CONFRONTING
A QUEST TO ASK K.W. THE HARD QUESTIONS, AT LAST Decades after his son’s shocking death, would the ex-deputy dispel suspicions — or reinforce them?
K.W. Klaver knew I was snooping around. An old friend of his, a retired sheriff’s deputy like himself, had called from Gilroy and told him.
But Klaver didn’t know I was coming to Oklahoma. He didn’t know I would show up with a photographer that bright Monday morning at the Atoka livestock auction barn on the edge of town.
I had come to pose a brazen question and wasn’t quite sure how to phrase it: How do you ask a man if he killed his 10-year-old son?
‘WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE?’
Atoka is a small town on Oklahoma’s southeastern plains, a place best known for tornadoes and team roping. The tastiest catfish can be found at the truck stop on the highway into town. The Ten Commandments are etched in blocks of granite in front of the county courthouse.
Klaver moved here from Santa Clara County with his family in 2004, after retiring from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office. He bought 135 acres a few miles west of town, where he raises some cattle. His three children have grown up and moved out. His second wife, Bobbi, left after they split up in 2010 and eventually moved to Minnesota. Unlike most of his neighbors, he usually keeps the front gate locked, just like he did when he lived on Columbet Avenue in San Martin, where Josh — his son from a previous relationship — was found hanging
in 1989 in the family barn.
Klaver suffered from back problems and the sheriff’s office forced him to retire on disability, records show. He receives more than $49,000 a year from the state of California in compensation. His ailment hasn’t kept him from the roping arena outside of Atoka on Jackpot Roping night, where Kim Burkhalter also competes.
“He likes to rope and has good cattle and takes care of his horses. What’s not to like?” said Burkhalter, who has sold Klaver hay over the years. “He treated me good and paid me on time. I never had a problem with him. I don’t know anyone who has.”
MEETING ‘K-DUB’
In this town of 3,000, it wasn’t difficult to find out that Klaver spends most Monday mornings at the livestock sale barn with a group of regulars checking in on the price of cattle.
The dirt parking lot was filling up with trucks hauling trailers when someone pointed him out.
“K-Dub!’’ one of the guys called out. “Come over here, boy.”
I took a deep breath, then clip-clopped across the wooden front porch of the auction barn and met him next to a cattle pen outside.
He looked bigger than I expected. His shirt was untucked, and a feather stuck up from the band of his cowboy hat. He wore the same bushy mustache draping down his chin that he had since he met Josh’s mother, Kathy Atkins, at a San Jose country western bar nearly 40 years earlier. The two were never married and battled over custody of Josh for years.
Klaver had never talked to a reporter about Josh’s death, and hadn’t been interviewed by a sheriff’s investigator in decades.
So here he was, the last one to see Josh alive and the first to find him hanging, the subject of a renewed sheriff’s department probe that had sent investigators just about everywhere but here. And here I was, face to face with the man whose life I had spent months dissecting, wondering just what he was capable of. Would he even talk to me? Would he get furious and run me off?
I introduced myself. “I want to talk to you about Josh,” I said.
“What about?” he asked. “First off, why are you doing a story about Josh?”
“There have been a lot of questions about what happened to him,” I said.
“Questions raised by his mother,” he said. “His mother’s been beating that tambourine for years.”
Josh’s death had been ruled a suicide twice, he said, and “she won’t handle it. She’s the only one. Everyone else handled it just fine.” standing next to a corral of restless cattle — trying to find out what happened the night Josh died when father and son were left home alone together.
Klaver had a searing squint as he talked, catching my eye each time I looked up from my notebook.
“I know you talked to the officers and the officers told you everything was on the up-and-up,” Klaver said. “With deputies, they look at them twice as hard, just like the officers told you.”
The night Josh died, however, there was no extra scrutiny. Suspicions have swirled around the case for years in part because Klaver’s fellow deputies collected little evidence and quickly concluded suicide that night. Even the sheriff at the time considered him a personal friend.
I asked Klaver if he wanted to find a spot to sit down and talk. He didn’t. So we stood next to the cattle pen — the clamor of mooing rising and falling with his answers.
