McGUNNIGAL:
No, I think she truly believed her son was upstairs. Now, on the other hand, she was purposefully evasive about the whereabouts of her husband. She kept saying that he was “out,” and refusing to elaborate. At the time, we thought something might have been fishy there, but we later learned it was only a marital spat.
Besides, if Melanie knew Warren wasn’t upstairs, I don’t think she would have let in the officers without a warrant. But she eventually did and directed them to his bedroom. As you know, he wasn’t there. The officers switched into high alert, assuming Warren to be armed and dangerous, and quickly searched the rest of the house. We were starting a neighborhood search when Warren rode his bicycle up the driveway, soaking wet. He immediately took a confrontational attitude with the officers, refusing to tell them where he’d been and calling them pigs and worse. He was arrested under suspicion in the death of Chuck Buhrman, and charged with resisting arrest.
Warren readily admits that he behaved badly that night, and he knows that he did himself no favors by sparring with police officers. I asked Warren what was going through his head.
POPPY:
Many people have found your behavior the night Chuck Buhrman died to be suspicious. Can you tell me what you were thinking?
WARREN:
I get why people think I acted guilty. I’m certainly not proud of my behavior that night. But you have to remember that I was a seventeen-year-old anarchist who hated the police on principle. Also, I had spent most of that night robo-tripping in the cemetery.
POPPY:
Robo-tripping?
WARREN:
Yeah. You know, when you drink a bunch of cough syrup to get high?
POPPY:
That’s a thing?
WARREN:
Yeah. But it’s dumb. Don’t do it.
POPPY:
I won’t. So, on the night Chuck Buhrman was murdered, you have no alibi because you were drinking cough syrup alone in a cemetery?
WARREN:
Yeah.
POPPY:
Why a cemetery?
WARREN:
I dunno. It seems really disrespectful now, but back then it was something I liked to do. See, an overdose of cough syrup makes you hallucinate. And there’s nothing trippier than hallucinating in a cemetery. At least, that’s what I thought back then.
You don’t know how many times I’ve wished I was doing something else that night. I should’ve just stayed home, but even if I had been out doing something dumb, I should have been doing it somewhere where someone else would see me. But you never think about that kind of stuff—needing an alibi, I mean—before you’re arrested.
POPPY:
But you did see someone else that night, right?
WARREN:
Well, yeah. Not in the cemetery. I was alone there. But on my way home I cut through Lincoln Park, and as I rode past that part with the picnic tables, someone threw a beer can at me. I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating or not, so I stopped. And then I realized some kids were sitting on one of the picnic tables, and they were definitely throwing beer cans at me. When one of them threw a glass bottle, I lost it and charged them. I don’t really remember what happened, but some of these guys dragged me down to the lake—it’s just a couple of feet from the picnic tables, you know—and pushed me under. They were holding me down, and I really thought I was going to die. I must have passed out for a minute or two, because the next thing I knew I was laying on my side next to the water and they were gone.
POPPY:
And you have no idea who they were?
WARREN:
No. And I’ve done everything I can to find them. I thought they looked about my age, so my attorney brought me yearbooks from Elm Park and nearby towns. But it was dark and I was high that night, and I just couldn’t be certain. I thought I might have recognized a couple of guys, but nothing ever came of it.
This was the first I’d heard of Warren potentially identifying some alibi witnesses, and I spoke with Claire Armstrong, Warren’s then attorney, about this.
ARMSTRONG:
It would’ve been a huge help if Warren could have identified the individuals who threw him in the lake. If we could have convinced them to testify, we could’ve placed Warren at least a mile away from the crime scene. Unfortunately, he was never certain about who he’d seen. He indicated that some faces looked familiar, but those individuals denied involvement. Complicating matters, they were “good kids”—you know, student council, sports, straight-As. A jury would never believe Warren over them, and without their cooperation, they were useless. Besides, Warren himself wasn’t even sure that it had been them. I ran a couple of ads in the local paper, imploring anyone who knew anything to come forward, but I didn’t get any leads.
I would have thought Warren being drenched with lake water would lend credence to his story and suggest he was innocent, but the opposite proved true. Police theorized Warren intentionally entered the lake in order to destroy evidence, like gunpowder residue and any other trace bits of evidence that might have connected him to the Buhrman house. Even assuming that’s true, wouldn’t blood be the larger problem? Could lake water really clean up blood so effectively? I pressed former detective McGunnigal for answers.
POPPY:
What about the blood? How could Warren Cave shoot Chuck Buhrman in the back of the head at point-blank range and not get at least sprayed with blood? Lake water wouldn’t wash that from his shirt, so how did you explain finding not a spot of blood on his clothing?
McGUNNIGAL:
The theory has always been that Warren Cave wore something over his clothing. Outerwear of some sort, or perhaps even plastic. We believe this outer layer ended up at the bottom of the lake—along with the gun.
That’s right, not only is there no smoking gun in the Buhrman case, there’s no gun at all. No murder weapon was recovered from the scene, nor have the police been able to locate it in the intervening thirteen years. Warren Cave’s bedroom was searched the night of the murder, and the rest of the Cave house was searched the following day. The cemetery and the park were also searched, and the lake was dragged, all without success.
POPPY:
If you dragged the lake and didn’t find the gun, why do you think it’s down there?
McGUNNIGAL:
Dragging a lake is an imperfect procedure, especially for a smaller object like a gun. I wasn’t surprised we didn’t find it.
POPPY:
It didn’t concern you that you never found the murder weapon?
McGUNNIGAL:
We didn’t need it to make a case. We had his fingerprints at the crime scene, and the Buhrman girl saw him do it.