“No,” Zimmerman replied.
“Have you?” he asked, turning to Aceves.
“No, I haven’t,” Aceves answered. “We just want to know why you chose a maul.”
Neal reminded them that the murders were neither a “vindictive act” nor a “sexual act.” “It was to put them out the best way I knew how, as quickly and as silently and as fairly as I could. . . . In fact, I believe, even though I haven’t yet experienced lethal injection, it was a lot more compassionate and fair to kill them like that. Even though it didn’t look real pretty, it was instant, OK?”
Demonstrating how he struck his victims, Neal raised his hands and brought them down in a chopping motion. “Meaning,
boom,
dead. And if they weren’t dead and just throbbing, so to speak, they sure as hell weren’t thinking about the pain.”
“Did you think how many times you’d have to hit them, Cody, in order to make it instant?” Aceves said.
“I knew I had to make the first one count to kill them right there . . . kill them and put them unconscious,” Neal answered.
“Did you have any idea where you had to hit them?”
“Oh, I knew where I had to hit them. . . . Where I was going was right dead center in the top of the head at first blow.”
“Always from the back?”
“Always from the back,” he replied. “See, I didn’t want these people to know what was coming because they were good people. . . . It was a mercy thing. It was, like, not wanting them to suffer. The paper said I tortured them, OK. I mean, if I wanted to torture them, I could have sat there and, I mean, I could have done all kinds of things. . . . I wanted them not to know. I mean Rebecca and I had just finished some champagne, you know; I had a surprise for her. Same with Candace.”
“And why the maul?” Zimmerman asked, coming back to her original question.
“Because it had weight to it. . . . I knew it would be enough to kill.”
Neal changed the subject. He wanted to set the record straight regarding reports from his family that he’d abused and killed small animals. The police were interested in this facet as many forensic psychiatrists maintain that there is a correlation between a trio of behaviors during childhood and adolescence that might identify potential serial killers. The three: bed-wetting, fire setting, and cruelty to animals, often in conjunction with sexual abuse.
The stories that his family told were half-truths and lies, he complained, such as the incident of him biting the head off a pet hamster. “The only hamster that I ever did kill was when I was older. It was a friend’s pet, and I reached in to pet him and it bit me. . . . I didn’t like meaness, ever. I’d had enough done to me. To protect myself, I went
boom,
like that, and killed him,” he said, indicating that he punched the hamster.
“Did you ever abuse any cats or dogs?” Aceves asked.
“Well, hell, yeah,” Neal replied as if that were a common behavior among all boys. But, he said, the story that his brother told them about pitchforking a cat “because I felt like it . . . Well, that was either his poor memory or a lie to make me look worse than I was.”
The truth, he said, was that “damn right I pitchforked that cat, all right? . . . I went in there and was going to pet the cat because I like animals. I always have. I pet them. I went over to pet him, and this cat tore into me. And my temper when I was young . . . Well, I grabbed this fork, and I just pitchforked this thing. . . . It’s like they put animals to sleep for biting somebody. I mean, what’s the difference? It attacked me; I defended myself; I killed it—simple as that.”
Then there was the cat that was owned by a girlfriend. It used to “attack” his feet when he was sleeping. He warned the young woman that if the cat kept it up, “I was going to kill it. I don’t never like anybody—and this is after I got out of the service—messing with me when I’m sleeping. Wake me up too sudden, you could expect—I mean I would consider killing you.” The unfortunate cat went after his feet again, so he grabbed his nunchakus—a martial arts weapon consisting of two sticks attached by a chain—and “tracked it down to the kitchen and killed it. And there was blood everywhere, man. . . . I told her to clean it up and went back to sleep.”
Aceves asked if those were the only cats he’d killed. No, Neal admitted, there’d been others “who were mean to me.”
Nor were the hamster and cats the only pets to suffer. “I had a dog that bit me one time, and I killed him, too. And then I had a puppy that bit me that I killed. The puppy was mean. It was just like something was wrong with him.”
“How did you kill him?” Aceves asked.
“I punched his brain in,” he said, “just,
boom!”
His siblings said what they did because they were jealous of him, he said. “I was Mom’s favorite. I could get away with murder. Now they’re all stinkin’ lying. What’s new? Just like they want the electric chair to just get rid of me. Get what I deserve, right?”
However, he admitted that he’d continued killing animals as an adult, but that “killing animals was better than killing any more human beings, if that makes sense.”
