Pathological

by Henry Cordes

  Teresa’s incinerated bones actually turned up inside a burn barrel from Bobby’s yard, a steel drum barrel that also included a mixture of animal bones.

  One would think that an astute detective investigating a young woman’s apparent murder would have a natural curiosity about such a coincidence.

  “How long had you been hanging the deer, Bobby?” Dedering asked.

  “Since Friday night,” Bobby answered, referring to November 4.

  “Who hit the deer, you know?”

  “No.”

  Bobby suggested he found the deer “right up the road.”

  “OK again, who claimed the deer?”

  “I did. I trussed and hung it up that Saturday.”

  “Who skinned it?”

  “I did.”

  After asking what Bobby did with the deer skin, Dedering, the bumbling detective from Calumet County, blurted out, “shows how much I’ve been in your garage, doesn’t it?”

  At that moment, Dedering’s interview partner, Wisconsin DCI Special Agent Kevin Heimerl, made an observation.

  “It sounds to me like you’ve skinned and butchered your own deer before?”

  “Yeah,” Bobby agreed.

  “What would you normally do with the hide then?”

  “We took them into town.”

  “Oh, OK.”

  Then Dedering wondered if the local butcher shop accepted deer heads.

  “No. We just burn them,” Bobby answered. “Over in the burning barrel.”

  At that point, Dedering admitted he wasn’t familiar with Bobby’s yard even though it was just a short walking distance from Steven Avery’s trailer.

  “In the burning barrels?” Dedering wondered.

  “Uh-huh,” Bobby agreed.

  The conversation shifted back to Avery’s skills as a hunter and rugged outdoorsman.

  “He doesn’t hunt that much,” Bobby replied.

  When Heimerl asked whether the deer’s head still existed, Bobby responded by saying that the head was still right side of his mother’s garage.

  “So which burn barrel do you guys normally burn the heads up?” Dedering asked.

  “Uh, ours. This is the first one that we actually got our family … the other one we took in to the butcher.”

  “Describe to me again, Bobby, where you hunt?” Dedering inquired. “How far is that from your house?”

  His hunting spot was about two-and-a-half miles from home, he responded.

  Dedering wondered whether Bobby knew the land owner in northern Manitowoc County.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you know, what’s his name, Scott Tadych?”

  “Tadych,” Bobby answered.

  Bobby was asked if he and Tadych, the soon-to-be husband of Bobby’s mother, hunted together.

  “No. That’s the first day actually that I hunted.”

  Now that Bobby’s uncle was in custody, Dedering and Heimerl had a strong desire for Bobby to validate their murder theory. It was important for the reputation of Manitowoc County’s tarnished sheriff’s office to prove Avery was a cruel diabolical killer who belonged in prison for the rest of his time on earth.

  Ever a shifty detective, Dedering decided the best way to solicit Bobby’s help in implicating Avery was to drive a wedge between Bobby and his uncle.

  “Steve seems to think that he wasn’t the last person to see (Teresa) but that you had. He says that you were the last person.”

  “No,” Bobby answered.

  “That you followed her out of the driveway.”

  “No. Her vehicle was there.”

  “Is that an absolute truth?”

  “Absolute truth.”

  Bear in mind Dedering never seriously considered the young man sitting across from him in the interview as the more likely killer.

  At the time of their interview, Dedering did not have a clue about Bobby’s deviant sexual side. He knew nothing about Bobby’s sadistic appetite for naked, drowned women and mutilated bodies. As a result, Dedering remained singularly focused that November afternoon. He needed to make Bobby mad, raging mad, at his uncle.

  “I remember that we talked about why Steve would try to jam you up like that. Why?”

  “That’s a good point,” Bobby agreed. “That’s the kind of person he is.”

  “How does that sit with you?”

  “It makes me angry.”

  “We’re getting to the point where we’re going to know everything. OK? You understand that we are going to know everything pretty shortly. Now, my concern is this, Bobby, that if you haven’t been one hundred percent honest and truthful with me to this point, it’s because of two reasons. One is that you’re afraid something bad is going to happen to you and your family if you aren’t, if you cooperate with the cops … What would be the other reason for you not telling me the truth? Well, I’ll tell you, it would be because maybe you had some involvement with it. And like I said, you’re shaking your head no, OK?”

  Dedering asked if anybody told Bobby how to answer his interview questions with police.

  “No.”’

  “Nobody?”

  “No.”

  “Your mom hasn’t had any contact with you about this? You haven’t sat down and had a family discussion about how all this should play out when that bald-headed, old buzzard starts hanging around and asking questions?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nope.”

  Dedering wanted to believe Bobby had no role in Teresa’s brutal killing.

  “I’m kind of buying into the fact, and like I told you when I talked with you on Saturday, did I tell you that I thought I pretty much believed you then? I still think that pretty much too. OK?”

