This fits with what Gary Blaylock said. He said that while he was upstairs peeing, he looked out the window and not only did he see Janet but he saw Ben with her and the two of them drive off together in Janet’s car.
In his statement, Ben said she never came—that she was supposed to, that he waited and waited for her, but that she never showed. Said he figured she couldn’t sneak out, or fell asleep waiting for her family to go to bed. It had been a big, long weekend and she was exhausted. He was disappointed but he understood. Said he never saw her again after he took her home from the Sweethearts’ Ball and didn’t know anything was wrong until his mom woke him up the next morning saying that her stepdad was on the phone looking for her.
Though Ben never offered an alibi, he had one and it was offered for him. A girl named Sabrina Henry, who had always had a crush on Ben and who had always flirted with him and made sure he knew she was his for the taking, said he was with her, that they left the party together and were with each other the rest of the night.
The final witness from the farmhouse party wasn’t at the party at all. A loner with a violent juvenile record who graduated the year before named Clyde Wolf said he was watching the comings and goings of the party from the woods in back of the pasture. He never stepped forward or volunteered any information, but once it was discovered he had been there, he was brought in and questioned by the investigators. He too said Janet was there that night, but never went inside, and that Ben climbed into her car and left with her.
Chapter Nineteen
“Why didn’t you arrest Ben Tillman for Janet’s murder?” I ask.
“You finish the book?” Dad says.
“Finished the part where several witnesses have him leaving the party with Janet in her car—the same car she was killed in a short while later.”
We are in his new, immaculate, white extended-cab GMC truck, but unlike any other time we ever have been, I am driving.
It’s Tuesday afternoon and we are driving to Marianna to try to talk to Ben Tillman. We are coming from Dad’s bone marrow test at his doctor’s office in Panama City—something Anna set up and insisted he do sooner rather than later, something he agreed to when I told him we’d work the case for the remainder of the day once the test was done.
Dad is turned in the seat, leaning on his side, keeping pressure off the hip that was used for the aspiration and biopsy. So far it’s sore but not extremely so, and though the wound is seeping, it has yet to soak the bandage or the loose jeans he’s wearing.
“Maybe I should have,” Dad says. “Came close to it more than once during the investigation.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“It’s kinda complicated,” he says. “There wasn’t just one reason. Bottom line is I didn’t stay with the case as long as I should have. I should’ve seen it through, but . . . you kids were young, your mom and I were havin’ a pretty rough time of it, I had my own department to run.”
He doesn’t say anything else but I sense there is more—other reasons why he stopped working the case when he did.
“I worked it as long as I could and then turned everything over to the state’s attorney’s office. He convened a grand jury. I think it was a tough decision for them, but the decision not to indict was theirs.”
“Did you turn over the case to the state’s attorney before you were finished investigating it thoroughly?”
I’m pressing him and I expect him to become defensive, but instead he just nods.
“I’m pretty sure I did,” he says. “I didn’t think so at the time—or I didn’t want to think so, but even then part of me knew I was.”
“So take me through why you did. I’m not understanding.”
“I told you why.”
“There’s got to be more to it than that.”
He shakes his head and I can tell that’s all I’m going to get. I file it away to revisit later.
“The thing is, by the end of the investigation I didn’t think he did it,” Dad says. “I’m just wondering now if I was wrong.”
“So what said he didn’t do it?” I say.
“The girl, Sabrina Henry, swore under oath he was with her. She never wavered and we were never able to break her. There was no physical evidence against him—beyond a few fingerprints in her car that could be explained by him being in it at an earlier time. As her boyfriend he would’ve been. Would’ve been far more suspicious if there hadn’t been any. His mom said she got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and looked in on him, and he was in his bed sleeping soundly. We knew what he wore from pictures taken at the party. We tested his clothes, which were still on the floor of his bedroom, and didn’t find any blood or other evidence on them—and they hadn’t been washed. Still had beer that he spilled at the party on them. And I thought then and I still think now there’s a very good chance Ted Bundy did it.”
Marianna is an interesting place. A small town of less than seven thousand people, it’s a naturally beautiful place—like so many in North Florida—with a diverse landscape of massive old oak trees, their spreading branches draped with Spanish moss, tall North Florida pines, the Chipola River, Blue Hole Spring, and the Mariana caverns, a series of dry, air-filled caves with stunning formations of limestone stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws, flowstones and draperies.
Unlike my flatter part of Florida, Marianna is hilly, the large farms surrounding it consisting of sloping croplands and pastures of rolling hills.
Founded in 1828 by a Scottish entrepreneur named Scott Beverege who named the town after his wife Mary and her friend Anna, it became the county seat the following year.
Platted along the Chipola River just below the Alabama state line, Marianna and the broader Jackson County is known for extremely fertile soil, which is why so many plantation owners from other states like North Carolina relocated here back then.
