“So, I wasn’t completely shocked . . . like if I’d never known someone was gonna be shot, but I was shocked that he actually shot him. I was shocked that he shot him in his bed because that didn’t make any sense to me. So that’s really what I wanted to know. . . . ‘What happened that you would shoot him? What were y’all doing, you know, talking? Did he say something about the money?’
“[Will] doesn’t really give me good answers. He says that he knows . . . [Chris] stole the money.... The money thing just wasn’t even thought of anymore, after he shot him. That just faded away. I don’t think we ever even talked about it anymore.”
According to Martin, what Busenburg did say about the shooting was that “he knew for sure that Chris had stolen his money.... I can’t remember what he said in order, to be honest. But he did sometime in this conversation tell me that he did give him sleeping pills, that Chris did get tired, and that he did go to bed, and that this was about three, three-thirty . . . and that Will was going to come out and tell me that we were going to come up and look for the money but that he went into one of his trances at this point and thought Chris had reminded him of—something, they had talked about his dad or something and he reminded him of his dad, and plus, he’d been stealing his money and he said when he stood over him for thirty minutes before he shot him thinking about his dad and that that’s what got him into the mode of wanting to kill him and that when he shot him he saw his dad’s face. I remember that he said that exactly.
“I asked him, ‘Well, you didn’t talk to me about shooting him. You didn’t say that you were gonna . . . this sounds really horrible.” She laughed. “Sounds really horrible, like I’m a cold-blooded killer, but I kinda like said, ‘We didn’t talk about this, you know. We talked about . . . you going in there and you coming to get me and us looking for the money and that something might happen to you, you might have to kill him.’ ” She slapped the tabletop with every phrase. “ ‘You didn’t tell me you were gonna shoot him. That you were just gonna get him drugged up and shoot him.’
“And I said, ‘I don’t understand what made you decide to do that.’
“And he says he doesn’t . . . really have an answer. It’s just something he had to do, and that he was thinking of his dad when he did it. He went into one of his trances.’
“And that’s really the . . . best explanation I’ve ever gotten from him that he shot him, which is not much of an explanation at all, really. His whole life flashed before his eyes?
“It’s hard for me to understand because I’ve never been abused. I mean, I saw Will have his flashes of his dad a lot. And I saw him crying. And I’ve held him . . . but it was hard for me to imagine that . . . this suddenly happened to him. It’s like, in some ways, the way he talked about the trance he went into and the way he stood over the bed for thirty minutes before he shot him, thinking of his dad, it’s almost like he wanted to shoot him in any way. He had decided to shoot him anyway, and thinking of his dad is what allowed him to do it, like pretending it was his dad. That’s kinda how he described it to me.
“That’s about as much as he gave me, then he says he wants to sleep. He wants to sleep! And I didn’t sleep. I walked around the apartment for a good two hours, pacing the apartment, waiting to hear sirens any minute. I’m thinking about the cops. I’m thinking about what’s happened. He’s just in another world, I think. I think he was gone, out there. I think he was in a trance this whole time, really. Had to have been. I mean, he didn’t show any emotion about what he’d done, actually, you know, killing someone, the fact that there was gonna be probably people that had heard it. But they didn’t.
“Now after I paced around the apartment, freak—thinking about everything and afraid the cops were gonna come any minute, he comes out of the bedroom. I don’t know if he slept. I doubt it. But I had closed the door and left him alone, and I think I would go in there and check on him. Look at him. See what he was doing. And his eyes were closed. But I doubt if he was sleeping because he didn’t sleep that much when we were together anyway. Seems like he was always awake or he was always waking me up.
“I went in there, and he said—all of a sudden he needs me to go to the apartment . . . and get some things that he left. He wants me to get Chris’s car keys, Chris’s wallet . . . the bottle of Jim Beam and the glasses. Okay.” She slapped the table and laughed. “This is so stupid. What is fingerprints on a bottle gonna matter when you have a dead body in the apartment? . . . I had to have been in shock because that didn’t click to me. Why would you want to worry about fingerprints?
