Sears account. I bought her a VCR a couple of weeks before. And I also got her a bong, some perfume, and a vibrator.”
“Did you do drugs together?”
“We did Ecstasy a couple of times. She was constantly smoking weed. I smoked it with her a couple of times. She did speed and coke a few times.”
Bryan and Wetzel thought about Martin’s interview. Her account of drug use was different from Busenburg’s. “What was so exciting about Stephanie?”
“I was always a good boy, dated good girls, church girls like Emily Eaves. I’d never been to a strip joint before, until I went there with Chris. He was the one who went to strip clubs. And I was surprised that the girls were pretty. I expected them to be slutty.” He repeated for emphasis, “I was surprised that they weren’t slutty. Stephanie looked like a pretty cheerleader-type. I gave her everything I had. I paid her rent. I borrowed money to give her gifts.”
“What was the attraction? Was it her personality? The way she looked? Was it sex?”
“She was manipulative,” Busenburg stated. “She was in control of the whole relationship. It was bizarre and amazing for me to be able to date a dancer. Sex was not the attraction. I would do things to her during sex. And then I would have to force myself to have sex with her. She had a complex about it.”
Over and over again, Martin had claimed Busenburg was the best lover she’d ever had. Bryan and Wetzel had read a hundred or more pages of letters between the inmates that touted Martin’s sexual joy with Busenburg. They knew them too well. In those letters, Busenburg hadn’t complained, either.
“She was a fantasy to me. Chris had told me that dancers were the hardest people in the world to pick up. Some of them were real aggressive. Some were friendly.”
“If it hadn’t been for you, would Stephanie have done this?”
“She was involved in some kind of Satanic cult,” he answered. “She was in it with some other girlfriend. It might have been Roxy. Lynn thought that Chris was cute. Stephanie got mad at Lynn and said, ‘No way. He’s white trash.’ She told Roxy that she hated Chris and that he was using me. After the murder, she wanted to tell Lynn and Roxy about it, and I told her not to tell anybody. In letters, she hinted about telling the DA about getting the camper from her parents, and her parents said no.”
Bryan and Wetzel leaned back in their chairs. There were so many stories that it was hard to sift between manipulation and truth.
“In the police car,” Busenburg continued, “after we were arrested, the police left us alone for a couple of minutes.”
The prosecutors shook their heads. That was a blatant oversight of police procedure. “What’d y’all talk about?”
“She asked if I was all right and said, ‘Remember about the rape.’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ Then at the jail, after we were talked to separately, she said, ‘Did you stick with the story?’ Then some cop grabbed her and she couldn’t say anything else.
“Fletcher Mack, this murderer I met in jail, told me to be careful about what I say because they might be reading my mail. And Chris’ ’—he looked over at his attorney—“Chris Gunter told me not to write to Stephanie, but I kept writing to her.”
“Why?”
“Because she was my girlfriend—”
Gunter interrupted. He informed the prosecutors that he had relayed to Ira Davis that there was film in a camera that could have some incriminating photos on it.
The prosecutors looked at him. Gunter was noticeably careful in how he phrased his words. “What did Ira say when you told him that?”
“Ira just said, ‘Okay.’ ”
They turned their attention back to Busenburg.
“Everything we bought with Chris’s credit cards was for Stephanie, except for one watch and one earring.”
The prosecutors had one last question. They asked again, “Why did you steal his bike?”
Busenburg answered again, “It was just out of meanness. We had tried the sleeping pills the first time, and he didn’t fall asleep. And she was so frustrated. I just thought it was something spiteful to do.”
Bryan and Wetzel left the county jail. Neither one of them thought Will Busenburg seemed like the type who would, on a whim, shoot Chris Hatton in his own apartment just for the thrill of it. Plan it, yes. Do it on a whim, no.
Stephanie Martin had been running around telling her friends she wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.... That thought wouldn’t leave their prosecutorial minds.
The last week of January 1996, Robert Martin sat in Ira Davis’s office. “I’ve been called by the grand jury,” he said.
“Get another lawyer,” Davis replied. “I can’t deal with you. Get another lawyer. Protect yourself.”
Davis pointed Martin down the hallway to David Reynolds, a former prosecutor renowned for annoying the DAs with his nit-picking at details.
With Reynolds’s help, Martin refused to answer the grand jury’s questions. Bryan and Wetzel marched Martin in front of District Judge Wilford Flowers. Flowers ordered the father to testify.
Finally Martin stepped into the grand jury room. To almost every question he was asked, he responded, “I can’t answer that question without my lawyer’s opinion.” Then he got up, walked out of the room, spoke with Reynolds, walked back in, sat back down, and said, “No, I can’t answer that question because it might incriminate my daughter’s case.”
He knew that within the first fifteen minutes he’d antagonized every older person in the room, and there were numerous older people in the room. He knew he was angering the two assistant district attorneys. He knew he looked like he was hiding something.
He was asked about the camera Busenburg and Gunter had mentioned, photographs, and the crime scene.
Martin wanted to answer, “You want to search my house? Go ahead.” He said, “No, I can’t answer that without my lawyer’s opinion.”
Forty-five minutes later, Robert Martin walked out of the grand jury room. He turned to his wife. “We just spent five thousand dollars, and all we did was alienate the grand jury, Frank Bryan, and Allison Wetzel. That was wrong.” He sighed.
Sandra Martin went through the same process. “I can’t answer that question because it might incriminate my daughter’s case.” She, too, annoyed everyone in the grand jury room.
“This is a big risk,” Stephanie Martin’s lawyers sternly offered. “Fifty percent chance of capital murder, the way it is right now. Fifty percent at best.”