Truth Be Told Read online

  McGUNNIGAL:

  To be clear, I’m not the one who made that call. I can tell you that my boss thought the girls had been too scared to open up until their mother was there. They had been homeschooled, you know, and hadn’t had much experience with authority figures. He thought having their mother there made them feel safe enough to talk.

  POPPY:

  But you disagree?

  McGUNNIGAL:

  That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that Lanie Buhrman didn’t seem any calmer with her mother in the room. If anything, she seemed more agitated. But, well, there’s a reason why my boss still runs the force and I’m working in loss prevention these days.

  POPPY:

  Were you fired for disagreeing with your boss about Lanie Buhrman?

  McGUNNIGAL:

  I’m not here to talk about myself. All I’m saying is that, in my opinion, she didn’t seem that much more comfortable with her mother in the room. But who knows what that means—her mom was kind of spooky, you know? Even before she joined that cult. Anyway, the fact is that Lanie Buhrman described the murder scene exactly, right down to the place that the shooter must have been standing. There’s no way she could have gotten all that right if she’d been upstairs the whole time. Her first statement had to be a lie.

  So anyway, I sent a pair of officers next door to the Cave house. Melanie Cave was on her front porch—she had been watching the whole investigation from there—and she wouldn’t let the officers inside, arguing that Warren was asleep and couldn’t tell them anything. When they told her they were there to arrest her son, she became notably distressed.

  POPPY:

  Do you believe Melanie Cave purposefully lied about Warren’s whereabouts?

  McGUNNIGAL:

  No, I think she truly believed her son was upstairs. Now, on the other hand, she was purposefully evasive about the whereabouts of her husband. She kept saying that he was “out,” and refusing to elaborate. At the time, we thought something might have been fishy there, but we later learned it was only a marital spat.

  Besides, if Melanie knew Warren wasn’t upstairs, I don’t think she would have let in the officers without a warrant. But she eventually did and directed them to his bedroom. As you know, he wasn’t there. The officers switched into high alert, assuming Warren to be armed and dangerous, and quickly searched the rest of the house. We were starting a neighborhood search when Warren rode his bicycle up the driveway, soaking wet. He immediately took a confrontational attitude with the officers, refusing to tell them where he’d been and calling them pigs and worse. He was arrested under suspicion in the death of Chuck Buhrman, and charged with resisting arrest.

  Warren readily admits that he behaved badly that night, and he knows that he did himself no favors by sparring with police officers. I asked Warren what was going through his head.

  POPPY:

  Many people have found your behavior the night Chuck Buhrman died to be suspicious. Can you tell me what you were thinking?

  WARREN:

  I get why people think I acted guilty. I’m certainly not proud of my behavior that night. But you have to remember that I was a seventeen-year-old anarchist who hated the police on principle. Also, I had spent most of that night robo-tripping in the cemetery.

  POPPY:

  Robo-tripping?

  WARREN:

  Yeah. You know, when you drink a bunch of cough syrup to get high?

  POPPY:

  That’s a thing?

  WARREN:

  Yeah. But it’s dumb. Don’t do it.

  POPPY:

  I won’t. So, on the night Chuck Buhrman was murdered, you have no alibi because you were drinking cough syrup alone in a cemetery?

  WARREN:

  Yeah.

  POPPY:

  Why a cemetery?

  WARREN:

  I dunno. It seems really disrespectful now, but back then it was something I liked to do. See, an overdose of cough syrup makes you hallucinate. And there’s nothing trippier than hallucinating in a cemetery. At least, that’s what I thought back then.

  You don’t know how many times I’ve wished I was doing something else that night. I should’ve just stayed home, but even if I had been out doing something dumb, I should have been doing it somewhere where someone else would see me. But you never think about that kind of stuff—needing an alibi, I mean—before you’re arrested.

  POPPY:

  But you did see someone else that night, right?