“So I said, ‘Okay, wait a minute, I don’t want to go over there by myself.’
“And he says, no”—she stumbled for words—“he can’t go, he’s sick . . . he’s going to the bathroom, he’s sick. Of course he already told me he had a disease. So he says his stomach’s really hurtin’ now. And he can’t go. It’d be better if one of us just went in the car. So he had a way with ordering me around after this—this happened. I just did what he said.
“It wasn’t mean,” Martin said of the way he ordered her around. “It was just”—she stopped to think—“like, professional. It was always real calm....
“So I said, ‘Okay.’ Even though this was all a real horrible experience, in a way, I felt like I was trying to be strong, you know,” she stuttered, “really, not necessarily trying to impress him . . . because that didn’t matter to me at this point. But, like I had to be strong for him and for me since he had done this, and I kinda got in that mode of like I was his partner or something.” Again Martin laughed.
“Not really like I’m thinking this CIA-thing, because I wasn’t even thinking of that really.... I don’t know how to put it. I just had to be the efficient one because he seemed like he was . . . breaking down and sick.... I always had this pity thing for him. He’d throw his disease in, and he’d throw in his views or something, and that just always got me.” She slammed the tabletop again. “I felt like I had to be strong for him.
“So, I go over to the apartments in my car. It’s about ten o’clock. . . . Now the time we got back to my apartment from his apartment after he had shot him and after we had moved the body . . . was . . . between five-thirty and six [in the morning]. We talked a little bit. Then I think he had laid down at about seven . . . seven-thirty. So this is about ten o’clock. I’ll say he was in bed for about three hours then. It was something like that.... I remember looking at the clock, and it was ten.
“So I went over to the apartment.... I was nervous as can be, looking behind me in the rearview mirror, thinking there’s gonna be cops coming any minute, and I was really shocked that none had come. And by this time, I—we realized by this time that no one had heard . . . the gun go off. Or no one had called.”
She stumbled before finally saying, “Weird, isn’t it?” Then she asked, “Is a shotgun loud? The only time I actually shot one I was, um, I was twelve years old and shot a jackrabbit with my dad, in West Texas. And that was a little 22/22. This was a twelve-gauge. I think those are pretty loud.
“They asked me did I think he muffled it. And I didn’t see anything that showed he muffled it, like a blown pillow or anything.
“When I went over to the Apartments, like I said, I was real nervous.... I parked in the back alley, because I didn’t want to park around the front, because I wanted to watch the Apartments first to make sure I didn’t see anybody going in and out . . . like [the] landlady, manager, cops, whatever.
“So for ten, twenty minutes I sat there and watched, and I didn’t see anything. So I went in. Now, I may be superstitious, but I was scared to death to go into that apartment with a dead body.” She laughed. “I got in there, got the stuff, and got out as quick as possible.” It took her maybe five minutes, she said. “I didn’t have to go back into either bedroom. I got the stuff—so actually I probably wasn’t in there two minutes.... Well, five minutes probably because I rinsed the glasses off, put ’em up, got the Jim Beam bottle, got Chris’s wallet and keys, which were on the . . . the bar, by the kitchen, by the sink. They were right there. And then I left.
“And I was wanting to get out of there as quick as possible because I”—she stuttered—“have always been kind of superstitious, you know. I’ve watched a lot of horror movies, so when I saw that dead body,” she laughed, “from then on out, it was living in one.” She meant a movie, not a body. “So when I . . . went in there, just knowing that the body was in there really freaked me out.”
Her voice went soft. “And another thing, you know how they say you can smell death? It’s the blood, you can smell it. It has a bittersweet smell. It’s actually kind of nauseating.... To this day, I remember it. I’ve heard other people say it and talk about it, like people that’ve been in war. It’s not a horrible, gross smell. It’s just kind of bitter. Kind of sweet. It’s the blood.”