He insisted he had nothing to do with his son’s death, that he was a good father, that he loved his son and that the boy was upset because he wanted to live with him, not his mother.
“That’s the end of the story,” Klaver said. “That’s all there is to it, and she will not accept that fact so she wants to blame others.”
‘I LOST A CHILD’
Should I believe him, just like that, end of story?
Almost 30 years had passed, and Klaver was blaming Josh’s mother while Atkins was blaming him. Sadly, I thought, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
But I had to ask myself, could the mystery over Josh’s death ever be solved without knowing for sure with whom the boy wanted to live? He was scheduled to talk to a family court judge the morning after his death to possibly provide some answers.
Josh’s mother swears that Josh wanted to live with her. The reason she didn’t return him to Klaver’s house the night before his death, as required by their custody agreement, she said, was because Josh told her that night that he didn’t want to go back to his father’s house. Shortly after Josh died in 1989, Sgt. Gerald Egge was quoted in the Mercury News saying that Josh “loved his father, but he wanted to live with his mother.”
However, a year before his death, when his mother had primary custody, court documents show that the boy told one therapist he wanted to be with his father.
‘OFFICERS TOLD YOU EVERYTHING WAS ON THE UP AND UP’ And so began a 40-minute interview — “(Josh) killed himself that night because he didn’t want to go to her house. That’s the end of the story. That’s all there is to it, and she will not accept that fact so she wants to blame others.” — K.W. Klaver
They also recount an incident when Josh bolted from his stepfather’s car at a gas station to try to find his father at the sheriff’s department. Josh’s life with his mother and stepfather clearly wasn’t always the happy, safe haven that Kathy Atkins promised the judge it would be.
So what was Josh thinking that tragic night? Did he confide in his father his confusion, his fears, his desire to live with one parent over the other? Did he say something to trigger what Judge James Stewart after a 1986 custody trial had called Klaver’s “difficulty in controlling anger” and “marked propensity to use physical force when frustrated”?
Klaver wouldn’t tell me. No matter how many ways I asked, he said he didn’t remember a single thing he might have said to Josh that night or what Josh might have said to him.
“I was a great dad. I worked hard for him,” said Klaver, insisting he did the “honorable thing” by taking in Josh when the boy was a toddler and his mother was battling drug problems. “I did everything I could for him.”
He loved Josh, he said, “and I still love him.”
“I lost a child. I lost a child due to circumstances that were beyond my control,” he said. “I fought two or three years to keep him right with us, and she challenged it and she had nothing but problems with him.”
But what happened in the barn that night? What triggered the tragedy? Klaver said he doesn’t remember. “It’s too painful for me,” Klaver says of the night he entered the barn a few steps ahead of his wife.
His memories aren’t of that day, he said, but are of Josh “being upset leading up to that day.” About the only thing he said he remembers of that night is cutting Josh down and performing CPR.
Before his wife at the time, Bobbi, returned home, he said, “I was on the phone almost the whole time talking to a friend of mine.”
Bobbi Klaver, however, told me that her husband had explained to her that night what had happened: that he and Josh were in the barn, that Josh was upset, that Klaver gave him a “big hug” to calm him down then left him alone in the barn to feed the rabbits. When Bobbi came home with pizza for dinner, they both went to look for Josh in the barn. Klaver found him first, hanging in the slaughter room he used for butchering farm animals.
Why didn’t Klaver remember any of those details now? Was the trauma too great? Did the years dull his memory? Was he just unwilling to tell me?
‘IS THIS HOLDING TIGHTLY?’
I braced myself to ask the tough questions:
Did he hug Josh tightly that night? “Could you have taken the wind out of him?” I asked.
“Absolutely not. It’s just not like that. No. It’s not like that. It’s a very unfortunate incident,” he said. “It was investigated multiple times. I’m very sorry I lost a child to suicide.”
“Did you restrain him in such a way he might have died as an accident?” I asked.
“Absolutely not. You’re getting into something that just never happened,” he said. “I loved him and did everything I could for him.”
Perhaps that should have been the end of the interview. But the hug thing was still nagging at me. It’s something his stepson from his first marriage said he never saw Klaver do.
