How a shocking crime divided
 a small Minnesota town.

By John Rosengren

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Grand Marais is a quiet outpost on Lake Superior’s North Shore, set among boreal forest in the easternmost corner of Minnesota. The town of roughly 1,300 is home to a mix of artists and outdoor enthusiasts, working-class people and professionals, liberals and diehard Trump supporters. In the summer, Grand Marais’s art galleries, shops, and restaurants swell with tourists drawn to what the website Budget Travel once dubbed “America’s Coolest Small Town.” The wait for a table at the Angry Trout Café, which serves locally sourced cuisine in an old fishing shanty, can run to more than an hour. When summer is over, the town retreats into itself again, which suits full-time residents just fine. “Even though we’re a tourism economy, most of us live a life where we just don’t want to be bothered,” said Steve Fernlund, who published the Cook County News Herald in the 1990s and now writes a weekly column for The North Shore Journal. “I’m at the end of a road, and I’ve got 12 acres of land. My closest neighbors are probably about 600 feet away through the woods. So, you know, we appreciate being hermits.”

Content warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse of children.

Yet privacy only extends so far here. Gossip travels fast while having breakfast at the South of the Border café, or in chance encounters along Wisconsin Street. Everybody knows everybody else’s business—or thinks they do. “Even though there are differences of opinion—we have an eclectic collection of opinions—this is a close-knit community,” said Dennis Waldrop, who manages the Cook County Historical Museum. “Anything that happens here is discussed extensively.”

The residents of Grand Marais have had a lot to discuss in recent years. A suspicious fire that destroyed the historic Lutsen Lodge. The suicide of their neighbor Mark Pavelich, a star on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union. Plans for the 40 acres near town owned by convicted sex offender Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist clan. All those events stirred plenty of talk.

But nothing has captivated local conversation quite like what happened between Larry Scully and Levi Axtell in March 2023. A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice. Grand Marais is still trying to piece itself back together.

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Every small town has its cast of offbeat characters. Larry Scully was one of Grand Marais’s. Larry, who was 77 in 2023, dwelled on the fringe of town, where Fifth Street meets Highway 61, and on the fringe of reality. His two-bedroom house, which used to belong to his parents, was crowded with items he’d hoarded over the years. The mess spilled into his front yard, which was cluttered with satellite dishes, a statue of the Virgin Mary, and a wood-frame sign advertising “antler bone art.” The sign was decorated with several of Larry’s scrimshaw carvings, which he hawked at art fairs. In addition to carving, he’d tried his hand at an array of other pursuits: refurbishing broken electronics, selling solar-powered generators that could run home appliances in the event of an emergency, and even fashioning leather lingerie that he peddled to women. Larry had had no stable career to speak of since he arrived in town in the early 1980s.

Larry was a conspiracy theorist. On his Facebook page, he posted videos and articles declaring that the federal government controlled the weather, that Sandy Hook was a hoax, that Timothy McVeigh was a “CIA patsy,” that the totalitarian New World Order was real. Around Grand Marais, Larry was also known to be exceedingly religious. He attended Mass on Saturday evenings at St. John’s Catholic Church, always sitting in the front row, and he believed that the statues there cried actual tears—sometimes of blood. He carried a lock of hair that he said once belonged to Father Mark Hollenhorst, a priest at St. John’s who died in 1993, in a leather pouch around his neck; he claimed that it could effect miraculous cures.

Larry referred to himself as a prophet and would often appear around town dressed in a cloak and sandals and carrying a wooden staff. He once showed up on the courthouse steps for the National Day of Prayer clad all in black, his head covered by a medieval-type chainmail hood, and fell to his knees screaming. Another time he berated a group of gay people who’d gathered in downtown Grand Marais, shouting through a bullhorn that God didn’t approve of them.

Many locals found Larry’s zeal exhausting. “When I’d see him, I’d know I was going to be there for a long time, because he’d go on and on,” said Laura Laky, a Grand Marais resident. “He’d talk about the end-times, the Book of Revelation, Christ coming again.”

Other people were scared of Larry. Rumors that he abused children circulated around Grand Marais for years. People whispered about him watching kids from his parked car. There were claims that he’d videotaped girls’ volleyball games and children at Sven and Ole’s, the local pizzeria. A member of the nearby Chippewa tribe told me that Larry had been banned from the Grand Portage powwow after parents complained about him passing out candy to their children.

Larry once approached a man named Gary Nesgoda at a gas station and asked if he had kids. When Nesgoda said that he did, Larry showed him pictures of a fairy garden he’d built behind his house. There were miniature staircases and doors, and little figurines set amid tree roots. Larry insisted that Nesgoda, who had recently moved to Grand Marais, should bring his kids over to see it. “Everything he was telling me sounded pretty neat,” Nesgoda told me. Then, in the gas station parking lot, someone who’d overheard the conversation stopped Nesgoda. “Do not bring your children over there,” they warned.

This was a common theme. “Larry was the boogeyman,” said Brian Larsen, editor and publisher of the Cook County News Herald, who is a father of four children. “You’d tell your kids to stay the heck away from him.”

In 2014, Larry decided to run for mayor of Grand Marais. In a candidate forum broadcast on WTIP, a community radio station, he ranted about Christianity. “We can’t sit by and let our government stop us from having the Bible in the military, taking out the crucifixes, taking out the Ten Commandments in our federal buildings and establishments,” he said. Then, just before election day, the Cook County News Herald ran a front-page article that seemed to confirm the longstanding speculation about Larry. The piece detailed his criminal conviction for the sexual assault of a six-year-old girl.

“Take whatever treatment is available to you,” the judge said, “because this type of conduct, of course, is just wholly unacceptable.”

Before he became an object of fear and fascination in Grand Marais, Larry was married—twice. For a time he lived with his second wife, Sheila, in Ramsey, about 25 miles outside Minneapolis. On Ash Wednesday in 1979, Sheila went to evening Mass and then to bowl in her weekly league, leaving Larry home alone with their five children: three young boys from his first marriage and six-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, from hers. While the other children slept, according to police and court records, Larry invited his stepdaughter into his bedroom.

The little girl later told a police investigator that he showed her “pictures of naked people,” touched her “potty area” with a vibrator, then stuck his tongue and finger into her vagina. She said it wasn’t the only time he’d touched her, and that he’d warned her not to tell anyone, but she went to her mother anyway. Sheila reported the incident to child welfare services, who notified law enforcement. She told the police investigator that her husband had also recently become violent and suicidal.

The police arrested Larry. In a recorded statement with investigators, he admitted that he’d had sexual contact with his stepdaughter on two Wednesday evenings while his wife was bowling. A psychiatrist determined that he was competent to stand trial, finding no evidence of “any kind of psychiatric disorder.” Rather than face a jury, Larry confessed to second-degree criminal sexual conduct, and the prosecution recommended a sentence of five years. Two court psychologists submitted reports indicating that Larry wasn’t open to receiving treatment. At an October 1979 hearing, the judge urged Larry to reconsider. “Take whatever treatment is available to you,” the judge said, “because this type of conduct, of course, is just wholly unacceptable.”

Larry was incarcerated in Minnesota’s Stillwater prison, and in records from his time there, there’s no mention of him receiving counseling or treatment, though he did join a Bible study. Soon, changes to the state’s sentencing guidelines allowed Larry to seek early release. Since the state did not provide evidence that doing so would “present a danger to the public,” the court approved Larry’s request. He left prison on January 19, 1982, after serving a little more than two years for his crime.

In those days, there was no sex offender registry in Minnesota, or in most states. Larry was at liberty to go where he liked. Sheila had divorced him by then, and his three sons were living with their mother. Larry, who was 36 at the time, hitchhiked to Grand Marais to move in with his parents.

Three decades later, Larry lost the town’s mayoral election, 345 votes to 42. Many locals were surprised that he’d gotten any votes at all, especially after the story broke about his criminal record. “Forty-something people voted for him,” said Amber Waldrop, who lived down the street from Larry. “They knew about this guy. For anybody to even think that someone like that should become mayor of this town is sickening.”

Some of those votes came from Larry’s friends, many of whom shared his belief in conspiracy theories. Perhaps it’s no surprise that they also believed what Larry told them: that the accusations against him were made up, that his ex-wife had encouraged her daughter to lie to the police, that he only took the plea deal to avoid a long prison sentence.

Larry’s friends knew that he tended to hijack conversations and go on at length about topics ranging from the Rapture to homeopathic cures, and that he engaged strangers in ways many people found uncomfortable. But being an oddball, they said, isn’t a crime. Some of his friends thought Larry was on the autism spectrum, which made it hard for him to read social cues and show empathy. “This man has been persecuted all of his life,” said Bob Stangler, a Vietnam veteran who knew Larry for years. “The citizens of the area have labeled him a pervert, and he’s not a pervert at all. He’s a genius with Asperger’s who’s overcaring of people.”

A woman I’ll call Carol, who asked that her real name not be used, said she was so close with Larry that she spoke to him almost daily for 12 years. She knew him to visit sick people, distribute food to the needy, and take care of his ailing mother, who died in 2013. At her memorial service, Larry displayed his mother’s ashes in a cookie jar resembling the Star Wars character R2-D2, saying that it was what she wanted. (His father passed away in 1997.) “As long as I’ve known him, he never hurt anybody,” Carol told me.

She knows that hers is a minority opinion, that for many people in town Larry was foremost a convicted sex offender. “You can never get rid of that label,” she said.

Once they learned about his 1979 conviction, many parents in Grand Marais were more worried than ever that Larry posed a threat to their children. It’s a common enough fear. On the far right, popular conspiracy theories such as QAnon decry a global cabal of child molesters, but even among the general population, concern about the danger posed by pedophiles is widespread. In a Lynn University poll, 75 percent of roughly 200 Florida adults said they believed that sex offenders would reoffend. Yet according to a meta-study conducted by researchers at Public Safety Canada in 2004, one of the most comprehensive available, only 23 percent of people convicted of child sexual abuse were charged or convicted of a similar crime within the next 15 years. (The study’s authors concede that many victims never come forward.) In interviews for this story, researchers noted that recidivism rates have declined even more in recent years.

No one came forward to accuse Larry of more recent abuse after his 1979 conviction. Still, perception alone was enough to put many Grand Marais parents on edge. For one young man, that concern became an obsession.

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If you were passing through Grand Marais a few years back and stopped for gas at the Holiday station on the corner of Broadway and Highway 61, you might have met a stocky cashier with a round, friendly face. While making change, he might have told you one of his homespun puns or signature dad jokes: Why does Paul Bunyan trip in the woods? Because he’s always felling.

That cashier was Levi Axtell. He was raised by his parents, Denise and Treg, in Hovland, a small community located 18 miles from Grand Marais. The Axtells were devout Christians and widely respected in Grand Marais, where they both worked. Denise was a nurse, Treg a physical therapist. The couple had three children: daughters Karlee and Katrina, and Levi, the youngest.

Levi grew up in a picturesque log cabin in a clearing among birch and pine trees. The woods were his playground. He spent hours there as a child, often with his friend and neighbor Cedar Adams. They roasted marshmallows over campfires, tried to catch fish barehanded, and played make-believe, running through the trees as if an attacker were pursuing them.

