Wasted (21 page)

Carter noted LeBlanc’s red, runny nose, her sniffling, her red, tired eyes, her thinness—a drug addict. He left to get her some water and brought it back.

Detective Hunt questioned Kim for a few minutes. “Do you want to talk to the police?”

Carter left the room.

 

 

At 6:51, Kim LeBlanc requested an attorney before being questioned further. At 6:52 p.m., she was told, “You may leave any time.” At 6:55 p.m., LeBlanc was obstinate, insisting that all questioning cease, and asked again for counsel. At 6:56 p.m., she said, “I want to talk to my mother,” and again asked for counsel.

Hunt eventually left her alone.

Kim got up to leave, too, but the door wouldn’t open. “I’m caught,” she mumbled. She sat back down in the chair. LeBlanc rocked back and forth, as though trapped in the windowless cubicle, as though she thought she was going to die if she didn’t get another line of coke, a rope to escape with.

“I’m caught,” she mumbled again, and she pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped herself into a fetal position, and moaned. She was shaking flesh and bones.

At 6:58, Hunt told her, “You are not under arrest.”

 

 

Kim LeBlanc’s mother and stepfather arrived at the Austin Police Department. Cathy LeBlanc seemed nice enough, but she was very quiet. Ken LeBlanc did all the talking.

The couple appeared concerned about their daughter, but acted strangely, almost as if they weren’t surprised by what was going on. To the police, what reaction they did have came across as feigned, exaggerated. Her parents wanted to talk to Kim, badly.

“She’s not under arrest. You can talk to her.”

 

 

David Carter walked into the interview room where Justin Thomas sat. “I’m Detective Carter. I need some identifying information.”

“Uh, what’s going on here, you know?” said Thomas.

“We’re investigating a missing-person case and felt that you may have some information that could assist us.”

Carter left the room to monitor the interview with Kim LeBlanc.

 

 

“We’re going to get you out of this, baby.” The LeBlanc family was alone in the interview room. Cathy was small and slim. Kim was short and emaciated.

Ken was big-boned and big-bellied. He dwarfed his stepdaughter. “Tell them what they want to know,” he said.

Kim shook even harder from too little cocaine and too much fear. “He’s in a gang in California,” she said. “He killed a man in California. He’s killed someone before. He’s dangerous.” She rocked back and forth.

“Just say he did it.”

Her mother watched, her shoulders slightly hunched.

“Just tell them he did it,” said Ken. “He did it. We’ll get you out of here. It’s going to work.”

“No, no, no. You don’t understand,” cried Kim.

“Just say he did it.”

 

 

At 7:16 p.m., Kim LeBlanc knocked on the inside door of interview room two and invoked her right to an attorney.

 

 

Ken LeBlanc sat outside the room with Bastrop County Deputy Sheriff Nelson. Cathy LeBlanc sat in the interview room with her daughter. Kim LeBlanc requested an attorney again at 7:39 p.m. and 7:40 p.m.

Milliseconds later, Kim cried. “Take me home. I want to go home where we can talk with a lawyer about Regina.”

“Kimmie, don’t worry,” said her mother, a legal secretary. “The room’s not bugged. That would be a violation of your constitutional rights.”

The videotape ticked 7:41 p.m.

Twice more, in the next sixty seconds, she repeated her request to be taken home so that they could talk with an attorney about Regina’s death.

 

 

Detective Carter performed a quick computer identification and criminal check on Justin Thomas. He located a California driver’s license and some U.S. Army data.

He talked with Sergeant Reveles.

“It’s clear these people were witnesses, maybe suspects, to a homicide.”

“Don’t wait much longer to interview Thomas,” said Reveles. “You do it,” he said to Carter.

 

 

Justin Thomas had been sitting in interview room one for a long time. Detective Hunt had thought it best if no one interviewed him until they learned what Kim LeBlanc had to tell them, and if they didn’t turn on the videotape until the interview was started.

Now, the videotape was running, and Detective David Carter was with Thomas. So was Detective Mark Gilchrest.

“This is Detective Gilchrest,” said Carter to Thomas. “Do you know why we are talking to you?”

“No.”

“We’re investigating an apparent murder.”

Justin Thomas was cold, uncaring, nonchalant.

Detective Carter was tall, firm, professional. He read Thomas his Miranda rights, verbatim, from a standard form.

“Do you understand the warning? Would you sign the form and talk to us?”

Thomas signed the form.

“Do you know who I’m referring to when I say we are investigating an apparent murder?”

“Well, I know that Regina is missing.”

They talked politely about Justin, where he worked, what he did.

“How long have you known Regina Hartwell?”

“Two, three months.”

Carter noted that Thomas was evasive, even with non-specific questions. “When was the last time you saw her?”

Again, Thomas was vague.

“Were you involved in the murder of Regina Hartwell?”

Thomas began to fidget.

