The Whole Truth (3 page)

The crime scene unit arrived at the bridge soon after 7:30 a.m.

The original uniformed officer at the scene, Sergeant Jimmy Clubman, accomplished a lot before they got there. Conscientiously, though uncomfortably, he labored away in his wet clothes and shoes. A young officer with only two years of experience on the force, Clubman has two small children himself. He felt shaken up by his macabre discovery.

"I was just driving my route." The sergeant explains how he slowly cruised the residential streets each morning. "I spotted this fishing rod stuck on that bridge, but I didn't see anybody with it. I figured they saw me coming, and ran away and hid, and they didn't have time to get their pole loose. I got out to look for them, because I figured they wouldn't go far, not with that nice pole stuck there."

He attempted to dislodge the rod from between the cement supports, but it was snagged so firmly on something in the water that he couldn't budge it.

"If those people in that little boat hadn't come by, I probably would have got back in my car and just left it there," he admits, "because when I saw how tight that line was caught, I figured that was a better lesson to a fisherman than any warning I'd give him. It's real easy to get your line hung up on the crap that floats by those bridges."

Before the Carousel showed up, he pulled hard on the line a couple of times, but with no luck. Afterward, he shivered, not from being cold, but at the thought of what it would have been like if he had managed to yank the line up far enough to see what was caught at the end of it. He was glad that didn't happen. In his two years on the force, he'd seen awful things. He knew there were some things he didn't want to stumble across when he was alone. Having company, even if it was only two scared civilians, helped a little.

He knew he had to get down to business.

He told the Williamses to stay in their boat until the crime scene officers got there. "I felt sorry for them," he says. "I mean, what a thing to come across, when you just happen to be out for a morning boat ride." But he didn't have any time to waste on them. They'd have to comfort each other. He had to secure the scene as best he could by himself, using his own patrol car and orange cones he removed from his trunk, to block off the lane of traffic closest to the fishing pole.

He didn't think he should close both lanes, because these streets are man-made peninsulas, surrounded on three sides by water. If he shut down the whole bridge, the residents in their houses would be trapped for the duration of the crime scene investigation. They would be unhappy, and the fire department wouldn't like it either. When Clubman called in to his supervisor to report the body, and to request assistance, he asked her to call out the marine unit to help secure the area by using their boats to block access from the water.

Before anybody else arrived, Sergeant Clubman noted 7:12 A.M. as the time he found the body. He also recorded the temperature, ninety-two E, and reported the weather as being sunny, with a very slight breeze from the southeast, no clouds, ninety percent humidity.

He hoped that information—particularly the time, temperature, and humidity—could help the medical examiner determine time of death. The temperature of the water needed to be taken as well, but the officers in the crime scene unit could figure that out, as well as confirm the other data. He carefully wrote down a description of the body and the scene, including his observation that the victim's face appeared "peaceful." He expected the crime scene officers to make their own notes, but he hopes to make detective, himself, one day. He tries to train himself for the future, by thinking like a detective, noticing what they would consider important, and writing that down. He noted there was none of the eye-bulging, tongue-protruding awfulness of the face that would have been present if she had been strangled.

"Personally, I figured she didn't die from hanging from the fishing line," he says. "I figured she was dead before they hung her, and it seemed pretty obvious she was murdered. I mean, what else could it have been?"

Neither he nor anyone else investigating the death ever seriously considered the possibility that this was a suicide. For one thing, there was the extremely young age of the deceased. It wasn't that kindergartners never killed themselves; sadly, it was known to happen. But there was also the manner in which she was hung, which seemed impossible for her to accomplish by herself. They did toy briefly with the idea of this being some kind of macabre accident. Early on that first day, somebody with a warped sense of human capabilities suggested that maybe some kids played "fisherman," they used the child as "bait," and then they ran away, terrified, when they saw the consequences. But generally, the scene, the victim, and the method all screamed "homicide" at the police.

Clubman judged the victim to be around six years old.