  Still, Dedering wanted to know why Avery “would want to put you in a box? Why would he want to jam you up for?”

  “Well, he don’t want to go back,” Bobby responded.

  “You just said something. Something you might be on to,” Dedering pondered. “You know maybe, you think maybe, he did this because he doesn’t want to go back?”

  “Yeah. I know as much as you do,” Bobby replied. “You know more than I do. You guys know a lot more than I do.”

  “Yeah, but you know what you have that we don’t have? You got family intuition, man.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s your gut telling you?”

  “Steven’s playing his hand.”

  “Who do you think did it?”

  “I dunno.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “What I told you guys is all I know about it.”

  “So if you were a betting man, I’d bet that you didn’t do it. Would you bet like that?”

  “Yeah,” Bobby wisely agreed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ALIBI

  After investing close to three years of her life reinvestigating Teresa’s death, sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars of her law firm’s own money into Steven Avery’s post-conviction defense, world-famous exoneration lawyer Kathleen Zellner now believes the murder time sequence outlined by special prosecutor Ken Kratz was demonstrably false. According to Zellner, the cellular tower pings off Teresa’s cell phone reveal the Auto Trader photographer left Avery’s around 2:35 p.m. on Halloween 2005.

  From there, Teresa retraced her route of travel from Avery Road. Teresa would have turned left on State Highway 147, traveling for a mile. When she got to the intersection of County Road Q, Teresa headed south. Then she met her disaster shortly afterward, probably along the seldom-traveled Kuss Road, a spooky dead-end road covered by a dense swath of woodlands along both sides of the road. The area’s general terrain includes a patch of large sand and gravel quarries along County Road Q, including one enormous quarry that has been around fo
r years, a parcel owned by Manitowoc County Government.

  On the day of Avery’s arrest, investigators Dedering and Heimerl peppered Bobby with questions about his own movements on the day Teresa met foul play.

  “Now, I want to know again about when you left that day,” Dedering inquired. “You remember about what time that was?”

  “Right around 3 o’clock.”

  “Did you see anyone when you were leaving the driveway?”

  “When I left?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. I didn’t see no one coming up the driveway.”

  “Were there any cars in the driveway?”

  “Yeah. It’s a little SUV.”

  “Now, you told me that you were nowhere near that teal colored SUV.”

  “Nope.”

  “Never?”

  “Nope.”

  “Never there?”

  “Never there.”

  “Never touched it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you go anywhere that night after you got home from your hunting?”

  “No.”

  “You stayed home?”

  “Went to work.”

  Bobby worked at Fisher Hamilton in Manitowoc, a metal processing plant in town.

  He told the police he left for work at 9:30 p.m., which is seven hours after Bobby was discretely eyeing Teresa from inside his trailer window.

  “So what did you do when you were at home?”

  “Napped … I came right home after hunting.”

  Suddenly, the interview took a change of direction.

  Dedering wanted to boast about his credentials.

  “I’ve been in law enforcement for almost thirty years, and I’ve done more than an interview or two. OK? … And what works for me is that, I’ll be honest and then I find that usually people are honest in return, OK? I’m going to tell you something. OK? I can tell you that nobody from any sheriff’s department planted any evidence anywhere. And that vehicle was found because we thought this through and we figured that something like this could happen ... we made sure that no Manitowoc city or county cop was on the property without another agency right alongside them so that anything that might be falling could be falling honestly.”

  Dedering wanted Bobby to understand his role investigating the homicide.

  “Find the somebody that did something. I know you didn’t. I’m pretty confident that you have no play in this. Am I right about that?”

  Bobby mumbled something that couldn’t be heard.

  At that juncture, Kevin Heimerl bragged how he worked at the Wisconsin DCI, the same agency assigned in 2003, two years earlier, to review the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office 1985 rape investigation spearheaded by Sheriff Kocourek, the one that put Steven Avery unjustly in prison for eighteen years for a violent rape committed by Gregory Allen.

  “The Department of Justice, DCI. That’s who I work for. We are here. We are in the middle of this thing, the same agency that would ask to review that first case. Those same cops, me and the guys I work with, the guys that are here, OK? Another thing I want to chew on … people suggested that maybe, me and the people I’m working with, or any other cop like to make stuff up, twist stuff.

  “I got it better. They rely on me. I got two kids that rely on me. You know what? There is no case more important to me. And I’m not going to jeopardize my family and my life for anybody and any investigation. OK?”

  “That’s where I am as well,” Dedering added.

  “Who is going put their career, because you know, you could be in insurance sales and do a rotten job at it and get fired,” Heimerl reasoned. “You can get another job (in) insurance sales somewhere else. But you know, when a cop gets busted for lying, doing something illegal, they lose their job. They don’t get another job. They don’t get another cop job. OK?”