Detective Carter stared. There was an open wound in the webbing of Thomas’s hand, smooth and clean, as if cut by a knife. “How’d you get that?” He pointed to the unbandaged gash between the thumb and forefinger of Thomas’s right hand. It obviously needed stitches. A tendon appeared to be visible. Pus oozed at the edges.

Thomas lifted the hand toward his face and studied the cut. “I got it helping my dad mend a fence.”

“Yeah,” said Carter. “It’s the kind of wound one would expect to get stitches for.”

“Nah,” said Thomas, “it’s fine. Just rinse it with salt water.”

Thomas was trying to display his toughness, thought Carter. But the detective knew such wounds weren’t unusual when one used a knife to stab or cut another person.

“Where have you been? Who have you been with? What have you done since June 29?”

“I bought a trash can for my dad. I bought a tow chain, too.”

Thomas was now too specific; that bothered Carter.

He stretched out his legs. “Wal-Mart,” Justin said. “We went to Wal-Mart.” He stretched out his arms and hands. He was aloof.

Carter left the room to check again on Kim LeBlanc.

“Justin told me that he had stabbed her and that he had her Jeep and her body inside of the Jeep.” LeBlanc wept. “Regina took advantage of me against my will,” said Kim to Detective Hunt. “Justin knew about it, and he killed her for that reason. He was trying to protect me.”

“How did he get that cut on his hand?”

“A hammer. A hammer from a gun.”

 

 

It was dark when the Crime Lab team taped black paper over the windows so that they could do a Luminol luminescence test for blood. Jeremy Barnes was back at the Château and standing in Hartwell’s apartment.

Jeremy was asked what cleaning products he had used as Luminol reacts to bleach.

Brad Wilson was there, too. Jeremy and Brad were perhaps the last two people to see Regina alive, the last two people other than her murderer.

The Crime Lab team turned out the lights. Hartwell’s phone rang nonstop. In the darkened apartment with the continually ringing phone, blood glowed from the chair, the walls, the carpet.

Again, Jeremy Barnes freaked. To him, blood looked like it was everywhere, coating the chair, flooding the carpet, dripping from the walls. The Crime Lab team saw footprints on the living room carpet near the recliner, drops of blood by the window, drops of blood next to a closet door.
This is somebody else,
Jeremy told himself.
This is somebody I don’t know.

A quarter-sized bloodstain was found near the bottom of the shower curtain; a three-to four-inch-long smear of blood was found on the shower rod. Jeremy could not, would not, believe that it was sweet, dead Regina’s blood. He just couldn’t.

Later that night, Regina’s friends gathered in Barnes’s apartment—they needed to call Mark Hartwell. But no one had his number; no one knew him, really.

Regina’s friends ran back to her apartment, grabbed a black, plastic garbage bag she had used for a file cabinet, and ran back. Each quickly pulled a handful of papers out of the bag and sorted through them, looking for her father’s phone number.

They found it.

“You want to call him?” said Ynema Mangum, looking at Anita Morales.

“I can’t.”

Ynema, the young, American Indian woman, to whom Mark Hartwell had once commented about her heritage, phoned him.

Regina’s stepmother answered the phone.

“Mrs. Hartwell, this is Ynema Mangum.” She tried to sound calm. “Uh, I hate to tell you this, uh, but we believe Regina has died.”

Words of response couldn’t come out of Dian’s mouth. The thoughts were there, but not the words. She’d recently suffered an aneurysm. Finally, she relayed to Ynema that Mark Hartwell was at work and that she would go get him. “Ten minutes,” she chaotically uttered. “Call back, fifteen.”

 

 

Ynema Mangum called the Hartwell residence again and Mark Hartwell answered.

She told him what they thought had happened. Ynema, like Dian Hartwell, felt she wasn’t using the right words. “Regina, didn’t suffer any pain, but you do need to bring her dental records to Austin.”

He cried, and Regina’s friends wept with Mark Hartwell.

Carter conferred with Wardlow, Nelson, and Dukes, who were also monitoring both interviews.

 

 

Kim LeBlanc wrote out a statement. “Regina Hartwell and I had a relationship that began on July 4, 1994 until January 1, 1995.” She sweated. She ached and hurt. Her bones still rattled, and her heart still pounded, too hard. “May of 1995, I met Justin Thomas. He and I had a relationship since then. He knew a lot about things Regina had done and the role she played in my life and was very concerned about that.

“Then Thursday morning, late morning, he left to go to her apartment to take care of something that I asked him to do. I asked him to get her out of my life. I could not handle her being a part of my life anymore. I asked him to help me kill her. When he left to go over there, he did not say what he was going to do, but we had an understanding of what he was going to do.”

Kim made a pen change to the statement. She changed “kill her” to “help me out of this situation.” She signed the statement.

Three and a half to four hours after Kim had walked into interview room two, the video camera was shut off.