Faces of Evil Read online

  Another summer crawled past.

  Heidi wanted to scream, tear her hair out, march down to the police department and grab somebody by the lapels, maybe slap him around a little.

  Her beloved sister was dead and buried, her family devastated and a killer running around loose…and all along, Heidi felt as if she was trapped in a soundproof room, a room with a big window where, on the other side, she could see police officers laughing and talking, and, even though she screamed and screamed as loud as she could, she felt no one could hear.

  No one was listening.

  But what Heidi didn’t know was that on the other side of that imaginary window, a young cop was sitting over in the corner, watching.

  He saw her.

  And he decided to listen.

  It wasn’t just Heidi Guzman that got Detective T. Walton’s attention. He’d long been doing some pestering of his own, to the supervisor of investigations and to anyone else who would listen.

  “I don’t think Robby Nachlinger did it,” he insisted. “We’ve got witnesses. Jordan Rinehart is a sensible little girl. She’d sure as hell know the difference between her own uncle and a stranger.”

  It wasn’t proof positive for T. that Nachlinger had incriminated himself with the comments about his sexual fantasies or that he had failed a polygraph.

  “The way I saw it,” he said later, “to someone who was raised in a strict religious home, well, just the thought of being attracted to his own sister-in-law would make him feel guilty. I think the poor guy was just so ashamed of himself for even having those feelings that he just stepped all over his tongue.”

  T. agreed with what Heidi had so frequently pointed out, that Robby Nachlinger was so innocent that he did spill his guts like a fool to the police.

  After all, if he truly was guilty of this horrific crime, wouldn’t he at least have been a little bit, well, cagier? Wouldn’t he have known better than to discuss his sexual problems with the cops during a freakin’ murder investigation?

  “I kept bothering the supervisor about the case so much that, one day, he said to me, ‘Fine, T. You think it’s not Nachlinger? Then PROVE it’s not him.’”

  This was all T. needed to hear. It meant he could paw through files and reports and basically, reinvestigate the case.

  But it wasn’t easy.

  “It was like, you’re rowin’ up a river on a raft, right?” he said later in his rapid-fire way, “and you got one oar and, up on the riverbank, people are throwin’ boulders at you.”

  The supervisor of investigations, also weary of hearing from Heidi Guzman, told T., “You deal with her.”

  And so he did.

  “That first meeting, she was kind of wary of me,” he said later. “By then, she was as suspicious of me for being a cop as the cops were of her brother-in-law. It took a little talkin’ for her to accept the fact that I was not only startin’ fresh, but that I didn’t think Robby did it, either.”

  From that point on, the blonde activist and the rookie detective became fast friends. It was good that they had each other, too, because the road they were traveling would turn out to be so much more winding, rocky and lengthy than either of them could have imagined.

  Laughing, he relayed to me when we spoke how Heidi read books such as FBI profiler John Douglas’s Mindhunter.

  “She called me up, and she said, ‘Have you read this book?’ And she gave it to me and I read the damn thing.” In that particular book, Douglas had commented that killers sometimes visit the gravesites of their victims on the anniversaries of their deaths.

  “So there I was,” he said, chuckling, “dressed like a landscape maintenance guy, watching her grave on the first anniversary, but nobody showed up except family.”

  Another summer passed into another autumn. Detective Walton began the weary task of re-interviewing everyone associated with the case, but in October, he would have to drop everything—at least for the time being—for another case.

  In October, the Rinehart/Guzman family’s worst fear was realized.

  There was a second murder.

  The victim this time, Jonetta McKown, was not a beautiful, middle-class housewife and mother. She was, in fact, a prostitute.

  That did not mean she was not loved.

  On the evening of September 16, Jonetta McKown disappeared.

  The last person to have seen Jonetta was a friend of hers who watched her being driven away into the night by a man in a maroon Chrysler. For some reason, even though Jonetta often left with johns in cars, her friend was worried about this one. Maybe it was his appearance or the way he acted, but for whatever reason, the friend jotted down the license plate number of the car.

  And then Jonetta disappeared.

  When a couple of days had gone by without a word from Jonetta, her frantic friend called the Wichita police. They traced the license plate to a man by the name of Matthew Murphy.