But Levi couldn’t outrun his demons. There was a history of addiction on Denise’s side of the family, and Levi seemed to have inherited a predisposition to substance abuse. At Cook County High School, he played football, ran track, and drank. Brad Wilson, a carpenter in Grand Marais who was a few years behind him in school, recalled Levi getting caught with liquor bottles in his locker and running from the cops.

Levi’s parents sent him to finish school in Duluth, but he was cited twice within two months for underage drinking. The first time was at Duluth East High School. On the morning of May 29, 2014, when a resource officer tried to restrain him, an inebriated Levi pulled away. The officer wrestled Levi to the ground, but he pushed himself up and army-crawled—with the officer on top of him—down the hallway, until he wore himself out. Levi spent two days in jail and was charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process with force. “I didn’t know it made the charges worse if you resisted arrest,” he later told Cedar Adams.

Not long after, a law enforcement officer stopped Levi as he walked along the shoulder of Interstate 35. The officer smelled booze on his breath, and Levi admitted that he’d been drinking. The officer cited him and let him go after Levi dumped out a container of alcohol he was carrying.

Three days later, Levi was given a year of probation for his disorderly conduct at Duluth East. (The obstruction charge was dropped.) A judge also ordered him to obtain a chemical-dependency assessment and follow any recommendations. Levi satisfied the terms of his probation, including a stint in treatment.

By 2015, Levi had started dating Anna Ross, who was from Duluth. Their daughter was born on June 17, 2016. Anna had just turned 19; Levi was 20. At first they didn’t live together—Anna stayed in Duluth, while Levi lived with his parents in Hovland. He adored his daughter and beamed when she was in his arms.

Despite the new light in his life, Levi remained burdened at times by darkness. About a year after his daughter’s birth, on the Sunday evening of Memorial Day weekend, Levi got drunk, taped a vacuum hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, ran the other end through the back window, and started the engine. When he texted Anna about what he’d done, she called the sheriff’s department. While she was on the phone with them, Levi called her, and she talked him into turning off the car. Deputies arrived at his home and transported Levi to the hospital. It appears that he received some psychiatric treatment after the incident; a year later he indicated in a court document that he’d been a patient in a mental hospital and had seen a psychiatrist.

Despite his troubles, Levi was by all accounts goofy and lovable. Christina Conroy, a friend who worked with Levi briefly at the Holiday station, described him as “a beautiful soul.” Cedar Adams said, “He’s the best person you’ll ever meet. He’s joyful.” Michael Farnum, another friend, told me, “Levi is very kind and caring. He’d give you the shirt off his back.” His mother, Denise, described Levi as “a sweet, thoughtful boy.” (Levi’s family otherwise declined to talk to me.)

People who knew him casually from encounters at Holiday or Grand Marais’s Whole Foods Co-op, where he also briefly worked, described Levi as personable and a hard worker. Pat Eliasen, the Cook County sheriff and a former assistant coach for the varsity football team at the local high school, coached Levi, who played nose tackle and offensive guard. “You’d tell Levi to do a technique or something and he would just go do it,” Eliasen told me. “You couldn’t find a better football player than that.”

A photo posted on Facebook in 2023 shows Levi with his daughter climbing on his shoulders. According to friends, she was his everything. He was often her primary caregiver while Anna completed a social work degree and later held down two jobs. In the winter, Levi built his daughter snow forts that were so solid he could light a campfire inside. He and his daughter cooked together, drew pictures, and took walks. “She’s his life,” Adams told me.

Levi could not bear the thought of anything bad happening to his little girl. Like any parent, he was on the lookout for any threat to his child. At some point, his attention came to rest squarely on Larry Scully.

Levi and Anna got married in late 2018, but they filed for divorce less than two years later, signing legal paperwork that said “the marriage cannot be saved” due to “an irretrievable breakdown of our marriage relationship.” Levi’s mental health no doubt played at least some role in this.

The following winter, Levi staged a one-man protest urging a boycott of the Whole Foods Co-op, where he’d recently been employed. He’d earned $14 an hour stocking produce and ringing up groceries, but he didn’t think it was enough to provide for his daughter. Her day care alone cost $760 a month. After wrangling with the store’s management over a personal tip jar he propped up at the register, Levi lost his job. Soon after that, he set up a table and chair outside the store’s entrance along with a sign demanding that the co-op pay living wages.

Levi sat alone in the bitter cold for days—some locals remember it as weeks. He collected a few donations that he split with other co-op employees, but on the whole his campaign garnered scant sympathy. For a lot of people, it was a sign that something might not be quite right with Levi. “That was an indicator to me that perhaps he was struggling with his mental health,” his friend Christina Conroy told me.

After that, to make ends meet, Levi did odd jobs: clearing snow from roofs, picking weeds, cutting down trees, cleaning apartments, building shelves. By the end of 2022, he and Anna had reconciled enough that they agreed to live together for their daughter’s sake. They shared a split-level home on the edge of Grand Marais, and their property backed up against the woods behind Larry’s house. That meant Levi was now neighbors with the man who, over the previous five years, he’d come to consider his worst nightmare.

According to friends, Levi generally kept his fears about Larry to himself following the outburst at Trinity Lutheran. He didn’t bring up Larry in casual conversation, though it seemed that Larry was on his mind. He once posted a meme on Facebook depicting a person holding a gun, with a caption that read, “Only cure for pedophiles. A bullet.” In a comment below the image, Levi wrote, “People always ask me why I hate pedophiles. They assume I’ve been abused. But really I think being protective is just an Axtell trait.”

His friend Amber Waldrop knew that trait well. She’d met Levi in an outpatient treatment program for addiction, and she found that despite his personal struggles—or maybe because of them—he looked out for other people. Once, they were walking on the lakeshore together and stumbled upon a hornets’ nest. Waldrop thought that she’d been stung and panicked because she was allergic and didn’t have an EpiPen with her. Levi rushed her home in his car. In another instance, when Waldrop was in a dark place, Levi talked her through it. “He has a really big heart,” Waldrop told me.

Many people in Grand Marais knew that Levi had issues and that he could be aggressive when he was drunk. But those close to him didn’t imagine that he would commit brutal violence against another person. On March 8, 2023, Brad Wilson, the carpenter who lived next to Larry Scully, learned that they were wrong.

As the light drained from the sky that afternoon, Wilson was in his garage putting away some tools when he heard a loud crash, like the sound of a car accident. It came from Larry’s driveway. Wilson raced over and saw that Levi had slammed his white Dodge Caravan into Larry’s car. Levi had then jumped out of the van, grabbed a garden shovel from the deck, and barged inside the house. Wilson arrived on the scene in time to hear Larry’s screams.

Wilson stopped short of going inside. He heard the thud of the shovel hitting something, then hitting it again. “Help! Help!” Larry cried out.

Wilson, who had mowed Larry’s lawn the previous summer without pay and generally felt sorry for the man, wanted to intervene, but he feared for his own safety. From his vantage at the front door, he could tell that Levi was in a drunken rage. And Wilson knew from watching Levi play football when they were in high school that although he was only five foot eight and 185 pounds, he was strong. Wilson also feared that Levi might have a gun.

Wilson went around the back of the house to look through an open window. He saw that Levi had trapped Larry in a corner of the kitchen. Hemmed in by stacks of hoarded junk, 77-year-old Larry had nowhere to go. Wilson saw Levi swing the shovel at Larry, who raised his arms as a frail shield against the blows.

Wilson ducked beneath the window and called the sheriff’s department. He then heard a different kind of smash and what was “almost like gurgling.” Wilson said, “It sounded like he was choking on his own blood.” The screaming stopped; Wilson knew that Larry was dead.

Levi bolted out of the house, got into his van, and peeled away. But he wasn’t fleeing. Instead, spattered with his victim’s blood, he drove four blocks to the sheriff’s department, walked inside, and announced that he had just killed Larry Scully. He confessed that he had hit Larry between 15 and 20 times with a shovel, then “finished him off” with a large moose antler.

According to a report from the court-appointed psychologist who evaluated him, Levi considered himself a hero for killing Larry: “[He] believes that others are likely ‘relieved this was taken care of.’”

At Levi’s arraignment, Cook County attorney Molly Hicken successfully argued that bail should be set at $1 million. She told Judge Cuzzo, who was again presiding, “This was a brutal attack without provocation on an elderly man.” People close to Larry thought the attack was provoked—by his brothers Patrick and Jon. “They basically got the whole town against him,” his son Paul told me. “They created the environment where my father could be lynched.”

It was a sentiment that Larry himself had voiced at the hearing three years prior, when Patrick sought a restraining order. “He’s talked to other people and had Levi Axtell say I was trying to groom his daughter,” Larry said. “This shows the vindictiveness of my brother Patrick. He’s trying to establish that I’m a predator.”

According to a report from Mischelle Vietanen, the court-appointed psychologist who evaluated him, Levi considered himself a hero for killing Larry. “[He] believes that others are likely ‘relieved this was taken care of,’ ” Vietanen wrote. She determined that Levi was “impacted by hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia,” and that he was “unable or unwilling to take responsibility for making decisions to interrupt a repeat of impulsive, harmful behaviors.”

Based on Vietanen’s recommendation, Cuzzo found Levi incompetent to stand trial and suspended the criminal charges against him. Should he regain competency, prosecutors could proceed with trying him for second-degree murder.

In a separate and parallel proceeding before a different judge, the Cook County Public Health and Human Services Department pursued a civil commitment of Levi on the grounds—supported by Vietanen’s report—that he was mentally ill and dangerous as well as chemically dependent. At a hearing held via Zoom on June 23, 2023, Levi sat at a table inside the Lake County jail in Two Harbors, 80 miles down Highway 61 from Grand Marais. He wore a black-and-white-striped uniform. He picked at his hands while answering a series of questions, agreeing that he met the criteria for civil commitment. He appeared docile, almost childlike. The judge, David M. Johnson, ordered that Levi be committed, “for an initial period not to exceed 90 days,” to a secure treatment facility.

Levi would remain in the Two Harbors jail for nearly a year, waiting for a bed to open up at a psychiatric facility. When I spoke to him briefly on the phone in late September 2023, he couldn’t discuss the particulars of his case, but he told me a story about a time when he was working at the Holiday gas station and a customer—a man who drove a snowplow for the city—reached across the counter and slapped him in the face. Levi said that he reported the incident to the sheriff’s department, but “they were saying since he didn’t slap me very hard, I shouldn’t have called about it. I was feeling like the cops didn’t care about anything that happened.”

Levi told me that he didn’t know Larry was arrested for trespassing at the gas station, or that the arrest had led to his civil commitment. It seemed as though Levi mostly felt that law enforcement had failed to find a permanent solution—meaning a way to keep Larry away from his daughter and other kids forever.

While he awaited transfer, Levi was able to see visitors, including his daughter. He passed the time drawing pictures that he intended for his daughter and others to color. He sent them to his sister Katrina, dozens every week, and she posted the pictures on Facebook with the invitation, “Please consider mailing him your colored version of his artwork, a letter, photos, and/or a piece of art of your own creation.”

Levi also sent drawings to his friends. One of them went to Amber Waldrop. It depicted a bird’s wings spread wide. “To my dear friend Amber,” Levi wrote. “Remember to … celebrate every victory. To not give up … To leave the past behind … And on your darkest days I hope you learn to dance in the rain.”