  WARREN:

  Well, yeah. Not in the cemetery. I was alone there. But on my way home I cut through Lincoln Park, and as I rode past that part with the picnic tables, someone threw a beer can at me. I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating or not, so I stopped. And then I realized some kids were sitting on one of the picnic tables, and they were definitely throwing beer cans at me. When one of them threw a glass bottle, I lost it and charged them. I don’t really remember what happened, but some of these guys dragged me down to the lake—it’s just a couple of feet from the picnic tables, you know—and pushed me under. They were holding me down, and I really thought I was going to die. I must have passed out for a minute or two, because the next thing I knew I was laying on my side next to the water and they were gone.

  POPPY:

  And you have no idea who they were?

  WARREN:

  No. And I’ve done everything I can to find them. I thought they looked about my age, so my attorney brought me yearbooks from Elm Park and nearby towns. But it was dark and I was high that night, and I just couldn’t be certain. I thought I might have recognized a couple of guys, but nothing ever came of it.

  This was the first I’d heard of Warren potentially identifying some alibi witnesses, and I spoke with Claire Armstrong, Warren’s then attorney, about this.

  ARMSTRONG:

  It would’ve been a huge help if Warren could have identified the individuals who threw him in the lake. If we could have convinced them to testify, we could’ve placed Warren at least a mile away from the crime scene. Unfortunately, he was never certain about who he’d seen. He indicated that some faces looked familiar, but those individuals denied involvement. Complicating matters, they were “good kids”—you know, student council, sports, straight-As. A jury would never believe Warren over them, and without their cooperation, they were useless. Besides, Warren himself wasn’t even sure that it had been them. I ran a couple of ads in the local paper, imploring anyone who knew anything to come forward, but I didn’t get any leads.

  I would have thought Warren being drenched with lake water would lend credence to his story and suggest he was innocent, but the opposite proved true. Police theorized Warren intentionally entered the lake in order to destroy evidence, like gunpowder residue and any other trace bits of evidence that might have connected him to the Buhrman house. Even assuming that’s true, wouldn’t blood be the larger problem? Could lake water really clean up blood so effectively? I pressed former detective McGunnigal for answers.

  POPPY:

  What about the blood? How could Warren Cave shoot Chuck Buhrman in the back of the head at point-blank range and not get at least sprayed with blood? Lake water wouldn’t wash that from his shirt, so how did you explain finding not a spot of blood on his clothing?

  McGUNNIGAL:

  The theory has always been that Warren Cave wore something over his clothing. Outerwear of some sort, or perhaps even plastic. We believe this outer layer ended up at the bottom of the lake—along with the gun.

  That’s right, not only is there no smoking gun in the Buhrman case, there’s no gun at all. No murder weapon was recovered from the scene, nor have the police been able to locate it in the intervening thirteen years. Warren Cave’s bedroom was searched the night of the murder, and the rest of the Cave house was searched the following day. The cemetery and the park were also searched, and the lake was dragged, all without success.

  POPPY:

  If you dragged the lake and didn’t find the g
un, why do you think it’s down there?

  McGUNNIGAL:

  Dragging a lake is an imperfect procedure, especially for a smaller object like a gun. I wasn’t surprised we didn’t find it.

  POPPY:

  It didn’t concern you that you never found the murder weapon?

  McGUNNIGAL:

  We didn’t need it to make a case. We had his fingerprints at the crime scene, and the Buhrman girl saw him do it.

  Oh yes, the fingerprints. If Lanie’s testimony was what put Warren in a jail cell, the discovery of his fingerprints in the Buhrman home—and the way he lied about it—was what padlocked him inside. Warren initially insisted that he had never been inside the Buhrman home. Later, after his attorney had been hired and he had been presented with the indisputable fact that his fingerprints placed him inside the house, Warren changed his story.

