Angelhead (11 page)

INFAMY

From the front page of
The Daily Press,
Tuesday, April 14, 1992:

YEARS AFTER SLAYING, MAN SURRENDERS

Almost nine years after police found the partially clothed and strangled body of a 13-year-old Hampton boy, a 25-year-old Newport News man turned himself in to police Monday. But he didn't say why he waited so long.

Michael Scott Bottoms, of the ____ block of Main Street, was charged with murdering ________ on June 10, 1983.

He is being held without bond in the Hampton jail, said Sgt. _____ M_______.

Although investigators interviewed more than 200 people at the time of the killing, Bottoms was never a suspect until he phoned police Monday morning and said he wanted to talk about the slaying, ________ said.

______'s partially clothed body was found a day after he disappeared in 1983 walking to a friend's house in Powhatan Park. He was discovered on the wooded path near what was then road construction for Powhatan Parkway extension. The area is now part of that road. An autopsy revealed that ______ was sexually assaulted and strangled, apparently with one of his own socks.

An Eaton Junior High eighth-grader, ______ probably died within 30 minutes after he left home that afternoon, police say. Bottoms was not interviewed during the investigation because he didn't live in the area, said _______. Bottoms, 17 at the time, lived in Poquoson.

On Monday morning Bottoms phoned Newport News police from a Newport News business and said he wanted to talk about the case.

Newport News sent investigators and contacted Hampton police. “After the interview we had enough evidence to charge Bottoms,” _______ said.

Police refused to say whether Bottoms confessed to the crime and said he was not specific about his reasons for calling police. “They were not friends,” _______ said of Bottoms and the youth.

Police are also looking at other unsolved slayings to see if Bottoms might be connected, he said.

Bottoms is unemployed and lives with several people in a house in the Hilton area.

______'s father, _________, said he didn't think Bottoms was a friend of his son's.

_______ said he was reluctant to speak about the arrest Monday: “I hope it's the guy. It's something that I want to make sure there are no mistakes.”

It was big news. The sensationalism of it—the nine-year-old murder of a child solved—overwhelmed the lead of the news cycle for more than a week, my brother's name,
my
name, coming out of the television like a knife. His face, bloated and unshaven, shadowy and full of malice—a character seemingly special-ordered to run with an article about murder and rape—also filled the top half of the front page of the paper.

I saw the picture, but didn't, couldn't, read the story, couldn't muster the strength it would have taken to perform that monumental task. My hands were shaking. I couldn't even hold the paper.

I stared at his picture that day, into the eyes—black, empty, full of pain. I knew this was my brother, in a way, but, again, and especially now, it was all taking place at a certain remove. There was a part of me, a flash in my memory, that knew my real brother was just some kid, lost somewhere between this world and the next, still eight or nine years old, running through a front yard, holding a football, telling me to go long, go long, smiling with his crooked smile and gap teeth and wearing his favorite Levi's jean jacket. Could he be that person and this one? I wondered. Could, over time, this type of metamorphosis actually take place?

When I saw my brother's face—a mug shot complete with numbers—on the TV news for the first of many times that morning, I became violently ill from nerves. With that televised image it became real, out in the world, twisted and official, part of a collective knowledge and never, ever retractable. I was losing my mind a little and I believed, somehow, that by not reading the article in the paper I could keep this away from me. But not now, not with the television blaring my name into the room. Perceptions were made. Before I thought they—the cops, the media, the doctors, someone—would figure it out. Surely they would see the misunderstanding here, that the person they had in custody was insane, was having long talks with demons and angels, could put a cigarette out on his forearm with a deranged smile on his face.

The story was the lead on every local morning news program—murder solved. I remember very little of the day. I remember how I felt but I don't remember many of the specifics that triggered these feelings beyond the images of my brother. I sat on my parents' new couch, remote in hand. Aunts and uncles were there, my parents' friends, my grandmother, but they were like furniture to me; I could have been sitting there alone.

