“He once threatened me about my grades,” Clara explained. “He told me that if I ever got bad grades, he would withdraw my funding for school and take away my stocks.”
“How did you get along at home?”
“I stayed in my bedroom, for the most part. He didn’t like that. He would make me come downstairs to watch TV. He hated it, though, when I taped shows like X-Files and X-Men. I once attempted suicide while in high school. It was because of him! I cut myself. I did it to relieve the pain.”
They couldn’t stop Clara from going on and on, even if they had wanted. Clara was on a roll. She had a narrative she needed to get out—to vomit from her mind. She couldn’t contain herself.
She talked about how her father had “verbally abused” her often, and the abuse occurred “quite frequently,” and that he also “taunted” her for her “entire life.” She “couldn’t stand it!”
Clara revealed that “he even punched me in the arm once and sometimes slapped me.”
“When was this?” Locke wondered.
“Right after my mom died.”
She mentioned her storage unit she’d rented with a friend, again giving them the address and unit numbers, reiterating how they could find a sword and knife inside. It was almost as if because she knew that the murder weapon was Kyle’s sword, she wanted them to find her weapons and test them for blood.
Clara next talked about how she had mainly just hung out with Mike, Katie, and Kyle now, abandoning most of her other friends.
“My father never told me that Kyle was not welcome at the house, although my father didn’t want anyone around.”
They asked about those friends (Mike, Katie, and Kyle), since she’d brought them up.
“I was always lending them money. I’m upper-middle class,” Clara added.
“How much money are we talking about?”
“My friends? Oh, in total, they owe me about four hundred to six hundred dollars. I’d also give them gas money when they drove me places.”
They wanted to know how she was feeling over the past few months, how her life had gone with her father. It was one thing not to get along with your parents as a college student; some parents and their children fought all the time. Yet, it was quite another thing, however, when you sat and admitted fighting with your father at a time when he was sitting on a slab in the morgue, waiting to be buried after being viciously murdered. It didn’t make sense. Most kids, Locke thought, would be kicking themselves and sorry for all the fighting, looking back at the what-ifs and what-could-have-beens. Instead, Clara was bringing up things she didn’t need to mention.
“I would write down my thoughts in journals,” Clara offered. Clearly, she wanted this information known. She needed them to have it. “I listed incidents of abuse toward me in my journals. Even those incidents when he tried to poison me! He once told me,” Clara added angrily, “that the only way I would ever get any money from his will was if I ‘fed him strychnine.’”
“You tell anyone about your father allegedly trying to kill you?”
“I know I told Kyle and [another boy], Kate and [someone else].”
Here came the bus. Clara was preparing to toss one or more of her friends into its path.
As the conversation continued, Clara mentioned how these days she mainly just “kept” to herself. The longer the interview went, the more relaxed, composed, and not at all restless or nervous, she seemed. It was as though she had prepared for this, rehearsed it, and knew that she had a recorded history of what had gone down over the past year, especially the last few months. Out of nowhere, she added how she “doesn’t trust people” around her anymore. Her relationship with her father, she then said for no reason, bouncing from topic to topic, deteriorated after her mother passed away. The abuse she suffered from her dad got much worse after her mother was gone. “But I’ve learned to keep my emotions to myself. I don’t cry in front of people.”
She had an answer for every question that was never asked.
They were curious about a motive her father might have had to kill her. Indeed! If Dr. Schwartz was planning and scheming to kill his daughter, he had to have a reason.
Clara’s answer would become classic: “Well, look, the cost of a funeral is a lot cheaper than forty thousand dollars for college tuition.”
“You think it’s possible that any of your friends could have hurt your father?” Locke asked casually.
The bus was closer now. This was Clara’s chance.
In his report of the interview, Locke wrote that when they asked Clara this question: She never really answered. . . .
Instead, Clara spoke of what she knew about “the incident,” adding, “I spoke with Kyle after my father’s death, by telephone.” (The investigators did not ask her how she knew it was after Schwartz had been murdered.) “He had mentioned to me about ‘going up there,’ meaning my house. He said to me, ‘I made Mike park somewhere, and Mike and Kate drove me . . . up to the house.... He’s not going to hurt you anymore.’ Patrick and Kyle, I should tell you, were both afraid that my dad might kill me.”
Locke asked how close Clara was to Kyle.
“Kyle would do anything for me,” Clara said.
That bus had just passed—Kyle, Mike, and Katie being dragged underneath it.
CHAPTER 66
BRANDY AND KYLE were lying on Brandy’s bed, cuddling, watching a movie. Kyle later said he’d just taken Brandy out to a barn nearby and had sex with her on a couch inside the creaking, cold wooden structure. He recalled this only because Brandy had asked him why he had been so rough during intercourse. Kyle said he had never been that way with Brandy.
It was December 12. Clara was still at the LCSO in Virginia, where she was answering questions. Kyle and Brandy were in Brandy’s room. Kyle had not really heard from anyone since the murder and that following day when he spoke with Clara. He was still, he later claimed, running on autopilot, going through the motions. In the back of his mixed-up mind, he was waiting for the ball to drop and the doors to come crashing in.
