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Authors: Steve Jackson

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BOOK: Love Me To Death
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Angela had laughed when her mother told her why she’d called. “Oh, Mom, you worry too much,” Angela had said.
After the fireworks, Angela prepared to leave, hugging her mother. “I love you, Mom,” she said.
“I love you, honey,” her mother replied. “Be careful going home.”
Sunday morning came and went, and again Angela was a no-show at Tara’s apartment. Finally, early that afternoon, she called. She apologized, but Cody had decided to move up the surprise to that evening, and she wasn’t going to be able to help that day, either.
About 4:00 P.M., Rankin showed up at Tara’s apartment with Kyle and Kayla in tow. He said he’d gone by Angela’s apartment to drop off the kids, but she wasn’t home.
Tara paged Angela, who threw a fit when she heard that Rankin had tried to drop off her children. He was an hour early, she complained. She was still trying to run errands and get home in time to take the kids to a sitter so she could meet Cody for her surprise.
The outburst was unlike Angie. She was always so calm, so cheerful, even when her life was in shambles or she’d received her latest beating or disappointment from Rankin. Now she sounded hysterical, on the verge of tears. But she said she’d go home to wait for the kids.
A little later, Tara called her mother and told her about Angela’s outburst. “Something’s not right,” Tara said. “You need to call her.”
Betty tried to call and page her oldest daughter. But it was already too late.
When Angela Fite spoke to her sister, she was having a drink with Neal at The Bonfire Lounge. The bar was another of his favorite haunts, so he was well known to bartenders Maggie Champion and Ashleigh Raymondi. That evening Raymondi was off duty and had only come in to pick up a telephone number when she saw her friend Angie. She waved when Angie looked up for a moment from a rapt conversation with Neal. When he stepped away for a moment, Raymondi got a chance to talk to her privately.
Angie was excited. “He’s going to show me something tonight. I think it’s my new house. I think it’s all furnished and everything.”
Raymondi didn’t think much of Neal. He seemed to have a lot of money, but she didn’t consider him very good-looking and worse, thought he was just a con artist. Still, something else was nagging at her, something she couldn’t define, when she told Angie not to go out with Neal that night.
Angie just smiled. “You’re being overly protective,” she said.
That night Angela Fite dropped Kyle and Kayla off at the baby-sitter’s at about 8:00 P.M. The baby-sitter thought Angie was out of sorts, almost desperate to get going.
Angela drove to Fiddlesticks to meet Neal. He wasn’t there, so she ordered a drink and waited. When he did arrive, he didn’t come in but paged her from his truck and told her to meet him outside. They dropped her car off at her apartment and then drove to the town house on West Chenango where, he said, her surprise awaited.
True to his word, the town house was near her mother’s house; in fact, the two residences were within view of each other. Neal blindfolded Angela to take her into the town house through the garage. He’d told her that the home was ready except for the carpeting so she wasn’t alarmed when they crossed the bare wood floor.
After Angela was seated, Neal duct-taped her arms and legs to the arms and legs of the chair. He asked if she could get out. She tore through the duct tape, so he wrapped more tape around her arms and legs. This time she couldn’t free herself.
When Neal was sure that she couldn’t escape, he asked, “So how’s your day going so far?” He didn’t bother to wait for her reply but removed the blindfold. The room she sat in was filthy, the table and floor cluttered with dishes and the remains of old meals. An ashtray on the table overflowed with cigarette butts. To her right, there was a large lump beneath a blanket; a little farther, another lump wrapped in black plastic looked like a mummy. On the ground in front of her was a mattress. Large eyebolts had been screwed into the floor at the corners; ropes ran from the eyebolts beneath the blanket.
“Welcome to my mortuary,” Neal said. He moved over to the mattress and pulled the blanket up to reveal the bottom half of a nude woman. He reached up her thigh and groped at her thighs until the woman beneath the blanket flinched. Then he lifted the rest of the blanket to reveal Suzanne Scott.
The eyes of the two women locked. “I’m sorry,” Fite said, “but we’re not going to get out of here alive, are we?” Scott couldn’t speak because of the duct tape over her mouth, but the fear in her eyes must have been answer enough.
Neal ignored the exchange between the women. Sitting down in a chair facing Angela, next to the table at the side of the mattress, he took out a pack of cigarettes and began to smoke. After a moment, he stood and allowed the two women to have a draw from his cigarette, pulling the duct tape from Scott’s mouth so that she could participate. Whatever he was up to, he seemed to be in no hurry.
