Eight
As gospel hymns played, the choir sang, and a crowd of churchgoers watched, ninth-grader William Michael Busenburg walked down the aisle of First Baptist Church Round Rock. He stopped in front of the pulpit, shook hands and prayed with a kind gentleman, and made a public profession of faith in Jesus Christ. He melted with relief. Will Busenburg had finally found a family that would love him kindly.
Since his first cry at 4:35
P.M
. on October 22, 1973, in the Murphy Medical Center of Warsaw, Indiana, Will Busenburg had longed for sweet love. He had been the eight-pound, one-ounce new baby boy of Raymond Devon Busenburg and wife Frances Carol.
Warsaw was a small community just east of Fort Wayne and less than an hour’s drive from South Bend, which supported itself through the manufacture of orthopedic implants.
Will had inched the population of the town closer to 8,000. He was the youngest of four children: Michelle, seven years older, Heather, five years older, and Adam, two years older.
Despite the fact that Will lapped at his mother’s breast morning, noon, and night, he and Fran, a native Kentuckian who worked in the orthopedic industry, never quite connected.
But Will’s father, whose own father had died when Ray was nine years old, felt close to his new son. He desperately wanted to share with Will the father-son activities that Ray had missed out on as a child.
At ten months, Will was walking. At fourteen months, he was toilet-trained. His parents claimed he was ahead of schedule on the development calendar.
By elementary school, the dark-haired child with hazel green eyes was still looking like a boy of advanced achievement—earning mostly A’s and B’s. But in the schoolyard, Will Busenburg got into fist-flying fights with other students. He wanted to be a “man’s man.”
Will and his father hunted together. They shared sports together. In Ray’s eyes, he and Will were closer than Ray was to any of the other children.
But at age ten, Will Busenburg had developed a nervous stomach. Both his mother and maternal grandfather had stomach ulcers. Will’s mother often complained of stomach ulcers, back pain, and difficulty sleeping. She was an attractive blonde who could present herself as emotionally fragile.
In 1985 Will traveled to Arizona on a school trip. As he swam with the other adolescents, water suddenly gurgled into his lungs. The sky went black, and Will Busenburg fell unconscious. “I almost drowned,” he claimed. “I was unconscious for ten minutes.”
His mother said she saw a change in her son after the near-drowning—he became a loner. Will was busy constructing emotional walls of protection from a large family with parents who were beginning to have marital problems, but he couldn’t build them strong enough.
Heather slammed a fist into Will and, according to Will, “beat the hell out” of him. His dad, he said, was on a coke binge at the time and “had everyone stressed out.”
Then, said Will, Heather got him into trouble with their father. “So after he was done with me,” Will boasted, “I shot her in the butt with my BB gun.”
Sometimes Heather lived with the Busenburgs, and sometimes she didn’t. When she did, Will told himself that they were close.
In 1986, the year after Will’s near-drowning, the Busenburgs moved to Texas without Heather, who stayed in Indiana with her maternal grandmother. Will’s mother and other family members said Heather was the victim of much physical and emotional abuse by Ray.
According to Fran, Will, and Michelle, all the children—with the exception of Will—were physically abused by Ray Busenburg. According to them, Ray had broken Michelle’s and Adam’s noses and Heather’s fingers, in addition to other unnamed abuses.
Will continued shoving his fists into other children. In one fight, jabbing a mean right, he injured his writing hand. He complained about that injury for years.
Not long after the move to Texas, Ray and Fran separated. Will’s jaw began to pop when he opened his mouth wide. He got into more fights. In December 1988, the Busenburgs divorced.
Michelle, who had married years earlier, lived in Round Rock with her husband. Adam stayed with Fran in Austin, and Will stayed with his father in Round Rock.
Together, Will and Ray moved in with Ray’s new love, a woman named Sylvia, fifteen years younger than Ray and the mother of two young children, who also lived with them.
