“The girl’s mother reported it, and then the girl recanted,” Michael said. “He was sentenced to some kind of intervention program for a lesser charge, did some volunteer work, and his record was expunged. Juvie records are sealed in Florida anyway.”
“Then how’d you hear about the rape allegation?”
Michael grinned. “I have my sources. People in this town really didn’t like the guy. Guess that’s why he had to go to Bronson County to get a job.”
“Did you talk to Merle Goggins over there?”
“I called, then I drove over there to see him. Goggins wasn’t happy to see me, but after I pointed out that it was one of our reporters who’d been assaulted, he relented and gave me a quote.”
“What’d he say?”
Michael flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Shocked and disgusted that a former employee had betrayed the public trust. Recently discharged for dereliction of duty. Since juvenile records are sealed, he had no way of knowing about Poppell’s past. Like that.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Conley pointed out, turning back to her own story.
“Hey,” Michael said. “He said for me to tell you that he’s sorry. And I believe him. The dude’s not a friendly type, but he asked me to let him know if you need anything. At all. And that’s a direct quote. ‘Tell her anything she needs, at all, I’m here.’”
60
A VOICE IN THE NIGHT, LOCAL DEEJAY WAS AN ENIGMA
By Conley Hawkins
For fans like Winnie Churchwell, Silver Bay disc jockey Buddy Bright was a welcome guest in the kitchen, relaying the local news and weather reports and playing favorite rock music from the ’60s and ’70s during his popular Up All Night with Buddy Bright late-night shift. In high school football and baseball press boxes, he was the Man in Black, the familiar voice providing play-by-play commentary for the past six seasons.
Melissa Padgett-Holland, a night-shift waitress at the Waffle House on State Route 28, knew him only as a regular customer. As soon as she saw his vintage white Corvette with the distinctiveWORKING PRESSlicense plate pull up to the front of the restaurant in the early-morning hours, she’d put in his order for eggs over easy, crisp bacon, and grits. “Nice guy,” Joyner said. “Real easy to talk to; although he never said much about himself, he’d always ask about my kids. He’d talk to some of the other regulars here too. And he never left less than a ten-dollar tip.”
Neal Evancho, station manager / owner of WSVR, said Bright showed up “outta nowhere” six years ago, asking for a job at the exact moment Evancho’s previous nighttime deejay departed without notice. Bright had no audition tapes or résumé, but Evancho said his new employee was obviously a seasoned pro. “I hired him on the spot.”
Like most of Silver Bay, Evancho was shocked to learn of Bright’s murder on a quiet, leafy block of Felicity Street on Sunday morning.
That shock was compounded when he learned that the amiable Buddy Bright was really a fugitive named Robert Breitweis, a disgraced Detroit deejay convicted of killing a Michigan teenager in an alcohol-fueled hit-and-run accident. Authorities there say Breitweis was working on a prisoner highway detail in 2008 when he simply walked away into obscurity.
Over his years on the run, Breitweis bounced around small-market radio stations in the Midwest and the South, working under several assumed names, including Buddy Bright.
The sixty-eight-year-old disc jockey was killed by a single gunshot fired by a disgruntled former Bronson County sheriff’s deputy as he rescued a local woman the deputy was attempting to abduct.
I am that local woman. My name is Sarah Conley Hawkins. I was born and raised in Silver Bay, and I grew up in that house on Felicity Street. My great-grandfather foundedThe Silver Bay Beacon,and I am the fourth generation of my family to work in our family enterprise.
Until Sunday morning, in the moment before he saved my life, I had never come face-to-face with the man we thought we knew as Buddy Bright.
Brittany Michelle Pakowsky only met the man she knew as Robbie Breitweis once. At seventeen, the suburban Detroit teenager and some friends snuck into a hotel bar in Bloomfield Hills, where they encountered Breitweis, who’d earlier worked a live remote broadcast from a nearby auto dealership. It was December 1998, the week before Christmas.
According to witnesses, Breitweis, who’d been drinking steadily most of the day, plied the girls with frozen daiquiris and invited them to accompany him to a private party. The teens declined his offer and were walking to their car when Breitweis, driving a white Corvette at a high rate of speed, struck Brittany Pakowsky in the hotel parking lot before driving away. The teenager died two days later.
Marlene Pakowsky, Brittany’s mother, said she will never stop grieving the loss of her youngest daughter. She still lives in the home where Brittany grew up and keeps a small artificial Christmas tree in Brittany’s room, which she lights up every night, year-round.
“I’m not glad he’s dead, because he got it easy,” Mrs. Pakowsky told me. “I prayed for years that he’d get caught so he’d have to rot in jail. You tell me he’s been out there, living, enjoying life, while my baby is cold in the grave all this time? I don’t know what to say.”
Conley wrote the story in an adrenaline-fueled burst of creative energy, melding her harrowing first-person experience with facts and quotes and observations of an experience she couldn’t afford to forget.
At four, she typed the last paragraph, and as she sat back in her chair, overcome with mental and physical exhaustion, she heard a faint mewling coming from the vicinity of her backpack.
Michael whirled around on his chair. “What was that?”
“Oh Lord, I completely forgot she was in there,” Conley said guiltily. “She’s been traumatized. I couldn’t leave her alone in that cat-carrier.” She picked up the backpack and brought out the squirming cat. “This is Hi-Fi.”
Michael’s freckled face lit up as he reached for her. “A stowaway!”