The investigators knew that Neal once had a job as a truck driver that had him crisscrossing the country. “While you were doing that, Cody, did you ever kill anyone on the road?” Aceves asked. “I mean, going from state to state, nobody would ever know that you were—”
“No, no.” Neal shook his head. But, he added, it was a cover in case he had to “do some jobs.”
Neal denied any extensive drug use. He’d used cocaine or methamphetamine in the past, but on an irregular basis. He did like to drink, boasting that he’d done as many as twenty-seven shots of tequila at a sitting. He also bragged about his fighting prowess, including an incident with Beth Weeks’s husband before they were divorced. “I got him to where he got right in what I call my kill zone . . . close enough so I could chop him in the throat to finish him.” Weeks and Gerloff had intervened.
Overall, Neal was defensive about his toughness. Since his arrest, he’d been kept in isolation at the jail, as he’d demanded as one of the conditions for his surrender. He told investigators that it was to prevent him from killing anyone else, but his jailers figured it had more to do with his fears of what might happen to him if he was placed in the general population. Rapists and woman killers were not popular, even among other criminals, and Neal was no imposing physical specimen.
The investigators noted that Neal had promised all three murder victims a house. “How many other women did you do that with?” Zimmerman asked.
“I’d have to think about that one,” he replied. But first he wanted lunch and those cigarettes he’d asked for.
“Can I ask one more question?” Aceves asked.
“Yes, sir,” Neal replied.
Aceves wanted to know what would have happened to the bodies of the three women if they hadn’t been discovered on Wednesday. He was thinking of the two new footlockers and the unused saw next to them in the living room.
“I would like to answer that when we get off of break,” Neal said, “because you’re opening a real big door and probably one that’s worth at least an hour to get cleared up easy, OK? They wouldn’t have ended up being there. But then there would have been probably a bunch of other people killed that you don’t know about.”
Thirteen
September 14, 1998 cont’d
When the trio met again after lunch, and the requested cigarettes, Jose Aceves made sure he had Cody Neal on the record again stating that it was his wish to speak to them without his lawyer. They did not immediately get back to what Neal had planned to do with the bodies.
Neal wanted to begin by “clearing up” some things about himself and Candace Walters. He wanted to make it clear that she did not try to blackmail him, “but she did threaten to go to the authorities.” It was that or give her more of his time, he claimed.
“My look at it was: time was money as well as my life. It was something personal. I had already been raped when I was younger and molested . . . and this is not disrespectful to Candace . . . but I did not want to give myself physically to her.”
Yes, he said, he was angry with her demands to get her money back. “But that’s not why she died. I was angry with her because she wanted something out of me I didn’t want to give to her, and that was my time . . . sex. . . . It’s like, man, if I’m going to be a whore, let me get paid for it.”
“Why did she lend the money to you?” Aceves asked.
“Because I let her know that I needed some money for some stuff regarding my little girl as a way to touch her,” Neal replied with a shrug. “Also some trouble I was in in Las Vegas regarding borrowing money from somebody.”
“And who was that from?” Cheryl Zimmerman asked.
“That was from nobody,” Neal said. “It was a scam . . . a bullshit thing. I used that in order to manipulate to get something out of somebody.”
Neal noted the deception with Chief Deputy District Attorney Mark Pautler posing as a public defender trying to arrange his surrender. The move was “inappropriate,” he said, “but I believe that you did the right thing under the circumstances.”
“Our whole concern that night was to get to you before somebody else got you,” Aceves said.
“That’s correct,” Neal agreed. “And I still think that you were professional and did right by the community.”
Suddenly Neal reversed himself on why Walters was murdered. “I killed Candace because she got to Rebecca.” She’d found out where he lived about a month before the killings, he said, and talked to his roommate. “She was going to blow my cover.”
“So what was it that Rebecca told you that Candace said to her?” Zimmerman asked.
“That I was a hit man—OK?—for the Mafia.”
“And why did she tell her that?”
“Because she believed that I was.”
“Cody, are you a hit man?”
Neal shook his head. “No, I’m not.” He said that his world “was rapidly falling apart. . . . I mean, my covers, my bullshit, was catching up to me. And the reason was because of Candace stalking me. She was ruthless.”
The matter came to a head when Rebecca told him that her taxes would be due in August and she would need her money. She believed that he had been using it for investments and to pay off loan sharks, never realizing that he’d spent most of it on one long party.
“Cody, was there anybody in Las Vegas that you really owed money to?” Zimmerman asked.
“No.”
Aceves asked why he had urinated on Walters’s body.