  “OK,” Bobby repeated.

  “Because if we’re not credible, we can’t go into court,” Heimerl maintained. “That’s why. You can’t be a cop, if we’re not believed.”

  Dedering echoed those comments.

  “Yeah, you know basically a cop whose word is worth nothing, isn’t worth anything as a cop. You know. Because why go up on a stand, I swear to tell the truth and for the same reasons Kevin just insisted, I’ve got a family. I love my family. I need to have a few things to myself.

  “You wouldn’t lie or do anything illegal but your family comes first, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Bobby agreed.

  Transcripts of Bobby’s police interviews show that almost all of his police interview answers were just one word answers.

  Yet a bond was forming, between Bobby and the police. They wanted to use him to prosecute Avery. He could strengthen their case. For Bobby, the opportunity to help the police nail his uncle would solidify his purported alibi.

  “Everybody else kind of takes a back seat,” Dedering reminded Bobby. “You’re not different than me. You’re not different than Kevin. You’re not different than any other cop. That’s something that we all have in common. We all love our families. And we want to do the right thing for our families.”

  The temptation of planting evidence continued to come up.

  But Bobby was not bringing up the topic. It was Dedering and Heimerl who kept dredging up the topic.

  “It brings shame, humiliation, poverty, we wouldn’t want anything like that,” Dedering offered. “I’m not taking a chance … I’m fifty some years old. How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “You can walk down the street. And if there’s a job to be, young, healthy, you could work here. You know what? I’m starting to be a liability, health insurance reasons. … I can’t do things wrong because there’s too much writing on it for me. You believe that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sure that the family would love to and probably does believe that there is some sort of conspiracy. But I’m here to tell you something … You know what? Imagine how many people, how many police officers it would take to orchestrate a conspiracy of this size?”

  “Yeah.”

  “One person could not do it, all right?

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think two people could orchestrate a conspiracy of this size?

  “No.”

  “OK. Now you’re talking more than two dirty cops within one police agency. All the supervisor’s eyes and everybody else; the neighboring sheriff’s department and state’s special agents, and everybody else, and crime lab personnel. You know, you can’t fool forensics.”

  “Yeah.”

  Dedering brought up the old motorcycle gang saying of how three people can keep a secret if two are dead.

  “OK, that means if you don’t want somebody else to know anything, you can’t involve anybody else because somebody’s going to give something up.”

  Bobby was told he “can believe what you want with your family about the conspiracy … I can’t tell you what to think. OK? But I can tell you that we do have a lot of stuff. I don’t understand why Steve would tell somebody something like he wasn’t the last one to see her. You know, I don’t understand that. What do you think about that?”

  Bobby: “I don’t understand how?”

  “OK. Do you get along with Steve pretty well?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What was the last thing that caused you to not get along with him?”

  Once again, Bobby mumbled something unclear.

  Eventually, Dedering asked Bobby whether he dated.

  “Do you see anybody?”

  “No.”

  “You are going to break a lot of young ladies’ hearts.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Ha. You probably will die as a rich man if you keep that attitude. OK?”

 
Given that a couple of charred human bones apparently did turn up near his uncle’s burn pile pit, the next question made sense to ask.

  But Dedering had no idea whether his witness was being truthful or deceitful because authorities did not obtain any foot impressions near Avery’s burn pit. In effect, it was a wasted question.

  “Is there any way or any reason you can think of why your footprints might be near Steve’s fire pit or was it Steve’s burn barrel?

  “No.”

  “No way that they’d be there?”

  “I’ve been all over the place. Not by the burn barrels and fire pit.”

  “I just wanted to make sure, OK? Because if something like that’d show up, I worry you’d disappoint me.”

  Heimerl interjected.

  “Well, if something like that would show up. It should potentially disappoint Bobby.”

  “Yeah,” Dedering agreed.

  Bobby sat there in utter silence. He knew if he could just sweat out a few more minutes, his interview with these two cops would all be over.

  “We got a room available to get your swab, fingerprints and all that, so I think it’s time to do that now. It’s 3:51 p.m. on my watch. You nervous?” Dedering inquired.

  Bobby did not answer.

  “That was an eye roll,” Heimerl remarked. “Yes or no?”

  “No,” Bobby responded.

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  CHAPTER ONE-The 911 Call

  March 16, 2009

  Hood River County, Oregon

  6:09 p.m.

  When the 911 call came into the Hood River Sheriff’s Office, it wasn’t so much what the caller said, but how he said it. His voice neither rose nor fell as he phlegmatically relayed the information.

  911 OPERATOR: “911, where is your emergency?

  CALLER: “Hello. I need help. I’m at, uh, Eagle Creek.”

  911 OPERATOR: “Okay, and what’s going on there?”