I'd Kill for You

by M. William Phelps

  Interesting comment from someone at the scene. Neither Kyle nor Katie ever claimed that Mike went up to the house with Kyle. But here was Mike, with his own tongue, claiming he waited for Kyle outside the house, which told Eiland that Mike knew about the murder before it had occurred.

  Mike was then transferred to another part of the jail as he waited for Locke. He spent some time with a deputy.

  “You have anything sharp on you, Mr. Pfohl?” the deputy wanted to know.

  “Nope—but I wish I did. I don’t like myself very much right now.”

  Locke arrived and took Mike into a small room to talk. It wasn’t an interview suite, but was more modest and comfortable, nonthreatening.

  Mike told Locke he would ask for an attorney, but he didn’t have any money. He asked the investigator to fire away with questions and he’d answer best he could.

  It didn’t take much for Mike to spill himself. He talked about Katie, Kyle, and Clara. “I spoke to her on Monday, Clara. She didn’t cry. But she didn’t talk about his death, either.... I drove Katie and Kyle to the Schwartz residence on December eighth to see Clara. I hadn’t seen Clara for a long time. None of us realized she might be in school. But as I drove up the dirt road driveway, I thought about that.”

  “What happened next, Mike?”

  “While driving up to the house, I believed we were going the wrong way, so I turned around. Kyle said he needed to do a ‘job,’ but I knew that meant ‘assassination.’” It was implicit in Mike’s confession here that he recognized that Kyle was there to kill Robert Schwartz.

  “So you stopped.... What happened?”

  “I got stuck in the mud and did not drive all the way to the house. So Kyle went up to the house to see if Mr. Schwartz could pull us out. He was gone about thirty-five minutes and said the house was locked and no one was home. Kyle came back and looked like he had a bad day, like he saw something up there he didn’t want to see.” He then explained how Kyle went to a neighbor’s house to call a tow truck.

  The conversation turned to Clara and her father, their relationship.

  “No one who knows Clara,” Mike explained, “likes what she said about her father—the way her father treated her! She was not close to her family and did not get along with her father. He didn’t like her friends.”

  “What about Kyle Hulbert?”

  “Kyle always carried a sword,” Mike said, adding that Kyle “had one with him on Saturday, December eighth. There was a circle of us friends and Kyle was the protector. Kyle believed it was his responsibility to look after me. And Kyle took everything with Clara and her problems with her father very seriously. He believed he needed to watch over and protect Clara from her father. Clara told us that her father was trying to poison her. Kyle even tasted poison when Clara brought him a pork chop one day. Clara thought the poison was sulfuric acid.”

  Locke wanted to know why Mike drove Kyle out there. Important question, from a legal perspective.

  “Betrayal is the worst possible thing and I did not want to betray my friend Kyle,” Mike said. “He is my brother.”

  Had Mike just set his future in motion? Had he just admitted that he knew his friend was going to commit a murder, but he drove him to the scene, anyway?

  Throughout this conversation, Mike clearly admitted that he and Katie knew Kyle was going to kill someone that day when Kyle mentioned he had a “job” to do. But he claimed he didn’t know the target was Schwartz until they got close to the Schwartz home—and even then, he contradicted himself by stating that he didn’t know Kyle had killed Schwartz until Kyle returned to the car after going up to the house. Mike explained to Locke: “Kyle said, ‘No. One. Is. Home.’ I still didn’t understand until Kyle repeated himself.” And Kyle said back to Mike: “‘I said, nobody is home!’”

  Locke wanted to know if Mike knew where the murder weapon was now.

  “Wrapped in a towel in a downstairs closet in my bedroom under some other towels. Kyle gave it to me and told me to clean it with alcohol. The blade looked dark and burned. He told us about the incident and said this ‘was the first’ that really bothered him,” implying that Kyle had killed before and it hadn’t bothered him.

  “Did he talk about the murder?”