When Waldrop showed the drawing to me, she said, “It’s almost like he’s giving himself advice.”

It didn’t take long for a substantial cohort of people in Grand Marais to elevate Levi to the status of folk hero. In their view, what he did was in service of the greater good. Brandy Aldrighetti, a sexual-abuse survivor who lived near Larry, told the Star Tribune, “To me, Levi is like St. George who slayed the dragon—he killed a monster.” Kelsey Valento, a Grand Marais resident and mother, posted an article about the murder on her Facebook page with a comment addressing Levi directly: “I stand by you for removing a horrible nasty pedophile from this community.”

Within days of the crime, his sister Katrina had started a crowdfunding campaign, “to ease the financial burden of the family.” As of this writing, it had raised more than $7,000. When Katrina saw that Amber Lovaasen, Larry’s niece, had posted on Facebook that she and her family had nothing against Levi, she reached out. Soon Lovaasen had designed T-shirts featuring the words, “Our Connection Is Our Strength. Two Families. One Goal. Stop Childhood Sexual Abuse.” She told me that “my family and Levi’s family are coming together pretty much as one family now.”

She does not speak for Larry’s three sons. “I feel sorry for this poor Levi guy,” Paul told me. “He’s obviously got mental issues. I just hope my father gets some justice, that his name is cleared, and he can be seen as the kind, gentle, loving person he was.” Paul and his brothers also hoped to inherit Larry’s house, but a district court judge ruled in March 2024 that a photocopy of their grandmother’s will appointing Larry the sole inheritor of the property was not valid. That placed the home in the possession of Larry’s seven siblings.

His siblings had mixed reactions to Larry’s death. His sister Beth told me that she was worried when she heard the news. “I wanted to make sure that none of my siblings had done anything,” she said. “When I realized that everybody I loved was OK and they all had alibis and it was not them, then I felt relief, kind of lighter and bouncier.” His sister Jane said, “Nobody has the right take anybody else’s life, but when Larry was beating me up and doing things to me as a kid, I wish I would have had access to something to kill him.” Patrick told me that he feels Larry’s death was preventable, if the court system had only listened to him and his siblings. “The sad thing is we tried to warn authorities something like this was going to happen,” he said. “We were afraid some kid’s dad would go over and kill him when they found out about him.”

Within a week of the murder, someone created an online petition asking people to sign “if you agree that Levi Axtell should not be charged with any crimes and immediately be released from jail.” As of mid-May 2024, it had drawn nearly 900 signatures. The petition asks people to “stand by this father, who tried to seek relief via the justice system which failed him.” People who signed the petition noted various reasons for doing so: “I would’ve done exactly what he did if the court system failed me” (Dmitri Birmingham); “Anyone with children understands how this man felt and why he acted” (Joan Folmer); “The world is better off without a child molester!” (Grace Koopman).

Paisley Howard-Larsen, a local mother, told me that she believes Levi did the community a service by killing Larry. “I think this should have been done a long time ago, and I feel bad that it had to be Levi doing it,” she said. “I don’t even see Larry as a human. I think he’s just a monster. It makes me really sad that Levi is going to do any sort of time, whether it’s in a prison or a mental institution. I don’t think that’s right. I think he should have got off free.”

“Even though he actually murdered somebody?” I asked.

“Yeah. I think he did the right thing.”

Others in town, while not condoning murder, nevertheless welcomed the news of Larry’s death. One mother of four young children said, “What Levi did wasn’t justified, but that’s not to say I’m not thankful for it.” Others felt that Levi had been treated unfairly by the state. “Levi tried to go the legal route, he tried to do what he was supposed to do,” his longtime friend Cedar Adams said, citing Levi’s effort to get a protective order against Larry. “They say, ‘Don’t corner a wild animal, because if you do it will attack.’ I feel he felt he was backed into a corner and had no other choice. I feel he’s a victim more than anything.”

Adams’s boyfriend, Nick Swenson, who works at Buck’s Hardware, never met Larry but had heard rumors about him. “You can’t go around killing people,” Swenson told me, “but Levi couldn’t have picked a better person.”

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There’s another side to public opinion, and its defining feature is dismay. The Cook County News Herald published a letter from Jim Boyd, a Grand Marais resident and retired newspaper editor, that argued against vigilante justice. “Scully had not been arrested, charged, jailed, tried, or convicted of any recent crime,” Boyd wrote, referring to the fact that no one had come forward to accuse Larry of abuse since 1979. “You can’t go around killing people just because they are horrible. (The dead would be stacked up like cord wood.)” Similarly, on Facebook threads about the case that mostly lionize Levi and disparage pedophiles, an occasional voice of dissent pops up. For example: “You can’t just murder people because you ‘think’ they might do something” (Penelope Orl). And: “Child molestation is horrible and wrong. Murdering someone by butchery is also wrong” (Don Croker).

For Larry’s friends and sons, much of the discourse about his death is chilling. “He did not deserve to die the way he did,” Carol told me. “I hate the way Levi’s family and Pat and Jon are going after Larry as a monster, and Levi’s a hero.” She conveyed that the main reason she didn’t want her real name used in this story was that she feared repercussions from Larry’s brothers.

She wasn’t the only person to request anonymity. People on both sides of the Levi–Larry divide told me that they were concerned about their reputations. Two sources said the situation is so polarizing that having their names attached to their opinions might hurt their businesses.

On March 7, 2024, Levi was finally moved to the Forensic Mental Health Program, a locked facility in St. Peter, Minnesota. Where his life goes from here, and how the dust of his crime will settle in Grand Marais, is an open question. During my visit to Grand Marais last August, I spent the better part of an hour talking to Amber Waldrop and her father, Dennis, a thoughtful man with a thick gray beard. We met in a building downtown overlooking Lake Superior’s seemingly infinite horizon. When it came to this story, the Waldrops saw no happy ending in sight.

“It’s just a series of people being hurt: Larry’s family, Levi’s ex-wife and daughter, Levi’s parents,” Dennis told me. “There are a lot of victims here. And being in a small town, there’s a conflict going on with what happened and what should’ve happened. It’s a tough line to walk. This is sensational news to the rest of the world, but we’re living it.”

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For years, a mysterious figure preyed on gay men in Atlanta. People on the streets called him the Handcuff Man—but the police knew his real name.

By Hallie Lieberman

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 “Stay away from him.”

In May 1991, Michael Jordan visited Atlanta, Georgia, to revel in the city’s social scene. Jordan, who was 21 and lived in Florida, came on vacation and ended up in a neighborhood called Midtown. If the Deep South had a gay mecca, Midtown was it. The bars there were legendary; among the busiest were the Phoenix, a brick-walled dive, and the Gallus, a sprawling three-floor property transformed from a private home into a piano bar, restaurant, and hustler haunt. Piedmont Park, situated in Midtown’s northeast, was a popular cruising spot, thanks to the privacy offered by its dense vegetation. Cars lined up in droves there, bearing license plates from as far away as California and Michigan. Local residents complained about the traffic, and arborists put up fences to “protect” the trees. A cop once told a reporter that the park was “so busy” with gay men, “you’d think they were having a drive-in movie.”

Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.

But Midtown’s freedoms and pleasures had limits. Sodomy was illegal in Georgia, and cops routinely detained gay men, sometimes by going undercover and posing as hustlers. “One of the television stations would scroll the names of all the people who had been arrested for soliciting sodomy,” recalled Cliff Bostock, a longtime journalist in Atlanta. The HIV/AIDS crisis was approaching its zenith, and testing positive was a near certain death sentence that some Americans, especially in the South, believed gay men deserved. Prominent Atlanta preacher Charles Stanley had made national headlines in 1986 when he declared that the epidemic was a way of “God indicating his displeasure” with homosexuality.

On the evening of May 12, his first day in the city, Jordan was milling around Midtown when he was approached by a man in a white Lincoln Town Car who asked if he wanted to make some money. “What do I have to do?” Jordan replied. The man said he was conducting a study and would pay Jordan $50 to drink vodka. “I’m going to watch as you become more and more inebriated, and I’ll take notes,” the man said. Jordan jumped at the chance to earn some easy cash and agreed to meet the man at the corner of Fifth and Juniper Streets.

Jordan was already there when the man arrived. The man motioned for Jordan to get into his car, handed him a fifth of vodka, and told him to drink it fast. Jordan downed about half the bottle, at which point the man left the car for a few minutes to get something to mix the alcohol with. When he came back, the man asked Jordan to get hard because he wanted to see him masturbate. Jordan said he was too drunk to get hard quickly. Then he drank more and blacked out.

Early the next morning, a man named David Atkins found someone curled up in the fetal position on the ground of the parking lot behind the Ponce de Leon Hotel, where Atkins worked as a clerk. “At first I thought he was 30 to 35 and very dirty. I nudged him with my foot, told him to wake up,” Atkins told Southern Voice, a gay newspaper in Atlanta. “Then I realized it was blisters all over his body and he was just a kid.”

The person on the ground was Jordan. He was naked, and his genitals had been wrapped in a rubber band and set on fire. Burns extended to his buttocks and legs, and his nose and mouth were filled with blood.

Atkins called 911, and Jordan was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital, where he would remain for a month. When the police were slow to respond to the scene, Atkins reached out to Cathy Woolard, a gay-rights advocate working with Georgia’s chapter of the ACLU. Woolard sprang into action and contacted the police investigator assigned to the case. In her words, she got “nothing but runaround.” Because of the victim’s profile, the police had designated the attack a bias crime. For the same reason, Woolard sensed, they weren’t taking the incident seriously.  

Woolard urged law enforcement to talk to a potential witness: Bill Adamson, a bartender at the Phoenix. Adamson said that Jordan had come into the bar before going to Fifth and Juniper and had described his conversation with the stranger in the Town Car. Adamson issued a warning: “Stay away from him. He’s dangerous.”

Adamson didn’t know the driver’s name, only that people around Midtown called him the Handcuff Man. He was a serial predator who approached gay men, offered to pay them to drink liquor, then beat or burned them and left them for dead. Sometimes he handcuffed his victims to poles—hence his sinister nickname.

There were men who said they’d narrowly escaped the Handcuff Man, and rumors that some of his victims hadn’t survived. But there were also people who thought that he was nothing more than an urban legend. Jordan’s assault would bring the truth to light: Not only did the Handcuff Man exist, but there were people in Atlanta who knew his name, including members of the police force. He hadn’t been caught because, it seemed, no one was trying in earnest to catch him.

That was about to change.

 “I’m going to sue you.”

No one could be certain when the Handcuff Man had staged his first attack. Adamson claimed that he’d been terrorizing Midtown since the late 1960s, that he drove a white Lincoln, was about five foot ten, and had black hair and glasses. A sex worker said that the Handcuff Man had picked him up in Piedmont Park in 1977, asked him to take shots of liquor, then assaulted him. The victim managed to flee with a stab wound to the shoulder, and later saw the man again at the park eyeing other male hustlers. He didn’t report the crime because he was afraid of being outed to loved ones.