Her voice strengthened a mere mite, but her throat smacked with dryness, “So I left [Chris’s] apartment, went back to my apartment, and by this time I think Will was up and had taken a shower. And I gave the stuff to him. And he—I don’t remember him putting—but I remember this is where later they found it, he put . . . the wallet in one of my drawers.... He was trying to hide it.
“He actually went to work that day. And he told me the reason . . . was because he wanted to go to work like everything was normal for the benefit of the people he worked with. It’s like . . . during this whole thing, he would think of some things teeny to cover up . . . like for instance, he suddenly thinks of these fingerprints on these glasses. But then other things, he would just completely miss.
“Now, me,” she defended, “I missed everything.” Martin chuckled. “I did. I didn’t think of anything. I couldn’t hardly function.... I had some . . . Vicaden that I took for my headaches, and I took me a couple of those for my nerves—that day when we got back to my apartment.”
She added, “And I continued to take ’em, a couple here and there when I needed them, for the next couple of days—because I had real bad nerves, I was very paranoid, and I was upset and I was in shock, everything.
“[Will] calls me from work. I don’t remember how long he was there. I know he ended up getting off early, because he said he told them that he was sick.” She yawned deeply. She explained that the coldness in the interview cubicle was making her sleepy. “He called me from work, and he told me to go to get a tarp. This is to wrap the body up in, which he doesn’t say over the phone, but I know. . . . He says he needs me to do that by the time he gets home.
“So, at nine
P.M
., I go to Academy [a sporting goods store], which is on Burnet Road . . . and I get a tarp. It was almost closing because it closes at nine . . . I got in right before it closed. The manager had to open it for me. I said, ‘Oh, this is an emergency. I’m going camping,’ or something. And, uh, paid for the tarp. I don’t remember how much it was.
“At one point I went to my mother and dad’s house, and I can’t remember if that was Tuesday or Wednesday.” She played with her memory for a moment. She fluctuated between the days. She couldn’t recall. “There was some point that I went to my parents’ house, during the day, while they were at work, to get”—and all of sudden she began to recall—“the paint. But it had to be Wednesday or Thursday because he didn’t even tell me that we were gonna go back and paint until that night. So it was Wednesday or Thursday.”
She still tried to recall, as if the detail and lack of memory bugged her.
“It had to be Thursday because we slept all day Wednesday.”
Martin still wanted to figure it out for certain. Maybe she could think it out as she talked, she said. Then she changed her mind. “That’s not really that important, anyway. But really, it’s really horrible that I went and got something from my parents to use to cover up a murder. I mean, I could’ve almost got my parents involved.
“But I wasn’t even thinking about that. And”—her voice rose as if excited. She slapped the table—“I called them and asked them for a tarp before I called Academy to go get the tarp.” She rhythmically rapped the table.
“My dad said it had holes all in it, that it was messed up. . . . When he asked what it was for, I said me and Will were gonna go camping. That’s so horrible.” She laughed at her audaciousness. “That’s just horrible—that I called my parents for a damned tarp and went over to get some paint.” This time she seemed to be slapping the tabletop out of anger or frustration. “I mean, I didn’t even realize what kind of jeopardy I’m putting them in.”
Thirty-one
Just hours before purchasing the tarp in which to wrap Chris Hatton’s corpse, Stephanie Martin drove to Intermedics Orthopedics to take Will Busenburg dinner, an “Egg McMuffin” she’d made for him.
As they sat in her car, with Busenburg eating the food, there wasn’t much conversation, just a little talk about his upset stomach. He said he’d call her later and went back to work. It was the first time Martin had seen Busenburg at his workplace, the place he’d claimed was home base for his CIA missions.