After a minute, he asked Fite if she wanted her own cigarette. “Yes, please,” she answered.
“Can you smoke it without using your hands?” he asked.
“Yes, thanks.”
Neal lit another cigarette and placed it in Fite’s mouth. He didn’t offer Scott one but instead retaped her mouth, this time much tighter than he had before. Suddenly he stood up. “I’m gonna go get a treat for my cat,” he said, walking off behind Fite, toward the kitchen.
A few moments later, Suzanne Scott saw him reappear behind Angela Fite. He had the splitting maul in his hands, still covered with the gore from his previous victims. Before she could warn Angela, Neal lifted the maul above his head and brought it crashing down on the other woman’s head. She fell to the side but was held to the chair by the duct tape as he struck again and again, like a man chopping at firewood.
Neal had hit Fite several times and was still going at it before Scott could turn her terrified eyes from the gruesome scene. Then, as if he’d finished some chore, Neal turned and calmly walked away.
When Neal returned, he didn’t have the maul with him. Next to Fite’s body, he stooped to pick something up. With the first blow, the cigarette Fite was smoking had popped from her mouth and onto the floor. He retrieved it now and settled into the chair next to the mattress to finish smoking it.
Suzanne Scott could hear Fite’s blood striking the wood floor . . . not one drop at a time but like water pouring from a pan. Neal got up and placed a blanket over and under his victim’s head. “So you don’t have to listen to that,” he said to Scott, and retook his seat.
Angela had been saying things she wasn’t supposed to talk about, he explained. He regretted that it had been necessary, but he had done what he had to do.
“You see how calm and smooth I am,” he boasted, taking a drag on his cigarette. “Bet you didn’t know that was comin’.”
Eight
After he finished Angela Fite’s cigarette and watched television for a bit, Cody Neal stood and undressed. He left his shirt on but removed his pants, underwear, and boots. He came over to the bed and untied one of Scott’s hands. Lying down next to her, he demanded that she manually stimulate his penis.
When he tired of that, he untied her other hand and her feet. Pointing a small-caliber handgun at Scott, he went and stood just behind the lifeless body in the chair. His victim was slumped over to her right at a nearly ninety-degree angle but was still held into the chair by the duct tape. He ordered Scott to kneel next to Fite and then to take his penis into her mouth.
Neal held the gun to her head. “Am I going to die?” she asked, crying.
“Do you want to die?” he replied.
“No.” She could feel the hard steel against her temple. Her face was just inches from the body of the dead woman in the chair, but she did as she was told.
Neal ordered her back to the mattress. “Get on your hands and knees,” he ordered. Then he finished raping her.
When he was done, he tied her up again. This time he bound her legs together, tied to an eyebolt, but he tied just one of her wrists to the floor; the other hand he left free. He sat down in a chair next to the mattress and began watching the television. “Know what movie this is?” he asked after a few minutes.
“No,” she replied. She couldn’t see the television well and didn’t really care. She was thinking, trying to do whatever it took to stay alive.
“Portrait of a Serial Killer,”
he said nonchalantly.
Twice as he sat there, sudden loud noises came from what seemed to Scott to be the upstairs. The second time, Neal got up with his gun and went to check. He came back and told her it was “the others” he’d warned her about.
As he sat watching the television, chain-smoking, Neal talked to Scott, rationalizing his actions. His first two victims had betrayed him, he said. They’d had fair warning. He’d hated to do it, but Angela had to die because she couldn’t be trusted with his secrets.
Scott thought quickly. She had to keep him from thinking that she couldn’t be trusted, either. “You’re right,” she said. “Angie couldn’t be trusted. You had to kill her.”
Neal looked at her and smiled. She ventured a request. “I’m a little cold,” she said. “Could I have a blanket?” She wasn’t really cold, but being naked made her feel even more vulnerable. Her tormentor did as she asked, and she felt better. It helped her keep her nerve in a room just a few feet from three dead women.
“Why don’t you come and sit next to me?” she invited. The thought of Neal being close filled her with revulsion and fear, but she wanted him where she could see him all the time. She didn’t want him to sneak up on her like he had Angie.
Neal sat next to her. “Would you hold my hand?” she asked. She thought that if she held his hand, even if she fell asleep she would know if he tried to slip away to fetch his ax.
