by Lisa Howorth
Mary Byrd felt shame at how she had balked about coming to Richmond to deal with this. Pale at no crime.
“In fact, one victim—he was thirteen at the time but looked younger—could never get over what had been done to him, and later killed himself,” Stith said.
“But Stevie was the only boy this guy killed?” Nick asked.
“Up to that point. Steve—Stevie, if I may—apparently resisted Zepf and struggled, or angered or threatened him in some way.” It was weird to hear Stith say Stevie, like he’d known him.
“But if it wasn’t Ned Tuttle, what about the N on Stevie’s shoulder?” blurted Mary Byrd.
“It wasn’t an N,” Stith said. “It was a Z. I don’t quite know how the guys on the case fumbled that. Stevie and Zepf lay on their sides, Zepf behind Stevie, his left arm under Stevie to hold him, and with his right hand, he clumsily slashed the Z. If Stevie had been upright or flat on his stomach during an autopsy, the slashes would have appeared to make an N, unless you considered the position they’d been in. The coroner blew that. And other stuff.”
Mary Byrd shuddered; so that had been done when Stevie was still alive. How could they even be just talking about it.
“Jesus Christ,” said Nick. “Who was the coroner? Helen Keller?”
“If you want names, that’s your prerogative,” Stith went on. “Like I’ve said, most of the department guys who worked this case are gone, or clueless. So let’s just—”
Nick interrupted again. “They were clueless, all right. Is this asshole still out there?”
Stith looked down. “Please. I’m going to give it all to you.” Mary Byrd could see that he was struggling to be patient. This must really suck for him, too. What a fucked-up job: digging up old dirt and bones and awful tragedies and department mistakes.
They sat stonily—even Nick seemed deflated—and listened to Stith tell them more about Jeffrey Zepf.
“Even though they knew this guy was out there, and they had a pretty good description of what he looked like from victims, and all the attacks were in the same area, he still wasn’t caught. Since there was no publicity about any of the attacks before Stevie, there wasn’t much to go on. Even the FBI had gotten involved—because they investigate all kidnappings—but nobody could ID him. At that point.”
“We had to move,” her mother said quietly. “I—we were all terrified of Ned. Some of the neighbors moved, too.”
Mary Byrd remembered that James, a solemn little guy, had become silent and angry. Her mother and Pop had never let the boys out of the house alone that summer, before they were able to move, and had monitored them every minute. They had been afraid of Tuttle, and they’d been just as afraid of the closed door of Stevie’s room. Only Pete the baby had seemed okay.
Stith gave them a breather, drinking from his Dr. Pepper. He walked from his desk to the window, touching things. Mary Byrd knew he wanted a smoke. She did, too.
He resumed. “About a year to the day of Stevie’s murder, there was a break in the case,” he said. He puffed out his cheeks in frustration and exhaled. “Look, I’m just going to read all this to you, as I’ve written it up and summarized for your family. You’ll each get a copy. Nobody here except the chief has seen this. Let’s be careful; I can’t emphasize how important it is that we not let this get out just yet. There are sensitive legal issues involved here, and what we don’t need is reporters and publicity complicating things, or scaring off the people we need to interview before we can get to them.”
Mary Byrd was sure Stith was only thinking about his department saving face. He picked up a blue folder and said, “Okay. Here’s the rest.” He began reading, his voice businesslike and clipped.
Sometime in May 1967, eighteen-year-old Jeffery Zepf first noticed fourteen-year-old Freddy Brickle, a boy who appeared to be two or three years younger than his actual age. Over the next several weeks, Zepf began following Freddy home from school and hiding beneath an open kitchen window at the Brickle house. By eavesdropping, Zepf learned all about the comings and goings of the Brickle family, and especially about Freddy—his schedule, interests, and when he would be alone in the house. On the evening of June 12, knowing Freddy’s parents were going out and leaving him to babysit his younger sister, Zepf phoned Freddy. Knowing Freddy’s hobby was building and flying radio-control model airplanes, Zepf pretended to be a member of a radio-control airplane club and convinced Freddy to meet him in an empty lot several houses away to look at some planes and discuss Freddy’s possible membership in “the club.” Excited, Freddy left his house at dark, about 8 p.m. Arriving at the empty lot, he found nobody there. Turning to leave, he suddenly felt something painfully sharp poked into his back. Zepf told him to keep quiet and still or he’d be killed. Zepf then blindfolded Freddy with a bandana and dragged him into the shrubbery, and lay him on top of a sleeping bag. Freddy’s pants were taken down and Zepf lay down behind him and began fondling him.