  “Yeah, he said that Schwartz asked him, ‘What did I ever do to you?’ Schwartz was on his knees. It was then that Kyle said he drove the sword through his abdomen.” Mike said further that Kyle had told him and Katie about the entire thing that night.

  Locke asked about getting stuck.

  He explained how they decided to call a tow truck. “Kyle said he’s done other ‘jobs,’ which we knew to be homicides. He said he buried one victim behind the victim’s house.”

  “What do you think should happen to Kyle?”

  “He should probably go to jail for the rest of his life.”

  Locke explained to Mike that he was not under arrest, but he wondered if Mike was willing to write out an “apology” for what happened out there at the Schwartz home. If he was truly sorry for what happened, Locke explained, why not write it out on paper? For Locke, it was a way to get Mike to say what he knew about the crime.

  “I don’t think that [he or Katie] knew the depth of their involvement or the culpability that they were involved in this,” Locke later explained. “I believe that they both knew what Kyle planned to do once he got out there. . . .”

  “Sure,” Mike said. Writing an apology sounded easy enough. It also gave Mike the impression that if he apologized, well, perhaps he was going to be given the option of getting out of this mess. As far as Mike’s role in all of this, according to Kyle, Mike did not know anything about what was going to happen inside the Schwartz home until it was over, later on that night. Further, if you asked Kyle, he would tell you that Mike didn’t know he was driving Kyle to the house to kill someone.

  One of the many off comments Mike made in encapsulating the entire evening of December 8, 2001, and his role in the events: the murder, getting stuck in the mud, keeping the secret about Schwartz’s death—all of it. To Mike, when asked, he called it one “big oopsy.”

  CHAPTER 62

  FOR KATIE’S PART, as she began her conversation with Investigator Greg Locke, she started out by telling a series of lies. Katie said how she, Kyle, and Mike got stuck in the mud by her mother’s house and needed to be towed.

  Her mother’s house?

  Locke knew this was a total fabrication, but he allowed Katie to continue.

  “Kyle went to a neighbor’s house of my parents’ to call a tow truck,” Katie said. “No one was home at my mom’s and I didn’t have keys to get in.”

  Locke smiled to himself.

  From there, Katie broke into an elaborate explanation, actually rambling, describing the events that night Schwartz was murdered and the following days. Locke and other LCSO investigators could tell she was mixing lies with the truth because of the information they had already gathered. But they listened, anyway, allowing Katie to bury herself deeper and deeper. Each lie, effectively, became more ammo for the LCSO.

  “Clara called me near midnight Monday, she was pretty upset ... and told me her father was dead.”

  “Look,” Locke finally said when Katie seemed to be finished with her little soliloquy. “We know that you did not go to your parents’ house, Miss Inglis.”

  Katie looked at them. She tried to look puzzled. Then, after a long pause, she said: “Okay. We went to the Schwartz residence.” Then she told Locke what she knew. Her story was basically the same as Mike’s; however, Katie offered more detail and insight into the relationship between Clara and her father. “Her dad was violent ... ,” Katie told Locke.

  She next told investigators that Kyle had washed the sword at her mother’s house; they could probably find what she believed to be blood in the drain. Yet, Katie played down her knowledge of anything other than knowing about the murder after the fact.

  As Katie talked, Locke went back and spoke to Mike, who was in a room
not far away. Locke wanted to verify some of the things Katie was saying.

  “We know you’re speaking in half-truths,” Locke told Katie at one point when he returned. “Stop it. It’s time to be one hundred percent honest with us.”

  “I admit,” Katie said, “I knew Kyle was doing a ‘job,’ and that Kyle is an assassin. I knew Kyle was going to kill somebody when we went up there, but didn’t know who. Not then.... I saw blood on Kyle’s coat. I also know that he cut his coat.” She repeated what was a familiar story by now: Schwartz on his knees, pleading with Kyle. . . . Kyle stabbing him in the stomach. She said Kyle had told them the same story on the night of the murder. “Kyle has injuries on his hand and scalp. He called Clara on Sunday—and Clara knew her father was dead then, because I remember Kyle telling her, ‘I did it.’”

