Authors: Steve Jackson
Love Me To Death (12 page)
Twelve
September 14, 1998
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
“You have the right to speak with a lawyer and have him present during questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, the court will appoint one for you free of charge . . . which they’ve already done.”
Investigator Jose Aceves read the Miranda advisory to the prisoner in the small interview room at the Jefferson County Detention Center. William Lee Neal had called asking to talk without his lawyer, Jim Aber, whom he’d fired for the television cameras and later reconsidered, being present and waived his rights immediately when they arrived that morning, as he was anxious to get to “the truth.” Neal probably had already dug his own grave with his tape-recorded confession and statements that he’d made to investigator Cheryl Zimmerman, as well as several he’d made since to the police and media. But Aceves, a short, barrel-chested detective with jet-black hair and a Fu Manchu mustache who’d been the lead investigator at the West Chenango scene, and Zimmerman, a nine-year veteran who’d talked Neal into surrendering and was also present in the interview room, were taking no chances that this interview would be tossed out on a technicality. There were still a lot of questions that they wanted to ask Wild Bill Cody Neal.
For one thing, they were still unclear regarding how he knew the victims, and whether the victims knew each other. And what ruse had he used to get them all into the town house on West Chenango?
There was also a question as to whether he had committed other murders. He’d claimed to have killed as many as “five hundred others” and that there were bodies that they had not yet discovered. He’d retracted the statements, but they had to assume that he might have been telling them the truth, or at least some of the truth, before changing his mind. No one believed his more fantastic claims, but he had proven he was quite capable of killing multiple victims over a period of time. It was also difficult to believe that at age forty-two he’d suddenly “snapped,” as he now claimed, and started cooly, calmly murdering innocent women. The crimes seemed too well planned and calculated for a first-timer.
Three were dead and whatever the investigators knew about their relationship with him came from the women’s families. The fourth woman, the one he’d raped, had told them how he’d brought her into the town house with a ruse about showing her a “surprise” for her roommate. In graphic detail, she had recounted his cold-blooded efficiency in killing the third victim, Angela Fite, and lack of remorse—while they shook their heads over the courage she had shown throughout the ordeal. But she knew little about him.
The necessity of learning more about his past would be important if Neal was convicted and then faced a death penalty hearing. At such a hearing, defense lawyers would be expected to present evidence of “mitigating circumstances”—or mitigators—in their attempt to save his life. Mitigators often involved such explanations for criminal behavior as an abused childhood, physical injury that might have caused brain damage, or even a defendant’s youth and lack of prior criminal history or history of violence. Neal was already claiming that his brutality was out of character for him, perhaps a first step toward an insanity plea.
The investigators had learned a lot about Neal’s past and character from his family. He’d been born on October 7, 1955, in Virginia. His father had been in the air force and the family had soon moved to San Antonio, where he’d spent the better part of his youth. But he had been secretive from even his family for years.
One of his sisters, Sharon, a former social worker, was sticking by him . . . at least to the point of insisting that he must have been insane to do what he did and therefore not legally accountable for his actions. It was clear that she didn’t want to provide any information that might harm her brother. But his other siblings—brother Phil and sister Peggy—were very helpful.
They described their brother as having spent his childhood as their mother’s favorite, her “golden boy” who could do no wrong, even when as far back as his childhood there was plenty of evidence that he could. They reported instances of animal abuse, one of the telltale signs of a serial killer in the making. He’d claimed in an earlier interview with investigators to have been molested by an older, married woman while a young teen; his family, who knew the woman in question, patently denied the affair existed anywhere but in his mind. However, it was true that he had sexually molested a younger girl at about that age.
His second wife, Karen Wilson, had mentioned that while living with him near Nashville, Tennessee, there had been stories about murdered women whose bodies were found wrapped in plastic. They’d been unable to get anything concrete on that. Neal’s own family revealed that he’d also been the subject of an investigation into the abduction, rape, and murder of a twelve-year-old girl in upstate New York many years before. The investigators knew that the FBI had been called in on that one, but Neal had denied any involvement, and without more to go on, he’d been free to walk. Even now, the police in Pueblo, 120 miles south of Denver, wanted to question Neal about a brutal murder there. But so far, they had not been able to link any more unsolved homicides or disappearances to Neal. So far.
A week after his arrest, Neal had been charged by Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas with thirteen crimes, including first-degree murder, first-degree sexual assault, kidnapping, extortion, and theft. Though it might have seemed like overkill, considering a conviction for first-degree murder could result in the death penalty, proving the lesser charges might bear on whether Neal would qualify for the “ultimate punishment” due to his having committed the murders either during, or to conceal, another felony.
Neal had kept Jim Aber as his public defender for the time being, though he frequently threatened to fire him for trying to defend him from the charges. Not that Neal paid much attention to his lawyer’s advice. He was bound and determined to take “full responsibility,” as if that were some noble gesture on his part.
As Jose Aceves finished reading Neal his rights, the killer nodded impatiently. “I understand that fully, and I agree with it.” He looked pale in the fluorescent lighting and a bright orange jail jumpsuit. He still wore his hair long, though he’d added a dark goatee since his arrest two months earlier.
“Did anyone from our office ask you to come talk to us?” Aceves asked.
“No, not at all,” Neal replied.
“Mr. Neal, you haven’t been threatened or coerced in any way to come down and talk to us?”
“No, no, sir,” Neal said, shaking his head. “This is totally voluntary, not out of fear or anything like that. You guys have totally respected me the whole time I’ve been with you. That’s another reason why I’m comfortable in talking with you . . . because of how you have handled things with me during this time that we’ve been in this situation.”
Neal began the interview trying to butter up Cheryl Zimmerman by complimenting her on her appearance. But she cut quickly to the chase. “What is it you wanted to talk about, sir?”