In 1984, Susan Faludi, then a twentysomething reporter a few years out from becoming a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, wrote a front-page story about gay hustlers for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She asked her sources about the dangers of their lifestyle and learned that “the greatest fear on the street right now is invoked by the specter of ‘The Handcuff Man,’ a man who reportedly picks up hustlers, offers them a pint of vodka spiked with sleeping pills and then handcuffs and beats them.”

The following year, in April 1985, a thin man rolled down his car window on Ponce de Leon Avenue and asked Max Shrader if he wanted to make some money. Shrader, 21, had been hustling since he was 13, turning tricks for out and closeted men alike, including a married Baptist preacher. He knew that what he did was dangerous; someone had pulled a gun on him, and a female sex worker who was his friend had been killed. “They found her head in one dumpster, her arms in another,” Shrader said. “She was a nice person.” Shrader knew about the Handcuff Man, who had attacked another of his friends. But the man in the car on Ponce, as the thoroughfare is commonly known, didn’t come off like a predator. He wore glasses and a pressed shirt; he seemed normal.

The man asked Shrader to drink some alcohol with him, and Shrader obliged. But after a little while he started to feel funny. Had the man slipped him something? Shrader collapsed to the ground. “Don’t hurt me!” he begged, as the man pulled him into his car.

The man drove to a wooded area, parked, and dragged an intoxicated Shrader into a patch of kudzu. He then poured a liquid onto Shrader’s groin and lit a match, illuminating his face in a ghoulish way Shrader would never forget. When the man dropped the match, Shrader caught fire.

Shrader lay in the woods for hours, drifting in and out of consciousness. He cried out for help when he had the energy. Around 9:30 p.m., a man who happened to be a nurse was driving home with his girlfriend when he spotted a naked figure on the side of the road. The nurse stopped, saw Shrader’s condition, and rushed home to call the police and to get some blankets to wrap Shrader in. “I guess God sent him,” Shrader said.

Shrader was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, the same place Michael Jordan would go six years later. He stayed there six weeks, during which the police came to see him once. They left a business card and said to call if he wanted to talk. He misplaced the card and never heard from the cops again.

Shrader wasn’t surprised. Atlanta cops seemed more interested in harassing and arresting gay men than in protecting them. Sometimes they wrote down the numbers on license plates in Piedmont Park and blackmailed drivers terrified of having their sexual orientation exposed—it could cost them their families, their jobs, possibly their lives. Incidents of gay bashing often went unsolved, if they were investigated at all. Etcetera, a gay and lesbian magazine in Atlanta, reported that between 1984 and 1986, at least 18 gay men died at the hands of unidentified perpetrators. The publication noted with frustration that police had “little understanding” of homophobic crimes. The Atlanta Gay Center began offering sensitivity training for cops, but feedback was mixed. “I think what you told us will be helpful in the longrun and should be expressed more often in police work,” one participant wrote in an evaluation of the training, “but I still think gays are disgusting and a disgrace to our country.” George Napper, Atlanta’s public safety commissioner, refused to make a statement condemning crimes against the gay community because it might be construed as favoritism.

After healing for two years, Shrader went back to hustling, scars and all. He’d grown up poor, and selling sex was one of the only ways he’d ever made money. At least now he knew what the Handcuff Man looked like and could steer clear of him.

J.D. Kirkland suspected that he’d seen the Handcuff Man’s face, too. Kirkland, an Atlanta cop, worked security a few nights a week at the Gallus. According to Don Hunnewell, one of the owners of the Gallus, Kirkland was a combination of Dirty Harry and the sheriff from Gunsmoke—a “kick-ass, cowboy type of tough cop.” In his free time, he trained horses on a large piece of property outside the city and worked on a novel about a time-traveling cop. Kirkland was married with kids; he wasn’t gay, but he was compassionate toward the Gallus’s clientele. “He really cared,” Hunnewell said. “I don’t think he was judgmental at all on what they were doing.” (Kirkland died in 1996.)

Patrons had told Kirkland about the Handcuff Man, including what he looked like, and on November 4, 1983, a man came into the Gallus who matched the description. Kirkland wrote a trespass notice, then snapped a polaroid of the man. The Gallus had a “barred book” filled with photos of people who weren’t allowed on the premises; bartenders were supposed to check it at the start of their shifts so they could eject any banned patrons. Kirkland put the man’s photo in the book.

Before kicking him out for good, Kirkland asked for his name. The man said he was Robert Lee Bennett Jr. “I’m an attorney,” he added, “and I’m going to sue you.”

 “What have you done?”

Robert Lee Bennett Jr. was indeed an attorney, like his father before him. He had been adopted as a baby by Annabelle Maxwell Bennett and Robert Lee Bennett Sr., of Towanda, Pennsylvania, a small town perched on the Susquehanna River. Annabelle was a socialite and the daughter of a wealthy judge; in addition to practicing law, Robert Sr. was the president of a bank.

Robert Sr. was originally from the South but moved to Towanda for his bride. They lived with their son, their only child, in a Victorian mansion nicknamed Nirvana. It had five bedrooms, a white marble fireplace, and a pool house; a Steinway grand piano, Tiffany sterling silver, and plush oriental rugs. The local paper chronicled the family’s every move: vacations to Africa, charity dinners. They were the Kennedys of Towanda.

Ellie Harden Smith, who knew Bennett in high school, said that he was charming, fashionable, and quirky. Most of his friends were girls, and he liked to cross-stitch and garden. He was devoted to his mother. As far as Smith knew, he was never bullied or mocked for his feminine tendencies. Bennett sang in the glee club in high school, was active in the Boy Scouts, and worked at the student newspaper.

After graduating high school in 1965, he moved to Colorado to attend the University of Denver. Smith visited him there, and he took her out to gay bars. “I guess I sort of knew, but that was the first I realized that he was really into that stuff,” she said.

Bennett’s first run-in with the law appears to have happened in 1971, when he was arrested in Virginia for indecent exposure during a homosexual act. At the time, he was pursuing a master’s degree in political science. According to legal documents, he was arrested two years later, this time in Atlanta, for assault with an automobile. A year on, soon after graduating from law school at Emory University, he was arrested again. It happened in Midtown, when he was cruising near the Gallus. Bennett tried to pull a man into his car—a man who happened to be an undercover cop. Bennett was charged with kidnapping a police officer, but he ended up pleading no contest to simple battery and paying a $75 fine.

Once he’d finished his law degree, Bennett moved back to Towanda, where he lived a double life. By day he worked at a law firm and claimed to be looking for a wife; in his free time, he paid poor local boys to take their clothes off and drink or have sex with him. Eventually, he quit the firm and bought a plant and flower business called the Tree Stump.

On April 16, 1976, Bennett met a young man at Leonard’s, a beer garden in Towanda, and suggested that they go to a lake cottage his parents had bought him as a gift. The men had sex in Bennett’s car, then drove to the cottage. According to Francis Panuccio, a police captain quoted in a local newspaper, “something occurred that frightened” the young man, who fled the cottage in Bennett’s car and drove it into an embankment. When police arrived at the scene, they arrested the young man, but Bennett deflected scrutiny thanks to Robert Sr. “Nobody wanted to press charges against him because of the influence of his father,” a retired state police investigator later told the press. “His father was gold.”

Still, Robert Sr. feared that his son would keep getting into more trouble if he remained in Towanda. Two months after the incident at the lake, Bennett moved back to Atlanta. He was 29.

Bennett was hired by a law firm, which is where he met Sandra Powell, 34, a secretary and bookkeeper. She was small and demure, a junior-college graduate who wore her dark hair in bangs. They started dating, and Bennett told Powell that he was impotent. She said it didn’t bother her; they talked about adopting a child. In 1978, on a trip to the lake cottage in Towanda, Bennett proposed and Powell said yes. They were married at Rock Springs Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. Powell wore an ivory gown decorated with pearls and lace, and carried a bouquet of burgundy roses. Bennett wore a tuxedo with a white bow tie. They honeymooned in South America.

His hometown friends were surprised that Bennett got married. Irma Henson, who had known him since his early twenties, said that he likely did it for his parents, especially his mother, with whom he was still close. “He probably gathered from his mother that who he was wasn’t fitting her picture of who he should be,” Henson said.

Shortly after the wedding, Bennett quit the law firm. He worked for a while behind the jewelry counter at Davison’s department store, but mostly he lived off dividends from stocks his father had gifted him. “He would just hang around the house all day, and he would be in his robe when I got home,” Powell later said in court. She was unhappy, but “kept it inside.”

Then one day in the fall of 1982, Powell was getting off the bus she rode home from work when she saw police placing her husband in handcuffs. “What is it?” she asked. “What have you done?”

Over Labor Day weekend, James Lee Johnson, 24, had been found shot to death with a .25-caliber pistol in the middle of the street close to his apartment. His wallet was missing. Police learned that Johnson may have been a sex worker, and that he’d last been seen with a man who looked like Bennett. According to friends, Johnson was in a relationship with a man named Robert whom he’d met at the jewelry store where Bennett once worked. A few weeks before his death, Johnson had expressed fear of this man, telling friends, “Robert’s gonna get me.” When investigators examined the contents of Johnson’s stomach during his autopsy, they found roast beef and potatoes. They searched Bennett’s home and, discovering those items in his refrigerator, arrested him for murder.

Bennett was released on a $25,000 bond and was never tried, because the prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial. His arrest marked the end of his marriage—Powell soon filed for divorce—but not of his comfortable lifestyle. When he wasn’t in Atlanta, Bennett spent time in Clearwater, Florida, where his mother, widowed in the mid-1980s, kept a home. He vacationed in Nassau, Mexico, and China. He hosted lavish parties, and when he and his mother attended an annual lobster boil at a club in Towanda, an otherwise casual affair, he made sure their table was set with linens, porcelain plates, and a silver candelabra.

Meanwhile, in Midtown, the Handcuff Man’s reputation was mounting. Max Shrader was attacked in the spring of 1985. That August, a man named Charles Gallows was assaulted and robbed. The following June, Anthony Charles Poppilia got in the car of a man who offered to pay him $50 to drink vodka, then pushed Poppilia from the moving vehicle. The stories continued until May 1991, when Michael Jordan turned up maimed behind the Ponce de Leon Hotel. Midtown denizens would later report that, in the hours leading up to Jordan’s assault, the Handcuff Man had approached at least one other man in the area.

“A sadistic Woody Allen lookalike.”

When word of Jordan’s assault reached Richard Greer, he immediately thought of the Handcuff Man. Greer, 32, worked the 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. cop beat at the Journal-Constitution. A few months prior, he’d overheard a Midtown patrol officer casually mention the Handcuff Man to some colleagues. Greer asked around and gleaned that a lot of cops thought the attacker might be “folklore.” Jordan’s assault seemed to be confirmation that he was not.

Greer went to gay bars in Midtown to speak with employees and customers. He heard a rumor that the Handcuff Man had either removed the door handles inside his car or covered them with duct tape to trap his victims. People were upset that authorities seemed to be doing nothing to stop the violence. “The victims were people that most people either wanted to ignore or didn’t know existed,” Greer said.

Greer left his business card with patrons of the Gallus and told them to get in touch if they ever saw the person they believed to be the Handcuff Man. “I started getting calls at one in the morning saying ‘He just drove by’ or ‘He’s on the corner of X street and X street,’ ” Greer said. If he thought the information was reliable, Greer would jump in his car and drive to Midtown, but by the time he arrived, the suspect was always long gone.