“This is so funny. This is really weird. I remember—this is so dumb. In fact, I don’t even know what it means.... As I was driving to get him [Busenburg] . . . I remember looking up in the sky and seeing this star.” She laughed. “And I felt like the star was telling me”—she laughed more—“that we needed to go.” The laughter left; her voice grew deep. “That we needed to leave. That we needed to follow. I was thinking clear back to the Bethlehem thing.” The laughter returned.
“Really. . . . I mean, why God would speak to me at this time, I’m not sure. Maybe He realized what kind of distress I was in.... This was a cold act that had been done.... I’m not any saint in any part of it because, you know, I knew a lot of things. But . . . when I looked at that star, I felt like we needed to—it was telling me that we needed to leave.”
She stammered, “That something bad was going to happen, and we should just leave. Not go back to the apartment. I never wanted to go back to the apartment and do any of that anyway.... I didn’t see why we had to go back and get rid of the body. But that was immediately cut off when I suggested that. . . .”
Martin had suggested that they leave and not return to Chris Hatton’s apartment, she said, earlier that day. “Why are we gonna get rid of the body? . . . The cops are gonna be coming. Let’s—let’s just go. Let’s leave. Let’s get out of town.”
Martin said she had suggested it just as they had arrived back at her apartment, just as the sun had been rising.
Busenburg had replied, “No, we have to get rid of the body.” According to Martin, “That was it. No more discussion about it.”
Sixteen hours later, though, as the light in the clear winter night sky of Texas had shone like the North Star over Israel, Martin had still wanted to run.
“I think about that sometimes. I don’t know if it was my imagination or it was my head talking to me.” She chuckled. “Or if it was deliriousness.” Her tone turned serious. “Or if it was really something that was telling me that we—but why would God tell me to leave with a killer and go out of town?” She laughed again at herself and slapped the table. “You know, that doesn’t really make sense.”
Her voice went very solemn. “My parents are absolutely sure to this day he would have killed me. I don’t know if he would have or not.” She laughed. “Most people generally think that if I would have stayed with him and had never left him, he probably would have killed me.
“That night, when I took him back from work . . . he told me the details, that he had a plan.” The plan was that they would put the body in Chris’s truck. “Not Will’s truck because Will didn’t want a dead body in the back of his truck. That’s what he said.... And we would take it out to some deserted place. And he wanted
me
to come up with the deserted place because I had been living in Austin, and he didn’t know where to go.
“And I thought of... out on three-sixty, which is not deserted at all.” Three-sixty was a loop that wound through the rugged hills, high-tech offices, and millionaire homes of Austin’s west side. “On three-sixty, there’s that wildlife preserve.”
The Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve, as it was officially named, had one winding, climbing dirt road with a postcard view of the city and gave frequent nature tours, even at night.
“We’ll take the body there,” she continued, “and then the next day we would go back to the apartment and cover up the blood on the walls.
“He decided that we would paint over the blood and we would scrub the blood off the floor if there was any, which there was,” said Martin as her intonation lifted with cynicism, as if Busenburg’s idea that there might not be any blood on the floor was ludicrous.
“Now”—she began to correct herself—“when we decided to scrub the blood from the floor, I don’t think [that] was until we got there and saw it. Because the only blood on the floor was a big—there was a big blob of blood, and it was—it looked like it was—must have been the impact of when he shot him. It must—the way this blob of blood was, ’cause it was, it was—ooh, man . . . it was disgusting.” Martin seemed about to smash her fist against the table from her own disgust.
“It didn’t even look like blood. It was a big, round, thick blob”—her words came slowly—“of blood and it looked like kinda fluffy.” Then she chuckled briefly. “That’s a terrible word,” she laughed. “It had foamed up. . . . And it was very odd-looking to me. . . .”
She stopped. “I’m getting ahead of myself. This was the next day when I saw this blood because it was after we had moved the bed out of the way.”
“This is what I saw with my eyes [in Chris’s apartment]. The first time, I didn’t see anything but splatters because it was dark.... After we had gone and took the body out and then we slept that day.” She once again began to rap the tabletop. “And then on Thursday, we went back to the apartment to clean up. Uh, and that’s when I saw it in the light, okay? Okay. I didn’t see any, any head parts. I didn’t see it.
