forty-two
W
hen Stacy Lemke went missing in 1995, the local papers had covered the case ad nauseam. The
Watankee Weekly,
which never had any news to report besides the weather, had kept Stacy’s name alive for months—and we had thought
that
was bad. I remember the white news station vans parked across Rural Route 4, keeping their distance under Grandpa’s watchful eye. At the time, the presence of a few op-ed pieces and the occasional updates on our local affiliate stations had made us feel hemmed in, prisoners on our scant 160 acres.
This time around, dozens of reporters and white utility vans descended on Watankee. They camped outside the rows of yellow police tape at Jerry Warczak’s house; they followed his walk from the jail to the courthouse in Manitowoc, greedy for the footage that would explain it all. They hounded the Lemkes, too. I had my first glimpse of them in sixteen years on the evening news, the night after Johnny was shot. They must have been in their late fifties by now, but they looked much older, in ways I couldn’t fully explain. Maybe it was the harsh glare of the studio lights, revealing faces that gleamed faintly orange with makeup. Maybe it was the circles under their eyes, dark as storm clouds. Maybe it was the shock of believing one thing for sixteen years and then overnight having to believe something else entirely.
And, of course, the reporters couldn’t get enough of Johnny. Back then, he’d been the suspect. Now he was a victim—and a hero.
Johnny didn’t want to tell the story, but it leaked anyway, the way news does in a small town.
When Johnny pushed open Jerry Warczak’s front door, Jerry had been sitting in a recliner, his rifle ready on his shoulder.
“You killed her,” Johnny had said, and in confirmation of this fact, Jerry had fired.
The bullet had only grazed Johnny’s arm before he’d tackled Jerry, bringing him down in what I liked to imagine was the most spectacular pin of his life. Once Jerry had lost control of the gun, Johnny had simply held him in a full nelson—a decidedly illegal move, if this were high school wrestling—until the police had arrived. When Emilie and I’d pressed him later, Johnny admitted to a particularly tight hold, which had explained the screams we’d heard following the gunshot.
Jerry Warczak—it was repeated with relish—had screamed like a girl.
If it was difficult to go from chief suspect to town hero, Johnny made the transition gracefully. Everywhere he went, people said that they had always known he was innocent, that it was such a shame what had happened back then. The women patted his shoulder, the men offered him a hand to shake. If it were me, I might have been too bitter to accept these assertions, but Johnny just wasn’t that kind of guy. When you got right down to it, Johnny was a better person than I could ever have imagined. He thanked everyone for their kind words, insisted rather modestly that he was no kind of hero.
In Texas, Johnny told me once, he had just been some guy who lived alone in a dinky apartment, sold farm equipment, spent long days on the roads and slept several nights a week in motels. No one he encountered knew anything about Johnny Hammarstrom, and he’d liked it that way, without his past waiting around every corner. He’d dated from time to time—not seriously, friend of a friend sort of thing, he said—and held his breath, waiting for some enterprising person to connect the dots.
In March 2012, Johnny took the stand as the star witness in the case against Jerry Warczak. By this time he’d packed up his life in Texas and moved to Watankee permanently. With Dad gone and Jerry in jail, someone needed to run the farm.
In a way, the trial was like an extended family reunion. Mom, using her accrued vacation time, stayed with Aunt Julia and Uncle Paul. Emilie and Darby came up from Vegas; I took a semester’s leave of absence from my doctoral program after assurance from my advisor that a spot would be waiting for me. Each day we filed into the courtroom and took our places on one of the wooden benches, a few rows behind the Lemkes. We were a curious group: Aunt Julia, oxygen hissing into the plastic tube at her nose; Mom, wearing one of several expensive suits purchased especially for the occasion; Emilie, with her blue-black hair and off-the-shoulder throwback-to-the-eighties tops; Darby, her body swimming in an oversize concert T-shirt and the tightest jeans I’d ever seen; and me in a Cal sweatshirt, hunched over a notepad where I scribbled furiously. Suddenly it was important for me to write everything down, to own every detail.
Collectively, we focused our attention on Jerry Warczak. He had been denied bail from the beginning; by the time trial started, he was a heavier, shaggier, paler version of the man who had come up behind me at the cemetery. If it were possible for glares to bore holes through someone, Jerry Warzcak would have looked like a piece of Swiss cheese by the end of the trial.
Some of the details about that night I’d forgotten, but they came back in a sudden rush during Johnny’s testimony. We heard again about his date with Stacy—a matinee in Sheboygan, hamburgers at The Humble Bee. The Green Machine hitting a patch of ice and fishtailing, landing in a ditch. And finally, Stacy pulling the hood of her coat over her head and walking away into a swirl of snow. Johnny told all of this calmly; I was reminded of the seventeen-year-old boy he had been that night, sitting at the kitchen table with the detective, pounding his fist against the wood. He’d wanted to go out there. He’d wanted to do something, before it was too late.
