“And then she just picked me up by my throat and then set me down.”
As she did this, Brian urinated in his underpants, all over himself.
Kim Cargill had a distinctive way in which she placed her hands on the children’s throats. It wasn’t as though she’d grab them in a rage any way she could. For KC, it was ritualistic; she had a way to inflict the most pain she could.
“She would put her thumbs on my Adam’s apple and then caress her fingers around my throat... ,” Brian recalled. “Her thumbs would just push in and make it to where you couldn’t scream or talk or anything.”
The belt beatings, chokings, picking the kids up by their necks and lifting them up off the ground, Brian said later, would go on “probably about every day of the week” in some form.
* * *
The kids got home from school or from the sitter’s house and they never knew which monster was going to be underneath the bed.
KC was fixing Brian a peanut butter sandwich in the kitchen one afternoon after school. He stood nearby, mumbling to himself. Later he could not recall what had been troubling him. Probably something to do with school, he surmised, or maybe KC getting on him about not feeding the cats the way she demanded. She would blow up about little things, not done specifically the way she had asked.
KC was over near the refrigerator after she had finished making the sandwich. Brian asked for his mother to get him a red Gatorade.
She stopped, stared him down.
Uh-oh.
Kim brought her son a blue Gatorade.
“I don’t like blue,” Brian said, more to himself than KC. After all, by now he knew better than to sass or question anything KC did.
Not saying anything, KC picked up the knife she had used to make the sandwich and threw it at her son, like a circus performer tossing knives as his assistant stood in front of a board. Then, walking back over to the sandwich on the counter, KC picked it up and shoved it into Brian’s face, smearing it all over him.
Even the youngest son, Timmy, the boy Cherry would watch for KC, would make KC mad enough for her to inflict pain and abuse. Brian recalled many times seeing her shove the toddler’s bottle deep into his mouth after Timmy made her angry for some stupid reason. Other times, if she got mad at him, she’d wait until Timmy was walking across the driveway or on the hard wooden floor (having just learned to walk) and she’d purposely trip him by kicking out one of his feet.
* * *
Brian said there were times when KC would take the kids out to the “ghetto” part of the city, as he described it, a bad section of Tyler, and leave the kids inside the car while she went somewhere. She’d roll the windows down so they could breathe, but she would leave them there for “four hours” at a time. The kids had no idea where she was, what she was doing or when and if she was ever coming back. She’d pull up somewhere, park the car and get out. No explanation.
As Brian would later tell cops, KC knew what to do to try and hide the abuse. She had a way of making a fist, protruding her middle knuckle out and whacking the kids in the head, so their hair covered up the bruises. When she slapped the kids, she’d use just enough force, Brian maintained, to leave a welt on the side of their faces that lasted just a few hours before going away.
“You’re stupid,” she’d yell at the kids. “You’re all stupid sons of bitches . . . motherfuckers. Little fuckers!”
“Mom!” the kids would respond.
“KC,” Brian would answer, “stop saying that.”
“You’re nothing but a dumb little fucker,” she’d snap back. “Get in your room.”
* * *
KC had a man over one night. He was playing the video game Guitar Hero in the living room. She sat nearby, watching.
Brian walked into the room. “And I smelled this really bad smell,” he said later.
“Who farted?” Brian said aloud, laughing.
The guy thought it was funny. “You smelled it, you dealt it,” KC’s date said to Brian, and they had a good laugh over it. Brian wanted to play the game. He looked over at his mother, though, and knew by the look on her face that he would not be playing games on this night.
“I’ll be right back,” Kim told her date.
KC grabbed Brian by the arm and walked him to his room down the hallway. Then she knelt down, eye to eye with her son. She put her face right up against Brian’s so that they were “head-butting” each other. She gritted her teeth at him and whispered, “You don’t say that around people, do you understand me?”
“I shouldn’t be the one getting into trouble for being in my own house and asking who farted,” Brian answered back, realizing maybe he should not have talked back.
