By Mike Nichols
Columnist
The first question Joe DeCecco asked police after finding out the killers who buried a hatchet in the skull of a 78-year-old woman were allegedly two 13-year-olds, including her great-grandson, was a simple and incredulous one:
“Did these kids grow up here?” asked the veteran Sheboygan County district attorney. “Did they grow up here in Sheboygan?”
The last murder in idyllic little Sheboygan Falls was in 1996. There are maybe one or two first-degree homicides per year on average in all of Sheboygan County.
This isn’t a big metropolitan area where ingrained poverty, drugs, gangs and family dysfunction have helped foster horrific crime by young teenagers. This is small-town Wisconsin, and these kids, Antonio Barbeau and Nathan Paape, look like they haven’t even reached puberty. I have a 13-year-old myself. Kids that age have consciences and an innate innocence that lingers.
Something different grew in Sheboygan.
According to the criminal complaint: The boys asked Paape’s mother to give them a ride from Sheboygan, where they live, to Barbeau’s great-grandmother’s house in Sheboygan Falls seven miles away. That’s a meandering, pleasant drive, especially when the leaves are deep red beside the sun-dappled waters of the Sheboygan River. You pass baseball diamonds and parks and the stables of Kohler. It’s the sort of drive you’d take with a picnic basket on your lap. These boys, say police, secretly carried a hammer and a hatchet.
“These two boys were cold, callous and calculating,” said Sheboygan Falls Police Chief Steven Riffel.
Barbeau’s great-grandmother’s house in the quiet Westwynde Bluffs subdivision has a welcome sign affixed to a plant stand in which she helped things grow. Barbara Olson is said to have been like that – welcoming, nurturing.
After Paape’s mother, oblivious, dropped them off the other day, they walked in, struck the old woman several times with the blunt end of the hatchet, then turned it around while she lay groaning on the floor, according to the criminal complaint.
“Nathan stated he hit her twice with the hammer and then Antonio, using the blade end of the hatchet, struck her in the head and the hatchet stuck there and that both of them had to pull the hatchet loose,” according to the complaint.
When they were done with her, it is alleged, they went out for pizza. Yes, pizza.
DeCecco is a prosecutor, not a minister. But I can’t get over the fact these kids are 13 and from Sheboygan. I asked him if the killing gives him pause about human nature.
“No, no, this is an exception. I have been a prosecutor for about 23 years. Of all the people I have prosecuted, there are only two that gave me pause like this case does.” Those two had a “dead affect in describing the crime: no emotion, no apparent remorse.”
He thinks there are a “limited number of people in the world” who aren’t just immoral but are “amoral,” people who “have no moral compass at all.”
This case has a long way to go, so while Barbeau and Paape have also appeared remorseless to DeCecco, he is resisting definitively lumping these kids in with what the professors would call sociopaths. He did say, however, that some people “don’t see the world like we all see it … We just have a sense of conscience, and if we do something wrong, most of us are regretful … But there are some people in the world who never have those feelings.”
These boys did indeed grow up in the Sheboygan area. But if they did this, I don’t think that tells us what we want to know – where they really come from.
That’s a place unknown to the rest of us and one where, we can only hope, there aren’t many more of them.
Mike Nichols is a freelance columnist based in Cedarburg. The opinions expressed here are his and not necessarily of this newspaper of Southern Lakes Newspapers LLC. Contact him at [email protected].
