Intro By David Petlansky:
This is a story that is personal and important to me. It recently vanished from the web with the removal of 2009's archives at its original home at Folio Weekly. For my own personal reasons, it is important that this story remains available to anyone who wants to read it. So, I have collected the pictures, retyped it from the original magazine, and incorporated any available links to preserve this piece of my history in an interactive digital format.
Thank you for reading...
Printed July 28th, 2009
Dan McKinzy was up against a deadline. He'd promised to finish the job two nights earlier, but had been unable to go through with it. Although he was fearful of disappointing the guy who'd hired him, he'd ditched the gear he'd been given - black clothing, a knife, a dark-brown ski-mask - and explained that the scene had just been "too hot." There'd been too many people around, he said, possibly even police.
Mckinzy was, without contention, a criminal. His substantial rap sheet included arrests in both Duval and Nassau counties for domestic violence and myriad instances of drug possession and sales. But he wasn't a murderer - yet. The question facing him: Was he willing to become one?
McKinzy took cover in a length of corrugated plastic culvert piping and removed his sage-green polo shirt and khaki pants. He put on a pair of black pants, a black T-shirt, and black high-top sneakers he'd brought with him in a navy blue duffle bag. He'd polished off about a gram of cocaine that day, part of his payment for killing David. Other than the drugs - with which he'd been provided throughout the previous week while he and his co-conspirators staked out the West Jacksonville home - he was given a meager $260 in cash.
McKinzy emerged from the pipe leaving behind his clothing, the empty bag, even his wallet, and waited in a wooded area for the sun to go down, knowing all the while, or so he'd later say, that he couldn't go through with it. He didn't even know David or "the girl," he would tell police, and they'd never done anything to him.
Still, he waited there in the dark, chilly woods, getting eaten by bugs, for a long time. He wanted to at least prove that he tried - that he'd at least "put forth an effort" to make the hit.
By the same token, Steven Bozemen isn't the kind of guy you'd expect to arrange a hit. An avid golfer and former high school athlete, Bozeman is the wealthy son of a successful local business owner. He's conventionally handsome, indisputably privileged, and the last person his friends or coworkers would suspect of attempting to kill someone.
Bozeman and Petlansky are virtual strangers. They met just once, during the winter of 2007, when Petlansky's best friend Angela Sanders (now Angela Petlansky) was dating Bozeman. The meeting was unremarkable. The only detail Petlansky remembers from the encounter is that he hugged Bozeman. "I was in a really hugging point in my life at that time," he recalls. "I hugged everybody."
Just four months later, according to police, Bozeman would hire Dan McKinzy, a common criminal he was introduced to by a mutual friend James Lewis, to endPetlansky's life. In the interim, Angela had broken up with longtime boyfriend Bozeman and taken up with reliable best friend Petlansky. On April 18, 2008, about a month after they started dating, Petlansky and Angela were engaged. (They married on February 21st, 2009) As it happens, that was also the night David was supposed to die.
"What are going to do?" wonders Angela. "Wave a piece of paper at him?"
Bozeman hasn't made any attempt to contact the Petlanskys during the year and several months he's been out of jail, but David hasn't let his guard down. "[My brother] let me borrow his gun, just in case," says Petlansky, referring to handgun he keeps at his couple's Riverside apartment. "The [hearing] is coming up, and he knows he is going to jail now for something that he didn't get to finish doing."
The sense of dread is so acute that Angela sometimes wishes for something awful to happen just to motivate the legal system to act.
"At this point I would almost rather be murdered," she says, point-blank, "[Then] they'd actually do something, and we wouldn't have to live paranoid forever."
In a deposition taken in March of this year, James Lewis swears he didn't introduce Bozeman to Dan McKinzy with any ill intent. Sure, he knew that Bozeman, a high school friend, wanted his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend dead, but Lewis insists it was pure coincidence that a criminal-for-hire like McKinzy was around on the April afternoon he and Bozeman planned to have lunch together.
Both Lewis and Bozeman attendedHilliard High School in the early aughts (Lewis is a year younger than now-25-year-old Bozeman) They played on the basketball team together, but had fallen out of touch after graduation. Lewis - who worked as a logger, admittedly to meet customers for his primary venture as a drug dealer - said hadn't heard from Bozeman in years. But in April '08, he got a call from another high school friend, Marcus McCullough, informing him that Bozeman needed to get in touch with him.
According to Lewis,Bozeman visited his Hilliard home that very day, and after some small talk, said he was going to get "straight to the point." The point, Lewis told police, was thatBozeman wanted David Petlansky dead. Lewis says he declined to assist in committing the murder, explaining that he had a wife and child to worry about. Still, the two men agreed to meet for lunch another day. It was during one of several subsequent luncheons that Lewis introduced Bozeman to McKinzy. According to a statementMcKinzy made to police on April 20, 2008, Lewis contacted him and said that he had a "job lined up" for him. Incidentally, McKinzy had an interview scheduled at a local Wendy's, but figured whatever "job" Lewis had for him would pay better and faster. In the car that day, either en route to or returning from lunch, McKinzy says Bozeman told him what he wanted.
"He needed me to off somebody ass and do him in and...I'll be tooken [sic] cafe of." Under the terms of their original agreement, McKinzy would receive $500 in cash and a bus ticket to New York.
