calm. We needed a statement from him and besides that I needed to protect him from his own parental instincts. All parents are the same. They want to see their child. It’s not something that you can allow, not because of rules or regulations, but for their sake. I knew what he was going to say before he said it.
“Jim—my boy—I want to go in. I want to see my boy.”
That was something I couldn’t allow. First of all, it was a crime scene and he wouldn’t know what to do. More importantly, if I let Ray go in there, he would never get the image out of his mind. He would see it for the rest of his life when he closed his eyes at night, every time he thought about his son. That wasn’t going to happen if I had anything to say about it. Some people resent it, but later most people realize it was the right thing to do.
“Ray, I’m going to tell you something and you need to listen and trust me. There is nothing you can do to bring Bryon back. I don’t want you to remember Bryon the way he is right now. You stay here with Fran. One of the detectives will be over to take a statement. Then you go home with your friends. I’ll have one of the deputies drive you. We’ll call you. Trust me on this, Ray. This is best. I won’t let you go in there. I’m sorry.”
I walked over to Fran. Bill had his arm on her shoulder. She was shaking her head. The sound that was coming out of her was a low, keening moan. What could I say? All I could do was let her know that I cared. “I’m sorry, Fran. There’s nothing else I can say. I’ll let you know things as we figure them out. Right now we just don’t know anything.”
I’m not sure she really heard anything I said. For her, all that was important was said when I told her I was sorry. Her friends looked at me and then surrounded her in a circular compassionate embrace. I saw Ray, standing still and erect, staring at the store. I patted him on the shoulder and walked back toward the crime scene. There was a long evening ahead and I was already emotionally drained.
There is a symmetry to the chaos of a crime scene, especially a murder scene—things that should be there and things that shouldn’t. What is there and what isn’t tells you a lot about the perpetrator. This scene was no different. It just took a little longer to adjust to the reality of it. Even seasoned investigators have a hard time when three innocent young people have had their lives ended so abruptly and so violently. Almost all of us had been to triples before, but they were normally drug shootings or barroom brawls that turned into combat zones. These were kids and they didn’t do anything except be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was going to be hard explaining it to their parents.
Bill and I walked back toward the crime scene tape and started to go under it when a young man grabbed at me. He said he was Bryon Schletewitz’s brother-in-law. He wanted to go inside. I removed his hand from my arm while Bill stepped behind me. The man kept saying that Bryon was in there and he wanted to see what had happened to him. I didn’t have time for this, but I also didn’t want to turn my back on him. I told him “No” as firmly and as gently as I could and then I nodded to a deputy who guided him away. I had done this enough times that I knew if it were me, I wouldn’t have felt any different than these people. I often thought that I probably wouldn’t behave as well. Maybe that’s because I knew what lay ahead and they didn’t. We all depend on the system to bring us justice. The problem is that to most people the only justice in crimes like this—the murder of children they love—is seeing the son of a bitch who ruined their lives taken out and shot. Well, while I knew that wasn’t going to happen, they hadn’t figured it out yet. And even when we got the killer, and I was sure we would, prosecution would be a long, slow grind. That night I had no idea how long it would be. That’s the final part—the long, inexorably slow, grinding process of the law. By the time the perpetrator gets what the law says is coming to him, the system has worn the victims out, worn the attorneys out, and worn itself out. The only one who isn’t worn out is the one who started it all. Those types never seem to wear down.
Bill and I walked carefully back inside. The bathroom door was open and the light was on. The room was divided by a sink on one wall and a door that separated the sink area from the toilet. The back wall of the room with the toilet was covered with bits of flesh and bone, and blood had splattered all over the corner, outlining a blank space where something had blocked the spray of blood and tissue. Kenny offered his thoughts. “I’m guessing the shooter stood at the door and fired at the kid, the one that got away. From what we can piece together, the kid must have shoved himself into the corner and turned away from the shooter. His left arm took most of the blast. The shooter must’ve thought the kid was dead because he left him there. Then, later, I guess the shooter heard him leaving through the storeroom door that led to the parking lot and chased after him.” The bathroom was only a few feet square, and with the toilet in it there wasn’t much room to move.
When you look at a crime scene, you try to visualize what happened. It helps you to think about where evidence might be located, and it will be of invaluable help when the time comes to interrogate suspects or to question witnesses. This one wasn’t hard to figure out. The shooter stood at the toilet room door, pointing the shotgun at the kid. The end of the barrel was no more than three or four feet away when this guy pulled the trigger. The kid must have been terrified, looking at the end of that gun and the face of a man who intended to kill him. In a macabre way, he was probably fortunate. My guess is that he went into shock and collapsed on the floor when he was hit. With all the blood and gore, the shooter figured he was dead and left him. The kid was the lucky one.
When a shotgun is fired, the ejected buckshot spreads in an inverted-cone shape from the barrel. The farther away the barrel is from the target, the wider the spread of the pellets. At almost point blank range, there is a very limited spread pattern, but at three or four feet, there is a noticeable spread. Assuming he has the weapon or knows what weapon was used and the kind of ammo, a forensic expert will look at the spread pattern and be able to determine with fair accuracy how far the shooter was from the victim when he fired. The two kids on the floor showed almost no spread. The shooter was probably no more than a foot or two away, and he was likely three or four feet from the kid in the bathroom. For Bryon, well, that was something that we would have to evaluate later. He had fired at Bryon, but he had aimed high. Whatever the precise distance, this guy was so close that he didn’t have to be careful with his aim.
The surviving witness said the gunman was a man, but it had never occurred to us that the shooter wasn’t a man. Maybe it isn’t politically correct, but there are distinct differences in the way women kill and the way men kill. First, women aren’t usually as violent, at least not as violent in the same way as men are. It is pretty unusual to see premeditated violence from a woman. Oh, a woman will kill, but when they do it they usually are really pissed. I mean, a woman will unload a gun if she’s going to shoot you. She’ll keep firing until she hears the click. A man will usually just shoot you. Another thing, a woman is unlikely to kill kids this way. She might kill her own kids, but then she will usually try to kill herself, or else she’s plain crazy. No, this was a guy. Some things you just know.
Bill kept looking around. “No shells.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Kenny, has anybody found any shells?”
Kenny shook his head. “Nope, haven’t seen any. Of course, they could be under the shelves or somewhere around here. But I don’t think there are any.”
That meant one of two things. Either the shooter used a single-shot shotgun and removed the empty shells each time he fired, or he picked up the ejected shells. When you fire a single-shot shotgun, you need to open the shotgun at the breech, remove the expended shell casing, put in a fresh shell, and then close the breech. Most people who fire once will then turn and run. They don’t stand there slowly reloading and placing the empty casing in their pocket. If the shotgun carried multiple shells and they ejected as rounds were fired, the alternative was that the shooter had picked up the ejected shells, which meant he had the presence of mind to pick up a casing, which would have extractor marks on it from the ejection mechanism or a firing pin
