Night of the Full Moon
July 13, 2003, a quiet and hot Sunday night. Eleven o’clock news was over, but it was still hot enough for fans to be on. Sky clear. Moon brighter than the streetlights. Full moon—and the sky speckled with stars. To the east, the sky was black. To the west, the sky above the horizon only darkened to a dusky blue because of the lights from the city, so the stars were harder to see on that side. There was some light traffic on the nearby main thoroughfare, Five Mile Line Road. But things were quiet on Pennicott Circle. Although some of the residents of the street were still up watching television, most had retired for the night. After a summer weekend, folks were going to bed early, getting ready to return to work the following day. Some neighbors were away all together during July and August, living in summer homes.
The street of Pennicott Circle started and ended on the main road, forming a semicircle. All the action that night was in front of the two-story colonial-style white-with-black-trim clapboard house at the corner of Pennicott and Five Mile Line.
The front of the house faced north, toward the entrance to the tract. The east side faced Five Mile Line Road. The west side consisted of the garage and the driveway, which led to the road where Pennicott Circle had just about completed its lap. Behind the house was a large lawn with a well-tended garden. Since the backyard was at basement level, a wooden deck and stairs had been built so that one could get directly from the yard to the main floor through a set of sliding glass doors. On the other side of those doors was the kitchen. The backyard was enclosed on all sides by a six-foot-tall wooden-plank fence, contoured into a wavy curve at the top.
The front door had a small concrete stoop in front of it, but there was no sidewalk leading to that door. In times of mud or snow, it was bothersome to enter the house that way, so the garage functioned as the front door for much of the year—although not so much in July. There were pine trees along the front of the house for privacy. On either side of the front stoop was a row of flowers to decorate the base of the house.
It looked like an idyllic spot. From the outside there were small indications of neglect, however. The outside glass front door was still decorated with sprayed-on artificial snow left over from Christmas. There were finger smears going through it.
Neighbors had heard a commotion on the street earlier in the evening, a lot of yelling, but no one could really be sure from which house it had come. That commotion had died down hours before. Everything was quiet now.
Sometime between eleven and twelve o’clock that night, a deep pink Monte Carlo pulled off the main road onto the circle and pulled into the driveway of number 2. Driving the car was a tiny young female, eighty pounds tops, in her early twenties. She had dirty-blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. She was disheveled, not a relaxed muscle in her body, a rubber band stretched and ready to snap. Her eyes were wide and her face was bruised. The guy sitting next to her in the “shotgun seat” had recently smacked her around. He was in his early twenties. Recently out of the service on a medical discharge, he still had closely cropped hair. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a decal of a dragon ironed onto it under a leather jacket. Across his lap was a .22 Marlin-Glenfield rifle, with the initials CG burned into the stock with a wood-burning set. The rifle belonged to the young woman behind the wheel, a gift from her father.
All indications were that things were quiet inside the house. The children, two small boys, were upstairs in bed, asleep. The wife, as was her habit of late, had unfolded the downstairs couch and had gone to sleep in the living room. The husband was awake in bed, reading a Tom Clancy thriller.
Only seconds after midnight, 911 operator Jacqueline Sanabria took her first call of Monday, July 14. She said, “Nine-one-one center.”
Kevin Bryant: “Nine-one-one, there’s been a shooting and someone is, uh, been shot, been, my wife has been shot. I heard someone screaming. Jesus Christ, there’s blood all over the place.”
“Your wife has been shot?”
“Yes.”
“Who shot your wife?” Sanabria asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody . . . ,” Kevin replied.
Jacqueline shifted gears. Enough with who-did-it for the moment, establish the condition of the victim.
“Where is she shot?” she asked.
“It looks like the throat.”
“Does she have a pulse?” Sanabria asked.
“No, let me see. I do not feel one. Nope.”
There had been less-than-a-second pause between “Let me see” and “Nope,” as though there had not been time for the man to check anything.
Sanabria knew it was important to keep the man on the phone for as long as possible, so she kept asking questions. The man identified himself as Kevin C. Bryant. He was forty-five years old. The victim was his wife, Tabatha. The 911 operator was used to dealing with hysterics when reports of dead loved ones came in, but Jacqueline wasn’t having that problem with this caller. The husband was not hysterical. In fact, she thought, Kevin Bryant spoke in a strangely calm voice as he explained that he had been reading a Tom Clancy thriller upstairs when he heard noises coming from the living room.
His wife had shouted, “Oh, my God!”
Then, Bryant said, he heard gunshots, screaming, and a car outside pulling away. One of his sons was startled by the sounds and alerted his father that something was wrong. Bryant said he immediately went downstairs and found his wife dead on the pullout couch in the living room, where she had been sleeping.
“Is there anyone who might have wanted to hurt your wife?” Sanabria asked.
Kevin replied, “She has a boyfriend and a friend and we have been having some difficulty and trying to resolve the situation, and, I don’t know, she may have had a—”
Jacqueline Sanabria: “She had a boyfriend?”
Kevin: “Well, a friend. I don’t, I don’t . . .”
“Your wife had a friend?”
“Yes.”
“Was she having a problem with him?”
“I do not know. I didn’t inquire. I wanted to try to—”
“How old is your wife?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m sitting right on the bed. She was asleep on the couch. I was sleeping upstairs. Can you send an ambulance ?”
At one point during the conversation, Sanabria thought she heard the man on the other end yawn.
“Were there any weapons in the house?” she asked.
“Not that I know of,” Kevin answered.
“Stay on the line until emergency personnel arrive,” she instructed.
In other words, don’t run away.
CHAPTER 3
Three Gas Stations
The young woman with the dirty-blond ponytail had stayed behind the driver’s wheel while her boyfriend went into the house. She heard a sound—had it been the rifle, the same rifle that had always hurt her ears when she went target shooting?
The sound had not been loud, muffled by the thick walls of the big house, probably not loud enough to cause the neighbors to call the police. Shoot a gun off inside a mobile home and the whole court wakes up, although in some lots it is unlikely that anyone will call the cops.
She would say later that the sharp sound reminded her a bit of a champagne cork popping out of a bottle. Looking at her, you wouldn’t figure her for an expert in champagne corks—except for maybe those she had heard popping on TV.
Only a few minutes after she heard the sound,