“Twice,” Neal admitted, as the “ultimate humiliation. I just whipped it out, and it was basically around the shoulders and head. I urinated on her because, you know, ‘Lady, you’re gone. My life is gone. Rebecca. Angie. . . . Careful where you dig, OK? It was my way of also saying, ‘Don’t. I’ve had enough, people. You’re backing me into a corner.’
“It was like an Oriental martial arts thing or an Indian thing. I mean, I hope somebody pisses on me when I’m gone, all right?”
He said that he hoped others would take it as a warning. He said that he needed to be kept separated from the other inmates. “An inmate was beating on my stinkin’ door. I just photographed him in my head, just like, ‘I’ll remember you forever. And as soon as I’m out of this door, and I’m within striking distance, I’m going to kill you. . . . I’ve had enough.
“If I can murder someone I love, what am I going to do to some bastard that I don’t love or have any respect for? I’m going to tear him up. Then you’re going to know what torture is. . . . Disrespect me and abuse me, and then you’re going to see it’s like I’m two people, all right? The good and the bad, and then it gets real ugly.”
Having made his point, Neal turned back to the murders, saying he loved “all three of those people. Candace was a good person. . . . She was a good soul and did not deserve to die.
“Nobody does. I don’t even believe Ted Bundy deserved to die . . . or even me. But justice is justice.” The difference between his victims and himself, he said, “was that I was judge, jury, and executioner all in one. I had no right to do that, but I gave fair warning.”
Neal said that he was in a “normal, relaxed state” when he killed the women. “I wasn’t angry to where I said, ‘Fucking bitch . . .’
boom!
. . . I just totally knew where it was going. I knew, when it came down to it, I would not hesitate. It was just,
boom!”
Nor did he disassociate during the murders. “If I had done that, I wouldn’t have been able to hit the mark with that ax, like chopping wood. I knew that I could not slip with that first stroke. I had that thing in my hand not even maybe one second, two seconds, before it was in her brain and she was dead.”
“Why didn’t you use a gun?” Aceves asked.
“I didn’t want to put a gun to their heads or a shotgun to the back of their heads and blow their heads off, because of the neighbors, you know. And then I would have had to kill the next-door neighbor and the painter and . . . It’s like if the neighbor would have come over, I’d have killed the neighbor. I would have just gone ahead and went on a real killing spree. I mean, you guys would have had to pump a bunch of lead in me, all right?
“I was very calm . . . a normal, relaxed state. I wasn’t vindictive. I wasn’t mean. I wasn’t angry, you know, to where I said, ‘Fucking bitch,’
boom!”
Neal said that he chose Suzanne Scott to be both a victim and his witness because she was so innocent. He knew that the other women had black marks in their past that his lawyer would have exploited at trial. He knew that Scott had no such blemishes and would make sure he paid for the crimes.
In midafternoon they took another break so that Neal could smoke. When they returned, Neal wanted to talk about Angela Fite. He wanted them to know that he never took any money from Fite. However, of the three, Angela was the only one that he was in love with, he said. That’s why he promised her a home for herself and her children. “She wanted to live better. She wanted the money.” He’d warned her: “You talk about the house, I’m going to kill you. You’re going to die, period.” When Angela betrayed his trust and told others, including her family, she had to die.
“I found out before she died that she had been running her mouth . . . about a few other things as well. And that’s one of the reasons why Angie died. . . . It’s like, you know, fair warning. And I said, ‘Because you’re a snitch, you die. I mean, I can’t give you any clearer warning than that.’ ”
Of all the odd and self-serving things that he’d say, one of the most bizarre was that he’d talked Angie Fite into joining him as a female hit man for the mob. “She was going to have to kill somebody to prove her loyalty to me that night.” He could tell by her reaction when she saw the bodies of the other women that Angela wouldn’t keep her mouth shut. “She was a snitch,” he said.
This was a new twist, one the investigators knew he’d never mentioned to Scott or Beth Weeks in his confessions. No one believed him now. . . . Or if she’d said it, it had been in jest, not thinking he was really a killer . . . until she saw his “mortuary.”
He’d loved Angie so much, however, that he’d told her that he would kill her estranged husband, Matt Rankin. “They had a very violent relationship. I was going to do it for love: ‘Nobody’s going to mess with you.’ ” He said that he was not just going to kill Rankin, but his brother and father as well, “and if his mother was around, I’d probably have killed her, too.”
Rankin had come looking for him one time at Angela Fite’s apartment. Called him “a little bitch.” Neal told the investigators that he normally didn’t let people talk to him that way, but this time he “snuck out of the apartment so Angie wouldn’t be in another domestic [violence incident].