Klaver doesn’t remember hugging Josh that night, but “I always held him tightly when he was upset,” he said. “So, was he upset that night?” I asked. He didn’t answer. Instead, in a startling moment, the former deputy sheriff sidled up to me at the edge of the corral, wrapped his arm firmly around my shoulders and pulled me in. Then he tilted his head down so close to mine that the brim of his cowboy hat nearly touched my forehead.
He looked me straight in the eye. “Is this holding tightly?” he asked. “This is what I did to my kids. This is what I did to my kids when they were upset, when I talked to them.”
There we stood for a full 20 seconds: Klaver looking down at me; I looking up at him, neither of us blinking.
The moment went on so long I had time to contemplate several possibilities. One of them was this: Was there truth in his eyes? If someone looks you straight in the eye long and hard when he says he did nothing to harm his child, should you believe him? If you look straight back, can you see into his soul?
The cows mooed in chorus. Klaver let go.
“You’ve asked me to believe you,” I said, “and not believe what’s in the court papers. Who should I believe?”
“I can’t tell you who to believe,” he said. “I can only tell you my version and how it happened. That’s all I can do.”
‘TRYING TO DIG UP DIRT’
The call from an anonymous woman came the next day. Photographer LiPo Ching and I were on our way to see the historical marker where, as local lore has it, Bonnie and Clyde — or at least Clyde Barrow — survived a shootout.
I pulled over to answer. The caller was agitated, her voice elevated. She heard I was “running around” the sale barn asking questions.
“You most certainly haven’t done your homework very well,” she said, “because you’re trying to dig up dirt on somebody where it doesn’t exist.”
She refused to identify herself, insisting she was just a friend of Klaver’s. But she was intent on convincing me that any suspicions about Klaver were false and that they were the work of a scorned ex-girlfriend.
“You’re digging up all this dirt and hurting people tremendously by doing so, because she can’t have him back.”
If Klaver has problems, she said, it’s because of women, “that’s his only problem.”
“Women absolutely love this man,” she said. “Women are attracted to him.”
K.W. Klaver is “a good guy, an honest guy and a hard-working man,” she said.
“You were bamboozled, madame, coming out here.”
‘IF YOU ARE ANY JUDGE OF CHARACTER’
Klaver had tried to convince me of the same thing. Along with blaming Josh’s mother for his son’s death, he had accused his ex-girlfriend of being “a thorn in my side” and stirring up false rumors.
There was something else about my interview at the livestock auction barn that summer morning that stuck with me. It happened at the end, when I thought the interview was over. As I was sitting in my rental car reviewing my notes, Klaver walked across the dusty parking lot, through the trucks and trailers, to my window. I rolled it down. He leaned in, again, close.
“If you are any judge of character, you can see I look you right in the eye when I say it’s devastating,” he said, “and I’m telling you it’s very painful.”
Klaver was asking me to judge his character. So I asked him again about the abusive behavior — confirmed by a judge when Josh was 7, spelled out by two grown daughters in restraining order requests in 2010 and alleged by his first wife. Bobbi Klaver, his second wife, had even written that he threatened to kill her and fired a gun at her feet saying, “It will be that quick.”
“It never happened, never happened,” Klaver said. “I treated women well. Yes, verbal arguments, but I’ve never been physical with a woman or children.”
I tried to give him some leeway. I asked if perhaps he saw himself as a strict disciplinarian back then whose behavior wouldn’t have been seen as abuse decades ago. But he denied that as well.
He had his own explanation for the time the social worker was called after the boy told his school his father had knocked him down the stairs into garbage cans and that he was afraid to go home. Klaver would later tell me Josh had tripped and fallen after Klaver had sent the boy outside to take off his muddy shoes.
“I think a lot of that child abuse was created by that woman trying to get custody,” he told me at the barn, referring to Josh’s mother, “because it didn’t happen.”
Then he asked me a question, one that Josh’s mother has been asking for 30 years, one that I couldn’t readily answer:
If he was guilty of child abuse, Klaver asked me, “how come I was never charged?”
COMING TOMORROW: A rope, a chair, a re-enactment