Читать книгу Limb from Limb - George Hunter - Страница 12

Macomb County sheriff Mark Hackel wasn’t having a good month. It started heading downhill back on February 4, Super Bowl Sunday. What had begun as a relaxing evening at a friend’s annual football party—watching the Indianapolis Colts get ready to square off against the Chicago Bears—soon turned to horror.

A few seconds after the Bears returned the game’s opening kickoff for a touchdown, the sheriff’s cell phone rang. The caller was one of his detectives, bearing news that disturbed, even sickened, the veteran lawman and his staff.

A woman named Jennifer Kukla had just been arrested for murdering her two young daughters inside their Macomb Township mobile home, the detective relayed.

Kukla, a thirty-year-old single mother who worked at a McDonald’s restaurant near her small trailer, told arresting officers that voices in her head had told her to kill the girls, eight-year-old Alexandra and five-year-old Ashley. The killings would spare them from future pain, Kukla said.

She told deputies that she grabbed a butcher knife at about 7:30 A.M., and chased the dark-haired little girls through the trailer. She slashed her youngest daughter in the chest, and the bleeding five-year-old scurried to hide under the kitchen table. Ashley’s older sister came to her defense, screaming, “Mommy, don’t do it!”

Kukla wheeled and turned her attention to Alexandra, repeatedly stabbing the little girl in the throat, nearly severing her head. Then Kukla dragged Ashley from beneath the table and slaughtered her in the same manner.

In a bloody frenzy, Kukla proceeded to disembowel the family dog and its two puppies—to prevent them from eating her dead children, she later said. Finally the stringy-haired, ruddy-faced woman snatched her daughters’ pet mouse from its glass cage and snapped its neck. Then she dragged her children into their bedroom and arranged their bodies, side by side, on the bed.

Kukla’s sister, Lauren Russell, showed up at the narrow, dilapidated trailer more than ten hours later to take her sister to dinner. She found the trailer dark, though the front door swung ajar, despite the winter chill. As Russell ascended the trailer’s front steps, she spotted Kukla through the open door. Her sibling was pacing the trailer’s living room in circles.

Kukla met her sister at the door and told her she’d just killed her children. Russell, afraid for the safety of her own children, who were still waiting in the car, immediately ran back to her vehicle, drove away, and called police from her cell phone. “I think my sister may have harmed her children,” Russell told the 911 dispatcher at 6:18 P.M. “She said she killed them. She said she was going to the deep ends of Hell.”

Macomb sheriff’s sergeant Lori Misch, who responded to the call, found Kukla sitting on her front porch, smoking a cigarette. Kukla told the sergeant she was waiting for a hearse made of bones to take her to Hades.

“That had to be the toughest case I’ve ever worked on,” Hackel said. “I’ve seen some pretty bad things, but nothing prepares you for a case like that. As a human being, something like that can be difficult to deal with.”

Two weeks after the Kukla atrocity, Hackel, a gaunt, media-friendly, second-generation lawman, would find his department embroiled in yet another bizarre domestic homicide case.

And within a year, the paths of Jennifer Kukla and Stephen Grant would cross in a perverse twist of fate that made headlines.

For the time being, though, Stephen was still just a suburban husband who claimed to be searching for his wife.