Stith paused. He looked them over quickly. Nick’s jaw was working again and James cracked his knuckles, but they sat quietly listening.
Zepf told Freddy that he’d been stalking him and said he couldn’t help himself because he was attracted to blond, blue-eyed young boys. Freddy, thinking quickly, told Zepf that he had VD, something he had recently learned about in health class. Zepf went no further than fondling, but kept Freddy for approximately an hour. Still blindfolded, Freddy could not see Zepf, lying behind him, but he reported that he could feel Zepf’s rough acne as Zepf rubbed his cheek against his.
Mary Byrd shivered, feeling the flesh of her arms tightening into goose bumps.
Zepf proceeded to tell Freddy that he had no friends his age, he was the “black sheep” in his family because they knew about his homosexuality and that his only friend was an older man named Chuck Richards, an attorney. Zepf told Freddy he would release him, but said, “I’ve killed before and I’ll kill you if I find out you told anybody.” Zepf then commanded Freddy to count to 1,000 before removing the blindfold, and he fled the scene.
The detective stopped again, and Nick burst out, “And why do we have to hear details about other disgusting things this son of a bitch did?”
“Nick,” their mother said.
Stith raised a palm—just hold on a minute—and continued.
Freddy Brickle’s parents called the police. Lacking a good physical description, except for a report of acne, detectives told the Brickles that if Zepf should again contact Freddy, Freddy should arrange another meeting whereby police could immediately apprehend Zepf. Zepf did phone Freddy again later that summer, telling him, “I feel bad about what happened and want to make it up to you. You like firecrackers, right? I’ve got some really cool ones for you.” Police were notified, a sting was set up, and Zepf was arrested at the scene on August 3, 1967. He was carrying a four-inch knife and in his car police found rope, a sleeping bag, and a toy truck. He was found to be wearing size eight tennis shoes, the size of the footprint found at the scene of the attack on Steve Rhinehart.
Jeffrey Zepf was charged with the sexual assault and the attempted murder of Freddy Brickle. One of the arresting officers punched Zepf and Zepf used a bandana to stop the bleeding from his nose. During initial questioning at the station that night, Zepf admitted to stalking Freddy. Detective Fahey, now deceased, told one of the officers to discard the bloody bandana. When it was suggested by other officers that immediate comparisons should be made between dark brown hairs found at the scene of both Steve’s and Freddy’s assaults, and between Steve’s fingernail scrapings and the blood on Zepf’s bandana, Detective Fahey disallowed this, puzzling the arresting officers. The officers declined to challenge a superior, assuming there was a legal explanation for Fahey’s decision. Jeffrey Zepf went to trial for the sexual assault and attempted murder of a minor, Freddy Brickle, on April 2, 1968. His attorney was Zepf’s aforementioned “only friend,” Chuck Richards, soon to become a U.S. District Court judge.
Despite the strong case presented by
prosecutor Bill Cates, Judge Thomas Fairborn sentenced Zepf to a two-year suspended sentence and two years’ probation. Freddy Brickle’s parents were so shocked by the lenient verdict that they told their son that Zepf would be “imprisoned for many years” and would not be a threat to him any longer. Inexplicably, the arrest and trial of Zepf were not reported in the Times-Dispatch, allowing Freddy to believe this.
“Jesus,” James said. “We weren’t told about Brickle? It wasn’t in the papers? Zepf gets a slap on the wrist for attempted murder of a child? How can this be? Why wasn’t somebody raising hell? Inexplicably?”
Nick said, “That’s what Linda Fyce plans to do. It will sure be in the papers now.”