  WARREN:

  I broke in. It was a Wednesday afternoon, just a few days before Mr. Buhrman died. I’d skipped school and was hanging around in my bedroom when I noticed Mrs. Buhrman leaving the house with the twins. She never really went out because, you know, she was kind of not right in the head. I’d heard my mom talking on the phone about how crazy she was, and I figured that meant she probably had some pretty good drugs over there. So when I saw her leave, I just went. Got the key out of the hiding spot—they used one of those fake rocks, like everyone else—and went inside. She had some Xanax, so I took that and some cash.

  Admitting to burglarizing the victim’s home is not an admirable defense, but I believe it’s an honest one. The State’s interpretation of the fingerprint evidence has always failed to fully account for the fact that Warren’s fingerprints were not just in the kitchen—they were on both floors of the house, including the upstairs bathroom and master bedroom. If the fingerprints were left in commission of the murder, what was Warren doing upstairs? How did he even get up there? I’ve been in the Buhrmans’ former home, and take it from me, it’s not a home with a lot of hallways and dark corners. More importantly, there’s only one staircase. While it’s theoretically possible Warren could have snuck upstairs undetected and back down again without alerting Chuck Buhrman to his presence, it’s unlikely. At the end of the day, Warren’s problem might have been that he was too good a thief: no one noticed the house had been burglarized, and no one believed him after the fact.

  With all this discussion of where Warren’s fingerprints were, I think it’s only appropriate to mention where they weren’t: on the bullet embedded in the wall.

  The State was untroubled by this. Warren wore gloves, they suggested—in my opinion, an unlikely scenario given that his fingerprints were found in many other places—or someone else loaded the gun. Wait a second, Poppy, you say. Someone else? Did Warren Cave have an accomplice? While it’s certainly a theory that Warren might’ve had an accomplice, the State’s implication has always been more shocking: the State believes that Chuck Buhrman loaded his own gun.

  Here’s the thing: Chuck owned a .38 caliber handgun, and that gun is still missing to this day. Erin told police her husband had purchased the gun for her parents after a break-in on their farm and the gun was only registered in Chuck’s name through a bureaucratic error. She stated she was unsure what happened to the gun after her parents’ deaths in 2000, but she claimed to have never seen the gun in her home.

  I’m not sure what—if anything—this diversion about a weapon that may or may not have belonged to Chuck means to the larger narrative. To those who are convinced that Warren Cave is guilty, it’s a handy explanation for how he got his minor hands on a gun: he stole it from his intended victim, of course. They assume the gun had been passed back to Chuck after Erin’s parents’ deaths—or that the gun had never actually changed hands in the first place—and that Warren exploited that. But how likely is that scenario, really? Likely enough, it seems, for a jury.

  In the end, the physical evidence was shaky and circumstantial, and the foundation of the State’s case against Warren Cave was the testimony of the victim’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who had changed her story twice in the first thirty minutes that she spoke with police. Was she just traumatized, as the State maintained at trial? Or was she telling a calculated lie?

  For Melanie and Warren Cave, it doesn’t matter.

  MELANIE:

  All we want is the truth. Lanie, if you’re listening, I want you to know that we forgive you. I give you my word that neither my son nor I will pursue any charges or seek civil penalties against you. We just want you to tell the truth. We just want Warren to be free.

  chapter 2

  It was nearly five in the morning by the time I finished listening to the second episode, and I didn’t think I would be able to sleep even if I wanted to. My head felt full of static, and beneath that was an insistent drumbeat of discontent. If the fingerprints were left in commission of the murder, what was Warren doing upstairs?

  Had Warren been upstairs that night? Could he have been standing in the hallway, just yards away from where I slept, gun in hand? I shivered. For that to be true, he must have been exceptionally quiet to avoid detection by not only my father but also my sister, who had been awake.

