Love Me To Death. Steve Jackson
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Oregon, before transferring to the Denver office in 1995, in part to get a fresh start on life.
She hadn’t lived at the town house for long before Neal moved in, which might have had something to do with why her neighbors thought of her as distant. She rarely returned greetings and never wanted to stop and chat or introduce her new boyfriend, who also kept to himself. Not long after the man in the cowboy hat moved in, butcher paper went up on the inside windows of their town house, as if preparing to paint the interior.
Two years later, the paper was still up, but time was running out for Neal. The romance with Holberton had faded quickly enough from their relationship, until sex was no longer part of it. They were more like roommates. He came and went as he pleased, often spending days away from the town house. She had to have been aware that he was seeing other women, though it’s hard to tell if she was hurt more by that or by the realization that her “perfect man” had taken her for nearly every penny she owned.
Somehow over a two-year period, she’d let him borrow more than $60,000, much of it she’d had to borrow against her credit. Some of it was supposedly for his custody battle; another portion of it was for business ventures that he promised would make them both a lot of money when they matured. They just never seemed to reach that point, and the legal battle for his trust fund—with which he promised to pay her with interest—seemed to go on and on with no end in sight.
By June 1998, she’d had enough. She was starting a new position at the telephone company on July 6 and was excited at the prospect, circling the date on her desk calendar. She told a friend that she was going to get Cody Neal out of her home and out of her life. But she wanted her money back first.
Holberton confronted Neal and threatened to go to the police. On June 29, he surprised her by announcing that he was finally going to be able to pay her back. His trust fund had been released by the courts. As a measure of how certain he was, he urged her to write nearly $56,000 in checks to pay her creditors. The money to cover the checks would be in her account the next day, he said, when he would also give her “a surprise” to demonstrate his gratitude for her patience. That was in addition to taking her to Las Vegas for an all-expense-paid holiday before she started her new job.
The next morning, Neal rose early and drove to a building-supplies store. He’d been thinking of this plan for a couple of weeks and so he knew exactly what he needed. He already had a large footlocker back at the town house and a new circular saw. Now he moved quickly through the aisles picking up Lava soap—good for scrubbing almost anything off skin—four large eyebolts, nylon rope, duct tape, and . . . He went to the area of the store where the various axes, sledgehammers, and mauls waited. He tried the heft of several before settling on a seven-and-a-half-pound splitting maul—half ax and half sledgehammer—with a long wooden handle. Just right.
When Neal got back to the town house on West Chenango Drive, he pulled into the garage and closed the door. He left the maul in the truck to scout out the situation. Holberton was up, though still dressed in her nightgown.
“Ready for your surprise?” he asked with a smile. He noted her excitement; she was “filled with joy and happiness,” he would later say. He led her to a chair that he’d placed on the plywood floor of the living room—she’d planned to have it carpeted soon—facing the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. He then fetched a briefcase and placed it on her lap. It was heavy, as though it held tens of thousands of dollars. He’d wanted the weight of it to be a distraction, though in actuality it held only newspapers.
Neal went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of champagne. Popping the cork, he poured them both a glass and toasted their new fortunes, their new lives. Setting his glass down, he picked up a blanket, which he said he wanted to place over her head for her “surprise.” She protested that it would mess up her hair, but relented at his insistence.
Placing the blanket carefully over her blond hair, he announced, “I have to go get something in the garage. Be right back!” He walked quickly to the garage and picked up the maul. Returning to the living room, he noticed that his little white kitten was strolling about, rubbing against Rebecca’s legs. He raised the maul, his eyes fixed on the center top of Holberton’s head.
A pause. A heartbeat. A breath. Then the maul whistled down in an arc, the sledgehammer side crushing into the woman’s skull. Her hands flew up involuntarily to her head as Neal quickly swung the maul again like a man driving in a spike. As he struck again and again, and she pitched out of the chair, he noticed that her head was becoming sloppy and that a rip had appeared in the cloth through which blood and brain matter seeped.
At last Neal was finished. He turned and walked a few steps over to a hall closet, where he left the bloody maul. Going back to his victim, he removed the blanket and placed Holberton’s head in a plastic bag to catch some of the blood. He lashed her arms and legs with rope, and then encased his victim in black plastic lawn bags, which he bound with the duct tape until she looked like a mummy. He then dragged the body over to a wall to the right of the chair.
Turning, Neal noticed a two-inch piece of skull lying on the floor, bloody blond hair still attached. Using the paper from an ice-cream bar, he picked up the bone and carried it to the kitchen. The first part of his plan was complete. He’d given them fair warning, told them all: “Anybody who believes me deserves to get fucked.”
Well, now they’d believe him. But there wasn’t time to rest on his laurels, he had to go visit Candace Walters and put the second part of his plan in motion. As he left the room, he noticed his kitten. . . . Poor little thing, her belly hadn’t come off the floor since his attack on Rebecca. She knows who the biggest predator is, he thought.
Five
July 3, 1998
Neal held the blanket up to cover Candace Walters. She was sitting in the chair where just a few days earlier he’d murdered Rebecca Holberton, but Candace had not noticed the mummylike object wrapped in black plastic, partly covered by a scrap of carpet, over against a wall. If she did, he was prepared to tell her it was just some remodeling materials; he’d already warned her that the place was a mess.
Happy and excited, Candace balanced a briefcase on her lap as she waited for her “surprise” in the pretty white sundress she’d worn for their trip to Las Vegas. “No, Cody,” she complained, refusing the blanket. “I don’t want to mess up my hair.”
Neal shrugged. He knew better than to try to get the forty-eight-year-old woman to do something she didn’t want to do. Besides, she was already suspicious of him. So he gently draped the blanket around her shoulders. “Well, promise to keep your eyes closed,” he said as he walked behind her toward the closet where he kept the maul.
They’d met a few days after Christmas the year before, at a hotel where she worked as a bartender. He was charismatic and generous, tipping her extravagantly for every drink or courtesy. More than that, he was caring and such a good listener; after she got off work, they sat in a booth talking all night.
Cody, as he’d introduced himself, was mysterious about where all that money he threw around came from. But, she told her daughter, Holly, he was obviously a very sensitive man who’d almost cried as he talked about the court battle he was waging to gain custody of his young daughter. He’d invited her to a New Year’s Eve party that he was throwing at the hotel. She’d attended and had a great time with him.
Like Holberton, Candace Walters had once been married. But she and her husband had divorced some twenty-five years earlier, shortly after moving to Colorado with their infant daughter, Holly. They’d remained friends—in fact, when her father died shortly after the divorce and left her a small inheritance of a few thousand dollars, she’d used part of it to buy her ex-husband a household’s worth of furniture since he’d left her everything in the divorce—but she’d had few committed relationships since then. When the last one ended some four or five years earlier, she’d told her daughter, “I think I’ll just stay away from men.”
Holly didn’t mind; she’d loved having the bulk of her mother’s attention since earliest childhood. She’d lived with her