The defense attorney posed the question to Johnny: “But you had reason, didn’t you, to kill Stacy Lemke?”
“No, of course not.”
Shuffling through a stack of papers at his table, the defense attorney questioned Johnny about a conversation he’d had with “the defendant” on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 1, 1995. This clicked with me instantly; it was the day after I’d seen Johnny and Stacy arguing on the side of the road, the day after she’d pushed him and he’d fallen backward, catching himself on the bumper of his truck.
“Do you remember telling the defendant that Stacy Lemke, your girlfriend, was pregnant?”
Johnny wetted his lips. His gaze traveled apologetically around the courtroom, taking in the Lemkes, our row of Hammarstroms, and settling on Jerry Warzcak. His expression didn’t change, but suddenly the vein in his forehead seemed more prominent, as if thumping with purpose. “Yes,” he said.
“Some people would call this a motive,” the defense attorney said mildly, turning away.
“It was a motive for me to love her even more,” Johnny countered.
The worst part of the trial was the testimony of the county’s forensics experts. These were the details we sometimes wanted to discuss but never could, because to say these things made them real.
Stacy’s remains had been found in a fifty-five-gallon drum in Jerry Warczak’s cellar, next to a water heater and towering stack of industrial-sized canned foods. If he’d ever needed to hole up, Jerry was prepared. Compared to the rest of his house, where the carpet was worn through and the linoleum was warped and spiderwebs hung from the corners, the basement was clean and well-tended. Jerry had pointed out the barrel for the detectives himself, as if he were proud of it.
After all those years, much of the evidence had decomposed, or simply dissolved. After an examination of the skeletal remains, the cause of death was ruled unknown, possibly strangulation. Stacy was identified through dental and medical records, including an X-ray of a broken arm from when she was twelve.
The last bit of the coroner’s testimony, seemingly thrown in as an afterthought, was that there was only one type of DNA present in the remains. Stacy Lemke, he clarified for a puzzled courtroom, had not been pregnant.
When he heard this news, Johnny closed his eyes, his chin sinking to his chest. Had Stacy really believed she was pregnant? Had she just wanted to hold on to Johnny for a little longer, for as long as she could? I remembered the way she had been that afternoon in his bedroom, so unwilling to let go. The pregnancy might have been a trick or a trap, but I couldn’t bring myself to judge her; she’d been only sixteen years old then, trying to figure out the rest of her life. Everything about her was frozen at that delicate age, no longer a child but barely a woman.
For me, it was enough—and it was nowhere near enough—that Jerry was found guilty.
We talked about closure, and putting the past behind us, and moving on. I’d heard these sentiments on television talk shows, before the cameras turned to the victims, who looked shell-shocked and blank. They hadn’t figured out how to put the past behind them. They didn’t know how to move on, or what they were supposed to do to move toward.
For a long time we were the same way. We tiptoed around the subject. We hesitated to say Stacy’s name or make any reference to Jerry. We talked about safe things: the weather, the crops. We held our breath, waiting for the right moment to exhale.
epilogue
D
ad had told me once, a million years ago, that everything worth knowing could be learned on a farm. He had valued the land above all elseâthe hard work it demanded, the simple routines and quiet satisfactions. It had been his father's land, and his grandfather's before that, and so on, back to the Homestead Act that had divided much of the Midwest into neat, square grids.
And so he had left it to Johnny.
He'd made the arrangements years before, mailing Johnny the paperwork in a thick legal envelope. Johnny had signed everything and mailed it backânot that he understood any of it at the time, he said. He'd been in his early twenties then, picking up odd jobs here and there, trying to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. All those years in between, when Johnny had moved from Illinois to Ohio to Tennessee to Texas, the farm had actually been in his name, with Dad listed as the official renter. Now the land was Johnny's free and clear, with none of the inheritance taxes that had crippled Jerry Warczak so long ago. His first act as a landowner was to draw up plans for expansion. The dairy would always be there, but Johnny knew the future lay in genetics and breeding. “This is what I dreamed of, all those nights when I was on the road,” he told me once.
“You dreamed of inseminating cows?” I asked.
He smacked me, but lightly, playfully. “Coming home,” he clarified.
I grinned at him. “The prodigal son makes good.” And one by one, the rest of us began to come home, too.
Emilie took a few more gigs in Vegas before she and Darby packed up their tiny apartment and moved back to Watankee, permanently. Surprisingly, Emilie had “a little money saved up”âenough to begin some renovations on Grandpa and Grandma's old house. She'd been dabbling here and there in photography, and a new generation of teenagers used our farm as a backdrop for their senior pictures. Darby enrolled at Lincoln High School; I experienced a particularly hard jolt of déjà vu the first time I saw her in a gray Ships sweatshirt.