  “Katie, would you be willing to write out an apology letter detailing your part in the events on Saturday night?”

  “I can do that.”

  They left Katie alone. When they returned, one investigator asked Katie if she knew where they could find Kyle.

  “Yes . . . he stays at his girlfriend’s house.”

  Katie provided the address in Maryland.

  CHAPTER 63

  PATRICK HOUSE SURFACED after it was reported by the media that Dr. Schwartz had been murdered. He wanted to reach out to Clara and talk to her. After doing some checking, Patrick heard Clara was at her grandparents’ house in Maryland. With his parents by his side, he took a ride out to see her. They went to a restaurant to have lunch.

  Patrick knew Clara was somehow involved. How could she not be? She had tried to get him to kill her father before she took Kyle under her wing. What Patrick wanted to know was “Why did you involve someone as innocent as Katie?” Patrick was invested in Katie more than any of the others; he had known Katie the longest.

  This was not the same Patrick whom Clara had described in her journal during this same time period. The guy she described—you might think by reading her entries—was someone she had never and would never stop seeing. You would assume that they could never sever their ties.

  “Why?” Patrick asked again, when Clara didn’t respond.

  “I didn’t mean to” was all Clara said.

  For Patrick, this lunch and their relationship had reached the complete end. Finished. He did not want to see or hear from Clara ever again.

  Patrick’s next stop would be the LCSO.

  CHAPTER 64

  DR. CAROLYN REVERCOMB, with over seven hundred autopsies under her belt, took over the task on December 12, 2001, of taking a look at Robert Schwartz’s body to see what she could find out about his murder. Ultimately, every human being dies of the same cause: cardiac arrest. Whether cancer, a blow to the head, liver disease, strangulation, stabbed, or shot, the heart eventually stops and we expire. Revercomb, like everyone else, knew that Schwartz had been stabbed repeatedly and those wounds led to his death; that wasn’t a difficult conclusion to deduce. But what could she determine during the autopsy that could help law enforcement further its investigation? Were there clues present to who had murdered Robert Schwartz? Was there evidence left behind?

  Revercomb noticed almost immediately after she began with a cursory inspection of Schwartz’s body that he had suffered two stab wounds to his neck that went entirely through one side of his body and—quite alarmingly—out the other. She counted twenty-seven stab wounds to his torso, along with several additional stab wounds, some superficial, some penetrating the skin an inch or more, some going all the way through his body.

  There was serious rage in this killer’s heart. That could never be denied.

  What became clear from her postmortem was that there had been numerous stab wounds to Schwartz’s back that seemed to be administered after he was dead. How did she draw this conclusion?

  “Many of the wounds to the back were associated with defects in his clothing that do not have blood on them.”

  Effectively, the doctor was saying, many of those back stab wounds going all the way through Robert Schwartz’s body “were inflicted when he was not moving and did not have blood pressure.”

  This was significant. Schwartz’s killer repeatedly stabbed him after he had breathed his last. So Schwartz was on the floor, facedown, not moving, and his killer was standing over him, jabbing that sword over and over into his back.

  The doctor noticed a pattern to several of the wounds, which she pointed out to investigators. There were three particular wounds in a group on Schwartz’s upper left back “very close in space” that appeared to be in the shape of “a three-leaf clover.”

  The suggestion might be that these three wounds were somehow ritualistic or placed there for a purpose other than to inflict pain and death.

  Revercomb finished her autopsy and did not find anything out of the ordinary other than this pattern, along with those stab wounds administered after death. It was clear to this doctor that whoever murdered Robert Schwartz had gone into that house with a plan to kill. This person carried that plan out with emphatic precision—this opinion based solely on the number of wounds the killer had left behind. Moreover, there was good reason to believe Schwartz’s killer was male. The strength involved, the fact that Schwartz had defensive wounds, made this clear. Beyond that, there was clear evidence that Schwartz’s killer meant to kill him. There was no question about that. With the amount of blood and stab wounds present, there was no way, investigators knew, that Schwartz’s killer could claim self-defense or some other harebrained reason to get out of what was a ferocious, mutilating, and horribly violent murder. The new task at hand, however, became to find out why. In reviewing the autopsy report, investigators were certain that once they knew the why, the who would fit into that scenario like a gun slipping back into its holster.