Kim hauled off and head-butted him. “Hard,” he recalled. But it wasn’t just in the head, she made sure she knocked the bridge of his nose, too, so as to inflict as much pain as possible.
“Get your ass in your room, you little fucker.”
When KC clenched her teeth, she meant business. On a twelve-year-old’s level of thinking, the way Brian described it later, it was akin to when a ballplayer goes up to bat and he’s waiting to hit the ball. The ballplayer, focusing, grinds his teeth so he can dredge up enough energy—or “anger”—to smash the ball as hard as he can. When KC ground her teeth, she’d sometimes say, “You don’t do that again, or I am going to fucking kill you.”
* * *
Another favorite way of abusing her children was for Kim Cargill to walk by, if they were in the hallway or near a wall, and body slam the kid into the wall for no apparent reason other than she felt like it.
Brian brought home a grade of eighty-nine. He thought it was amazing—and it was, actually.
“One grade away from a ninety,” he said, beaming, proud of himself. If it wasn’t for that seventy he had gotten on a test, he explained to KC, he would have a ninety average in that class. For a kid whose mother is beating him and ridiculing him, as he claimed, almost on a daily basis, an eighty-nine was remarkable.
“You’re a stupid fuck,” KC said. Then she slapped and hit Brian in the face, he later recalled.
“What the heck?” he asked.
KC said she wanted the ninety. “It’s your fault for not making good grades!”
* * *
KC put a lock on the outside of Brian’s door, turning his room—a kid’s sanctuary, his place away from the world where he can go and be by himself—into a prison.
A cop asked Brian why he thought she did that.
“So she could lock me and [Timmy] in there,” Brian said.
“How long?” the cop interviewing him asked.
“Longest would be about four hours, not ever less than one hour.”
During one of those times she locked Timmy and Brian in the bedroom, KC said beforehand, “I’m doing this because I am getting your birthday presents ready.” She was referring to Brian. He was about to celebrate his tenth birthday. She was trying to make it seem as though it was for his benefit she was locking them up. She didn’t want him or Timmy to surprise her and see what she was wrapping in the bathroom nearby, she claimed.
In they went.
KC locked the door.
A few minutes went by and Brian thought he heard something. It was like a car door slamming shut. He got up and looked out his window.
There was KC: driving out of the driveway, taking off.
“So I knew right there she was lying,” Brian recalled.
When he was forced to watch Timmy inside the locked room, Brian put on cartoons. This was how he later figured out how long KC had been gone. He would count the episodes of cartoons he watched with Timmy: “four” or “eight” episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants meant she was gone for two or four hours.
Timmy was exceptionally antsy one day. He couldn’t sit still. He started to jump off the furniture in Brian’s room.
“You better stop it,” Brian warned his little brother.
Timmy would jump and then fall to the ground, pretending to roll
over and play dead.
“Stop it,” Brian said. Timmy was jumping higher and higher each time.
Then it happened: Timmy jumped up and his foot turned inward and he landed on his leg and snapped it.
“What happened?” KC asked when she got home.
Brian didn’t want to tell because he was scared she’d beat him for not watching the child. All he said was Timmy had hurt his leg somehow. He didn’t know how bad the injury was or how he did it.
The kid couldn’t walk on it, however.
For the remainder of that day, Brian explained, “He, like, crawled on his butt, like, scooted around.”
KC didn’t care one way or the other.
A nurse.
She allowed him to crawl around all day with a broken leg. Finally, later that night, the kid was treated.
* * *
It didn’t matter to KC who it was. If she felt you had wronged her, she’d lash out. One day when Brian’s dad, Matt Robinson, lived with Kim and the kids, Matt’s mother was over watching the kids while Matt and Kim were at work. The child’s grandmother had the kids out back playing on the swings and in the sandbox. Over near the edge of the lawn, by the fence, the grandmother noticed something on the ground. She walked over and had a look.