Mom was next, taking a head nurse position at the E.R. in Milwaukee. She wasn't ready to call Watankee home again but liked being able to drive up on a long weekend to help with a remodeling project or watch one of Darby's volleyball games. She even got over her phobia of shopping in the grocery store. To see her walk through the Piggly Wiggly now, you would think she owned the place, and it was everyone else who didn't belong.
I returned to Berkeley to finish my studies in cultural geography, finally understanding what it meant to have a sense of place. Every chance I could, I caught a flight back. Sometimes I stayed in Aunt Julia's guest room or on Emilie's sleeper sofa, but every now and then, I stayed in Johnny's house, curled up in my old childhood bed under the eaves. I could never do this without crying, but they weren't always tears of sadness. Sometimes I cried simply with relief for things being right with the world.
Being back home, it turned out, wasn't a distraction at all. I toted my laptop most mornings to the Watankee Public Library and found myself suddenly zipping along on my dissertation. Somehow, the words came more easily here.
From time to time, I thought about visiting Jerry Warczak in prison. He was at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, which had famously housed Jeffrey Dahmer before him. I imagined sitting behind a Plexiglas barrier, lifting the receiver and demanding an explanation. I pictured him on the other side in his orange jumpsuit, just one of a thousand other men in an orange jumpsuit. I rehearsed the string of invectives I would let loose on him, knowing that nothing I said would matter, and nothing he said would change anything. Jerry Warczak had killed Stacy Lemke, and my family had suffered for it. In the end, I never made the trip. Jerry Warczak had stolen my childhood, but I wasn't going to let him have anything else.
The summer after Jerry was convicted, the Lemkes held a memorial service for Stacy at the Watankee Memorial Cemetery. Thousands of people attended, some from as far away as Minnesota and Iowa. Her gravestone read simply,
Stacy Lynne Lemke, 1978-1995. Never forgotten.
Bill and Sharon Lemke were there, of course, and Joanie and Heather, too. We'd only nodded to each other politely during the trial, giving each other space, but we stood together at her gravesite and ate together afterward at a small luncheon at the Lemkes' house. Bill Lemke didn't exactly apologize to Johnny, but he offered to help him out, should Johnny ever need anything. Johnny accepted graciously, but I knew he would never take him up on that offer.
Heather and I talked for a while on the Lemkes' front porch, while Joanie's redheaded kids chased each other in circles on the lawn. Neither of us mentioned the tetherball match; it was ancient history now. We shared the basic details of our lives: my dissertation, her plans to work for a district attorney's office after law school. I thought this was a perfect fitâif she took no prisoners on the playground, she would be fierce as a pit bull in criminal court.
“You'll stay in California when you finish?” she asked, catching me off guard.
“Well, actuallyâ” I hadn't admitted this to anyone else, and hardly even to myself. “I've applied for a few teaching positions in Wisconsin. There's an opening at Marquette, and another one in Madison.”
“Good,” she said, touching me on the arm. “It'll be good for you to be home.”
When I returned to California a week later, the homesickness was especially strong. Darby would be starting her senior year soon, and Mom was going to help Johnny rip out the upstairs bathroom, which needed a complete overhaul. We talked every few days, but sometimes that wasn't enough for me.
Once, late at night, I logged on to Google Earth and visited Watankee through my laptop. I approached first from far away, following the ridges and crevices of the Rockies, whizzing past the flat expanse of prairie, lingering over the neat sections of green-and-brown farmland bisected by gray lines of highway, dawdling over the forests that appeared suddenly, like green heads of broccoli.
I zoomed in on the businesses on Main Street, the striped awnings and flat silver parking lots. I followed the country roads, dotted here and there with pickup trucks and the metallic blurs of oil tankers.
There was a curious absence of human life, as if the farmers in their work boots had been lifted from the fields, the women and children sucked from kitchens and backyards.
Something inside me tightened when I approached 2242 Rural Route 4. My heart ached for the old truck still rusting away behind the barn and the white homes set close together on the lush, green lawn. It didn't take much to fill the land with people I knewâJohnny and his dog, heading out to the barn; Darby with a backpack slung over one shoulder, waiting for the bus. I could even make one of those blurs into Stacy Lemke, still a sixteen-year-old girl, her red hair trailing over her shoulder, her smile wide and welcoming.
When I zoomed back out, following the neat grids of farmland and pavement, I could almost hear the mosquitoes buzzing in the stagnant water of ditches, the cows flicking flies off their hides. I licked an imaginary finger and held it to the wind, feeling the storm roll in. Then I put an imaginary ear to the ground, listening for the roots of the corn to spread downward, deep down, beyond the face of the earth.
* * * * *