Stith said evenly, “I’m sorry. Let me go on.” He glanced at his watch. Poor guy, thought Mary Byrd. He should get one of those new nicotine patches. She had begun to feel sorry for him—for the ugliness of what he was having to do. Stith—the whole RPD—would become another circle of victims in the whole tragedy. Crime upon crime, infecting more and more lives, on and on. The ruining that keeps on ruining. Detective Fahey—that name suddenly was familiar to Mary Byrd. She was sure he was the one who’d questioned her that day. She was glad to hear he was dead; she hoped he’d died from quartan fever or the bloody flux. And the Brickles—god. Would her mother and Pop have been able to come forward like that, if Stevie had only been molested? Pop was from an old-school Irish family in a hard-scrabble steel-and mine-worker neighborhood in Pittsburgh. If Stevie had been Freddy, could Pop have let what happened be public, or offered him up for a sting? A more chilling thought came to her: what would she and Charles have done if it had been William? She wiped her clammy hands on the coat in her lap, catching a whiff of sweat from her sweater. Stith picked back up with his report.
For as yet undetermined reasons, Zepf spent only three nights in jail for the attack on Brickle. Later in 1968, Zepf moved to Bloomington, Illinois, supposedly to attend college there. In 1977, Bloomington police were looking for the murderer of a young boy whose sexually molested body had been found in a cave near railroad tracks. The details of the crime were very similar to those of the two assaults in Richmond. Bloomington police were unaware of Zepf and the fact that he lived six blocks from the child’s house and one mile from the murder scene. There were no leads in that crime until June 1986, when Zepf was arrested and charged with molesting a young boy he was babysitting. At the same time, an RPD detective began reopening and reviewing all cases, including Steve’s, around Richmond involving unsolved sex crimes against children and repeat sex offenders.
Stith looked up to say, “That detective, by the way, was my predecessor and is deceased.”
Learning that Zepf had relocated to Bloomington, the detective called police there to inquire about any crimes involving young boys. It was only then that Zepf was connected to the 1977 murder there. The RPD detective flew to Illinois to interrogate Zepf regarding Steve’s case. Zepf denied involvement in Steve’s case, and passed a polygraph test, although the polygraph technician determined that Zepf had been coached on manipulating results by altering his breathing patterns. There were no arrests in the Bloomington murder or in Steve’s. On November 8, 1986, Zepf received twelve months’ probation and paid a $375 fine for molesting the child he had babysat in Bloomington. For reasons unknown, none of these facts was made public by the Bloomington police, or again in Richmond.
Around this time, Zepf moved to the San Francisco area where he sold drums and gave music lessons to young boys. There he was a suspect in numerous other sex crime investigations, none resulting in convictions. Zepf returned to Virginia and began using Compuserve to seek out and arrange meetings with underage boys. According to a 1987 chat log between Zepf and a sixteen-year-old boy, Zepf wrote, “I hope you don’t tell anyone I’ve sent you these pictures. I don’t ever want to go to jail and be Bubba’s love slave.”’ In July 1987, Zepf initiated contact with an FBI agent posing online as a fourteen-year-old boy. Zepf was arrested in December 1987 and charged with crossing state lines to engage in sex with a minor. Zepf pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court and was sentenced to eighteen months in jail. FBI agents searched his home and found more than six thousand pornographic images, many involving boys, enabling the FBI to build a second case against Zepf, who admitted to having sex with a thirteen-year-old boy, photographing him, and sending the photos from his computer. For this second charge, Zepf was sentenced to nine years in the federal penitentiary at Butner, North Carolina, where he is today. These two cases mark the first and only time Zepf was actually incarcerated for his many actions as a child molester and suspected murderer.
In my investigation, I’ve determined that Jeffrey Zepf has been the primary suspect in 125 cases of the sexual molestation of children in several states, of the murder of Steven Rhinehart in 1966, and convicted of the attempted murder of Frederick Brickle in 1967, for which he was incarcerated for only three days.
His lips pressed together grimly, Stith closed the report folder and added, “And of course we will probably never know how many other victims there were, most of whom would not have been attacked if Zepf had been caught and convicted of killing Stevie, or if he’d been appropriately sentenced for his attempt to kill Freddy Brickle.”
“Suspect? Suspect? Are you fucking kidding me?” Nick was going Sicilian and practically shouting.
“When did loud ever help anything,” Mary Byrd said, channeling Charles. But she also wanted to shout something; she couldn’t think what. She looked over at her mother, whose tanned face was pale.
