Imprisoned by Fear. Kathy Lange
his SUV. On Wednesday, he asked a neighbor to assist him in pushing his two motorcycles into the same garage. (Motorcycles were being rebuilt, so not running at the time.) John had mentioned to Byron that the town of Swanville had had about $100,000 damage to cars in which windshields were broken to gain entry to steal items in cars. This detail made him more nervous about his own vehicles along with his own break-in.
9 On Thanksgiving, Byron planned to continue cleaning and put away various items in the two-car garage. Since he needed room to work, his silver truck had to be moved outside. Feeling serious threats of vandalism, he felt it risky to leave anything outside his home. He moved the truck in front of a highway patrol’s home about two blocks away, where he thought it would be the safest outside.
10 On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Byron told his neighbor, Bill, to retrieve the twenty-pound turkey he had thawing in a large pail of ice water in his shop and take it to the Lange’s. He had declined their standard Thanksgiving dinner invitation that year. When Bill entered the shop, he found the large pail of pinkish water right where Byron said it was, but no turkey in it. There had been no one on the property in those two days except for law enforcement and an assistant county attorney. Where did the turkey go?
11 Byron was bewildered by unusual questioning when he showed Deputy Luberts the bodies of the home invaders. He had been asked by Deputy Luberts repeatedly if he had seen “something on the boy’s waist.” This was immediately after law enforcement arrived to his home on that Friday after Thanksgiving. The deputy also asked if he had noticed anything on the girl’s boot. That same deputy left the room to make a phone call in a hushed voice. Both Nick and Haile were labeled as unarmed when they entered the Smith home. However, friends of Nick Brady claim that he had stolen a bulletproof vest and had worn it to school, bragging to many about it, and also never left home without it. Why would the deputy ask these questions to Byron if there wasn’t something there in the first place?
Chapter 2
Settling In
The days that followed Byron’s release from jail resulted in all of us adjusting to having a guest in the house. We had been the third home asked to have Byron live with us and the only one with a child attending the high school. His close neighbor on Elm Street was reluctant because they had grandkids over all the time. That was their reasoning anyway. Another one of Byron’s friends said his wife thought it was okay to have Byron stay in their shop out back, but there were no living quarters. Bruce then asked John, but he needed to discuss with me before he agreed. When I was asked by Bruce to have Byron live with us, my main concern was solely for Dilan. If the kids at school who were grieving about these two classmates found out he was in his home, he might be the target for some type of retaliation or bullying. Drug use also heightened the level of concern. I needed to discuss this with Dilan as he was the one this would affect the most. He always had many friends that came over. He preferred having them here instead of staying elsewhere. I explained to him that he would be very limited to having friends over if Byron lived with us. I explained that this would change his lifestyle for a while, but after thinking only for a second, he told me that he wanted to help Byron in any way he could. This didn’t surprise me. My son has always wanted to help those in need. He is very kindhearted and Byron was someone he looked up to. We knew this would be an adjustment for all of us, including Byron. He was used to working in his huge park of a backyard and living as a single guy. He also was sensitive to smell because when he came into our home on previous occasions, he commented if it had a strong smell of candles I had been making, especially during the Christmas season. I would no longer be able to burn or manufacture candles every day, which was the least of my worries right now.
The first order of business was a neighborhood watch system with the parade of cars that continued to go down Elm Street. Being an expert at video surveillance, he set up a system to have every vehicle that went down Elm Street documented. There seemed to be extra traffic at the end of Elm Street, and there were still suspicions of possible drug activity in that house. Byron was certain that drugs played a part in his burglaries. The next order of business was to retrieve some of his personal belongings from his home. With Bruce still here, but with plans to leave soon, Byron gave him a list each day of the things he would need while living with us. The list included suits and other clothing, personal toiletries, wine (he belonged to a monthly wine club), and his favorite movies. I put a shopping list pad on our refrigerator so Byron could let me know what he wanted for groceries, etc. He wouldn’t be going out himself in public, at least for a while anyway. So Bruce brought over some things from his house. Some were his favorite movies, which included the whole series of Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, TV episodes of Babylon 5, and Max Headroom, along with many foreign movies with subtitles and Academy Award-winning titles. One night, Byron and I watched Lawrence of Arabia, a winner of many academy awards in 1962. It is a four-hour-long movie. I was not a person to ever sit and watch a four-hour movie. John would run away at the thought of a movie that did not contain car crashes or elements of continuous action. Byron had brought over his huge, forty-eight-inch flat-screen TV, and we installed it in our family room downstairs. The TV has surround sound, and it was just like you were in a movie theater. The day he set it up, we all sat down in amazement at the huge screen. We were all ready to watch something right away on this big screen. Byron had his first real laugh in days because all three of us were eagerly sitting on the sofa waiting for him to put a movie in. He said we would have movie night tomorrow, so we had to wait until all his Blu-ray movies were brought over. As his movie collection was slightly different from ours, Dilan was willing to watch a few of these with some interest. I wanted him to feel welcome and safe so was willing to watch some of these old movies he enjoyed. The four-hour-long ones were a bit much for me, though.
Byron wanted to get his cell phone activated, and he didn’t want to go out yet, even to St. Cloud, so Dilan and I drove to the T-Mobile store at Crossroads Mall in St. Cloud. I wasn’t prepared for all the questions because all I wanted was a little SIM card with a new number to activate his phone. It was an old phone, which he had for a long time, sufficient enough to receive and make calls. A young man asked to help us, and I told him what I needed. He then proceeded to ask for the city we lived in so he could assign the number. By this time, Byron had been in every newspaper from here to Florida. When I said Little Falls, the guy looked at me and said, “Oh my, how are things up there?” inferring to the recent shootings. I played along and said, “Fine.” Then he asked for a name. I thought for a second if I should use my own name or Byron’s. In my thoughts, if I would say his name, they wouldn’t recognize it because Smith was a common name. I was wrong. When I said Byron Smith, he gave me a look of “Oh my gosh, it’s him!” I quickly stated that he was a friend of ours and we were running errands for him. I thanked him for giving him privacy and confidentiality as I was afraid his number might be given out if someone overheard us. I know the T-Mobile guy was in utter shock that he had helped activate Byron Smith’s phone. Dilan looked at me in disbelief that we couldn’t get by with getting a new number for him without someone recognizing his name. As we drove home, Dilan and I decided that we would not tell Byron about the T-Mobile experience. It might worry him for nothing, so we kept it to ourselves. Similar things happened when I stopped at the local coffee shop. His face was plastered on the front page of all the newspapers—the St. Cloud Times, the Brainerd Dispatch, and the Minneapolis Tribune. People were talking about it as I stood in line to get coffee. I heard varied opinions about why he did it and a few opinions that the kids deserved it too. I was standing there silently listening to all the words and thinking if they only knew the whole story. If they only knew he was my neighbor, a person just minding his own business, and that he was living right in my home now. It was all so surreal.
A few days later Byron’s attorney assigned an investigator to his case. Ross drove a black Cadillac and wore bold gold jewelry and black leather cowboy boots. He reminded me of those TV investigators, all calm and cool, dressing really slick. He had interviewed John and I, along with Dilan, and now wanted to concentrate on the burglars. We actually had one of their classmates living in our home for several weeks by the name of Colt. Colt had also helped Byron do some yard work one day last summer. He was a teen with a strained relationship with his single mom. He and Dilan had been friends a couple of years ago but had drifted in different directions. At the beginning of October, a city policeman called me to ask permission