“Matt’s a piece of shit. He’s violent. He’s mean. They should have had him in jail for breaking the restraining order like he did. . . . She was scared to death of him. She told me Matt Rankin was going to end up killing her.” So he was going to kill Rankin. “It was a love thing. It was: ‘I love you, baby, nobody’s going to mess with you.’ ”
Neal said he spread the “bounty hunter” rumor just to see where it would go, know who was talking to whom.
“So you were never a bounty hunter, right?” Aceves asked.
“Oh, hell no,” Neal replied. “I never wanted to be.”
“You were never a hit man?”
“Never a hit man.”
Neal said that he’d been bullshitting people for so long that it had become a habit, even when unnecessary to achieve some purpose. “I mean, there’s a book that I’m reading right now about Bundy. It’s called”—he had to think—“shoot . . . I’ve read
The Stranger Beside Me. . . .
It’s not that one. . . . What’s the name of that book?” Then he remembered.
“The Only Living Witness.
“Bundy put it in a good way. And not that he was an idol, but there was certain things that he did that were close to me. He said that the more you practice it, you were like an actor, an illusion, that you sold somebody that you were somebody that you weren’t. That the more he practiced lying or acting the role, the better he got and the more natural he became. It was all just an act, playing a part.
“I don’t believe that I believe my own bullshit. That’s why I had an argument with mental health. They kept saying, ‘Do you hear voices?’ No. Nobody told me to do it. I’m just a stinkin’ liar, OK?
“Candace, Rebecca, and Angie did not pay because I ‘snapped.’ Now, isn’t that scary?”
At times when Neal was interrupted by the investigators, he irritably insisted on finishing a thought, whether or not it had to do with the question that he’d been asked. His demeanor ranged from complimenting them on their insight, to warning them not to push him into discussing subjects that he considered taboo. He even made thinly veiled threats, such as when asked about whether he felt rage.
“The rage is there,” he told the investigators. “Don’t fuck with me. And I don’t mean that as a threat. . . . Santa Claus is coming to town, motherfucker, and you ain’t going to like who shows up. You can’t run, you can’t hide, nothing. . . . Fuck with me and give me a reason to get out of here, and I’ll find a way.”
Neal turned the conversation back to Suzanne Scott. The others had betrayed him in one way or another, and so had to die, he said. Suzanne was different. “She did not deserve to have anything happen to her other than she was an innocent. She was the most innocent one that I knew that could tell them: ‘This is a warning—don’t fuck with me, all right? Don’t open your fat mouth, OK? You better keep yourself quiet or you’re going to die, all right?”
There never had been anybody else in the room upstairs, he said. The noises that they’d heard, and he’d pretended to react to, had been the neighbor walking about. However, he surprised the investigators by telling them that someone else saw Holberton’s body.
“Who was that?” Aceves asked. If this was true, two murders could have been prevented. . . . Maybe the witness could be charged with accessory to murder after the fact.
“I’ll never share that,” Neal said, and smiled. “He was not involved in the murder.”
“But he could be a witness to what she said,” Aceves countered. “When did that person see Rebecca dead?”
“The day that she died,” Neal replied. “That’s all I’ll tell you. . . . I have a problem with snitches, sir.”
“Why do you feel that this person hasn’t come forth?” Aceves asked.
“Because they’re not a snitch, either,” Neal said, now referring to “he” as “they.” “They’re good people, and they’ve never been involved in anything wrong at all. But I can tell you, they’re not somebody to fuck with, either. . . . I almost snapped his mind over it.”
Neal returned to the night that he murdered Fite. She was “flipping out” when she saw the bodies. “Angie knew when she said, ‘We’re not going to get out of here alive, are we?’ is because she knew I had her number, too. . . . Her conscience was bothering her that she had betrayed my warnings.”
After Angela Fite died, Suzanne agreed with him that she couldn’t be trusted. But Suzanne trusted him, he said. “I don’t know if she said that I was very gentle with her. I mean, you know, her and I held hands while I was sleeping. . . . She said she wasn’t really asleep, but she was sleeping because I could hear her dozing. It was very stressful for her. But I know she wanted me to stay with her.
“I wanted Suzanne to be the one that made it out alive and the one that was going to send me to the chair. I wanted a living witness, so to speak, as a warning to everybody else: Don’t fuck with me; I’ve had enough. Time out . . . because then I’m going to lose it, and I haven’t lost it up to this point.”