Photos were spread out all over the place. They had gotten wet from a recent rainstorm. The grandmother picked them up and brought them inside, spread them out on the kitchen table to dry. She figured maybe the kids had gotten hold of them somehow and tossed them, or they might have blown away in the wind. In any event she was looking to help KC and dry them out so KC could put them away.
When KC got home, she found one of the photos—of Matt Robinson—and brought it over to the grandmother and tossed it into her face, saying sharply: “What the hell are you doing with photos of my husband?”
Except Kim and Matt aren’t married, the grandmother thought right away.
The grandmother didn’t know what to say. She was just trying to help. “I picked them up in the yard and was trying to dry them off, Kim.”
“You have no business looking at these pictures,” Kim snapped. Then she grabbed the grandmother by the arms and twisted them, hurting her. From there Kim jumped on top of the woman and shook her, twisting her body and arms.
The grandmother kicked KC in the stomach to stop her.
KC fell backward. Then she got up and pushed the old woman.
The grandmother kicked her again.
“I’m pregnant,” Kim said. “What are you doing? I thought you knew that.”
The grandmother looked at her: “Well, you may not be now.”
22
JILL LOWE WAS INFATUATED BY the baby in Kim Cargill’s arms. An account executive, Jill worked for a major television network and lived in Tyler. She’d been going to her child’s Little League games and seeing one particular woman on the sidelines with what appeared to be a newborn in her arms for some time, so she decided to introduce herself. Their kids played on the same team. Mothers and fathers often begin friendships while their kids play sports.
“I’m Jill,” she said.
“He’s [two years] old,” Kim said. It was 2008, a few years before she started leaving Timmy with Cherry Walker. Apparently, that kick by the grandmother hadn’t done anything to KC and she had the baby without a problem. Kim Cargill had two other children with her, beside her fourth child—Brian—out on the ball field. She had just gone through another divorce, her third. Matt Robinson had figured KC out by now and had left her.
Jill had been sitting, watching her boy, admiring Kim Cargill’s baby. As they chatted, Kim seemed kind and friendly. Kim could be charming; she had a side to her that many later described as intelligent and sophisticated. She knew how to carry herself if she wanted to win somebody over.
“Here’s my phone number,” Jill said. Through conversation they realized they did not live far from each other. Maybe they could get together some day and have lunch.
“That would be great,” Kim said. She gave Jill her phone number.
Kim saw a babysitter and a confidante—somebody she could use, control, con, lie to, cheat and steal from.
Jill was the perfect mark.
If their relationship had ended on that day, Jill would have been able to walk away thinking she’d met a nice neighbor. Here was a woman with four kids, her hands full, her days and nights spent changing diapers and making meals. No man around to help out. Here was Kim Cargill, all these kids, wading her way through life, raising the children the best she knew how. That was the façade, the front, the magnificent, martyrlike sense of self she exhibited in public.
Peeling back the layers of Kim Cargill, however, as her relationship with Jill grew to encompass lunches and babysitting and phone conversations, Jill saw a vicious, revolting, crass woman, someone who cared little for her children or anybody else but herself. It was as though KC could not contain herself, or control her emotions. She had to act out. She had that impulsivity most narcissists cannot contain, no matter how hard they try.
“Poor behavioral controls,” most psychologists will say.
“If you ever need a babysitter while you’re working,” Jill told Kim as their friendship carried on into the summer of 2008. This was when Jill was not yet aware of the monster she had invited into her life. At this point Jill felt bad for KC.
“Money is so tight,” Kim would complain to Jill. “It is very difficult. I’m never getting enough shift work at the hospitals. Finding babysitters and paying them . . .”
Jill offered to help any way she could, including lending Kim money. Jill would help out, she explained later, by buying “groceries, diapers, get [Kim’s] car fixed, maybe pay [the] electric bill or something.”