First Neal cryptically said that he hoped they would get a message through to an agent with the FBI “relating to certain, what I believe are federal, issues, if worse comes to worse, if I don’t have any other choice. I am considering what I’d like to say . . . and then they can do with the information whatever way they choose.”
The investigators assured him that they’d been in contact with the FBI and would pass his messages along. But that wasn’t their main concern. Zimmerman asked him to go over the day that Angela Fite had died.
Before he got started, Neal cautioned the investigators that he might not be able to remember everything “not because I’m hiding something. . . . It’s just the act, I mean, the whole scene is such a nightmare to me as well.”
Zimmerman asked him to try to remember the day at least from when he’d picked up Suzanne Scott. Neal described again how he’d asked her to go with him to the town house on the pretense of showing her “a surprise” for Beth Weeks. “I might have said I had something else to pick up at the house.
“I had a certain way that I wanted to—she was going to be the one presenting that surprise to Beth Weeks because I was going to be out of town to Vegas, and I wasn’t going to be able to do it for her.
“So that’s why she was willing to let me blindfold her when we got into the garage, as well as put duct tape on her mouth, which I was gentle about doing. It was totally voluntary on her part as well.”
“Were her hands bound in any way?” Zimmerman asked.
“Oh, no, no,” Neal said. “She came of her own free will on the understanding that what we were doing was legitimate. I mean, you know, if I had told her I’m going to take you to the house, and I’m going to tie you down, and I’m going to rape you, and you’re going to witness a murder, she’s not going to go.” Seeing the look on Aceves’s face, he added, “I mean, I’m not being sarcastic with you at all, Jose.”
Neal said he led the way into the house because “I was always so worried about the little kitty cat getting out.”
Scott trusted him enough, he said, that she lay down on the mattress without protesting. “I just said, ‘This is how I want you to do the surprise with Beth.’ . . . They always knew how crazy I was.” Again catching the investigators’ looks, he quickly added, “I don’t mean crazy, I feel, in a bad way. I was always kind of like fun, and I would do things people wouldn’t seem to do, just partying and enjoying myself.” His unknowing victim didn’t complain, either, when he tied her arms and legs down.
“So then you tied her up, and then what happened?” Zimmerman asked. So far, his story was the mirror image of Scott’s.
“Then I started taking her blouse off,” he said. “She felt at that time that she was going to be . . . I believe she felt like she was going to be raped.”
“Did she say anything?”
Neal shrugged. “She muttered a few things like, ‘No.’ Or started to be upset. And I said, ‘If you want to live, you’re basically going to have to listen to what I have to say.’ ” He noted that he’d read Scott’s statement to the police. “I would like to say that I believe that she was totally honest and totally accurate except for certain timing issues. . . . Like something comes to me . . . It might have been on the news or things I’ve read that said Angela Fite watched me rape Suzanne Scott, which is totally not true. I had never done that to Angela, okay? . . . As far as the news, they don’t have a stinking clue, all right?”
“They never do,” Zimmerman agreed.
“You know,” Neal said, “I’m facing death row. . . . I’m facing the end of my life for what I know that I’ve confessed, and I’m fine with doing that over and over again. I want the truth to be out. But I find it real difficult for me to see people, even my own flesh and blood, that have lied or added to something that was not true.
“I’m not saying that I’m always truthful with things. I mean, I have not been that way in my life. . . . I’m not trying to judge them, either, but I do have a problem with it, mainly because I believe it takes away from the investigation, and it’s putting something on me I don’t deserve. I’ll eat what’s mine but nothing else.”
When the investigators began asking questions, they addressed him as Mr. Neal, until he insisted that they call him Cody. Some of their questions he answered directly; with others he took off on tangents—all the while, his hands flew around like a pair of disturbed birds. He would flit from subject to subject, often following no particular order and it was everything the investigators could do to keep him on track as he told his story. He described showing Scott the body of Rebecca Holberton covered in black plastic.
“Did you say anything to her at that point?” Zimmerman asked.
“I let her know that if she screamed or drew attention to herself, she would die,” he answered. “She wasn’t hysterical.”
The investigators nodded; they were already duly impressed by how well Scott had held herself together under horrific circumstances. Still, Aceves thought that at some point after being shown Holberton’s or Walters’s body, the girl had screamed.
Neal shook his head. “She was not screaming. She never screamed the whole time she was with me. And if she recalls that she did, she did not.
“I mean, the only real tense time for Suzanne with me was in the beginning when I got on top of her, and I settled her down right away. And then I took the blindfold off to reassure her that murder was definitely an option. I wanted her to live, and she was going to have to trust me that she would live. But she was going to have to follow exactly what I said.”
“What was her reaction to seeing these two people?” Zimmerman asked.
“I’m not a doctor,” Neal noted. “Just my observation was I believe that she was in shock, but not bad shock. She was still in control of her senses. She was aware of what was going on.” He took a deep breath and added, “I believe part of it is because Suzanne trusted that I would get her out of there alive, even after she saw the bodies.”
Neal said he removed the duct tape from Scott’s mouth so that she could talk to him. “So that I could understand, you know, what she’s going through a little bit more. I mean, I know that might sound bizarre to you, my concern for a victim, but believe me it was a concern because she was a beautiful young lady. She never did nothing wrong to me at all.”
Other books
When the Bough Breaks by Jonathan Kellerman
Promises by Ellen March
The Right Hand of God by Russell Kirkpatrick
The Fields of Death by Scarrow, Simon
With His Ring (Brides of Bath Book 2) by Cheryl Bolen
DoingLogan by Rhian Cahill
1929 by M.L. Gardner
Domiel by McClure, Dawn
Noise by Peter Wild
Painkiller by Robert J. Crane