And it’s not just the soil, Marianna is rich with history too. It’s where the Confederate governor of Florida, John Milton, is buried. It’s the scene of a Civil War battle between a small home guard of boys, old men, and wounded soldiers and a contingent of some seven hundred Federal troops. It is also the site of the savage torture and brutal lynching of Claude Neal, an African American man accused of rape and murder in 1934. Marianna is also the home to Dozier School for Boys, an infamous reform school operated by the state of Florida, which for a time was the largest juvenile reform institution in the United States. Throughout its over one-hundred-year history, the school was a place of brutality, of abuse, beatings, rapes, torture, and murder. Marianna is, of course, also the place of the Broken Heart Miss Valentine Murder of Janet Leigh Lester, which to this day remains unsolved.
Looking at Marianna’s quaint main street of restored old buildings, its historic district of ancient churches and antebellum homes, and its breathtaking natural beauty, it’s hard to fathom so many horrific things have happened here.
Chapter Twenty
Ben Tillman was Marianna High School’s star baseball player, taking his team to state during his junior year, coming just two runs short of bringing home the championship.
It was believed he’d do the same in his senior year, only more successfully, but then his girlfriend was murdered, he was suspected, and his life unraveled.
Before the Broken Heart Murder case, Ben was popular and respected.
Ben was cute in a boyish way, but it was his genuine niceness that caused most of the girls at Marianna High to find him so attractive. That said, he was strikingly photogenic and model good-looking in the many photographs Janet took of him over their years together. Nearly all in black and white, Janet’s photographs of Ben were dramatic and artistic and revealed a depth and complexity Ben rarely revealed to anyone else.
The son of the sheriff of Jackson County, Ben was neither a bully, a punk, nor a rat. Although always careful not to break the law, except for a little underage drinking, he never made the other kids feel guilty or like they were being watched for t
he illicit or illegal activities they engaged in.
Loyal to his friends, faithful to his longtime girlfriend, Ben was liked by his fellow students and well-regarded by his teachers and the school administrators.
Apart from a few rumors about him having a pretty nasty temper, which was rarely if ever witnessed and not given much credence by most, Ben was believed to be about as perfect as an adolescent young man could be.
There is little left of any of that in the middle-aged man whose face shows the signs of a hard life or hard living, or both, standing before me now.
I can’t find even a trace of the effervescent and athletic young baseball player who was smart and attractive enough to steal Janet’s heart in the too-thin, brittle-boned, sun-damaged, unkempt husk of a man hunched from carrying the invisible weight of this across all these years.
Unable to ever really get over what happened, Ben hadn’t accepted the baseball scholarships he had been offered. He had never left Marianna, never attended college, never married, never had kids, never had a decent job.
Never had a job at all. Not really. No one in town would hire him.
He has spent decades mowing grass. He doesn’t even do it under a business name, just as a cash-only odd-job approach like a grammar school kid using his parents’ mower over the summer.
We find him at the old Marianna High School building loading his mower into a rickety and rusting old trailer hitched to his rickety and rusting old Ford Ranger.
He had started shaking his head the moment I got out of the truck and walked toward him.
“Told you I wouldn’t talk to him,” he says.
When I called earlier and told him what we were doing and asked if he’d talk to us, he had said he would never speak to Dad again, which is why I asked Dad to stay in the truck while I tried to speak to Ben.
“Will you talk to me?” I ask. “If he stays in the truck. Will you just talk to me for a few minutes?”
He shakes his head, but there’s no real conviction in it. He then looks from me over toward the truck. “He ruined my life.”
His life was ruined the night of February 12th—whether he killed Janet or not—and from what I could tell, Dad hadn’t done anything to make it worse, but I don’t say anything.
“Sure, he didn’t kill Janet and he didn’t arrest me, but he didn’t clear me, didn’t catch who really did it. Cost my dad the next election and left everyone around here to suspect me for the rest of my life.” He lets out a harsh laugh. “Haven’t had a life. Not really.”
This decimated man, this later iteration of Ben Tillman, has the skinny, bleak, raw-boned, bloodshot look of an alcoholic, and though it’s early afternoon and he’s at work, I can smell the cheap liquor on his breath.
“You think he did it intentionally?” I ask. “Or just failed to solve the case?”
“Comes to the same damn thing, don’t it? Either way. It’s the same.”
Violent crime, particularly murder, breaks people, makes hollowed-out shells of previously vibrant people. And it does so to the criminals and cops no less than the loved ones left behind in the vacuous absence of the victim.
I nod toward the brown brick buildings behind him. “This is where y’all went to school, isn’t it?”
He turns and looks at it and nods slowly.
We are quiet for a few moments.
The midday sun looms high above us, radiating stifling bands of heat that seem concentrated directly on us. He had been sweating when I arrived. Now we both are. Hair and clothes damp, skin moist and clammy, beads of perspiration trickling down backs and faces.
“Lot of people’s lives peaked here,” he says. “But mine didn’t.”
I wait but he doesn’t say anything else. “No?”
“My life didn’t peak in high school. It ended.”
I nod. The truth of what he’s saying is etched in the lines of his face, written in the sad song behind his eyes.