Will Busenburg’s grades began to slip. By ninth grade his Round Rock High School report card was mostly C’s. That same year, he went out for smashmouth football and track. But the roar of the student body and the victory hugs, he didn’t hear or receive. Busenburg dropped off the teams. His parents wouldn’t drive him to practice, he said.
His frustration grew. His anger queased his stomach into relentlessly tight knots. Busenburg slammed his fists into more students—two fights within two weeks with the same boy. “Come to my office whenever you need to cool down,” said Round Rock High School counselor Grace Finto. Busenburg did and Finto became his advocate. She knew his problems at home.
Busenburg walked down the aisle at church in hopes of finding a new family. He was desperate. In the eight months since his parents’ divorce, Will Busenburg had packed his bags and moved back and forth between his parents’ apartments, trying to get along with first one, and then the other, and back again.
At one point, he brought his possessions over to his sister Michelle’s house. But that living situation also did not work out. Will packed up his T-shirts and jeans and returned to his mother’s apartment.
He stayed only briefly, running away twice and disappearing for a month. When he resurfaced, he found himself knocking on his father’s door, his stomach still queasing. According to family members, Will was still jealous of his father’s new family—nine-year-old Sara and six-year-old Steven. Will ran away, twice more.
On his own, Will Busenburg found three families to take him in. Not one of the situations worked out. Church seemed like a good option to the teenager.
Will Busenburg announced to both his mother and father that he wanted to live at the Texas Baptist Children’s Home (TBCH) in Round Rock, a loving Baptist community of Christian adults who were willing to help in a healthy way.
Busenburg had become religiously unhealthy and religiously rigid—furious at his parents for not living up to his Christian standards. He demonstrated that anger by staring long hours at the flashing light of the TV.
His father and stepmother complained that he wouldn’t work or do household chores. Others griped that he was compulsive about cleanliness and table manners.
The Busenburgs argued that he had no motivation and was lazy. He did, though, attend church and its youth activities. “But he uses that time with the church and its youth ministers to create problems for us at home,” they said. “These people have taken Will in, and not once have they spoken with us to confirm Will’s stories.”
He created a reputation for playing the role of evangelist at home, which only distanced him further.
On the Fourth of July, 1989, the day before Will Busenburg was to leave for church camp, he grabbed his stomach and pushed hard on his belly trying to ease the pain. He threw his head into the toilet and vomited.
The next day, Busenburg went to camp. As the other kids sang, laughed, and played, he moaned of stomach problems and complained about how much he didn’t want to go back and live with his father.
His obvious physical and emotional pain touched the hearts of Ken and Rusty Long. The Longs, with three children ages nineteen, eighteen, and twelve, were a stable, respected family involved in the
Round Rock Leader
newspaper and First Baptist Church Round Rock. They agreed to take in Will and phoned the Texas Baptist Children’s Home asking to be approved as foster parents.
On July 16, 1989, just before fifteen-year-old Will Busenburg was to enter the tenth grade, Raymond Busenburg signed a placement application for his son at the Texas Baptist Children’s Home.
By then, Will no longer wanted to live at the Home. He was against placement, said the application, “because someone informed him that there would be strict rules to follow such as being in at a certain time.” Busenburg had a girlfriend from his Round Rock Baptist church group.
His living situation with the Longs wasn’t working out, either. Busenburg was constantly yearning for the reassurance of physical touch and taking the possessions of the Long children.
On July 27, 1989, eleven days after Ray Busenburg had signed the Children’s Home application, it was marked received. It stated in part, “Will has no medical problems. He does very well in school life if he wants to. He’s very well liked by other kids. Will’s only problem, I feel, is that he wants to be the center of attention at all times.... No matter how hard we try to include him and make a place for him in
this
family, he won’t give it a chance. Will is only happy when there is plenty of money and no rules to follow.”
The application was filled out from the point of view of Raymond Busenburg, but the handwriting on the application did not match the signature of Ray Busenburg.