  Matthew Murphy lived in Newton. This is how the case came across the desk of Detective T. Walton.

  Like Jonetta’s friend, T. had a bad feeling about this case. For one thing, Matthew Murphy was already on parole. For another, he and the Wichita detectives figured out pretty quick that Matthew Murphy was not the guy’s real name.

  His real name was Chester Higginbotham.

  Murphy’s wife was not only dumbstruck by the sudden presence of police at her home, but she was stunned to learn that she was not really married to Matthew Murphy. She’d had no idea that “Matthew Murphy” was a pseudonym.

  Deeply disturbed and more than a little distraught, the woman told T. that when her husband hadn’t come home one night a few days before, she had gone to look for him.

  She found him parked in front of his storage building, sitting in his car, and next to him was a woman who appeared to be slumped over, like she was asleep.

  T. and the other detectives exchanged glances. Storage building?

  They got a search warrant for the storage building.

  Among other items in the crowded storage building, searchers came across some black plastic ties, yellow rope, green duct tape with a few stray hairs clinging to it and a white button.

  Next, T. served a search warrant on Higginbotham’s house and threw Higginbotham in jail on a parole violation—keeping company with prostitutes, which was forbidden under his parole terms.

  By this time, T. was convinced that Jonetta McKown was dead. Detectives sent out a search team, looking for what they believed was most likely a body. There was a creek near the storage building. They drained it.

  Nothing. Several weeks passed. Still nothing.

  Then, on October 11, 1995, a county road worker was cutting the grass alongside a county road outside Walton, Kansas—about twenty-five miles from Newton.

  And he found Jonetta McKown.

  “I drove out,” said T., “and as soon as I saw the body, I knew she had been killed by the same person who’d killed Sarah Rinehart.”

  Jonetta McKown was gagged. Green duct tape covered both her mouth and nose.

  And her ankles and wrists were tied together. Hog-tied, just like Sarah Rinehart.

  Further investigation confirmed that the button found in the storage building belonging to Chester Higginbotham, a.k.a. Matthew Murphy, matched the buttons on Jonetta’s blouse. The blouse happened to be missing a button.

  By this time, Higginbotham had bailed out of jail. T. got hold of the bondsman, who also happened to be a private investigator, and told her that he was certain that Chester Higginbotham had murdered Sara Rinehart. He asked her to withdraw her bond so that they could get Higginbotham back to jail.

  While that was taking place, T. started taking a serious look at Chester Higginbotham.

  He learned that Higginbotham had worked as an assistant manager at a local restaurant where Sarah’s Christian women’s group regularly met for luncheon. Sarah had been the group’s treasurer, and when Higginbotham tried to charge her more than the agreed-upon price, they had argued. The confrontat
ion had occurred two days before Sarah’s murder.

  And Chester Higginbotham had lived in the halfway house just down the block from Sarah’s at the time of the Rinehart murder.

  Detective Walton questioned Higginbotham, and he interviewed the manager of the halfway house where Higginbotham had been a regular. But the manager showed T. a sign-out sheet that, he insisted, proved that Chester Higginbotham had been in the house at the time of the murder.

  Still, Detective Walton thought Higginbotham was a much better suspect than Sarah Rinehart’s long-suffering brother-in-law; Walton just wasn’t sure how to prove it.

  He decided to have a second, more serious conversation with Chester’s bewildered and frightened young wife. T. called her and asked that she come to the Newton Police Department for questioning. He met her in the lobby. She was holding the hand of her six-year-old son.

  As Walton led the woman and child down the corridor to his office, they passed a bulletin board plastered with wanted posters.

  Pinned to the board was a large photocopy of my composite sketch, the one I’d made with little Jordan Rinehart and her friend Ashley after Jordan’s mother, Sarah, had been murdered almost a year and a half before.

  And as they walked past the bulletin board, the little boy tugged excitedly at his mother’s hand and cried, “Look, Mommy! It’s a picture of Daddy!”

