Kim Kepler jokes that she puts on all of the weight that her mother takes off. While it’s true that thirty-year-old Kim is one inch shorter and thirty pounds heavier than her mother, she looks great. With her wide brown eyes—like her father’s, she says—and her dark brown hair curled around her face, she is a dead ringer for the former movie star and U.S. diplomat, Shirley Temple. She also has the same intelligent look in her eyes that Katherine has, and the same merry lift to her frequent smile. There’s definitely an intensity about her, too, that reminds the rest of the family of Katherine. Both of them appear nice, even soft, but give them some purpose to hold to—such as doing everything you can to look exactly the same for twenty-two years!—and you soon sense the determination within. “A goer and a doer” is how Kim, known as Kimmie to her family, describes herself, and everyone who knows her seems to agree with that assessment. When Kimmie Kepler’s around, things get done.
Kim dresses beautifully—lovely suits and blouses every day to work—and carries herself with a head-high dignity that would put a diplomat to shame. Her emotions, nonetheless, are almost always close to the surface.
“I cry at movies,” she says. “But I’ll also laugh at any excuse.”
Likable is the word to use in summing up Kimmie Kepler’s appearance to other people. That, along with sincere. And responsible. And brave.
“Oh, I’m just a Girl Scout at heart,” she says, with a laugh. “Just don’t ask me to light a fire by rubbing sticks together.”
That would seem a highly impractical request to Kim, who always carries a little Swiss Army knife and a packet of matches in her purse, because you never know what you might need or be called upon to use in the campground of life.
And don’t ask her to talk about her father, either.
“Dad left,” she says succinctly.
They are two little words of one syllable each, spoken with clipped efficiency. Dad left.
Her mother doesn’t say much more on the subject, adding only a few extra, careful, one-syllable words. “It was too hard for him,” Katherine says, if asked . . . why.
Her other remaining children, Kim’s older brother and younger sister, are not so reticent on the subject.
“When Johnnie disappeared, it destroyed our family at the time,” says Christie Kepler Warneke, herself now the mother of three. At twenty-five, she’s the baby of the Kepler family. “I guess you could say we’ve rebuilt it, Mom, Kimmie, Cal, and me, but it took a long time and we had to do it without Dad.”
So, where is Frederick James Kepler, now sixty-three years old?
Where did he go?
Why did he leave them?”
“I used to fantasize,” says Christie, “that Dad took Johnnie. That this was just a custody case, where Mom and Dad couldn’t get along and so he left and took one of the boys with him.”
For years, little Christie had herself convinced of that, that Johnnie was safe and loved somewhere with Daddy. It didn’t keep her from missing her father desperately, but it kept her fear down quite a bit. A psychologist would probably call it a “coping mechanism.” And quite an effective one, at that.
“If my brother was with my father, then the world wasn’t such a scary place,” Christie says, remembering the hopeful, impossible dream of her childhood. “If Dad took him, then the worst that could happen was that he was fine—even if he missed us—and we’d probably get to see them both again someday. And the world wasn’t full of evil cruel strangers who could snatch me and take me away forever.”
The factual problem with that clever theory, unfortunately, was that her brother disappeared in 1976 and her dad left home in 1979.
To this day, Christie still has a favorite fantasy.
In the current one, the reason Fred Kepler left in 1979 was to spend his life, if need be, searching for his lost son.
“It could be true,” she says, defensively, heatedly, although everybody else in her family scoffs at her ideas. “I mean, it could! It’s not like Dad ever told us exactly why he left us!”
Her mother’s eyes mist over when she hears that. Fred’s leaving may not have been accompanied by a torrent of explanatory words or even letters after the fact, but it was not exactly mysterious either. At least, it wasn’t a mystery to his wife. She says that Fred withdrew more and more from interactions with her and the children he had left. He refused counseling. He dropped out of their church. Finally, he quit his job and began drinking heavily nearly every day with people Katherine didn’t know, in parts of town she’d never been.
Then he asked for a divorce. Nothing else. No division of property, no custody, no visitation rights, nothing but the divorce. She gave it to him without contest. By then, she was fed up with him, he was “more trouble than he was worth,” as his remaining son now describes him.
“Dad was a mess after Johnnie left,” says Calvin, who goes by Cal. “I guess anybody would be, but he never was a particularly strong character. Kind of a weak man, I guess. Mom has always been our pillar of strength.”
He thinks that over, this thirty-four-year-old, handsome man whose little brother was his mirror image. One wonders, seeing Cal now, if—all things being different—the two of them might have grown up to look nearly like twins. Having thought over his last words, which he seems to recognize as a cliché, a superficial response, Cal corrects himself, with a slight air of surprise. “Or, maybe Kimmie was. I don’t want to take anything away from Mom, but maybe it was all she could do to keep herself standing. Kim kept the rest of us going, I’d have to say.”
Cal is known for being plainspoken. “Rude,” his youngest sister calls it; “blunt,” his other sister says. “Truthful,” is what he says he always aims to be. He follows up many of his statements with the phrase “I’d have to say.”
Fred Kepler never again surfaced in their lives, not even during all of the publicity attendant to their reunion with John/Ray. Searches were newly made for him. Nothing was found, and nothing in the media brought him forth again.
“He could be dead,” his firstborn son says, and then Cal adds firmly, “That’s how I think of him. Of both of them. Those people I knew—my little brother and my dad—they’re dead. They died a long time ago. I’ll never get them back again. I’ve adjusted. That’s how I see it.”
And that’s why Cal refused to go along with his mother’s and his sisters’ idea to fly to Bahia Beach to try to get in to see “Raymond Raintree” once he was captured, and in custody again.
“That’s not my brother,” he says, almost angrily. “I don’t want anything to do with that person, and he doesn’t have any claims on me. I have to say I’ll be ashamed if it turns out we actually share the same blood.”
Kim tried to change Cal’s mind about it, but their mother spoke up, saying, “Let Cal be, Kim. Let it be.”
People, Katherine Kepler believes, have different limits, and we reach those limits at different times from one another. “Maybe it’s easier,” she says, “for a mother to love all of her children, exactly as they are, than for them to love each other.”
They were four siblings, on the eve of possible reunion. And what were they . . . “exactly” . . . at that moment? Well, Kim was excited, hopeful, tearful, full of nervous energy to go there and meet him and help him. Christie was apprehensive of the reunion, scared of what she’d heard about her brother, and she was having nightmares. Cal was embarrassed and angry and rejecting. And John was . . . evil. At least, that’s how Katherine saw her kids, at that moment. “You have the children you have,” she says, simply, “not necessarily the ones you thought you were going to have. You’ve just got to accept them as they really are, and love them any way you can.”
It was a noble aim, born of never-flagging love and hope, and it would prove extremely difficult to achieve, for how can even the most loving, longing mother accept the Devil as her child?
7
Raymond
On my way to the Bahia Beach airport, I stop at the home of Susan and An
thony McCullen. I don’t want to forget them or their daughter in my pursuit of this story. Sure, I may be on my way to meet Ray’s mother, but what about Natty’s mom? I’m worried about how the McCullens are enduring this second search for her killer.
Tony opens the door to me, and says, “Why the hell didn’t she kill him, Marie?”
“It sure would have made things easier,” I agree. “How are you, Tony? How’s Susan?”
“Come on in.” He steps aside so I can enter the foyer of their beautiful, and now tragic home.
“I don’t want to bother you, Tony. I just came by to say hello.”
“Susan!” He yells toward the back of the house. “It’s Marie Lightfoot!”
In a moment, Susan McCullen rushes toward us, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “I’ll be so glad when he’s dead,” are her first words, which are identical to what I’ve heard the families of other victims say. “It’s unbearable to think of him walking around out there like any other person. I can’t stand it if I had to think of him . . . alive . . . for the rest of my life.”
“The only thing that would make me happier,” Tony chimes in, “would be to kill him myself.” He is dressed in black boxer swimming trunks that hang loosely on his six-foot frame, which has visibly dropped quite a few pounds over the past few harrowing months. It is no longer so easy for people to look at him and think, “ex-fighter.” But at the moment he says that, I think that he looks pugilistic right down to the balled fists at his sides. “They oughta give us families the choice. Let us flip the switch. Or drop the pellet.”
“Or inject,” Susan says fiercely. “I’d do that.”
“You would?” I ask her.
Natalie’s mother nods her head until her hair bounces. When I saw Susan in the courtroom hallway on the first day of the trial, I thought the bereaved young mother looked as pretty as the beauty queen she used to be. She has blue eyes, like Natalie, and streaked blond over brown hair, cut blunt at the shoulders and worn with bangs just like her daughter. Back then, I thought Susan was already way too thin for good health; since then, grief has wasted her away. Now it appears that the only thing that keeps her standing is fury, and I wonder how long that will last. Until Ray is dead? If I were to make a prediction based on the experience of other families I’ve known, Susan will feel a little relief at Ray’s death, and then she’ll collapse.
And only then may come the long, long healing.
“You bet I would,” Susan answers me while Tony stands, swaying like an old fighter, exhausted but ready to fight somebody. “In a minute. Let me fill the syringe. Show me the vein to hit.” She makes a furious jabbing motion with her right hand, as if poking a needle into Ray Raintree. Her lips thin and tighten into a grimace as she does it.
With a shock, I realize that Susan is not beautiful anymore. Her skin is grayish now, like a cancer victim, and her complexion is blemished. Every day she went to the courthouse her physical appearance seemed to slip a little more, until it was obvious to anyone who was looking at her daily. And everyone was. Not just looking, either, but staring. They were staring discreetly—the kind ones—but all eyes were on “the parents,” all the same.
Susan and Tony experience those stares as accusing.
To Susan, those staring eyes say: There she is, the mother who wasn’t watching her child. And to Tony, they shout: There he is, the father who didn’t lock the back door before he went to bed.
I believe that most of the people who look at Susan and Anthony are feeling horror and sympathy. There they are, the ones whose little girl got killed. Oh, poor things! That’s what they say in quiet, sympathetic tones behind the parents’ backs. There is a universe of sympathy available to Natalie’s parents, but the young couple is having a hard time believing it, or accepting it, because their own sense of guilt is so enormous. They simply can’t believe that other people don’t hate them as much as they hate themselves.
Tony is constantly in agony, thinking, Why didn’t I lock the door!
And Susan’s obsession is, I should have known something was wrong, I should have dreamed it, or heard a sound when she went outside, I should have known and gone to check on her! I’m her mother, I should have known!
There is no talking them out of it, either.
We all hope that time persuades them otherwise.
I’ve seen Natalie’s inflatable life preserver ring still floating in their swimming pool. I know that Susan swims slow laps, clinging to it and crying. It breaks people’s hearts to see the child’s belongings still scattered around the house all those months later. But Susan gets furious if anybody suggests moving them out of sight, or giving them away.
“You’d feel better,” people tell her.
“I don’t want to feel better!” she explodes at them.
The McCullens cling to their anger and their guilt as hard as Susan clings to the plastic life ring in the swimming pool.
“We’ve got the TV on,” Tony tells me. “We’re always waiting for the bulletin, to tell us they’ve caught him. I’m hoping he bleeds to death on the run. Either that, or when they find him, he tries to get away and they shoot him, and they do a better job of it than the judge did. I don’t think I can ever sleep again until I know the bastard’s dead.”
Suddenly I feel overwhelmed in that small space with them.
“Where are the twins?” I inquire.
Susan looks puzzled, as if she has temporarily forgotten she has other children. Then she says, almost dismissively, “We took them over to a neighbor’s house, to spend the night with their kids.”
My heart sinks. I’ve seen this happen before: parents who lose one child to murder becoming so obsessed by grief and revenge that they can barely recognize the existence, much less meet the needs, of their other children. Equally painful is the opposite reaction, when grieving parents cling to their remaining children like fallen climbers to a lifeline. Either way, it’s hell for the surviving children.
“Have dinner with us, Marie?”
“Yeah, come on,” Tony echoes. “We need to talk to you anyway.”
“Thanks, but I’ve got a plane to catch. I just wanted to tell you I was thinking about you. What did you want to talk to me about? Can it wait? I could call you from where I’m going.”
The couple exchange glances. Suddenly, I feel wary.
“We don’t want to be in your book,” Tony says, gruffly.
The marble under my feet starts to crack.
“It’s nothing against you,” Susan assures me.
“We read those pages you sent us, and we just decided we don’t want to be in the book,” Tony says. Although most journalists never let the subjects of their articles read them before publication, I do, especially where the victim’s family is concerned. I don’t want to hurt them, and I do want to get things right. I had sent to the McCullens the sections of my manuscript that are written specifically about Natty and them.
It’s a gamble, and this is the risk I take.
“Why?” I ask, through numb lips.
“It’s all that stuff about this house,” Tony says, looking embarrassed but obstinate. “I don’t want people knowing all that, how it’s free and all. It makes us look like moochers.”
“I don’t think it does,” I say.
“All that stuff about spending too much money,” Susan says. “I don’t want people reading all that about us. You understand, don’t you, Marie?”
I want to say to them, Do you understand that I don’t need your permission for any of my book? Do you get it that you’re news? I can write anything I want to as long as it’s true, and I can prove it? But I can’t say that to these suffering people, no way.
“I do understand,” I say, because I certainly do understand the concept of having second thoughts about things. If they only realized to what lengths I have gone to protect them, even as it is written now! But I have to let it go. Later, I’ll try to persuade them, or maybe I can rewrite those scenes in a way that appeases them
without sacrificing my own integrity. I want and need their cooperation. Without it, the promotion of the book could be a disaster. I can just see the headlines and interviews: “Victim’s Family Sues Writer.” And there would be Susan on television, saying, “We pleaded with her not to write it.”
Tony looks marginally more relaxed now.
“You take care of yourselves,” I tell them as I start to leave.
Susan replies bitterly, “Why should we?”
“Because of the boys!” I urge her.
She gives me a quick hug. “Thank you for being so nice to us.”
Naturally, I feel like the world’s biggest hypocrite as I get back into my car, take out a pen and writing pad, and begin to scribble notes. I will change their minds about those scenes in the book. I have to, that’s all there is to it. But what will they say if it turns out that the man who murdered their child was himself abducted when he was Natty’s age? Will they hate him any less? I recall Franklin’s words, and I doubt it. Ray will still be the killer, and Natty would still be dead. With a sigh for the McCullen family and every family like them I have ever known, I drive on to catch my flight to Kansas.
Once in the air, I accept a cup of coffee from the flight attendant, and think about the truths I know, but won’t publish, about the death of Natalie Mae McCullen.
Some things I will never tell anybody.
The way I wrote the story of how Tony McCullen went to bed the night his daughter died wasn’t quite the way it happened. I won’t be telling my readers the real reason why he didn’t even think of looking in on his children. And I’m not about to divulge the probable truth about why Natalie woke up.
Tony didn’t check on the kids, because he was horny.
“I don’t know,” he told me, trying to explain something that probably didn’t require explaining. This is why ordinary people have to be protected by the journalists who “cover” them; they don’t have any experience being “news,” and they don’t begin to understand how vulnerable they are to being quoted correctly, but embarrassingly. If they’re plainspoken people like Tony and Susan, they’re likely to blurt out truths they would never want millions of people to read. “It had been—God—I’ll bet a week since Susan and I had done it. One thing and another, either the kids interrupted us, or one or the other of us was too tired, or some damn thing. And I was watching Leno, but he had a hog caller on, so I was switching over to HBO, and they were showing these episodes from foreign sex shows. French. English. I can’t remember what all, but I remember there was even one from some Arab country, if you can believe that. All it was, was a belly dancer though.