Then Greer was given a name: Robert Bennett Jr. But the tip didn’t come from a hustler or a bartender—it came from a cop. Greer was surprised. In his experience, it was unusual for a cop to be so candid. More importantly, if people on the force believed that they knew who the Handcuff Man was, why hadn’t Bennett been investigated and arrested?

Greer spoke with Kirkland, the cop who moonlighted at the Gallus, and Kirkland said that he was never able to do anything about Bennett except ban him from the bar back in 1983, because it was difficult to persuade survivors and witnesses of the Handcuff Man’s attacks to come forward. But if that were true, law enforcement bore at least some responsibility for people’s reluctance: Victims of homophobic crimes in Atlanta feared that if they spoke to the police, they might be blackmailed or arrested, or simply not believed. “The police say if you don’t report the crime, we can’t do anything about it,” Bill Gripp, an activist with the Atlanta Gay Center, told Greer. “We say if we don’t have confidence in them, we won’t report it.”

On May 28, two weeks after Jordan was assaulted, Greer published a front-page story about the Handcuff Man. “Gay prostitutes in fear of sadist,” the headline read. Greer wrote that the Handcuff Man may have attacked up to 100 men during his “reign of terror,” and that gay Atlantans were “angered” that the police were “indifferent” to his crimes. Greer quoted Kirkland, who said that it was possible the Handcuff Man was responsible for several unsolved murders.

Greer characterized the Handcuff Man as “a sadistic Woody Allen lookalike … scrawny and peering with eyeglasses through his car window.” He wrote that Kirkland believed the predator was a “DeKalb County professional.” But Greer didn’t name Bennett. He couldn’t. Doing so would have risked a defamation suit against the newspaper; Bennett hadn’t been arrested or charged with a crime, and he was a wealthy lawyer with his own wealthy lawyer on call. To finger Bennett, Greer needed to keep digging.

Greer began combing through public records and police files. He read documents pertaining to Bennett’s prior arrests. He learned that Bennett had briefly been a suspect in one of Atlanta’s most high-profile crime sprees: From 1979 to 1981, a serial killer murdered 30 people in the city, most of whom were young boys. As pressure mounted to find the perpetrator, the FBI arrived to help. Based on various records, law enforcement came up with a list of 65 suspects. Bennet was among them, perhaps because of his previous arrests. He was also a known fixture in Midtown, and the FBI thought that the killer might be gay. Agents were assigned to surveil “homosexual bars and areas frequented by male prostitutes,” and to pursue the “development of informants with knowledge of child prostitution,” according to a February 1981 memo. Bennett was eliminated as a suspect after three months. (In late 1981, a man named Wayne Williams was arrested in connection with the slayings. He was convicted of two of the murders and is presumed to have committed the others.)

Greer also found the transcripts from Bennett’s contentious divorce proceedings in 1984. Astoundingly, the Handcuff Man was mentioned. Powell’s counsel called three male sex workers to the stand, all of whom testified that they believed Bennett to be the Handcuff Man. Frank Sheridan, a local gay-rights advocate who liaised with the police, testified that he had been “working with the street prostitute community … to build up information on this gentleman regarding his sexual habits and picking up of young men from the street.” Powell herself claimed that her estranged husband was “violent” and a homosexual.

Bennett denied being gay, then admitted that he was. However, he was adamant that he wasn’t the Handcuff Man. Attorney Guy Notte, who represented Bennett, chastised the authorities for not identifying the real threat. “The Handcuff Man is still down there somewhere,” Notte said. “Could you please tell me why this man hasn’t been caught?” The court ended up ordering Bennett to pay Powell a divorce settlement of $40,000.

On May 29 and 30, 1991, Greer published two additional articles about the Handcuff Man. There were still concerns about naming Bennett, so Greer didn’t. By then Jordan had picked a photo of Bennett out of a lineup. Greer reported that Jordan had identified his attacker, but that police hadn’t issued a warrant for the suspect’s arrest. “I’m sure we will call him,” the chief of the sex-crimes unit told Greer.

Greer grew increasingly worried that Bennett might attack another man soon; naming him seemed like a matter of public safety. There was a heated debate in the newsroom about what to do. One editor told Greer that he hoped never to be an uncharged suspect in Atlanta, lest his name show up in the paper. Another editor, Pam Fine, was on Greer’s side. “Heinous crimes were involved,” Fine later said, “and we recognized that police had waited two decades to actively pursue the case.”

On May 31, Greer published an article naming Bennett as the man Jordan identified as the last person he saw before losing consciousness during his attack. The piece indicated that the police still hadn’t spoken to Bennett, much less detained him. “I would certainly love to interview him,” Bobby Ford, a sex-crimes detective, told Greer. The article went on to state: “For 20 years, police officials and members of the gay community say, a man fitting Mr. Bennett’s description has been involved in cases of brutality against young white male prostitutes. The perpetrator of these crimes has come to be known as the Handcuff Man.”

After the article was published, Greer reached Bennett on the phone at his lake cottage in Towanda, and Bennett denied being the Handcuff Man. “No attorney in his right mind is going to make a comment one way or the other on something the police are investigating,” Bennett continued. “You know as well as I do that that is not an indication of guilt or innocence.” In a separate interview, attorney Guy Notte, who was still representing Bennett, said that his client would be flying down to Atlanta the following week “to defend every allegation.”

 “I literally went nuts.”

Atlanta police didn’t immediately issue a warrant for Bennett’s arrest. “There’s just more work that needs to be done to make this thing stick,” Detective Ford told Greer. But the department did send out a dispatch to law enforcement agencies around the country describing the Handcuff Man’s crimes. When the message arrived in Tampa, Bob Holland, a local police detective, recognized similarities with a case his department had been investigating for a few months.

On February 22, 1991, 35-year-old Gary Clapp was standing outside a Salvation Army shelter, waiting for it to open. Clapp, who hung drywall for a living, was broke and struggling to feed his family; he also had a severe alcohol problem. When a white Town Car pulled up and the driver said that he was conducting a survey on how alcohol affected people’s moods, Clapp hopped into the vehicle. In between chugs of vodka from a plastic cup, Clapp asked the man his name, but he wouldn’t answer. Eventually, Clapp passed out.

Around 10:30 p.m. that night, police officer Jimmy Caplinger was driving on the frontage road along the mangrove-lined Courtney Campbell Causeway, which connects Tampa and Clearwater, when he noticed what he thought was a bonfire. He parked, got out, and saw a person engulfed in flames. It was Clapp. Caplinger grabbed an extinguisher from his car and put out the fire, then called for emergency services. When Clapp arrived at the hospital, his blood-alcohol level was “so high they could not get a reading,” according to a police report. He had fourth-degree burns on nearly half his body and was suffering from smoke inhalation.

Holland went to the hospital to conduct an interview. He wrote in his report that Clapp “was able to answer certain questions by either shaking his head or nodding his head.” Holland discerned that someone had deliberately set Clapp on fire.

Clapp’s injuries were so severe that doctors had to amputate his legs. When he regained consciousness after surgery, he began thrashing around. “I kept pulling out all my IVs,” Clapp told the Tampa Tribune. “I literally went nuts and they had to tie me down in the hospital bed.”

Holland spoke to Clapp’s ex-girlfriend, who said that she’d broken up with him because of his alcoholism. She also said that Clapp had previously been in a “homosexual relationship,” but that it “was an isolated incident.” There were only a few possible clues at the scene of the crime, including a Riva vodka bottle and a container of lighter fluid. Nearby were bags containing decapitated chickens and a headless goat. A dead body had recently turned up just 500 feet from where Clapp was found, which made police wonder if the two crimes were connected.

In early March, Holland interviewed Clapp more extensively. Clapp said that the man who’d attacked him drove a Lincoln Town Car made sometime between 1977 and 1984, with a brown leather interior. He worked with a sketch artist to produce a picture of the suspect, who Clapp said was between 40 and 45 years old, stood a little under six feet tall, and weighed 160 to 170 pounds. Clapp also described the man as having dark hair, a mustache, and glasses. The sketch was published in the Tampa Bay Times on April 9.

Two months later, when Holland saw the dispatch about the Handcuff Man, he quickly picked up the phone and called the Atlanta police. They sent him a photo of Bennett, which Holland then showed to Clapp in a lineup. Clapp, who had only recently been released from a hospital burn unit, identified Bennett as his attacker. Holland pointed out that in his photo Bennett was clean-shaven, and that Clapp had said his attacker had a mustache. Clapp said he was certain that the man in the photo was the one who’d set him on fire. “It’s hard to forget someone that’s done you wrong like that,” he told a reporter.

Authorities in Tampa connected more dots. Bennett’s mother’s home in Clearwater, a seventh-floor condo, wasn’t far from the area where Clapp was found. Bennett had been visiting her in February; in fact, a few days after Clapp’s assault, Bennett and his mother embarked on a Caribbean cruise together. Bennett also owned a Town Car, which he’d recently driven up to Towanda.

It was enough to bring him in. On June 5, Tampa police issued a warrant for Bennett’s arrest. They alerted their counterparts in Atlanta, who were expecting Bennett that very afternoon for questioning about the Handcuff Man attacks in Midtown. Just after 3 p.m., he was taken into custody based on the Tampa warrant.

Speaking to reporters, a shaking Bennett proclaimed his innocence. “I am here to tell the Atlanta police and the city of Atlanta I am not the Handcuff Man,” he said. He later complained that he wasn’t served breakfast in jail, and that he had to wait five hours to get a blanket, pillow, and cigarettes.

 “It struck a bell.”

In Midtown, people were relieved that the Handcuff Man may have been caught, but they were also frustrated that Bennett had only been charged with the attack on Clapp, not the crimes in Atlanta. District Attorney Lewis Slaton assured the public that his office was developing a case against Bennett, but also noted that it would be deferring to Tampa authorities. “Since Florida has asked for him, we’re going to let them have him,” Slaton said. “That case is obviously worse.” But worse by what measure, and for whom? “My life will never be the same,” Jordan told Greer at the Journal-Constitution. Jordan was upset at the way police had handled his ordeal. “It wasn’t until it was in the news that they seemed to care,” he said.

Bennett was extradited to Florida on June 11. He pleaded not guilty and was freed on a $200,000 bond. His mother helped him get the money together by putting up her condo as collateral.

By then, other men had started coming forward to accuse Bennett of attacking them. One of the men was Max Shrader. He’d been sitting at home one day in May when his dad called and told him to turn on the news. “There’s another guy who just got burnt the same way,” his dad said. Shrader saw the report about Jordan and called the police to say that he’d suffered a similar attack six years earlier. They asked him to come to the station, where he was shown a lineup of men’s photos. “That’s him,” Shrader said, pointing at Bennett’s face.

On June 21, an Atlanta grand jury indicted Bennett on two counts of aggravated assault and two counts of aggravated battery for the attacks on Jordan and Shrader. Investigators noted that Bennett was suspected of committing similar crimes going back two decades. Bennett again pleaded not guilty and was released on bond—an additional $100,000.