  But if he hadn’t left the fingerprints that night, he must have left them another time. Warren was right about how infrequently my mother left the house then; I could easily recall the afternoon he described. We had gone to the mall to pick out a gift for Aunt A’s birthday. I had a vague memory of Mom digging through drawers that night, muttering to herself. I asked what she was doing, and she mumbled something about losing her mind and misplacing things, or was it vice versa? Our mother was often absentminded about her belongings; I didn’t place any significance on it at the time. But what if she was looking for the medication or cash that Warren stole? And if he left the fingerprints on the second level days before the murder, did it stand to reason that he left the fingerprints downstairs then, too?

  Stop it, I ordered myself. It didn’t matter when the fingerprints were left. Maybe he left more the night he killed my father, or maybe that night he decided to wear gloves. It was just a diversion, a distraction from the real evidence: Lanie saw him pull the trigger.

  • • •

  Once I was aware of Reconsidered, I saw it everywhere. Anyone wearing headphones became a potential (or, depending on the level of my anxiety at that moment, probable) listener; anyone uttering anything that sounded even vaguely like Buhrman gave me pause. On line at Trader Joe’s, I thought I heard someone say Reconsidered and tensed. But a fearful glance over my shoulder revealed the speaker’s companion shaking her head vehemently and saying, “Stop telling me to reconsider. Your roommate’s a barbarian and I’m not setting him up with Denise.”

  Deep down, I knew the extent of my paranoia was unwarranted, but I was unable to shake the persistent sensation that people were staring at me. I stopped leaving my apartment for any reason other than to go to work. I ordered all my meals in, and when I ran out of toilet paper, I ordered that in, too, because in the modern era you could order in anything. I stopped sleeping. I sat up all night, reading everything I could find about Poppy Parnell and her podcast.

  Sometimes I wondered what would happen when Caleb returned from Africa and heard about Reconsidered. Sometimes I was terrified he had already heard about it, that he had put the pieces together and understood that I had lied about my past, and that he was never coming back to me. We had talked only once since I first heard about the podcast, and that call had been an unsatisfying five-minute conversation in which our words echoed back at us and the delay was so severe it was almost comical. Certainly not the right moment to mention that there was a hot new podcast reexamining your father’s murder.

  But thinking about Caleb made my heart hurt even more violently than thinking about my father, and so I pushed those concerns from my mind. I would cross that bridge when I came to it. For the time being, there was the podcast to think about.

  • • •

  By Friday af
ternoon, I had managed only a few hours of intermittent sleep over the last two days, and the demarcation between asleep and awake had blurred until the only state of consciousness I could muster was a lethargic near-trance. I was attempting to shelve a new shipment of books at work, but my brain was so sluggish that I stared at a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude for a full five minutes, unsure how to alphabetize Gabriel García Márquez.

  Clara watched my pitiful progress for a minute before gently taking the book from my hands and saying, “You okay, Jo? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re looking kind of rough.”

  “I haven’t really been sleeping,” I admitted, blinking.

  “Do you want to, like, run to Starbucks or something? I can cover for you, no problem. Some coffee might do you good.”

  “Thank you,” I managed, my throat closing. “But I’m going to be all right.”

  • • •

  Whether I was actually going to be all right remained to be seen. The podcast was frighteningly pervasive, even infiltrating the aisles of the bookstore, a space usually reserved for arguing whether commercial success equated literary achievement and debating whether Hemingway was a misogynist or a misanthrope. If these lit snobs were bickering about something they heard on the internet rather than playing chicken with arcane literary references, I felt doomed.

  On my walk home, my body vibrated with lack of sleep and itchy panic. I kept my head down, certain that everyone I passed had been listening to Poppy’s drivel and now knew everything about my painful past. Years ago I had changed my name legally, officially leaving Josephine Buhrman behind, but that was a mere technicality that would provide little comfort once podcast fans began running image searches. Now that their interest had been piqued by my father’s face on the Reconsidered website, how long would it be until they sought out images of all of us? What if they had started already? Had I been naïve to convince myself that a podcast was nothing more than modern radio, just words floating through the air? It existed on the internet, alongside Google images, just waiting for groups of dedicated web sleuths.