  Although Chester Higginbotham was convicted of murdering Jonetta McKown and sentenced to what, in Kansas, is called a hard forty—meaning, forty years without a possibility of parole, Detective T. Walton had a much harder time tying him to Sarah Rinehart’s murder.

  Even though the Rinehart/Guzman family had released a statement to the press almost as soon as Higginbotham had been arrested for Jonetta McKown’s murder, saying that he looked almost exactly like the forensic sketch I had done with Sarah’s daughter and even though, by the time of Higginbotham’s conviction, T. was wading in circumstantial evidence tying Chester Higginbotham to the Rinehart murder, the police still didn’t have any hard physical evidence that put Higginbotham in the Rinehart house that terrible day. Higginbotham cleaned up, left no fingerprints and he hadn’t raped Sarah, so there was no DNA analysis of semen, no hairs, nothing.

  They did have an extra pair of sunglasses, turned over by Higginbotham’s soon-to-be ex-wife, that looked just like the sunglasses they’d found under Sarah Rinehart’s bed.

  Meanwhile, not only did T. prove that it was entirely possible for the halfway house residents to sneak out undetected even when they were signed in, but he found a dumpster in a nearby alley where, he was convinced, Higginbotham would have had no problem dumping the bloody clothes he’d been wearing that day as well as the murder weapon.

  But other Newton detectives still clung stubbornly to their belief that Robby Nachlinger was a viable suspect.

  T. traced Higginbotham’s miserable life all the way back to the age of five, when he’d first been put into a juvenile facility.

  “I knew him better than he knew him,” T. said. “He had the big three,” he added, referring to warning signs of sociopathic behavior in youth, “setting fires, killing pets, and bed-wetting.”

  At the tender age of eight, Chester Higginbotham, known then as “Chip,” had even tried to kill himself.

  T. felt badly about the guy’s childhood, but he didn’t believe that should in any way mitigate what he had done as an adult. There comes a time, he figured, when you have to be responsible for yourself. You make choices. You choose to be good or you choose to be evil.

  During those long dark months, T. and Heidi continued to stay in touch. “Whenever I was down,” he said, “she pushed me up, and whenever she was down, I pushed her up.”

  The deeper Detective Walton dug into the nasty pit of Chester Higginbotham’s life, the more convinced he became that there were even more victims out there. For instance, Higginbotham had once lived in Arizona “and there were similar, unsolved crimes, out there.”

  The more Walton learned, the more he was committed to solving Sarah Rinehart’s case. It wasn’t enough just to know that Chester Higginbotham did it. T. wanted to arrest him for the crime. So what if Higginbotham was already in prison for another woman’s murder? So what if he wasn’t ever getting out? T. wanted to walk into that prison and serve Chester Higginbotham with an arrest warrant for the death of Sarah Rinehart. He yearned to take Higginbotham to trial, get a conviction, and to walk up to the Rineharts and Guzmans and Heidi and say, We did it.

  But the months slowly melted into years.

  And then, almost three years after Sarah’s death, Detective T. Walton attended a forensic seminar on DNA evidence.

  By then the collection and analysis of DNA evidence had grown by leaps and bounds. What would not have been possible back in 1994 was suddenly very possible in 1998.

  T. learned, he could now get a viable match off a pair of sunglasses.

  It didn’t happen overnight.

  For one thing, poor old Robby Nachlinger had hired a high-priced defense attorney who guarded his beleaguered client like an attack dog. He refused to allow Detective Walton to take a blood sample from Nachlinger for comparison with the DNA sample that the KBI’s lab had taken from the nosepiece and earpieces of the sunglasses found beneath Sarah Rinehart’s bed, and had sent on to the Sedgwick County Crime Laboratory in Wichita for analysis.

  Even when T. got a court order, the lawyer threatened to sue any hospital that cooperated. It’s the dangdest thing, T. thought in exquisite frustration, here I am trying to EXONERATE the guy, and they act like I’m strappin’ him into the electric chair!

  Still, after all Robby Nachlinger had been through, T. understood that the poor man’s attorney was trying to protect him.

  But a court order is a court order, and eventually, T. got his blood sample.

  It was no sweat, so to speak, to get one from Chester Higginbotham.