In those early days of knowing KC, Jill thought she and Kim “got along fine.” Yet, as she got to know Kim on a more personal level, Jill saw a callous, unempa-thetic, cunning shell of a human being emerge—one that she had been “warned about.”
Most of the uneasy feelings Jill developed as she got to know KC better revolved around what Kim Cargill “could do to other people.”
* * *
KC called Jill one night. She was livid—entirely pissed off at something involving Jill. “I’m coming over,” KC said with vengeance in her voice. It had to do with a deal for a pair of Jet Skis Jill had brokered—acting as the liaison—between a newly divorced friend of Jill’s and Kim Cargill’s mother. The Jet Skis, according to what KC was telling Jill, were worth $30,000, but Jill’s friend was selling them to Kim’s mom for $15,000. The deal had been in the works for several months, but here was KC exploding suddenly over it. Jill later learned, “She was irate about it, beyond a normal reaction, because she did not like the person her mother was buying the Jet Skis from. . . .” Mentioning the price meant that KC believed the woman was selling the Jet Skis at a loss of $15,000 just to spite KC.
But it was all in her mind.
KC blamed Jill for the entire mess, which did not seem to be a deal that anybody should be upset over. If anything, KC should have been happy that her mother had gotten such a good price on the Jet Skis. But not KC. To her it was personal. She was mad at Jill for putting her mother in touch with a woman whom KC hated.
The calls started. KC would phone Jill and berate her. “Bitch. Cunt.” All the nasty slurs she could muster. She’d scream and yell vulgarities.
After the calls KC stalked Jill.
“I was scared of her by then,” Jill explained. “I was looking at her through the peephole, and she was screaming obscenities and threatening me” while in her car or standing on Jill’s front porch.
KC would park her car in front of Jill’s house. “You motherfucker. You bitch. I’m going to destroy you.”
The hate spewing from KC’s mouth was intense and very real.
“You’re crazy,” Jill said, stepping out of her house one time, trying to get KC to calm down. “You do not have nothing on me.”
“I will fucking make up lies
about you. I’ll tell your husband to destroy you. I’ll destroy your career.” KC was red-faced; she was in a rage and unrecognizable to Jill as that mom she had met at the Little League game.
Jill walked closer to KC’s car. Jill could not believe it, but KC had her two youngest sons inside. They were listening to all their mother had to say, learning how to deal with life’s difficulties and disappointments from a person on a rage-fueled, profanity-laced rant, stalking one of her former friends.
“Go away! Get off my property!” Jill yelled. “I’ll call the police.”
* * *
There might have been more to this than Jill setting KC’s mom up with some Jet Skis, Jill soon learned. One day Jill had noticed some bite marks on Blake.
“What happened?” Jill had asked KC.
“Oh, that . . . he had a fight with his brother,” KC had told Jill. “It’s nothing.”
Jill was suspicious. It didn’t seem as though a child could cause such a brutal injury, but she took KC at her word. But then Jill began to think about how “intimidated” the children always were when around KC. They were afraid of her, for certain—all the time. They seemed to live under a banner of fear, much like an abused animal would act.
“When she got angry at them,” Jill explained in court later, “you could see the fear on them. . . .” They were scared of their mother and what she might do. There had been one instance, Jill recalled, that said a lot about Kim Cargill as a mother and disciplinarian.
Jill had the youngest child one afternoon and they were playing ball inside Jill’s house. At the time the child was about three years old. They were bouncing a tennis ball back and forth. The child missed his target and the ball accidentally hit a thermometer on the counter, which subsequently fell and smashed on the ground. The boy became visibly upset over the accident. He walked over and stared at the broken bits.
“Miss Jill . . . Miss Jill . . . my mama’s going to kill me,” the child explained. “My mama is going to kill me. I’m going to get a spanking. I’m going to get a spanking.” The child took off, running up and down the stairs in a nervous release of energy.
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