For Dale Sisco and Chip Purcell, who were prosecuting Bennett in Florida, the Atlanta indictment was good news. Their case against Bennett was proving delicate. Clapp had identified his attacker, but because he’d been drunk when he was set on fire, the defense would almost certainly argue that he was an unreliable witness. The defense would also likely argue that evidence found at the scene—the lighter fluid and vodka bottle—wasn’t necessarily connected to the case. Locals called the area where Clapp was found “the redneck Riviera,” because people liked to grill, drink, and party in the mangroves. “There was no videotape of him doing the act,” Sisco said of Bennett. “We had no photographs of him. There were still many circumstantial aspects of the proof that were going to be challenging.” The prosecutors didn’t even have fingerprints connecting Bennett to Clapp’s attack.

So Sisco and Purcell decided to rely on the Williams Rule, a legal precedent in Florida that allows prosecutors to present evidence from other cases or incidents that indicate a pattern of criminal behavior. They identified a handful of recent instances in which men had endured injuries similar to Clapp’s, hoping to find other witnesses willing to testify against Bennett. For instance, there was an unsolved case from 1989 in Detective Holland’s jurisdiction involving a man who was found unconscious outside a gay bar with his genitals burned. But survivors were wary of telling their stories in court. “We talked to several guys who were not excited about coming to Tampa and testifying to what their sexual activities were,” Purcell said.

The Atlanta indictments expanded the pool of potential witnesses. If the Florida case went to trial, Jordan could testify under the Williams Rule. So could Shrader. The same went for a hustler named Shane, who asked to be identified by his first name in this story. Shane was the man in Atlanta who claimed that the Handcuff Man had tried to pick him up in the hours just before Jordan was attacked.

At the time, Shane was in his mid-thirties; he had a wife and a kid he supported with sex work. When a man in a white Lincoln pulled up one day and asked him to drink vodka for $50, Shane was suspicious. He told the driver that if he wanted to drink, they could go to a bar, but the man insisted they imbibe in the car. Shane declined and went about his night. When he heard about the attack on Jordan, “it struck a bell,” he said. Shane got in touch with the police and later identified Bennett in a photo lineup as the man who’d tried to give him vodka. The experience shook him up. “It put a kibosh on me for a while from hustling,” he said.

As Sisco and Purcell built their case, a shocking news story seized headlines: In July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in Milwaukee and confessed to murdering more than a dozen gay men over the course of 13 years. Some journalists made the connection to the Handcuff Man’s crimes. “As in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer,” Mary T. Schmich wrote in the Chicago Tribune on August 3, “Bennett’s arrest has raised questions about the speed and sensitivity with which police handle crimes involving homosexual activity.” Schmich quoted Cathy Woolard, the activist who months before had asked the Atlanta police to take the threat of the Handcuff Man seriously. “A lot of people don’t care that much if gay people get killed,” Woolard said. “It doesn’t seem to matter that much that someone is savagely burning male hustlers, because they’re not the cream of the crop.”

The article ended with an update on Bennett’s whereabouts. “Bennett, who was released on bond, is spending the summer with his 85-year-old mother in Towanda,” Schmich wrote, “where he reportedly indulges a passion for gardening.”

 “You don’t count.”

To work alongside Guy Notte in the Tampa case, Bennett hired a defense attorney based in Florida. Rochelle Reback had spent the previous decade representing all sorts of clients, but none quite like Bennett. “Usually people involved in crimes of violence don’t have a lot of money,” Reback said in an interview for this story. Bennett was different. “We had an investigator. We had a jury-selection expert. We had a lot of resources that a lot of clients can’t afford,” Reback said.

When Reback visited Bennett’s mother in Clearwater, there were photos of Bennett everywhere. Many of them were from his childhood, when his mother had dressed him to the nines. “One was like Little Lord Fauntleroy looking, with his long, curly hair,” Reback said. Between how his mother viewed him and his wealth, it was clear to Reback that Bennett had led a cosseted life. And now he seemed sure that his privilege would protect him. “He really just felt like this was just one more case that was going to go by the wayside and he would suffer no ongoing consequences,” Reback said.

Bennett’s arrogance grated on her. “He was the most unpleasant client I ever had,” Reback said. When they clashed about strategy, Notte stepped in to smooth things over. He had a long history of appeasing Bennett. “Notte wanted to keep Bob happy because Bob was a wealthy client,” Reback said. Together, Notte and Reback tried to find character witnesses willing to testify on Bennett’s behalf, but according to Reback they found none. (Notte did not respond to a request for comment.)

In October 1991, Clapp was interviewed for a front-page story in the St. Petersburg Times. The picture accompanying the article showed him in his government-funded concrete-block apartment, seated in a wheelchair and cradling a black kitten. “There’s times I forget I don’t have legs and I want to get up and go take a walk, you know?” Clapp said. He told the reporter that he couldn’t stop thinking about Bennett. “Truthfully, I’d like to see the same thing happen to him that happened to me,” Clapp said.

When they spoke to the press, Bennett’s legal team tried to use what Reback called the SODDI defense (“some other dude did it”). Notte told a reporter that Clapp’s assault “smacks of the cult [of] Santeria,” because decapitated animals were found near the crime scene. As for the accusations against Bennett in Atlanta, Notte called them “stupid lies.”

Behind the scenes, however, it was becoming clear that Bennett was likely to lose in court. Sisco and Purcell had obtained a five-minute video, shot by the Tampa fire department, that showed Clapp burning in the mangroves; his cries of pain were audible. The prosecution upgraded the attempted murder charge to include use of a deadly weapon, which meant that, if convicted, Bennett could get a life sentence. This wasn’t an outside possibility: The judge assigned to the case was known for tough rulings.

Bennett’s lawyers persuaded him to take a deal. On February 13, 1992, he appeared in court in Florida to plead guilty; he planned to do the same in Atlanta several days later. At least three of his victims—Clapp, Jordan, and Shrader—were in the courtroom. Shrader wanted to lunge at Bennett as soon as he laid eyes on him. “But I knew if I hit him right there,” Shrader said, “I’d get hell.”

Bennett, who stood with his arms crossed, was sentenced to 17 years in prison followed by 13 years of probation. Under Florida law, he would be eligible for parole in five years. Clapp considered the sentence too light. “I don’t think he’ll ever feel sorry for anything he’s done,” he told the court. “He’s a sick puppy.”

Bennett’s attorneys requested that he be allowed some time to make arrangements for his aging mother’s care. He was told to turn himself in on March 9. “I trust you as a man and as a lawyer,” the judge told Bennett. The prosecution was stunned by the three-week reprieve. “This is clearly one of the most heinous crimes I’ve ever prosecuted,” Purcell told the St. Petersburg Times.

Frustration mounted further when it was announced that Bennett might get a deal that would allow him to serve his sentences in the Florida and Georgia cases concurrently rather than back-to-back. The Journal-Constitution argued in an editorial that this would effectively mean “no prison time” for the crimes he’d committed in Atlanta. “The full force of the legal system should be used to show that such acts will not be tolerated and to prevent them from happening again,” the editorial said. Had Bennett’s victims “been women or straight men … it is hard to believe the Florida sentence and the Fulton plea bargain would even be discussed.” (Atlanta is the seat of Fulton County.)

Gay-rights advocates agreed with the paper. Larry Pellegrini of the ACLU called the deal “horrendous.” Jeff Graham of Atlanta’s chapter of ACT UP told a reporter, “I think that clearly you’ve got a prejudiced judicial system in Atlanta.”

On February 24, Bennett appeared in an Atlanta courtroom for sentencing. It was packed, with cameras everywhere. Shrader was nervous, and when he got nervous he smiled; a lawyer told him to stop smiling.

The plaintiffs’ counsel argued against the plea deal. Jordan’s attorney said that her client “wants this man to serve life.” Shrader’s lawyer said that “this child of affluence has developed into a sadistic sociopath” for whom “the concurrent sentence is not adequate.”

When the judge asked if Bennett wished to say anything, he said no.

“Did you, in fact, pick up those two fellows?” the judge then inquired, referring to Jordan and Shrader.

“I’m pleading guilty to the charge, your honor, on the advice of my counsel,” Bennett said.

“I asked you, did you pick up those two fellows?”

Notte interjected. “Your honor, he would rather not answer that question.”

“I want to hear from him. You don’t want to say so, say you don’t want to say so,” the judge said.

“Yes,” Bennett responded.

Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of the plea deal. In addition to the concurrent prison sentences, Bennett was banned from Fulton County for life, instructed to see a psychiatrist, and ordered to pay restitution of more than $100,000 to his victims. When asked where the money would come from, Notte said that Bennett would use his mother’s trust fund.

Gay activists who had come to see the sentencing shouted “shame” repeatedly at the judge. In an article for Southern Voice, reporter K.C. Wildmoon wrote that the court sent “a message to the lesbian and gay community, to the hustler community, that these things will happen. It says ‘you don’t count.’ ”

“A danger to society.”

There are lingering questions in the story of the Handcuff Man. Chief among them is how many victims there actually were, and whether any of them died from the attacks. But no further indictments were ever brought against Bennett. “What upsets me the most is how many Max Shraders there are that maybe nobody even knows about,” said Don Hunnewell, the Gallus’s owner. “Maybe nobody even knows they died.” (The Gallus closed in 1993.)

Greer, who now lives in Virginia, wonders what lessons were learned from the whole affair—by the police, the media, and the wider Atlanta community. “The Handcuff Man was the perpetrator, but in a sense we’re all accomplices. I’m certain a dead hustler on the south side today would be all but ignored, while a crime against a wealthy family in Buckhead would get a lot of ink and cameras,” he said, referring to one of Atlanta’s poshest neighborhoods.

Then there’s the question of why Bennett committed his crimes, what motive he had. Was it a combination of rage and self-loathing? Shrader thinks so. “He was gay and he hated that,” Shrader said. “Then he decided that he’d get rid of [who he considered] the lowest of the gays, the slime on the totem pole, which were gay hustlers, and unfortunately I just happened to be in his path.” For her part, Reback said that she gleaned from her conversations with Notte that Bennett was “deeply repressed” and couldn’t “function sexually in any way.” (After his convictions, Bennett filed a court motion claiming that Reback had provided ineffective counsel; it was dismissed.)

An old friend of Bennett’s in Towanda, quoted in the local paper, placed some of the blame for Bennett’s crimes on the people who’d helped him evade the consequences of his actions as a young man. “He should have had some help earlier in his life when he got into some of the minor scraps in Pennsylvania,” the friend said. “If some of that was not covered up, he might have gotten some sort of help.”

The Handcuff Man himself never offered any insight. Two days after the contentious Atlanta hearing, the judge in Florida revoked the bond he’d released Bennett on so that he could sort out his mother’s care. After his sentencing, Bennett had been seen cruising a red convertible through an area of Tampa known to be popular with gay hustlers. The judge called him “a danger to society.”

Once in prison, Bennett was placed in solitary confinement at his own request. Eventually, he was moved to the general population because, as Notte told a reporter, he was “going buggy” in isolation. His mother died in 1993. Bennett would receive a $1.5 million inheritance upon his release from prison.

But that never happened: On April 1, 1998, just one year before he was supposed to get out, Bennett had a stroke and died behind bars. “He got the life sentence that he probably deserved,” Reback said.

