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But at that moment, Jimmy was on the floor, too, with his arms wrapped around Debbie’s neck, his legs wrapped around her waist and her chest, squeezing, strangling her. I could see that her lips and face were blue, that her eyes were bulging, that she was already dead. But Stevie put his head on her chest and insisted she was still alive. It was another case of him and Jimmy trying to outdo each other on who’s the better killer here. To prove his point, Stevie took a clothesline type of rope, wrapped it around Debbie’s neck, stuck a stick in it, and kept on twisting it and twisting it like a garrote.

She was definitely dead then, so Stevie and I took her downstairs while Jimmy just laid on the couch upstairs. The two of us basically went about the same thing we’d down twice before, with Stevie stripping her down, removing her black dungarees, blouse, and thin coat, and pulling her teeth out with the pliers while I dug the hole. Then we put her in and buried her. There was no blood with this murder, so there was little cleanup.

Stevie said he’d take care of the clothes and teeth. He was all business, going about the task of cleaning up and pulling teeth. Even though he had a long-term relationship with Debbie, this wasn’t bothering him any more than it had bothered Jimmy. Stevie was actually enjoying it, the way he always enjoyed a good murder. Like a stockbroker going to work, he was just doing his job. Cold and relaxed, with no emotion or change in his demeanor, he was performing a night’s work. Whether he then went out to meet another of his girlfriends or went home to Marion, I have no idea.

Later on, when I was alone with Jimmy, I asked him what that was all about. “Who knows?” he answered. “She was bringing blacks back to the house. She was doing drugs. Stevie was probably fucking her.” I never asked again, but it was just kind of distasteful killing a woman. I can see killing guys. That’s the life they chose, the life they’re involved with, the life we all chose. But a woman is different. It wasn’t a nice thing.

Years later, it came out that Stevie was in fact having sex with Debbie. And she’d been his stepdaughter since she was three years old. Who knows if she knew anything else about him? But to kill a woman because she threatened to tell that you were fucking her didn’t make any sense, no more than it did to kill a girlfriend because she wanted to leave you. According to Stevie’s testimony in a later trial, when it came out that he had been having sex with her daughter, Marion still continued to see him. She didn’t know about the murder, but she knew about the sex. That didn’t make any sense, either.

But that was the last murder in the house.

As it turned out, six months after Debbie Hussey’s murder the house got sold, so we had to get the bodies out of there. On Halloween weekend in 1985, an appropriate time for such a move, Stevie and I and another fellow went down to the house to exhume the three bodies and put them in body bags. The three of us arrived around five in the morning, put gloves on our hands and little painter’s masks over our noses and mouths, and got to work. Since Bucky Barrett had been there for a couple of years, McIntyre maybe for a year, and Deborah Hussey for less than that, we knew it wasn’t going to be a pleasant task to dig them all up.

The first body we dug up was Bucky, who had kind of mummified rather than decomposed, because of the lime we’d put on him. Apparently Phil Costa had brought us the wrong kind of lime the night Bucky got killed. Instead of buying the lime that helps with decomposition, Phil had bought the lime that is some kind of fertilizer you use for gardening. As a result, when we pulled Bucky out of the hole, his head snapped off and broke away, but we managed to get it into the bag with the rest of the body. The other two bodies were a little fresher, so it was pretty gory with the stench of the flesh, but we got each of them into a body bag without any parts breaking off. It took us a good