  Robby Nachlinger was excluded as a DNA match.

  According to accepted DNA analysis at the time, a defendant’s DNA profile was unique, based on a comparison of eight different strands of his DNA to statistical calculations provided by the manufacturer of the testing kit.

  The laboratory director herself made the comparison.

  She found that the possibility that anyone other than Chester Higginbotham would match the DNA marker as well as he did…was one in 5.5 billion.

  And in August of 1998, when I went home for my thirtieth high school reunion, as I walked into the hotel lobby, I heard the homecoming queen shriek my name and come running over in a throng of people to throw her arms around my neck.

  I found this, as Alice in Wonderland would say, curiouser and curiouser, because the homecoming queen never had two words for me back when I was in high school. In fact, I don’t believe she ever spoke to me once back then, and now we were great friends, it seemed.

  “You caught Sarah’s killer!” she cried. “You did the sketch! I’m friends with Heidi Guzman and she told me what you did! You’re a hero!”

  She wanted to pose for pictures with me and everything.

  Well, of course, I knew it wasn’t just my sketch that caught the killer, but a committed police sergeant and the dedication of a loving sister.

  Detective Sergeant T. Walton got his moment—he got lots of moments, in fact, from the day he served Chester Higginbotham his arrest warrant in prison for the murder of Sarah Rinehart, to the day he testified against him in court, to the day (November 24, 1999) that Higginbotham was convicted, to the day he got a second “hard forty” sentence—almost five years after Sarah’s murder.

  Of course, I flew up to testify in Higginbotham’s trial, and I got to meet the whole incredible Rinehart/Guzman clan. A handsomer family you never saw in your life. We bonded instantly, and to this day, I count Heidi Guzman a dear friend.

  Higginbotham’s sentence, Harvey district court Judge John Weckel ordered, was to be served consecutively to the one Higginbotham was already serving for the murder of Jonetta McK
own.

  Chester Higginbotham would never know freedom again.

  After the trial, there were big hugs for T. from the Rinehart and Guzman families.

  “T.’s motives were absolutely pure,” said Heidi Guzman years later. “He really cared.”

  During all those years that things hung in limbo on the Rinehart case, I worked away down in Houston, knee-deep in crime every day, wondering if anything had ever come of my sketch in Kansas.

  After the conviction, when the dust had settled and the celebrations were all over, T. got a letter in the mail. It came from Heidi Guzman, and from the little girls, Jordan Rinehart and her friend, Ashley, who were now ten and eleven years old.

  Dear T., it began…

  And then…one word: THANK YOU…written over and over and over, maybe 250 times.

  “It’s the best thing I ever got,” T. told me recently, his voice uncharacteristically soft. “I got it framed and it’s hanging on the wall.”

  Sarah Rinehart’s daughters, now teenagers, are, as Heidi put it, “soldiering on.” She says she can really see her sister’s spirit illuminated in them. “They’re gifted, artistic, athletic and smart,” she says, “but they’re also compassionate, thoughtful, and sensitive.”

  If anything good could have come out of such a terrible tragedy, I guess that would be it. Surviving such an awful thing at a very young age can make you stronger and more caring toward others who may also be suffering.

  About her driven obsession to find justice for her sister, Heidi told me, “I guess it’s like a lioness going after her prey. You’re going to hone in until you catch him.”

  Once the case was settled for her family, Heidi took her natural activism and channeled it into the organization, Parents of Murdered Children and Homicide Survivors, Inc. Working side-by-side with T., she often presents programs about her sister’s case, what it did to their family, and how they survived the devastation to go on and pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, and try to make something positive from it.

  Heidi urges anyone who has suffered a similar tragedy to contact POMC. With more than 100,000 members nationwide, POMC has chapters and Contact Persons in almost every city of any size. (Their website is: www.pomc.org. You can e-mail them at: [email protected]. You can contact them at 100 East Eighth Street, B-41, Cincinnati, Ohio, 45202, or call them at 513-721-5683.) Along with chapter support groups, POMC puts out newsletters and reading lists, and offers other resources to help families cope with the grief that is specific to losing a loved one to violent crime, and to help them navigate the criminal justice system.