The bulk of Bennett’s estate went to Towanda’s historical society and to the Boy Scouts. He left $25,000 to the son of his friend Ellie Harden Smith and $15,000 to the local country club, with the condition “that this bequest be acknowledged and established as a memorial to my grandfather, the Honorable William Maxwell, my mother, Annabelle Maxwell Bennett, and myself, Robert Lee Bennett, Jr.” He also requested the erection of a memorial to himself and his mother as a condition of a gift to the county library. There was no mention of honoring his father.

As for his personal effects, namely his clothing and photographs, he issued an unusual directive: Bennett said he wanted them burned.

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An ob-gyn in Virginia performed unnecessary surgeries on patients for decades. When his victims learned the truth, they fought back.

By Rae Nudson

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1.

Debra* had hoped that her medical nightmares were over. In 2009, she was diagnosed with breast cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes. The disease was estrogen positive, which meant that it was feeding on her reproductive hormones. After six months of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy, the cancer was declared in remission. To keep it that way, doctors put Debra on tamoxifen, a hormonal drug used as a prophylactic against certain types of breast cancer. She expected to be on it for about five years.

*Asterisks denote pseudonyms.

Debra has a wide smile, dimples, and thin, arched eyebrows. She likes high heels and she likes to talk. She used to work as a hairstylist, a job well suited to someone who falls easily into conversation with strangers. She is also a mom to two boys, and always wanted more kids. Patients on tamoxifen are advised against becoming pregnant; Debra, who was in her early forties when she started taking the drug, planned to conceive once she’d completed treatment.

Then, about halfway through her tamoxifen regimen, Debra got a letter in the mail with bad news: The results of her latest pap smear were abnormal. She had undergone the procedure, which involves scraping cells from the cervix, during a routine visit to a Veterans Affairs medical center near her home in Portsmouth, Virginia. (Debra was in the Air Force from 1988 to 1992.) An abnormal pap can indicate the presence of cancerous or precancerous cells; follow-up testing is usually recommended.

Debra knew that even with the tamoxifen, there was a risk that her cancer might come back, possibly in a part of her body other than her breasts; oncologists call this a distant recurrence. So she took the pap results seriously. When the VA referred her to two ob-gyns, Debra reached out to both. One had a monthslong waiting list, but the other had immediate availability. His name was Javaid Perwaiz. 

Dr. Perwaiz’s main practice was in a small redbrick building near a strip mall in the city of Chesapeake. The parking lot had 14 spaces, including one for handicapped drivers, and cars came and went in quick succession. Perwaiz had a reputation for working fast: An established patient could expect to arrive for an appointment and be back in their car in under 15 minutes. The waiting room was small, with a vaulted ceiling, a bank of windows, and walls painted a soothing mauve. Many of Perwaiz’s patients were Black women on Medicaid. Debra fit that profile.

When she met Perwaiz in July 2012, Debra felt confident about him as a doctor. He was in his early sixties and short, with a thick, well-groomed white mustache, bushy eyebrows, and a comb-over. During appointments he wore a white coat. He was matter-of-fact but not cold. He remembered details about his patients’ personal lives and asked about their loved ones.

According to Debra, after performing some tests, Perwaiz told her that she had precancerous cells on her cervix that would likely develop into cancer. He said that there was no drug she could take to stop that from happening. Given her history of breast cancer, he recommended a hysterectomy.

Debra was shocked and scared. She didn’t want to lose her ability to have more children. But she also wanted to live to see her sons grow up. After subsequent appointments with Perwaiz, during which she underwent additional tests, she agreed to have surgery, but said that she didn’t want her abdomen cut open. The doctor who performed the C-section during the birth of her first son had used a “beautiful subcutaneous suture” to close up the incision, resulting in a faint scar. “You couldn’t even tell that I’d ever had a surgery,” Debra told me. She wanted to keep her stomach the way it was. According to Debra, Perwaiz assured her that he could perform the surgery through her vagina; no abdominal incision would be required.

Debra trusted what Perwaiz told her. From their conversations, her understanding was that he would remove only her ovaries, because decreasing the estrogen in her body might diminish the risk of her cancer recurring. In fact, a hysterectomy by medical definition involves the removal of the uterus. But Debra didn’t know this going into surgery, because, she said, Perwaiz never explained it to her.  

On the morning of December 29, Debra arrived at Chesapeake Regional Medical Center and filled out the required paperwork for her procedure. One of the nurses was someone she knew from church, a friendly face. Then Debra was prepped for the operating room and given the sedative propofol. Hospital staff were wheeling her on a gurney down a hallway when she saw Perwaiz.

“What time do I need to tell my friend to come back and pick me up?” Debra asked him.

“That’s not the surgery you signed for,” she remembered Perwaiz replying.

She wasn’t sure what that meant. The propofol was making her sleepy. Then everything went dark.

When Debra woke up in a recovery room, she knew something was wrong. Groggily, she moved her hands to her stomach. She found tape covering an incision. Debra didn’t understand. She began to cry.

She was discharged the next day, and only then did it fully sink in: Perwaiz had performed an invasive surgery, slicing into her abdomen. Within a few days, Debra felt persistent, agonizing pains in her lower belly. The area also became swollen and tender. Debra was alone most of the time—her elder son had already moved out, and the younger one was in school during the day. She had trouble getting out of bed.

Debra called Perwaiz’s office for a prescription to help with the pain. When the medicine didn’t work, she called again. According to Debra, she spoke with Perwaiz directly. “Women all over the world go through this,” he told her. “You are just going to have to get used to the pain.” She was so out of it that she let the comment go. “I didn’t have the wherewithal to chew his head off,” she told me.  

One day a friend called to check on her and was alarmed to hear Debra cursing and not making sense. The friend drove to Debra’s house, and when nobody came to the door, she persuaded the landlord to open it. Inside, Debra was lying down; her skin was turning blue, and her stomach was so distended that she looked nine months pregnant. Her friend called 911, and an ambulance rushed Debra back to Chesapeake Regional.

Debra wondered if she was dying. In her head, she could hear a hymn her grandmother used to sing: 

I know it was the blood,

I know it was the blood,

I know it was the blood for me;

One day when I was lost

He died upon the cross,

I know it was the blood for me.

At the hospital, Debra learned that Perwaiz had removed more than her ovaries: Her uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes were gone too. A diagnostic scan showed that a large amount of fluid had built up in her abdomen, and labs indicated that she had severe acute renal failure. There was also a perforation in her bladder—one of six, she later learned, made during her surgery. She was in sepsis.

Debra remained in the hospital for several days. She slipped in and out of consciousness. At one point she thought she saw Perwaiz at the foot of her bed. He looked nervous to her; his hands were clasped. “He might have been praying, ‘Please live,’ ” Debra said.

Debra knew about the history of coerced sterilization in America, of doctors persuading women of color to undergo unnecessary hysterectomies or performing the surgeries against their will. She couldn’t help but see her case in that context.

She did live. She had to wear a catheter for several weeks, but she got better. The long recovery gave Debra time to think on what she wanted to do about the man who had hurt her. “I’m gonna get this motherfucker—that’s how I was feeling in my head,” she said. “You don’t want to mess with me. I got teeth. I spit sulfuric acid.”

She requested her medical records and was stunned to find discrepancies with what Perwaiz had said to her during appointments. Most glaringly, she didn’t see any mention of precancerous cells on her cervix; the tests Perwaiz performed on her had come back normal. “If I was normal,” Debra said, “why did I have a surgery?”

There were other inconsistencies. One form from an appointment described Debra complaining of back and pelvic pain, which she told me she never did. Another document dated the day before her surgery stated that she “insisted on having those ovaries removed through the abdominal wall incision and not vaginally,” and that the “consent obtained after entirely counseling the patient [was] for abdominal hysterectomy.” In fact, she had requested the opposite surgical approach, and she recalled no such conversation with Perwaiz; the only time she’d spoken with him in the lead-up to her procedure was in passing in the hospital hallway.

Debra was sure she had a malpractice case. She went to several lawyers, but none of them would take her on as a client. “So many men—man after man saying, ‘You had a decent amount of care, and that’s all you’re afforded,’ ” she said. Frustrated, she came up with a new plan: “I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to learn how to sue this bastard myself.’ ” (Perwaiz declined to comment for this story.)

Debra enrolled in a paralegal program at Tidewater Community College. She learned how to research case law, how to write briefs, and how to file a suit. She didn’t have an Internet connection at home, so she used a law library at a nearby university to access everything she needed. She meticulously highlighted key phrases in her medical records and made notes in graceful cursive. When requesting materials for her case from health care providers, she signed emails “respectfully,” but she was not sorry to bother anyone. She followed up. She was tenacious. To get anything done, she knew that she had to rely on herself. “I was now acutely aware that people can’t be trusted,” she said.

As it is in much of the U.S., the statute of limitations for malpractice in the state of Virginia is two years from the date of occurrence. Debra filed her suit on December 23, 2014, six days shy of the cutoff. She asked for $1.5 million in punitive damages and to be compensated for loss of enjoyment of life, loss of the ability to reproduce, and diminished sexual intimacy, as well as lost wages and medical expenses.

Someone told her to file the suit in state court, but Debra declined. She knew about the history of coerced sterilization in America, of doctors persuading women of color to undergo unnecessary hysterectomies or performing the surgeries against their will. She couldn’t help but see her case in that context. She believed that the suit belonged in federal court because Perwaiz had violated her most fundamental rights.

A judge disagreed. In January 2015, Debra was asked to provide a valid reason why hers should be a federal case, and not one decided by a lower court. She responded with documentation explaining her position, but that May her case was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. She appealed the decision, until one day she missed a filing deadline. According to Debra, she hadn’t received paperwork she needed to complete until the day before it was due, and there was no way she could get it to the court on time.

Just like that, her legal campaign to hold Perwaiz accountable was finished. But there were more patients like Debra, more women Perwaiz had injured. There were numerous dots waiting to be connected—someone just had to come along and do it.

2.

Javaid Perwaiz was born in a village in Pakistan that had no electricity or running water. He went to college, then medical school, graduating in 1973. He moved to the United States the following year, alone and knowing very little English. He worked as a surgical assistant at a hospital while he applied to be a medical resident. After completing his residency, he took a job at a private practice in the Portsmouth area, sharing an office with two other physicians. He struck out on his own in 1982.

If his online reviews were any indication, over the next thirty-plus years Perwaiz amassed a devoted following of patients. “Dr. Perwaiz is amazing. I had an issue that previous Dr’s kept putting off and he scheduled surgery for it immediately,” one review read. “He listens, he’s very understanding, and I’d never go anywhere else.” Some reviewers stated that Perwaiz had delivered both them and their children. “I love you and my family does as well,” another wrote. Perwaiz, that reviewer continued, will “go down in history as the best.”

All of Perwaiz’s staff were women, and they were fond of him, too. It helped that his practice did very well: He saw a lot of patients, many of whom underwent surgery, and money rolled in. Perwaiz took his staff to nice restaurants. He wrote their names in red ink on their birthdays in his appointment book so he wouldn’t forget to buy them gifts, often expensive flower arrangements. He sometimes paid for employees’ vacations or bought them chic accessories. The staff joked that after insurance clerk Diane Coleman became visibly upset about something that happened in the office, she could expect a new purse from Perwaiz in the next few days.

