Rachel Rear - Catch the Sparrow: A Search for a Sister and the Truth of Her Murder

CONTENTS

Murderers are not monsters, theyre men.
And thats the most frightening thing about them.

Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

This book is the product of interviews, research, police reports, and newspaper articles. Events that involved me as a child, teenager, or young adult were drawn from memory.

The names of survivors of sexual assault have been changed, as have certain others to protect innocent people.

Events that are described were re-created from anecdotes shared with me by Stephanies friends, teachers, students, coworkers, romantic partners, and acquaintances, as well as by police officers and attorneys involved in her case.

As much of this book relies on the memories of others, I am forever grateful for their generosity in sharing them.

Justin and Chris had just started picking up speed on Justins dirt bike, Chris balancing on the pegs, when the bike sputtered and stalled out. They were twelve years old in the spring of 1998, scrappy but both still a little short. Chris had brown hair and eyes, Justin blond hair and blue eyes, and mischief was often their goal. They were itching for speed, for action, for whatever freckle-faced boys yearn for on April afternoons.

That day the boys pushed the bike off the road near the intersection of Telegraph and Hurd, outside Holley, New York, a town that is home to one diner, one gas station, and an annual squirrel hunt dubbed the Hazzard County Squirrel Slam.

Past a hedgerow, the boys spotted a small stream. They loved to fish, so they couldnt believe their luck when they got closer to the shallow water and saw a flurry of foot-long fish in the water. Weve hit the jackpot! said Justin.

The boys didnt have fishing poles, so they tried any other method possibleattempting to grab the fish with their hands, spear them with sticks, dam the water flow with twigs and rocks, and herd the fish as they moved in toward one another. Chris started chasing a big one downstream, wielding a stickthen stopped suddenly.

Did you get him? Justin called.

Cmere, Chris whispered. Just cmere.

Justin made his way to where Chris stood, staring down at the water, and saw what had made him stop.

The stream where Stephanies remains were found, 1998

Bones protruded from the waters surface, half submerged and half in the sun. The boys poked at them once or twice with sticks; they werent bloody or fresh, just clean animal bones, and theyd seen scores of those. But soon they spotted something dome-shaped, with concave eye sockets and a few teeth.

A human skull.

The boys got out of there fast. They knew the Hurds, whose farm it was, did not take kindly to trespassers.

We cant tell anyone, Chris said, and Justin said, Nope.

They ran back to the dirt bike, which thankfully started right up.

But that night, Justin couldnt shake the image of the skull in the water. As he ran himself a bath, he confessed to his older brother. I swear it was real, he said. It was a real human skull.

Are you sure? his brother said.

Im sure, he said.

As Justin lay in the bath soaking, thinking about the bones, his stepfather, Chad, knocked on the door and called in, Is there something you need to tell me?

While Justin pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt instead of pajamas, Chris lay on the floor in the living room of his own house. The phone rang. His mom came and sat down close to him, and repeated the same question: Do you want to tell me something?

Justin and Chris sat in the back seat of Chads car in silence, wondering if they were in trouble. Chad pulled over in a little clearing next to Bob Taylors house, and the boys led him through the bushes to the creek. Chad aimed his flashlight where Justin and Chris pointed, doubting hed see anything. The boys had probably got carried away.

But then his beam of light landed on the splotched skull with dark eye sockets. My God, said Chad, there it is.

They drove home to call the Orleans County sheriff, who came out right away to survey the scene. Soon the boys were herded back into the thicket for the third time that day.

Walking through the brush, the sheriff was on high alert. The late-night call was a shock; this rural county, sandwiched between Buffalos Erie County and Rochesters Monroe County, didnt see much in the way of human remains, especially not discovered by preteen boys. The sheriff scanned the woods, his flashlight lingering on a couple of old beer cans. Were you guys really out here trying to catch fish? he asked.

The boys eyes widened. Theyd never had a sip of beer in their lives.

Its right in there, Chad said, taking the attention off Justin and Chris to shine his light again on the skull in the water.

Well deal with you tomorrow, the sheriff said to the boys, then headed back to his car to radio for backup, and for the coroner.

The police had even more questions for Justin and Chris on Wednesday. They thought the boys had heard a rumor about a skeleton and gone looking for it. Justin and Chris maintained their account of the broken-down dirt bike and the gold mine of fish. And when a detective searching the area caught a twelve-inch sucker with his bare hands, they finally believed the boys.

Pathologists gathered all the remains they could find. They even collected several nearby birds nests, which they hoped would contain some telltale scrap of fabric, anything that might help solve the mystery of who this was and what had happened. They compared the remaining upper teeth of the recovered skullthe lower jawbone was missingto a set of dental records theyd had on file since 1991. By Wednesday evening, the police were able to say definitively what some of the cops were already suspecting.

It had been nearly seven years since the night she disappeared, on July 31, 1991. Now they knew where shed been: decomposing in this shallow creek.

Finally police could deliver the report that hundreds of people had been waiting for all those years, including her immediate family down in her hometown of East Brunswick, New Jerseymy stepfather, Jerry, and my stepsister, Melanie.

It was her. It was Stephanie.

I was twenty when my mother married Jerry Kupchynsky, and thus married into his familys mystery. A photo of my new stepsister Stephanie, who was then still missing, stood on the table with the wedding cake. It was the same photo as on the missing-person posters that had hung all over Monroe County for years. Stephanies face at an angle, her wavy hair and sideswept bangs frosted auburn, a blush across her cheeks, her lips shiny with coral-colored gloss. Her eyes, large and brown as a Van Morrison song, gazing not at the camera but at someone out of frame, to the side, as if she were listening to the setup of a joke she wasnt yet sure was funny.

When Stephanie went missing from her apartment in Greece, New York, almost seven years earlier, she was twenty-seven; I was fourteen.