People brought food as if for a funeral. We watched television all day, waiting for the next news break, blank-faced, the phone ringing and ringing and none of us daring to answer it, knowing it was a journalist. Cars inched slowly around the circle in front of my parents' home. The phone wouldn't stop.

I think part of me believed it—murder wasn't beyond Michael. I remembered all the beatings, remembered his words:
Start the mower. Or I will kill you
. I went over the details of the time when the murder took place. He was seventeen in 1983, experimenting sexually. Since then he had had violent sexual encounters, both heterosexual and homosexual. I'm fairly certain he had participated in at least one rape while in Florida, and he had been raped at least twice. All of this, though, happened later.

It wasn't beyond him now to simply
say
he did it. His sensibility had shifted so drastically in the years since that time; 1983 would have been about the time he killed all his snakes, about the time he was at his most violent, at least toward me. I didn't know what to feel or how to respond. I was numb at the idea of Michael as a murderer, but then I thought, Of course, if anyone is a murderer it is my brother, and I am now the brother of a murderer and my life is over.

I'd seen him fold under sadness and confusion—moments that produced a great sadness and sympathy in me—but I'd also seen something in his eyes just before he threw me against a wall long ago, just before he let out a string of furious expletives at my mother, something dark and implacable. Maybe he did it, I thought. Maybe he didn't. For days after this, I weighed the pros and cons for his innocence and guilt, as the story in the local media took on a life of its own.

Anchors read the story at every news break; it was the top of the morning and noon news. As the day progressed, I started to become angry. How hard was it, I wondered, to find out and report that Michael was an acute paranoid schizophrenic who had just jumped the fence of a psychiatric-care facility? I didn't expect them to say he was innocent, to blow off a signed confession, but I did expect them to report
all
the facts. I just wanted someone—anyone—to mention that he was severely mentally ill.

“Bottoms is unemployed and lives with several people in a house in the Hilton area,” wrote the reporter. For God's sake, I thought, he left a
nuthouse
. An unemployed man admitting to a murder and an acute paranoid schizophrenic who was AWOL from a psych ward admitting to a murder are different narratives indeed. The former is a better scoop, certainly, but leaving out the latter is almost—whether from incompetence or laziness or stringent deadlines or whatever—a subtle form of lying. I don't know what happened, don't know how that fact could have been left out of every story. Maybe the journalists didn't talk to the cops, or the cops didn't mention that one thing; maybe the journalists had a story and ran with it because it was a great story and their time to research it was limited; maybe they simply weren't competent; maybe someone in my family should have answered the phone and told whoever was on the other end how sick Michael was, how he'd drunk Drano, how he'd been homeless, how he heard messages from God in the Robert Tilton show.

Watching people talk about you on TV was like staring into a lake at your own reflection and watching it walk away as you stood there. At the end of each televised segment on my brother (fifteen seconds that felt like hours, that stretched out in elongated dream time), you would be convinced that he had been free and raping and murdering children for the last decade, his mug shot up in the corner of the screen, over the pretty anchor's shoulder, her expression momentarily serious before she changed moods, face breaking into a smile, for the great spring weather.

My father had gone down to the police station the night before, immediately after he and my mother had returned home and I'd told him about my conversation with Sergeant M. Before he left, he looked at my younger brother, mother, and me and said that we needed to prepare ourselves. With glazed over eyes, he said—and I remember this perhaps more clearly than anything in my life—Michael may have done this. Then he turned around, picked up his car keys, and left.

When my father arrived at the station, Michael refused to talk to him. When he left, crying, someone outside took his picture, filling up his eyes with white-blue dots. That was one of the worst things, he told my mother, worrying about what would become of that picture, what story would run below the image of him with tears in his eyes.

From the local section of
The Daily Press,
Wednesday, April 15, 1992:

SUSPECT CALLED SWEET, TROUBLED

NEWS OF MAN's ARREST ASTONISHES NEIGHBORS

The man who turned himself in Monday in the slaying of a 13-year-old boy almost nine years ago lived near the victim for several years and is remembered by neighbors as both “a wonderful sweet boy” and a troubled teen.