“I guess it disintegrated into micro-micro-,” she couldn’t find the word, “you know, tiny, tiny, tiny droplets of blood, maybe skin, or skull. Okay, now, bones, I did see. Well, when we were scrubbing the floor and painting the walls, I saw bits of bone and that was from his skull. And it was—maybe the biggest”—she circled her fingers into half-dollar size—“this big.”
Quizzically, she added, “And I didn’t see very many.... When I think half of this person’s head was blown off in this room, I didn’t see all that. I guess it disintegrates into nothing, into powder, maybe? I don’t know. The blood, though, I saw, you know, the blood. And I did see in the wall—you could see some pieces of tissue. It was embedded in the wall, with the blood, and the pellets from the shotgun were in the wall, and they were in the carpet.
“Now that big blob of blood . . . it’s like that was just where the brunt of where everything went. . . .” She repeatedly pounded the table, then stopped. “Because, like I said, it was thick, and it was an odd color. It was brighter than normal blood. I guess that’s because it had thickened up.” She sighed. “It was hor—it was disgusting.”
She stopped and seemed to try to rest. “Whenever I get done talking about all of this, I’m exhausted.” She laughed tiredly. “It exhausts me.”
“I remember it was about midnight, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning.... We took the body out of the bathtub. The blood had—seemed to have all drained out. It was pretty—he was pretty much dry. He was getting stiff, because his arms were kinda out, like this.” Martin outstretched her arms. In the bed, though, she said, his arms had been out to his side.
But for further specific description of Hatton in the bathtub, to confirm or dispute the rumors that Hatton had been tied up by his feet, Martin was no longer free and forthcoming. She had to be quizzed, detail by detail. She answered only in short, three- or four-word phrases and “yeahs.”
Hatton lay faceup, lying on his back, his legs and feet propped on the edge of the bathtub, propped against the wall. “Yeah.” He laid simply like someone taking a bath.
Martin was ready to move on.
They dragged him out of the bathtub, she said. “And I remember there’s a little bit of blood left in the bathtub, and we ran the water, and cleaned that out. Not cleaned,” she corrected, “but washed—rinsed it out. Then we dragged the body to—we laid the tarp out as big as it would go on Will’s carpets, in his bedroom. And dragged the body from the bathtub, across the tile floor to the bedroom onto the tarp.
“It was very heavy. Deadweight, right. Because it gets—they get stiff. He didn’t have blood flowing from him anymore. It must have drained out the top of his head.”
Up until then, the prison had been unusually silent, no slamming doors, no loud talking. But slowly, the faint sound of distant voices began making its way into the interview cubicle.
“He lifted one end. I lifted the other end. At this point, we had on dishwash—no, we had on those gloves he brought from his work. Plastic gloves. Surgeon gloves. He had those at work. They worked with them, so he brought a bunch of those.”
Thick and slow like a child’s voice, her tone seemed to have grown weary. She had carried, she said, Hatton’s feet. Busenburg was still calm. “Calmer than ever.” Martin laughed weakly. “Always calm.” Her throat rasped with the syllables. “At this point, I’m calmer than I was”—she could barely get the words out—“when I first saw the body, but paranoid every second that we’re in that apartment, and around that dead body, and the whole situation in general.”
She had felt like evil spirits might be flying into her, she noted.
Martin stopped for a moment. “I’m like that. I’m very—I believe in [the] supernatural. I didn’t like being around someone that had been killed and”—she paused—“not to mention, I’m not going to say I had any friendship really with Chris, so there wasn’t that kind of feeling there.
“But to be honest, [it] never really hit me that—we had just taken someone’s body out and that Will had taken someone’s life. That all never really hit me until I had been in the county [jail] for some weeks. I was so out of it, and so brainwashed by him, and so into him and feeling sorry for him.” Her voice had become bitter.