If Perwaiz had a deputy in the office, it was Margo Stone, who graduated from nursing school in 1985 and started working for Perwaiz a few years later. For a time, Stone and Perwaiz were romantically involved, and Perwaiz became close with Stone’s two sons. The romance didn’t last, but Perwaiz remained an important part of the lives of Stone and her boys. They celebrated holidays and birthdays together. Perwaiz had the license plate for one of his cars customized to bear the boys’ initials. One of the sons recorded the outgoing message on Perwaiz’s phone. “You have reached Henry and John’s papa,” he said.

Perwaiz regularly gave Stone gifts, including several watches worth about $2,000 apiece. The pair also shared an American Express card, and Perwaiz helped pay for Stone’s sons’ education. Over the years that they worked together, the gifts, tuition, and other financial assistance Perwaiz gave Stone added up to several hundred thousand dollars. (Stone declined an interview request.)

In addition to seeing patients in her capacity as a nurse, Stone took on administrative duties at Perwaiz’s practice, including maintaining the payroll and keeping medical supplies stocked. The staff treated her as a go-between, someone they could talk to if they wanted something changed at the office. Perwaiz respected Stone’s opinion; he listened whenever she made suggestions.

It was Stone the staff turned to about Perwaiz’s approach to sanitizing medical devices. One of the procedures he often performed on patients was a hysteroscopy, which involves inserting a long, thin tube with a light at the end through the vagina and cervix to examine the uterus. Hysteroscopies are used to diagnose and, when necessary, remove polyps, fibroids, and other growths that cause gynecological issues, including abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding. Per office protocol, the scopes Perwaiz used in these procedures were supposed to be sterilized between uses, a process that took 12 to 15 minutes. But Perwaiz sometimes didn’t want to wait that long. According to Lisa Strong, a medical assistant, on busy days Perwaiz told her to just rinse the scopes between appointments.

The staff approached Stone about the matter, and she took it to Perwaiz. He agreed to abide by the rules. Above the sink where the scopes were cleaned, an employee placed a yellow sticky note with “soak for 12 minutes” written on it in large bubble letters.

Time was of the essence because Perwaiz performed a lot of hysteroscopies—so many, in fact, that he became the subject of an insurance inquiry. In July 2012, a week prior to Debra’s first appointment with Perwaiz, an employee at Optima Health raised an internal alert: The insurance company had recently received two suspicious requests from Perwaiz’s office for approval of hysteroscopies. In one instance, the patient had undergone the same procedure three weeks prior, yet nothing in Perwaiz’s clinical notes acknowledged it or indicated a change in the patient’s status that would necessitate another so soon. In the second instance, Optima denied the request because the patient’s medical records showed no justification for the procedure: There wasn’t documentation of heavy bleeding, for instance, or of the failure of more conservative treatments to resolve the patient’s issues. The same day Perwaiz received Optima’s reply, he asked the insurer to reconsider, and he provided a note that mirrored its concerns exactly. He said that the patient was bleeding all the time, and that neither oral contraceptives nor anti-inflammatory pain relievers were helping.

Optima, which has since changed its name to Sentara Health Plans, opened an investigation into possible “overutilization,” the insurance industry’s term for medically inappropriate care. Over the next several months, the company compiled some troubling data on Perwaiz’s practice. Nearly 11 percent of Perwaiz’s patients received a diagnostic hysteroscopy (an examination), and 12 percent underwent a surgical hysteroscopy (the removal of tissue), while other ob-gyns in Virginia who took Optima plans performed those procedures on just 1 percent of their patients. While 44 percent of Perwaiz’s patients who had a diagnostic hysteroscopy went on to have a surgical one, among his peers this happened so infrequently that the figure wasn’t statistically significant. Optima also reviewed the medical records of 20 of Perwaiz’s patients, chosen at random, and found that half contained discrepancies between Perwaiz’s notes and observations about procedures, and the pathology reports that came back from outside labs.

According to the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, “Performing medically unnecessary services solely for the purpose of generating insurance payments” is one of the most common types of medical scams. Another is “falsifying a patient’s diagnosis and medical record to justify tests, surgeries, or other procedures.” But was Perwaiz committing fraud, or was he just a bad doctor—sloppy perhaps, and overzealous too?

Greg Merti, a medical director with Optima, visited Perwaiz’s practice in May 2013 to speak with him about the investigation’s findings. The pair met in Perwaiz’s private office. Hanging on the wall were photos of Stone’s sons. Perwaiz had a massive wooden desk with a file tray and lamp. Notably absent was a PC—Perwaiz refused to use one, preferring to keep patients’ files in paper form. His staff were tasked with anything that required a computer, including filing insurance claims, updating hospital records, and renewing Perwaiz’s credentials with the state.

The two men spoke for just under an hour. Merti told Perwaiz that he was an outlier in terms of the number of hysteroscopies he performed. Perwaiz defended his decision-making, but he also expressed an interest in improving patient care and being transparent with Optima. When Merti suggested implementation of an “improvement plan,” Perwaiz was receptive. Merti later stated under oath that he took Perwaiz “at his word.” Whether or not the topic was broached, an improvement plan likely would have saved Optima money, since Perwaiz billed the company every time he performed a procedure on a patient covered by one of its plans.

Two years later, in 2015, Optima ran numbers on the costs and performance of its in-network providers. The results showed that Perwaiz was still an outlier: He was in the 97th percentile of doctors doing hysteroscopies, hysterectomies, and transvaginal ultrasounds, meaning that only 3 percent of providers in Optima’s network performed those procedures more often than he did. Merti spoke with Perwaiz again and told him that if he wished to change his approach to patient care, he could reach out for assistance. According to Merti, Perwaiz never did.

In a statement, Dale Gauding, a spokesperson for Sentara Health Plans, said the company “followed best practices” in its communications with Perwaiz. “There are strict criteria for peer review interventions,” Gauding said, “and utilization issues are not reportable to the state Board of Medicine.”

Perwaiz performed hysteroscopies at his private practice, but more complex procedures required using facilities at a hospital or surgery center. On Saturdays, Perwaiz had surgical privileges at Chesapeake Regional, meaning that his background and credentials had been screened and he was approved to operate at the hospital. It was a standard arrangement: Chesapeake Regional made money by billing a patient’s insurer for costs associated with Perwaiz’s use of its facilities.

One of the nurses Perwaiz worked with at Chesapeake Regional was Lisa Atkinson. At first, Atkinson had a good impression of Perwaiz, finding him pleasant and professional. She also saw that he worked much faster than other surgeons. His hysterectomies took between 20 and 30 minutes, while other providers required at least an hour. He packed his schedule too; no ob-gyn came close to performing as many surgeries at Chesapeake Regional. According to data compiled by the hospital, in 2017 Perwaiz performed 220 surgeries there. The next-highest number for an ob-gyn operating at the facility was 150.

By then, Atkinson’s opinion of Perwaiz had shifted. It started with a concerning encounter she had with him in 2014. One of Perwaiz’s patients came in for what was described on the day’s surgery schedule as the removal of her uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, and ovaries. This conflicted with the patient’s consent form, on which she had agreed to have only her uterus and cervix taken out. “We are not doing the ovaries?” Atkinson asked the woman directly. “Nope,” she replied. Atkinson assumed that there was an error on the surgery schedule, the kind of thing that’s usually cleared up before an operation begins.

After the patient was under anesthesia, Perwaiz completed his pre-op paperwork, then the surgical team assembled for what’s known as a time-out: Before an incision is made, everyone in the operating room discusses the specifics of the procedure, whether the patient has any allergies or known health risks, and other crucial matters. It was during the time-out, when Atkinson was looking at the paperwork Perwaiz had just finalized, that she noticed a change on the patient’s consent form. Since she’d last seen it, the words “bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy”—the medical terminology for the removal of the ovaries and fallopian tubes—had been added in small, swooping letters in the right margin. The handwriting was Perwaiz’s.

When Atkinson asked about the addition, Perwaiz readily admitted to making it. Legally, Atkinson knew she needed either the patient or a designated proxy to sign off on the change to the form before surgery began, so she went to the waiting room to speak with the patient’s husband. According to Atkinson, the husband assumed that ovary removal was part of a hysterectomy. Atkinson explained that it was not. “Well, if it has to be done,” the man replied. He deferred to his wife’s doctor and signed the form.

After the surgery, hoping to gain more clarity about what had happened, Atkinson spoke with two pre-op nurses who had worked with the patient. They told her that the patient had been adamant that she wasn’t having her ovaries removed—not casual about it, like when Atkinson spoke with her, but definitive. The next day, Atkinson sent an email to her supervisor. “I feel as though we performed an assault on the patient if she truly did not want to have her ovaries removed. This just really bothers me,” Atkinson wrote. “I suppose we are covered by having her husband sign the consent, but it should have never come to that.”

Atkinson never learned what if anything the hospital did with the information she provided, or what happened with the patient. All she knew was that Perwaiz kept operating at Chesapeake Regional, which meant that she kept working with him. (The hospital declined to comment for this story.)

Other nurses raised red flags about Perwaiz. On alternating Fridays, he operated at a facility called Bon Secours Surgery Center at Harbour View. Some doctors who use Harbour View have an ownership share in the business, and Perwaiz was among them; his photo was mounted on an interior wall. Nurse Jean Kennedy found Perwaiz’s routine chaotic. He’d regularly perform between ten and fourteen surgeries per day, while other surgeons at Harbour View typically did two or three. Patients tended to arrive at the same time, early in the morning, as if they’d all been scheduled simultaneously, and it was left to the nurses to figure out how to slot the procedures. Perwaiz was known to work in two or three rooms at a time, shuttling from one anesthetized patient to another, and to begin filling out post-op charts before surgery.  

The staff called these operating days “Perwaiz-a-thons.” The pace worried Kennedy. “To me, it was an open[ing] for risk of mistakes, errors,” she later stated under oath. Kennedy and other Harbour View employees spoke to their supervisors about their concerns, and around 2009 there was a staff meeting where nurses reported that they didn’t like how fast they were asked to work when Perwaiz was on the schedule. They also said that some of his patients didn’t seem to know what kind of surgery they were having.

Perwaiz wasn’t at the meeting, but the administrator of Harbour View was. So was his boss, the regional coordinator for United Surgical Partners International, which owned the facility. Afterward, according to hospital staff, the Perwaiz-a-thons continued. Staff were told to fill out incident reports when something happened that seemed like cause for concern.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Harbour View said the facility was “unaware that Perwaiz was performing medically unnecessary procedures on his patients,” and noted that “his medical license, as granted by the state of Virginia and subject to review by the Medical Board of Virginia, was unrestricted and in good standing” for the duration of his time working at the surgery center.

Jen wanted to start seeing a gynecologist, but as anyone who’s ever been to one knows, the initial appointment can be especially stressful. You have to take off your clothes and open your body and your life to a stranger.

Perwaiz wasn’t just performing surgeries on a lot of patients—in some cases, he was performing a lot of surgeries on a single patient. Carol White, a nurse at Harbour View, saw this pattern plainly. