Sometime during that same time period, either just before or just after the visit from Rocky, Kevin received a visit from Tim Hunter (pseudonym) and Jennifer Larch (pseudonym). He was probably a pimp and she a prostitute. According to Jennifer, she was an “escort” and her boyfriend a “bouncer.”
According to Jennifer, Kevin was a client. They’d met at group coke-and-sex scenes in local motels. She knew Kevin had a bad heart and had had a couple of open-heart surgeries. She’d seen the scars on his chest to prove it. Jennifer was impressed by how little Kevin was—just five foot two tops. One time early that summer, Jennifer was doing an outcall at Kevin’s office. He discussed with her, as he had done with Rocky, his plans to end violently his marital woes. She didn’t get it at first. Kevin, Jennifer said, told her he’d pay $500 up front for the purchase of a good piece, plus $4,500 later “when the job was done.” She asked him if he was planning to kill his wife. He said he was.
The discussion had taken place in Kevin’s office. While Kevin was making his pitch, he had gestured to the picture of his wife on the wall, the one he said needed taking care of. Jennifer took note of the woman in the photo, a pretty blonde. Jennifer didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about unloved wives—it was bad for business—but she focused on this unloved wife for a moment. This face registered: the wife whose sickly husband wanted to bump her off. Jennifer liked the cute blond woman’s face. She thought that Kevin’s wife looked like a nice girl.
Kevin, of course, had wanted sex, but Jennifer was no longer in the mood to become intimate with Kevin. She was creeped out by his deadly business proposition. Later, while Jennifer took a walk, Kevin had repeated his offer to the bouncer Tim. Jennifer’s boyfriend said sure, he’d buy a nice piece. Tim grabbed the $500; then he grabbed Jennifer. They split, never looking back. Kevin was $500 lighter and he hadn’t even gotten his rocks off. Did he think he was all set, that the deal was done?
CHAPTER 23
When the Party’s Over
As the first two weeks of July passed, Cyril Winebrenner and Cassidy Green were very strung out. Their coke habit was worse than ever. They were doing a lot of “partying all night.” The acceleration of their collective habit was causing a monetary crunch for the young couple, as evidenced by Tabby kicking them out for stealing money.
On the one hand, you have a pair of junkies panicky over drugs, selling coke—day and night—and snorting up the profits. They are desperate for blow, desperate for money, money to buy blow.
On the other hand, you have a middle-aged man, with a midlife crisis, who preferred to be in control, and he was losing control. Witnesses have suggested that, for Kevin, the question was no longer what to do, but how to do it. And how to get away with it.
By the middle of July, life was one never-ending party for Cyril and Cassy. It had been going on for days, drugs all night, make a run, sell some, blow some, have a beer, almost out of cigarettes, no toilet paper. The $5,000 offered to do the deed must have seemed like a million, almost enough to just stay high forever and ever....
Tabby somehow managed to get semen on her during the evening of July 13, but the DNA was never matched. (Although it may have been checked against that of Richard Oliver only.)
Assuming that the semen did not get on Tabby’s body postmortem, what was Tabby doing during the last hours of her life? Tabby and Kevin were sleeping apart. Her boyfriend hadn’t seen her in a couple of days.
CHAPTER 24
Car Trouble
In the early-morning hours of July 14, 2003, Cassidy Green, her heart pounding, drove the getaway car south toward West Bloomfield. But the going was not easy. She’d gathered up her nerves and had her earlier navigation troubles under control, but now the Monte Carlo was misbehaving.
As Cassidy would put it later, the car had been cranky in general, but now it was behaving downright sick. There were electrical problems. The battery was going dead and power was dwindling. Cassidy lost the ability to turn the headlights up to bright. They got the car home, but barely.
Cyril put his bloody T-shirt, jeans, and the down-filled leather jacket he had been wearing in a bag. He then asked his friends Emily Gibbs (pseudonym) and Vinny Bennett (pseudonym) if he could borrow their car. They said okay, and Cassidy and Cyril got into the friends’ car. Cyril brought the rifle and the bag of bloody clothes with him.
They drove south, away from West Bloomfield, and into the rural area known to the residents as the Township of Bloomfield—“township” to distinguish it from the village, where the population was dense, comparatively.
The first item to be chucked was the shirt with the dragon on it—the disposal of the bloody T-shirt defies explanation. Cassidy could have disposed of the shirt anywhere. Police were not chasing her. No one was following her.
The shirt could have been stuffed in a Dumpster, buried in a shallow grave in any secluded area, thrown into any of the many wooded areas in the township. Cassidy could have simply tied the dragon shirt inside a plastic bag and thrown it into a garbage can anyplace away from the crime scene.
If Cassidy had chosen to do any of those, Cyril Winebrenner’s bloody shirt probably would never have been seen again. Instead, she dumped the shirt on property belonging to a man named James Green. It was no coincidence that Cassidy and James had the same last name. James Green was Cassidy’s uncle.
Cassidy and Cyril drove down Stetson Road and pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road. One of them got out and walked into the woods a bit, leaving the shirt hanging from a tree limb alongside a path in the underbrush, which was mowed regularly. All in all, it was a lousy hiding place. But if ever there was a couple prone to bad decision-making, it was Cyril and Cassidy in the hours and days following Tabatha’s murder.
After getting rid of the shirt, they cruised to Wesley Road, where the leather jacket was hurled into a drainage tunnel. The final piece of clothing, the jeans, was chucked into the bushes along a stretch of Silvernail Road, which ran parallel to Stetson Road.
They then drove to a gas station to put gas in Emily and Vinny’s car. They pulled into a roadside bar and grill for a drink. It was the sort of place where most of the men in there would be wearing red-plaid hunting garb in a couple of months, whether they’d been hunting that day or not. And many of them had a cigarette lit all the time. The bar was typical of those in that neck of the woods. It was an area where the smoking-ban laws hadn’t really taken effect. In big cities across New York State, it was illegal to smoke in a public place, even a bar, and the sidewalks outside establishments were often filled with folks having a smoke before quaffing their next pint of lager. In the rural areas, like Bloomfield, the law was in effect but often wasn’t enforced. As Cassy and Cyril had their drinks, several people at the bar smoked cigarettes, and ashtrays were welcomingly in place for them.
The couple’s nerves were shot. They must have been jumpy as they smoked and drank, struggling to get a handle on it so they wouldn’t attract attention. After the drink, Cassy drove Cyril to his car, which was parked on Clay Street. He took the rifle and put it in his car. According to Cassidy, she never saw the rifle again, at least not as a free woman.
CHAPTER 25
Kevin’s Initial Interrogation
Whenever a wife is murdered and the husband reports the crime, it is good police work to eliminate the husband as a suspect first, and that was the intention here. When the first sheriff’s deputies and investigators arrived at the scene, the questioning of Kevin began immediately.
Interrogation began in the driveway in front of the Bryant home. Among those interviewing the grieving husband was Deputy Bridget Davis.
Kevin told his interrogators that he had been in bed upstairs at the time of the murder, but he had not been asleep. He had been reading a Tom Clancy thriller. He’d gotten a phone call