That educated guess was right on the money. Her last birthday was May first. The child was white. Later, she was measured precisely and found to be exactly two feet eleven inches tall. Forty pounds. She was a little slip of a girl, with dark blond hair that was blunt cut at shoulder length, worn with long bangs. As everyone learned eventually, she had liked her mom to pull the sides of her hair back off her pretty face and fasten them at the top of her scalp with one of her legion of plastic barrettes, one for nearly every color she could name. She had dark blue eyes. None of the crime scene personnel knew that until later, because when they first saw Natalie her eyes were closed. For the men who cut her loose and then lowered her tenderly into the police launch, that was a mercy. Even the most inured among them find it hard to look a dead child in the eyes.

The Bahia Beach police identified her quickly.

Surprisingly, there wasn't a missing persons report out on her. But little Natalie carried in the right pocket of her pink shorts an identification card encased in protective plastic.

"My name is Natalie Mae McCullen. I live at 2533 Palm Sunrise, Bahia Beach, Florida. My phone number is 394-999-1232. My parents are Susan and Anthony McCullen. Please call them for me. Thank you."

It may seem odd that she carried that card, because she appeared to be old enough to be able to remember her own address and phone number. Neatly typed in black on white, the ID card almost made it seem as if somebody expected Natalie McCullen to be identified by strangers. But the real explanation for the card was printed on it in bold black letters: I am deaf.

It took all of about ten seconds for Sergeant Clubman's boss to realize that this was going to be a high-profile case conducted in the public eye. The killer almost seemed to have placed it there purposefully, in plain view. The victim, the method, and the neighborhood all added up to an important case as these things are measured. She expected the media to go crazy over it. Acting quickly, she shunted it down proper channels until two fine detectives, Paul Flanck and Robyn Anschutz, got assigned to the case.

Detective Paul Flanck looks Hispanic, but isn't.

"It helps," he says, "especially down here where it seems like every other person speaks Spanish." At the time he was assigned to the case of the little girl found hanging from the bridge, he was thirty-two years old, and a self-described "fanatical runner, weight lifter, and good ol boy," originally from Fort Meyers, Florida. He was divorced, with no children. His perpetual hobby was taking Spanish lessons. "I can see the future," he says, wryly. It's a future, he means, in which English is the second language in south Florida.

That isn't an outlook that Detective Robyn Anschutz shares with him. At thirty-four and married to the son of a Cuban exile, she feels that Hispanics endure minority status, no matter what their population numbers. A pretty woman with short blond hair, a warm smile, and sober brown eyes, Robyn makes a striking physical match with her police partner. They are the same height, five foot ten, although Robyn's hair, back-combed a bit on top, gives her an illusory inch on him, which she likes to tease him about.

The topic of the Hispanic population is only one of many subjects that the two detectives were known to bicker about, almost like an old married couple. They are both frank enough to admit that theirs was not a pairing made in heaven. "Far from it," says Robyn, laughing, implying that it was a match made about as far from heaven as you can get—down on the first floor of police headquarters, in fact, where the top brass recognized each of them as top-rate detectives.

With her warm smile, Robyn gets felons to talk, and with his muscular, intense manner, Paul intimidates people without ever touching them. They were both known as dedicated cops. If any pair could produce quick, reliable results that wouldn't end up embarrassing the department, it was felt that Flanck and Anschutz could do it. They were expected to put aside their personal differences.

One of the few things they have in common—besides being good cops—was that neither has kids, not even step-kids. Paul asked later if that was one reason they were assigned to the case. "Was that supposed to make us more objective?" he asked their boss, the captain of detectives. "Did you think that we'd get less emotionally involved because of that? Because if that's what was supposed to happen, it didn't work."

He was told that hadn't anything to do with it.

Such misgivings came later, when in hindsight, every case can be conducted better and every Monday-morning quarterback will tell you how. On the morning of July seventeenth, the only thing that Detectives Flanck and Anschutz knew was that they were commanded to get to the scene as soon as possible. The detectives would rely on the forensic unit, which is part of the C.I.D., or Criminal Investigations Department. As Paul explains, "They're our crime scene unit, our specialists. They gather evidence at the scene, and they're responsible for preserving it and presenting it in court."