She returned to the facts. “Then [we] folded the tarp around him, and then tied both ends tight with some string, and I don’t know where that string came from—either Will’s truck or there in the apartment. I think he got it out of his truck, at some point. Okay. Now, it’s . . . about twelve-thirty to one o’clock. We have to take this body down the stairs and get it in the back of the pickup. I can’t believe we did this.” She breathily chuckled. “It was killing me. It was heavy. What I’m saying is that I can’t believe that we did this in a public apartment.”
With each carrying an end of Hatton’s body, they lugged the corpse outside. Said Martin, “We thought that if maybe we carried it like that and someone saw us we could say it was the carpet.” She laughed. “You know, rolled-up carpet.”
“The mood had definitely become somber—ever since this happened, between us. There wasn’t much hugging, kissing”—she chortled—“talking, in general. It was just kinda what we needed to do and—like the eating, you know, getting something to eat and . . . and me taking the pills to stay calm.”
She did ask Busenburg some questions, and made a few comments about the body’s appearance, she said.
“His head’s half blown off, but he didn’t really look like a person anymore to me. He looked like a dummy because he was so white.” She even mentioned that to Busenburg, she said. Martin stopped. “But I don’t remember much conversation about anything else.”
She stumbled for a moment. “He leaves me alone for a minute to go get Chris’s truck . . . brings the truck around and parks it in the alley, which is in the back.... I remember we looked at the other windows to make sure we didn’t see anybody. And, waited until we thought it was a good time and then we just”—her words suddenly shot with speed—“took off. As fast as we could. Picked up the body. Went down the stairs. Went in between the apartments in the back, and then threw the body up over the back end of the pickup.
“Now I started panicking because I couldn’t get it up. It was so heavy, and I started panicking, and I was like, oh, my God. Someone’s gonna drive down this alley right now and we’re gonna be standing here trying to put this body in this truck. Now I don’t remember if I was saying that, but I was like, ‘Will, Will, I can’t—’ And I started panicking. ‘I can’t get it up.’
“And finally he just said, ‘Come on, one, two, three,’ and we got it up. Then [he] puts the [lift gate] back up, gets in the car, tells me to get in my car.
“Okay, now I was driving my car. And I had in my car the firewood, the lighter fluid, the, uh, that’s it.” The hacksaw, she said, had been in Busenburg’s truck, then he moved it to Hatton’s pickup.
“At some point he said
he
was going to cut up the body and put it in the fire. Okay. Now”—she chuckled—“obviously you can’t just cut up a body. But at the time being. . . .” Her words faded for a moment, then turned serious. “Since I had the experience of having to do such a horrible, gruesome thing as cutting off hands, I realized you’re not going to be able to cut up an entire body. I mean, it’s gonna take you hours, and you’re not—you’ve gotta have a big stomach to do it.” She laughed uncomfortably. “I don’t know.”
They drove to the Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve, said Martin, and she laughed again. “We drove out there, but when I drove by, something told me no, this is not the right place.... This is public, you know. People might go down here, for all I know. . . . I made the motion, come on, keep following me.
“You have to realize I’ve been up for two days now and it’s one-thirty in the morning. So I’m thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking.” Her words were as fast as automatic gunfire. Then stopped, as if the gun jammed. “So I thought of . . . this deserted, abandoned—what’s the word—it doesn’t exist no more. They don’t go out there. Sandy Creek Park, at Lake Travis.
“This was out in the middle of nowhere, ’cause you had to go down that long”—she stretched out the word long—“winedee road to get to it. In the middle of nowhere.... Okay, so we drive down this winding road, for about thirty minutes.” She started to laugh at herself again.
Almost all of Martin’s laughs, giggles, and chuckles seemed to be laughter at her own stupidity, the ludicrousness of the situation, or laughter of nervous embarrassment and shame.