“I was just there. My body [was] experiencing what was happening around me. There was no thought to anything I was doing.”
This was how Kyle described the days before his arrest. He had been just hanging around, not doing much of anything. He’d had a job. He was paid $50 a week to clean up after some horses and feed and let them out. He did that on December 12, but he could not recall much of anything else he had done since the murder.
As they watched television, Brandy and Kyle did not hear the commotion going on in another part of the house. At that moment, cops were piling into Brandy’s home, in full regalia, weapons drawn, searching for Kyle.
The next thing Kyle knew (or could recall), he was literally staring down the barrel of a rather large gun that was pointed directly at his head, between the eyes.
“Don’t fucking move,” the cop said.
Brandy froze.
The barrel was so close to Kyle’s face that he remembered saying to himself, Wow, those are some pretty large rounds in the chambers!
Kyle had a fleeting thought about darting, trying to get out the window in back of where he and Brandy were lying, and then taking off down the street, running as fast as he could.
“Brandy’s eyes were as big as saucers,” Kyle said. “She . . . was pressing into me.”
Kyle was trying not to move, but somehow also shield Brandy by shoving her under and in back of him at the same time. This was not her fight. She and her mother had nothing to do with this. It was a thought that kept Kyle from doing anything stupid.
After this event, the next thing Kyle Hulbert recalled was being in lockup, waiting for the LCSO to come and extradite him to Virginia to face charges for the murder of Robert Schwartz.
“I could only think [how] Robert Schwartz would not be able to hurt his daughter any longer,” Kyle later said, analyzing that moment after his arrest. “And that was a good feeling for me then.”
CHAPTER 67
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INVESTIGATOR GREG LOCKE sat with Clara Schwartz and another investigator and talked. Clara had come into the LCSO for an informal conversation about her life and her father’s death. By now, Clara knew that her friends had been arrested—Katie and Mike. She was in no position not to help when the LCSO asked her and Jesse and Michelle to come in. Although, the best thing Clara should have done for herself right away was go to a lawyer—whether she was guilty of anything or not—and allow that lawyer to speak on her behalf. Yet, in all of her hubris and narcissism, Clara believed—as she had always believed—she was going to be able to talk her way out of this. She would calculatedly feed the LCSO the information they needed to bust Mike, Katie, and Kyle as she, of course, walked away into the sunset, dusting off her hands.
On the other hand, as Locke thought about Clara over the past few days, he focused on one thing with regard to her: “You always want to leave the door open for a way out. That’s what I was doing with Clara. I’ve found it’s much easier to give someone a way out than to push them.” Locke was conducting what he called “a soft interview” this first time with Clara. He wanted to get a feel for her personality; he really didn’t know her.
Clara talked openly with the LCSO as she dissed her dead father repeatedly. But there came a time during that conversation when Locke asked probably the most important question thus far: How did it make Clara feel when she heard from her friend Kyle that her father was dead? By this point, the LCSO knew that Kyle had told Clara right after he had killed her father.
“I didn’t think he would ever do anything,” Clara said rather defiantly. In one breath, her argument was revealed: “I didn’t know. I didn’t think he’d go through with it. I thought he was just talking.” But in another, she added, “Yet, he did give me the impression that he might do something.”
Two answers. Could Clara Schwartz have it both ways?
Locke would allow it today. He was still gathering information, getting a sense of who she was.
“How have you been feeling about your father’s death?” Locke smartly followed up.
“It didn’t really sink in until we were doing the casket stuff. . . . I’ve lost a lot of friends over the years. It doesn’t always sink in. But my mom’s death ... made it a reality for me. . . . Now it takes a while for it to sink in. It may not hit me until the funeral.”
“Casket stuff”! What an odd choice of words.
Locke brought up Mike next.
“He had a vision,” Clara explained. “He spoke to a dragon. He told me that if I went to the Virgin Islands at Christmas with my father, I wouldn’t come back. I was afraid to go at first, but then I thought it would be okay as long as we ate out at restaurants while we were there.”
The interview went on and on, for most of the afternoon and into early evening. Clara talked about her life as a pagan. How she considered herself to be the “priestess of high chaos.” She talked repeatedly about “discounting” anything Kyle had said about her father, but she failed to answer a direct question posed by Locke regarding if she had ever heard Kyle say pointedly or to the effect of “I’ll take care of this.” Instead of answering the detective, Clara stated how she was used to receiving “ten to fifteen death threats” per year, adding, “Kyle told me once that he was thinking about going up to the house to ‘have a talk with him,’ and then he said, ‘Maybe I should make sure he never bothers you again.’”
Locke wondered if Clara had ever given Kyle the impression that she wanted her father dead.
Clara shrugged, shifting a bit in her chair, and looked away. “Um, I might have said some off-side comments like, ‘I wonder what it would be like if he was dead.... Life would be better without Dad in the picture.’”
“Had you made these comments to Kyle on the same day he talked about your father never bothering you again?”
“I don’t think so, but maybe he pieced a bunch of things together.”