Six years before the slaying, Michael Scott Bottoms, now 25, lived with his family in the same Hampton Terrace subdivision as _________. In 1983 _____'s partially clothed body was found in a woods not far from the neighborhood.

“He had lived in that general area prior to the attack and was familiar with the area,” Hampton Commonwealth's Attorney Christopher W. Hutton said Tuesday.

Bottoms, who moved to Poquoson with his family in late 1977, often returned to visit old friends and neighbors, sometimes staying overnight, several former neighbors say.

The news of Bottoms' arrest Monday, almost nine years after searchers found the boy's body, astonished some of Bottoms' former neighbors.

“It puzzled me because I never would have expected him,” said Wesley R. Drew, a Prince James Drive resident, who lived a few doors from Bottoms and his family. “I've known him since he was a small boy. He always struck me as real nice. This is a big shock to me,” Drew said.

Bottoms called Newport News police Monday morning, saying he wanted to talk about the June 10, 1983, unsolved Hampton murder. Newport News police interviewed Bottoms, then contacted Hampton detectives.

Bottoms, a resident of the _________ Home for Adults [on] Main Street, was formally charged with murder at 1:40 p.m. A Hampton juvenile court judge Tuesday appointed local attorney Lacy L. Scoggin to represent Bottoms.

Scoggin declined to comment about the case and denied a request to allow his client to be interviewed. Bottoms remains in the Hampton jail without bond.

He faces a preliminary hearing in juvenile court on May 21, Hutton said.

A woman promptly hung up the telephone when the family home was called Tuesday.

Police declined to say why Bottoms decided to come forward after almost nine years.

Drew and three other former neighbors, who spoke on condition their names not be used, recalled Bottoms as a bright, playful young boy who wrestled on the same youth team, the Hampton Cubs, as _______'s younger brother and swam at the neighborhood pool.

Drew said Bottoms used to ride three-wheel all-terrain vehicles with him and his children on the dirt paths that connected Hampton Terrace with the Powhatan Park subdivisions. The body was found near the site of the Powhatan Parkway highway extension.

“All the kids used to play there. We used to ride our bikes on the trails and go hunt for snakes and lizards,” said one former resident who lived a few doors from the Bottoms family.

City records indicate that the Bottomses lived on Prince James Drive in Hampton, about a block and a half from the ________, from September 1965 until November 1977. Bottoms was a fourth-grader at Lee Elementary School about the time his family moved, a Hampton school official said.

Several of Bottoms' new neighbors on Rue Degrasse in Poquoson recalled Michael Bottoms as a troubled teen-ager who seemed lost.

“He was a wonderful sweet boy. I don't know what happened,” one of the Poquoson neighbors said.

Hampton neighbors agreed that as a younger boy Bottoms was outgoing and friendly but he changed as a teen.

“He just wandered aimlessly. He apparently went to different places. After he moved to Poquoson he kept coming back, almost like he was lonely and missed it,” a Hampton Terrace resident said. “He was getting to the point where he was becoming pathetic. He was obviously having trouble adjusting and had gotten in with the wrong crowd.”

Bottoms graduated from Poquoson High School in 1986. Principal Don Bock said Bottoms was not pictured in the yearbook that year.

Police and court records show the only conviction against Bottoms was a minor traffic offense in York County in December 1984.

Some former neighbors questioned why Hampton detectives never questioned Bottoms earlier in the investigation. But Hampton police spokesman Sgt. _____ M_______ said, “There was nothing in the beginning to lead us to him.”

Sergeant M didn't understand my brother—how could he?—and I imagine he was the kind of guy—a good cop, a guy who went by the book—who believed there was no side beyond the obvious victim's, the poor kid—a thirteen-year-old, for God's sake—who'd been raped and murdered. They had good reason to think Michael was guilty. Even though my brother was raving mad at this point, his confession was elaborate and full of details “unknown to the general public.”