  CHAPTER 65

  CLARA DID NOT make a habit of dating her journal entries. She had, of course, but not with any repetition or consistency. One date of particular interest that was later found in a journal by the LCSO was December 12, 2001, C.E. This was just days after her father had been murdered—and certainly after the LCSO had visited Clara at JMU, delivering that horrible news.

  It’s a peculiar entry. Clara began by talking about feeling “so isolated” and being “shoved away” by family. She called herself “useless.” She focused predominantly on Patrick and “wanting him” near her at this time. She said “everyone” in her life wanted her to “forget” about Patrick and move on. But it was now, at this juncture, that she claimed to need him the most. (Patrick, however, was already finished with Clara—something he made clear to her.)

  Clara wrote about being upset that they were not including her in family discussions of what was going on. Then, almost as if planting a thought because she knew it would sooner or later be read by law enforcement, she penned this gem: I know the sentiment and all.... Robbery, but whom. He died violently. Then the entry seemed to skip ahead, as Clara talked about not wanting to see “their name smeared,” although it’s hard to tell whom she was referring to. They aren’t evil, she added. Did she mean Kyle, Katie, and Mike? Or did she mean her family?

  As she continued, it seemed that “they,” her family, were “lumping” Patrick in with her friends, meaning Kyle, Mike, Katie, and a few others. Clara viewed this as unfair and unwarranted. She then went on to say how she would marry Patrick “in secret” on that night, at that moment, if he wanted her.

  On the same day she made this bizarre entry in her journal, Clara accompanied her brother and sister to the LCSO so they could be interviewed more formally. Locke and the LCSO agreed that it would be better for them to be spoken to at the precinct rather than at the Schwartz home. By now, the LCSO had a clear indication that Clara Schwartz was going to have some explaining to do at some point. She knew about the murder days before her father had been found. That alone was enough to cause great concern among investigators.

  Clara, Jesse, and Michelle Schwartz arrived at the LCSO near three o’clock in
the afternoon. Michelle and Jesse were interviewed first, while Clara waited. Both interviews were rather uneventful: two grieving kids, confused, sad, upset, mad, and not really sure how or why anyone would want to hurt their father. Both were baffled by the murder.

  Investigator Rob Spitler, along with Greg Locke, sat Clara down in an empty room inside the LCSO as soon as Jesse and Michelle had finished. They began to talk with Clara on a more candid, official basis.

  “You’re not under arrest or anything like that, Miss Schwartz, but we do have some questions,” Locke began. “You’re free to leave at any time.”

  Clara said she understood the protocol—however arrogant and snooty she came across.

  “Okay . . . ,” Locke said right before Clara, without warning, launched into a narrative as she “initiated” a conversation almost as quickly as she sat down—Locke later wrote this observation in his report of the interview. This made it clear to Locke that Clara had something to say; she had an agenda and needed to get some things across to them.

  At first, it was centered on her “home life” and her relationship with her father. Clara seemed to want to talk about this to get it out in the open, for some reason.

  Locke and Spitler were all ears. If Clara wanted to ramble, this was the place to do it—and they had all night long to listen.

  “He never approved of my friends and always made me feel like I wasn’t good enough,” Clara said of her father, right off the top. “He said my friends were ‘spooky,’ and he never liked the way I dressed. He even tried to throw out my Doc Martens.”

  These were rather odd details: a daughter apparently dissing a dead man, like Clara was, banging on and on about how her father (who had just been murdered) never liked anything about her. Why would she do such a thing? Especially now, and especially on this particular day?

  There was one friend, a girl (not Katie), whom Clara said her father truly and inherently despised. He once told Clara, “I don’t ever want her here.”