The only time that night they got up off the mattress was when she had to use the bathroom up the stairs. That in itself was a new terror. She’d never seen the “others,” never heard a sound that positively indicated the presence of another living human being in the apartment—it was a town house, she reminded herself, the noises could have been the neighbors—but she’d heard something and Neal told her they might kill her. She had every reason to believe him. He warned her again when he escorted her to the bathroom, telling her not to look to her left as they went up the stairs. “The others are over there, and they don’t want to be seen,” he said.
Neal stood guard outside the bathroom door while she went in. After closing the door, she looked around and noticed something odd. The room was almost bare. There wasn’t anything on the bathroom counter, like toothbrushes, soap, or a razor. There was a single bottle of shampoo and that was it. Odder still was a rope coming out of the wall next to the shower. The rope had a series of knots tied in it, but she couldn’t understand what it was for . . . and didn’t want to know. When she emerged, Neal was there to take her back down to the mattress, where he now tied just one wrist to an eyebolt.
The television stayed on all night. Or at least she thought it did, unsure if she had dozed off somewhere during that waking nightmare her life had become. She kept expecting Angela Fite to move, or maybe one of the other women.
This isn’t true,
she kept thinking.
This can’t be true.
In the morning, Neal untied her and let her go to the bathroom and put on her clothes. As soon as she was ready, they left the town house. She looked back as they left, the scene forever etched in her mind.
They got in the Toyota truck owned by Holberton. There was a brand-new pump twelve-gauge shotgun behind the seat that he’d purchased after the murder of Candace Walters; he tucked the handgun into his waistband. He drove to Scott’s apartment, where he moved quickly, picking up all the cordless telephones and Scott’s cellular phone, checking the bathroom to make sure there wasn’t another in there. Then he let her go in and shower.
“We still have a few places to go,” he said. “Don’t unpack. I want it to look like we just got back from our trip.” Then he changed his mind and told her to unpack. She opened her suitcase. “Hey, you really packed well for the trip,” he remarked.
Neal told her it was time to go again. He hid the gun under his shirt and again they went out to the truck and drove off. He was hungry, so they went to The Bonfire Lounge, where Maggie Champion was bartending. He ordered himself a Bacardi and Coke and Scott a beer; he also insisted that they order something to eat, a cheeseburger for himself, a plate of nachos for her.
Champion thought the girl looked young and asked for identification to verify her age. After the food arrived, she noticed that her two customers had barely touched their meals. “Food okay?” she asked.
“The food’s great,” Neal answered. “We just had a rough night.” They left with their lunches unfinished.
The afternoon was spent shopping: cigarettes for the both of them, Tums for Neal’s indigestion, and NyQuil for his cough. He drove to a mall and bought a tape recorder at Radio Shack, then on to a video store where he had Scott rent the movie
The Jackal,
a story about an international terrorist and assassin. He picked it out because her roommate, Beth Weeks, was always asking what he did for a living. “This will explain,” he said of the movie. “Good enough for Beth.”
At one point, Neal drove back by Holberton’s town house. He said that they might have to go inside.
“Please,” Scott begged. “Please don’t make me go back in there.” The image of Fite’s feet and hands still taped to the chair would not leave her mind. She was afraid that if he took her inside, she wouldn’t come back out alive.
Neal relented and they returned to Scott’s apartment. They called Weeks at work and told her about “the trip to Las Vegas.” “It was great,” Scott said, conscious of the gun that Neal had on the table in front of him. “When you going to be home?”
That evening, after Weeks got home, they watched the movie. Neal acted like nothing was wrong. He joked; he teased; he was solicitous. When Weeks was gone for a moment, he promised Scott that as soon as the movie was over, the two of them would tell her what had happened.
After the movie, Neal led them to the kitchen table and told Scott to go ahead and describe what she’d seen. Scott began, but now that all the memories were there on the tip of her tongue, she couldn’t. She began crying. Neal took over and told the story.
As he spoke, Weeks at first looked from his face to Scott’s, which soon told her all that she needed to know about the veracity of what he was saying. She screamed. How could he have done such things? He responded by pointing the gun at her forehead and asking if she wanted to die. When she said no, Neal shrugged. He’d done what he had to do. If they wanted to survive, they had to do everything he said, exactly. Later that night, Monday, July 6, he got out his new tape recorder and, sitting at the kitchen table with the women, began making a rambling, nearly two-hour confession. As he spoke, he took the gun from his waistband and placed it on the table.