It was around midnight when McKinzy says he got cold feet - again - and emerged from the woods. He tossed the ski mask in a dumpster behind a nearby convenience store, found a payphone and called Lewis to come pick him up. When they arrived back at Lewis' Hilliard apartment,McKinzy headed home on foot and attempted to go to sleep. Instead, he was plagued by worry. He later told police, "I felt like something was going to happen to me or to Lewis, you know? This was dead-line and now it's on us." Scared and likely exhausted, McKinzy phoned the Nassau County Sheriff's Office and admitted to having information about a murder that was to take place in Duval County. Just as day was breaking, that Saturday morning, he was picked up by Nassau County officers and taken in for questioning.
After telling police everything he knew, McKinzy agreed to help officers take Bozeman down. As police listened in, McKinzy phoned Bozeman and arranged for one last meeting so they could discuss the murder. McKinzy was set up with a wire and placed in a covert vehicle. Folio was unable to listen to the recordings because, according to the State Attorney's Office, they constitute "active criminal investigative and intelligence information," but according to investigating officers, Bozeman made sever sufficiently incriminating statements and was arrested on the spot.
According to police, when they asked Bozeman on the night of his arrest why he'd involve himself in something like this, he mumbled "I am just stupid." Asked to repeat himself more clearly, he said more loudly, "I am just stupid." (Bozeman, through his attorney Henry Coxe, declined to comment for this article.)
During his relatively brief detention in the Duval County jail, Bozeman applied to have his bail reduced from the $500,000 originally set (it was dropped to $10,000), a request he backed with 35 letters attesting to his good character. The letters - written by relatives,friends, former teachers, bosses, and pastors - paint Bozeman as a model employee, a devout Christian and generally good guy. Tim Spangler, the director of a golf course where Bozeman once worked as assistant golf pro, wrote, "Actions written on the police report are not the Steven Bozeman I've known for three years...he is a man of truth, character, honesty and compassion. He would not harm a fly, let alone a person." Friend Michael Wenzel said that Bozeman "did not believe in living life in a way that was contrary to God's word."
Several letters excuse Bozeman's actions as resulting from extreme heartbreak. He and Angela were together for more than four years before she ended their relationship in February of last year. She andPetlansky began seriously dating only about a month later. Susan Winters, a teacher at Hilliard Middle-Senior High School and a friend of Bozeman's mother, wrote, "I have never seen that side of him, and I am genuinely convinced that his actions were not the actions of that Steven I know, but rather one that was in a heartache that most of us will never know." His cousin Natasha De Grave said, "I would like to say that we all make mistakes in life, especially when the heartache involved is so monumental."
Angela thinks Bozeman honestly believed that if Petlansky were dead, she'd come running back to him. (James Lewis suggested something similar in his testimony, saying that Bozeman was under the impression that he and Angela would reconcile if Petlansky was gone.)
The very thought turns Petlansky's stomach. "[I'm sure] he would have shown up at the hospital to see her with a big bouquet of flowers, all dressed up, tickets to something," he speculates, "Like, everything would be all right. Like nothing happened and [Angela] wouldn't wonder."
As forPetlansky, he lost the job he had at the time - a steady, well-paying gig at a construction company - because he was constantly making and receiving phone calls to ensure Bozeman was still locked up. And both Angela and David are fixated on what-ifs - endless questions about how the near-crime might've happened, and what the results would have been if McKinzy hadn't balked. Unfortunately, neither have been able to express these impressions in any meaningful way. The Petlanskys have never given statements to the police, and they've never sat for depositions. Nobody even asked them to.
About the only time the couple has been involved in the narrative of the crime was when police told the Petlansky's of the plot on David's life. That visit remains a surreal memory. The couple was watching "The Holiday" in the family room at David's mom's house when a uniformed officer knocked on the door. David's first thought was that his brother was in trouble for underage drinking or that a neighbor had smelled him smoking pot on the back porch earlier that evening. Then the officer asked, "Do you know a Steven Bozeman?" Angela's first thought was that Bozeman had killed himself.
"Early on, [one of the detectives] said we needed to make this important to us,"Petlansky says. "He said that's the only way anything would happen with it. He said they have evidence to put [Bozeman] in jail, but he's a first-time offender, and his dad has a lot of money, so it's going to be really difficult."
Although the couple hasn't been able to actively participate in the case, they recently had the opportunity to listen to the recording police made of Bozeman talking to McKinzy. Petlansky said it's difficult, even hearing Bozeman say it aloud, to believe that it's his murder being discussed.
"I didn't feel like I was listening to somebody plot my death," explains Petlansky. "It was almost like listening to a radio show."
Both David and Angela are preparing statements to make at Bozeman's sentencing hearing. They expect it will be cathartic to finally have a chance to say their piece, but they're also bracing for disappointment. Sentencing guidelines allow as much as 30 years in prison, but because Bozeman's a first-time offender and has the luxury of high-priced representation, he'll likely serve the minimum four-year sentence, if that. Dan McKinzy is currently in prison on unrelated drug charges, but hasn't been charged for his role in thePetlansky hit. James Lewis, who wound up in jail for driving on a suspended license, the Saturday McKinzy went to police, was also never charged.
David Petlansky finds it unsettling that a crime of such brutal intent can disappear so easily from the criminal justice system. But he's weary of weighing what-ifs. Whatever happens in court next month, he, too, will be glad when it's finally over.
"It's just a relief at this point," he says. "All I've wanted is a cap on this entire situation just to move on."
Story Update: Steven Bozeman ended up spending less than 3 years in prison for a murder he attempted to have carried out at least 3 times. He is currently engaged to be married. [May 2013]