Under “Parent’s Expectations of Placement,” the application stated, “I would like for Will to work through his anger and disappointments. He doesn’t want to accept the way things are. He is loved in both [of his parents’] homes but would rather have the attention of outsiders with whom he can manipulate with tales. I would hope that he can learn that things can be better for him. But only he can make that decision. He can’t spend his life spreading tales and inventing problems.”
The very last question on the application was, “What do you like about your child?” In handwriting that did match the signature of Ray Busenburg, there were the words “most everything.”
On August 4, 1989, Ray and Sylvia Busenburg drove onto the 122-acre campus of the Texas Baptist Children’s Home, located on the eastern edge of Round Rock at the corner of Highway 79 and Mays, just across the street from the local H-E-B grocery store.
They walked into the office of social worker Sharon Willis. It was a plain tan-colored but friendly room with photographs and Bible verses. Willis extended her arm to shake hands and smiled. The staffers of the Children’s Home were always ready to smile.
Ray Busenburg grasped her hand. He was a large, muscular forty-two-year-old with hair pulled back in a long ponytail. He was eager to talk about his own childhood, the death of his father when he was nine, and complain about his son’s mood swings.
That same day, Rusty Long drove Will to see Dr. Ben White, an Austin pediatrician.
Busenburg was rigid but pleasant when he walked in and sat down in front of the doctor. “The past few days,” he said, “I’ve vomited bright-red blood, had diarrhea, and ran a lower than normal temperature.”
Dr. White thought Will was on the precocious side.
“I know that my stomach pains are due to my problems with my father.” But other than making sure that the physician knew his staunch views on religion and his parents, the teen tried hard not to reveal anything about himself.
Dr. White reached for his prescription pad. “I’m ordering X rays to rule out a peptic ulcer.”
“I get headaches every afternoon,” Busenburg said.
The doctor told Will to start wearing the eyeglasses the teenager already owned and suggested a visit with an ophthalmologist. He also recommended a visit to the dentist as Will hadn’t had his teeth checked or cleaned in several years.
Then Dr. White sat down with Rusty Long. “Give him three teaspoons of Maalox after each meal and at bedtime. If, after a couple of months, the antacid isn’t working, I’ll prescribe Tagamet.”
He looked Mrs. Long straight in her eyes and pointedly talked about the problem of Will’s black-and-white attitude and told her that Will was anxious about being released from medical care.
An August 7, 1989, review of Will Busenburg’s X rays revealed no ulcers, and the next day, social worker Sharon Willis met Will’s mother, who was then going by her maiden name of Fran Wallen.
As they talked, Willis thought Wallen was worried about the situation with Will and angry at her ex-husband for not making a home for their youngest child. Like Ray Busenburg, Fran Wallen complained about Will’s mood swings.
“I offered my home to Will,” she said, shaking her head, “but he wouldn’t attend school and he drove his brother Adam’s car. And Will didn’t have a license and didn’t have permission.” She looked down. “We can’t get along, so we only see each other once or twice a month for a couple of hours.”
Willis later wrote, “Will’s parents see him as not being able to accept the realities of their broken home and imperfect lifestyles. They see him as placing too much emphasis on material possessions. Both parents feel Will needs a stable placement, since he is unable to live with either of them.”
On August 10, 1989, Willis sat across from Will Busenburg. As she tried to talk to him, he withdrew almost completely, in both speech and body language, until he could assess the situation.
That seems to be his way of gaining some control,
thought Willis.
Finally he said, “I want a family, and my own parents aren’t available to me. My dad’s home is one of drinking and fighting.”
New Christian Will Busenburg resented his father’s involvement with the new wife and her children. His own fistfights, he explained, were an attempt to win his father’s approval.
“My mother has her own life that doesn’t include me. We get on each other’s nerves.”
Sharon Willis wrote, “Will has very high expectations of himself, his parents, and others. He has difficulty facing reality and he tends to see things the way he wants them to be.”
She also wrote, “He has little insight into the impact he has on others and tends to have a magical view of things rather than a realistic view.”