“It’s a good thing Pop died,” their mother said. “If he’d known this creature was out there, and all these … mistakes had been made, there’s no telling …” she trailed off, shaking her head. “Poor Pop.” She began crying.
“Ma,” said Mary Byrd, putting her arm around her mother’s shoulders. But it was true. Pop would have wanted William’s flame thrower, too. And he would have used it on Zepf and the police. But not on her—she was free of that now, at least, it suddenly occurred to her.
James rose and walked stiffly to the window, his broad swimmer’s shoulders and back ropey with muscle and tension. “So, now game over?” he said quietly. “He’s already in jail.”
“Yes, he’s in jail now,” Stith said. “But that nine-year sentence is nearly over.”
James turned to face him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean: Jeffrey Zepf is eligible for parole.” Stith knocked a fist on his desk. “In April. Two months from now.”
Nick threw his hands in the air. “And you people know all this about him, and someone’s going to let him out?”
“It’s hard to believe, but those two Internet convictions are all we’ve got. That’s all that’s ever stuck to him. But this is why we’re doing this. This is why I’ve been in such a hurry. We have to go forward with this information and try to get a conviction in Stevie’s case. If we do, he will never be released. It may be hard without the physical evidence, which would contain the DNA to make an unquestionable ID on Zepf, but I’m committed, and absolutely determined, to keep this guy locked up. At the very least. And to give y’all some closure.”
“What do you mean, ‘without the physical evidence’?” James said. “What about the towel and the … other stuff?”
Stith’s face sagged, and he shook his head. “The physical evidence—the towel, Stevie’s clothes and fingernail scrapings, the knife from the Brickle arrest, Zepf’s polygraph results—it’s all missing.”
“How could that happen? How could that happen?” Nick said, dazed.
“No wonder,” Mary Byrd’s mother said. “We … I should have paid more attention. I should have been asking more questions. I was just … I don’t know.” She dropped her head and cried again.
Oh my god, can this get worse? Mary Byrd reached for her mother’s hand. “Mom, don’t.” She selfishly wanted to know if the diary was gone, too. It’s not about me.
“You mean the evidence and the
polygraph results were lost, or they were ‘disappeared’?” asked James.
“At this point, I don’t know. That part of it will be an ongoing investigation, and is one reason I needed to know what, exactly, you all were shown, or told, in nineteen sixty-six. If the evidence was tampered with, or if the judge was influenced in some way in the Brickle case, or if any department guys or Chuck Richards were involved in a cover-up of the lost evidence, I’m going to get to the bottom of it.” Stith stepped back from his desk and opened the middle drawer. “But we do have this.” He took out a Baggie with a small object and held it out in his long, pale palm. A small green and yellow metal dump truck worn to the metal. “Do you recognize it?”
Mary Byrd closed her eyes, feeling tears. “That … that was Stevie’s Tonka truck. Or he had one like that. Same colors, and beaten up like that.”
“Definitely,” Nick said. “‘Pickin’ up dirt … Brrrrooom … dump truck.’ That’s what he’d say. He played with that thing all the time.”
Their mother said, “Yes. That’s his truck. I don’t know how many times I had to take it out of his pants pocket when I did his laundry.”
“Even I remember that truck,” James said, surprised. “Sometimes he let me play with it.” He smiled a sad little smile.
“So you feel sure it was his?”
Mary Byrd reached for it and he allowed her to take it. “Please don’t take it out of the bag.”
She thought of William, who always seemed to have a few of his tiny war machines in his backpack, or parked neatly in front of his plate at meal times. “Yeah,” she said softly. “It was like a good luck charm. He loved to load it up and make it dump stuff.” Like English peas he didn’t want to eat—William had tricks for that, too—or roly-polies, or Japanese beetles her mother paid him a penny apiece to pick off her roses. Pumpkin seeds. Her eyes and nose watered and she sniffed hard.
“It was evidence from Freddy Brickle’s case,” Stith said. “Those clowns hadn’t even inventoried it or cross-indexed it with Stevie’s file. It wasn’t Freddy’s, so I had a hunch that it must have been Stevie’s. Zepf kept it as … a kind of trophy, I guess. But if you’re sure it was Stevie’s it’s going to be a very important piece of evidence.”