It’s disconcerting to even think of this broken older man as the boy I’ve been picturing, the one dancing with Janet at the Sweethearts’ Ball, the one she decided to give herself to as they danced to “How Deep Is Your Love,” the one Sabrina Henry and so many other young women had such a crush on.
“Can we talk about that night?” I ask, not having to identify it in any other way.
For him and those like him, there is only one that night. For the truly fortunate, most of whom have no idea just how fortunate they are, there is no single night that is that night, that is the night by which life is divided into before and after.
He shakes his head. “Nothing to say. Said it all then, and a goddamn lot of good it did me. Got nothing to add. Janet didn’t show up that night. Period. I didn’t see her. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I don’t know who did.”
“What about those who swore under oath they saw her there?” I say.
“Only two possibilities. They’re lying or mistaken.”
I don’t point out that another possibility is that he is.
The August heat draws the sour smell of booze and cigarette smoke and body odor out of his pores as if vapors from precipitation after a recent rain, and he smells like an old diesel engine converted to now run on rotting food byproducts.
“More than one person said they saw you leave with her,” I say.
“See previous answer. They couldn’t have seen me do something I not only didn’t do, I couldn’t do—because she wasn’t there. She stood me up. Broke my heart at first. Then I figured she was just tired and fell asleep. Later I realized while I thought she was blowing me off or sleeping through what was supposed to be the best night of our lives because being crowned queen two nights in a row took too much out of her, she was actually being murdered.”
“What about Sabrina Henry saying you were with her?”
“See previous answer. Only two possibilities.”
“I can’t see how she could be mistaken about something like that,” I say.
“So,” he says, “only one possibility. She’s lying. Why? I couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is that someone viciously and savagely murdered the only girl I’ve ever loved. And he took her, so we couldn’t even bury her. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I don’t know who. What I do know is Janet’s life wasn’t the only one he took that night.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Sabrina Henry, now Gibbs, has the manic, uptight, slightly crazed-eyes look of someone desperately trying to hold everything together.
In high school she had been mostly on the fringes because the guys didn’t respect her and the other girls didn’t trust her. Back then she was seen as sort of slow and shallow and mostly annoying. She had a good, well-developed body and a prettyish face, but she wasn’t likable. Most of the guys who slept with her only did so once, privately confiding in each other that as good as her body was and as easy and effortless as it was to take her off into the woods or somebody’s empty river camp, it wasn’t worth the aggravation of listening to her on the way there and back.
Now a middle-aged woman with extra weight and a fading allure, she resembles Patsy Ramsey, the former beauty queen mother of the murdered six-year-old JonBenét, killed in her own home in Boulder, Colorado, on Christmas night in 1996. She has the same dyed-black hair, big blue-green eyes, immaculate makeup, and bright red lipsticked lips.
We meet with her on the pool patio behind her huge home beneath the shade of a large umbrella rising out of a wrought iron table.
A pitcher of lemonade and glasses with ice in them along with some sort of simple shortbread cookie are on a tray on the table waiting for us when we arrive.
Without apology or explanation, she tells us to park on the street down a little ways and walk around the side of the house to the gate of the tall wooden privacy fence.
“I remember you always being respectful and kind to me,” she says to Dad. “Didn’t get a lot of that back then. I really appreciated that.”
Dad nods and
tips the old cowboy hat he’s wearing, then shakes her outstretched hand. “Was my pleasure, ma’am. This is my son, John. We sure do appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.”
I shake her hand and we all take a seat around the table.
“Speaking of time,” she says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have much at all.”
“We understand,” Dad says.
He’s got his full Southern-gentleman charm flowing, which seems to me manipulative, insincere, and even condescending, but she seems not to see it that way at all.
“The truth is,” she says, as she pours lemonade into glasses and passes them to us, “I wouldn’t have agreed to meet anyone else. Like I said, you were very good to me back then. Even still, what happened to Janet that night has destroyed a lot of lives. I determined a long time ago it wasn’t going to destroy mine. So I’ve left the past in the past. But . . . I so want justice for Janet. It . . . does my heart . . . I just appreciate that you haven’t given up on finding out what happened to her. But I really, really want to keep this little chat just between us. None of the people in my life now have any idea about any of this—or that I was even . . . involved.”
“Including your husband?” Dad asks.
“Especially him.”
Her husband, a wealthy cattleman fifteen years her senior, owns and operates a cattle farm and processing plant of several thousand acres and worth several million dollars between Mariana and Dothan, and is rumored to be a severe, humorless man as stern with his wife as he is his business.
“Can you tell us what you think happened to her?” I ask.
Without her seeing, Dad shoots me a look that lets me know he’d rather handle the questions.
“Some absolute madman savagely murdered her and hid her body somewhere where no one could find it. It’s the only explanation. No one I know—or knew back them—could have done that. No one. It had to be a monster passing through.”
BLOOD WORK: a John Jordan Mystery (John Jordan Mysteries Book 12) Page 7