The organization of law enforcement bodies in the state of Florida is different from some other states. For one thing, there's no state police in Florida. There's a state highway patrol, of course, but their job is mostly what their name suggests: patrolling state highways. With no state police or state crime lab, a lot of authority devolves onto the sheriffs' departments of each county. Each county runs its own crime lab, for instance, and in addition, the sheriffs' deputies act as law enforcement for the smaller towns. But like Fort Lauderdale, Bahia Beach is large enough to support its own police department and to handle its own cases, from petty theft to mass murder.

The crime unit officers found important things at the scene.

But it was Paul who found the footprint on the Hatteras. And the ashes. And fingerprints on the fishing pole. And gouges in the ground where the perpetrator had dug in his toes to climb up and then dug in his heels coming back down. All of which would later be tied directly to the crime. And it was Robyn who sensed the truth, which would lead directly and with astonishing rapidity to the arrest of the suspect.

Knowledge of the murder of a child, and witnessing something like what the Williamses saw, tends to change people, sometimes dramatically. But as Paul says, "Hell of a way to learn it. I'd go back to being dumb ol' me, if that brought Natty back."

It's bad enough, a parent's worst nightmare, to be informed a child is dead when you know she's been missing and you've been desperate for news of her. If any fate could possibly be worse than that, perhaps it was what Natalie McCullen's parents faced that morning.

They didn't even know she was gone.

Apparently, Natalie slipped out of the house on some private little adventure of her own. It must have been after her mom kissed her and put her to bed, which was around nine o'clock, on Monday night, June fifteenth.

She was a bold little soul, by all accounts. Unlike most children, Natalie was never afraid of the dark. Whenever she played outside at night, Susan or Anthony always had to "call" her many times by flashing the porch light on and off when the sun went down. "Natty would have stayed out and played all night, if we let her," Susan says. "She always imagined she was born on a star." The child was a little star to her family, a sparkler who lighted their days and nights, a child who never met a stranger, who was outgoing and daring as a puppy.

When the McCullens' doorbell rang at 8:30 A.M. that dreadful Tuesday morning, Susan answered in her bathrobe, and found two detectives, a man and a woman, on her doorstep. They identified themselves, and then they asked her as gently as they knew how, "Are you the mother of Natalie Mae McCullen?"

"Yes, why, has she done something wrong? She's only six!"

"Ma'am—we're sorry to ask this, but do you know where your daughter is?"

"Of course, I do! She's asleep in her room!"

"Would you please check, just to make sure?"

"Why?" Susan didn't wait for their answer, however. Suddenly driven by the most overwhelming, sickening, soul-wrenching fear of her life, she fled from them, and ran down the hall to her daughter's room.

They heard her scream, "Natty! Natty, where are you?"

On the front step, Robyn Anschutz took a shaky breath, and felt her eyes fill, and her mouth tremble. Her partner tightened his lips, and simply thought, Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

"Where's my baby!"

Looking frantic and terrified, the mother ran back to face the police officers, who wished they could be anywhere but there, delivering any news but what they had to say next.

They told her that the body of a little girl had been found—they didn't tell her how, not yet—and the child had a card in her pocket that identified her as Natalie Mae

McCullen. They described her, and her clothing. They told her that they believed that her daughter—who she had thought was safely sleeping—was dead. They said her daughter's body, if the child was Natty, was on its way to the morgue.

"It was," Paul Flanck said later, "enough to make you want to quit police work, and start mowing lawns for a living."

Making it even worse was the unavoidable fact that in the murder of a child the first suspects are always the parents. That meant interviewing Susan and Anthony McCullen during the first moments of the greatest shock and grief of their lives. It was very hard for either detective to believe that the beautiful, hysterical young woman standing in the doorway in front of them could so heinously have murdered her own child. "My baby, my baby," Susan McCullen screamed, before she collapsed to the floor, moaning, crying, screaming, "no, no, no." The muscular, good-looking young man who ran up behind her appeared so undone by the news of his child's death that Detective Robyn Anschutz's first impulse was not to interrogate him, but to hug him.