Scott and Weeks were forced to sit there and listen to him recount his reign of terror and murder, but at last Scott was allowed to go to her room and lie down. She shut the door and turned on her television, hoping to go to sleep. But sleep, if it came, was at best fitful . . . haunted. That morning she tried to stay in bed as long as possible so she wouldn’t have to go out into the living room.
Incredibly, later that morning, Neal left the women alone while he went out. He threatened that they had better not call anybody or do anything because if somebody told the police or even if he got caught, more people were going to die. And that included them.
The horror of what he had already done and the threat were enough to cow them. They made no attempt to escape and get help. However, Scott gathered up all the clothes and anything else that she had with her at the town house the night before and put it all in a plastic bag. She stuffed the bag into her closet under other clothing. She told Weeks that if anything happened to her to give the bag to the police. Despite all that she had been through, she was thinking clearly enough to preserve evidence that could help convict her tormentor.
Otherwise, Scott and her roommate didn’t talk much throughout that day. They just wandered around the apartment, feeling helpless. They had no doubt that Neal was sincere about his threats. He wouldn’t hesitate to hurt them. Every way that they could think of to get help, they quickly decided wouldn’t work well enough or fast enough.
Neal returned before they could come up with a plan. For the next several hours, he kept talking about leaving and committing suicide. He called Steve Grund, a television newscaster who’d been a drinking buddy. Grund wasn’t in, so he left a message saying he had a “big story” for him and to call the number that he left.
In another twist, he told the women that they could summon a male friend over to the apartment if that would make them feel more comfortable. “Someone you trust, but who won’t try nothin’ with me,” he said.
One name leaped to the minds of both women at the same time. David Cain. A thirty-four-year-old friend of Weeks’s.
In contrast to William Lee “Cody” Neal’s cowardice and indifference to life, there were a number of acts of bravery and selflessness by others during his rampage. Angela Fite’s first response when she saw the spread-eagled and bound Scott on the bed was one of sympathy for the younger woman. Scott’s courage and will to live may have been the difference that allowed her to survive her ordeal. Although rendered nearly helpless by fear and shock, Scott and Weeks didn’t abandon each other when Neal left, nor did they take a chance that someone else might be killed in order to save themselves.
David Cain was another hero. Weeks called and invited him over without telling him of her predicament. He had no idea what he was stepping into when he arrived at the apartment and was confronted by a gun-bearing Cody Neal. He was told that it was his choice: stay with the women or leave. But if he left, Neal warned, there were going to be consequences for those he left behind. Cain looked in their faces and knew that the women needed him. He chose to stay.
They all sat down at the kitchen table again, and Neal played the tape that he made the night before so that Cain would know the full story. Close to midnight, Neal decided they were all going out . . . to the Allstars Strip Club. They stayed until closing, with Neal acting like they were all having a grand time, tipping the strippers lavishly, complaining that the drinks weren’t strong enough. He insisted that his hostages drink with him and enjoy themselves.
The following morning, Wednesday, July 8, Neal began making plans for what was to happen next. He called Grund again and this time got through. At first the newscaster didn’t believe his story; only after Neal put the women on the telephone did Grund realize the truth.
Neal warned that killing the three women might have only been the beginning. He was thinking of killing as many as thirty more people that he had in mind. When he got off the telephone with Grund, he told the others that he was at last ready to leave, find some lonely spot—maybe return to the scene of his murders—and kill himself. He’d decided to spare their lives, but only if they followed his explicit instructions on what each person was to do when he was gone.
Scott was to call 911 and tell the police what had happened. After she called, the three were to go outside and sit on the front lawn of the apartment complex. “I’m worried that if you stay in the apartment, Dave’s gonna get hurt when the police come in,” he said. “They may think he’s the suspect. . . . I don’t want him to get hurt.” He continued with his instructions. When the police arrived, Weeks was to give them his pager number and a message regarding what time to call him. Then he was gone.
The plan fell apart after Scott called the police. She didn’t want to sit on the front lawn. She thought it might be a trick, another “surprise” by Neal. He might see them outside and know that the police had been called; it could be a signal for him to return and shoot them on the lawn, so they stayed inside.
The police arrived quickly. Scott and Weeks were hysterical; Cain was on the telephone telling Grund what had happened since he spoke to Neal. It took the first officers on the scene a few minutes to make any sense of what they were hearing. When they did, they called the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office to say they’d just received a report of three homicide victims and another victim who’d witnessed the whole thing and had then been raped by an armed suspect who was still on the loose.
BOOK: Love Me To Death
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