Locke stared at Clara. She’s trying to convince me that she didn’t have anything to do with this. Here she was offering information he had not asked for; she was trying her best to put out every fire she could before it started.
Clara then told Locke a few familiar stories about her father yelling at her, following that up with the fact that Mike and Katie did not like the way Mr. Schwartz treated Clara and they had made it clear to her that they worried about her.
Backpedaling, Locke thought. He could almost hear Clara thinking: He knows something—I need to try to find a way out of this.
“How are you feeling now?” Locke asked.
“I am still confused,” she said. Then, as if the detective insulted her: “What the heck!”
“Do you think Kyle would do this?”
“I thought he was just joking. He did tell me once, ‘I will kill your father,’ but I thought he was just venting and that I didn’t take it at face value.”
“So you just blew it off then?”
“Well, yeah, but I probably didn’t use those words. I think Kyle, if you want to know, would have worked on his own. Mike told me that he didn’t know what Kyle was doing. I definitely think Kyle acted on his own.”
Funny, she didn’t add: “If he did this.” Locke found that lack of questioning to be quite revealing. Clara believed Kyle killed her father, Locke knew right then.
“How do you get along with your family?”
Keep her talking. That was the strategy. The more she talked, the deeper Clara Schwartz buried herself. It was clear as glass that she was trying her best to downplay her role in this thing. Otherwise, why divulge so much information without being prompted?
“My sister doesn’t like my friends. But she doesn’t matter! I sort of dissociate myself from my family. . . .” She stopped and thought for a moment. Then, as if she’d had an epiphany, Clara asked, “Did I do something wrong?”
“Did you?” Locke asked.
“No! Aside from not taking Kyle seriously, I guess. . . . No!”
“Why didn’t you tell me about your father’s death when I visited you at James Madison just a few days ago to notify you of his death?”
Clara grew quiet. She’d forgotten that one little problem. She thought about what to say. “It all seems like a dream since September eleventh—it all seems like a dream.”
Locke came out with it candidly: “Did you know what Kyle did?”
“Yeah,” she answered immediately, “but I never said he was an assassin.”
She never used the word “assassin”? Locke considered. What was that about?
Catching herself, Clara followed this by saying, “He didn’t use that word.... He mentioned it other times.”
“You mean Kyle used the word ‘assassin’?”
“He may have. I might have blocked it out.”
“Perhaps Kyle used the word ‘assassin,’ but you just didn’t like it?”
Backpedaling even more, Clara reiterated: “I blocked it out!”
CHAPTER 68
AS CLARA SCHWARTZ tried talking her way out of a terrible jam, Investigator Greg Locke kept up the pressure. This was where his skills as an interrogator—and Locke had the chops, no question about it—came into play.
As an investigator, you have to know what to ask your interviewee, what not to ask, and what to push back on hard. For Locke, all he needed to do at this point—certainly because Clara had been so open about her relationship with her father—was keep the focus on Kyle (whom he now knew to be the murderer) and her father. Just keep Clara talking about both. She’d do the rest.
“I have gaps in my memory,” Clara claimed. She was more subdued at this point. She kept hopping all over the place, though sticking to one main narrative: Her daddy was the bad guy. “Like, for instance, my entire eleventh-grade year is missing.” By “missing,” she meant she could not recall anything about it. Then she became quiet—almost like she was beginning to sink into herself after realizing she’d probably said too much. “There were other things,” she added, “beyond th
e physical and verbal abuse.”
Locke wondered what she meant by that.
“When I was in ninth grade . . . a freshman in high school, my father touched my butt. My mom was there. She said, ‘Stop molesting her!’ This happened while I was walking past my father. He smacked me on the butt.”
“Was there any other type of sexual abuse?” Locke didn’t know how important a question this would become, because Clara had bullhorned this allegation to Kyle over the past several months, taking it far beyond a slap on the butt. Kyle recalled Clara telling him several times that the OG had fingered her. He was certain of this.
“No,” she said. “That was it. Just lots of yelling, I remember, and slaps and punches.”
“You think you blocked things out?” Locke asked.
“Possibly.”
“Is there anything, looking back on all of it, that you would now do differently?”
“Taken Kyle seriously.” Then she changed the subject entirely, adding, “You know this will be the sixth funeral I’ve been to since September. I cannot take more of this. I am the priestess. I preside over funerals. I’ve done two since October. . . .”
“Why would Kyle do something like this—kill your father?”
She shrugged. “Maybe he did it because he figured if he did it, I wouldn’t have to worry about my grades. I was really worried about getting bad grades and how Dad would react.”
“When was the last time you saw Kyle?”
“Thanksgiving. He has not been back to the house since then.”
They discussed how much school Clara had missed recently. She said only a few days. Locke then asked if someone might have brought her up to the house between December 3 and 7.
Clara said no.
“What if someone says you were there in town on December sixth?”
She became riled. “They’re lying!”
“Do you know when your father died?”
“No.”
“Did Kyle mention it?” Locke was pinning Clara down now to specifics. He was asking for dates and times and what she knew, and when she knew it. This would help later, especially when they interviewed Kyle. “I’m under the impression,” Locke continued, “that he might have shared that information with you.”
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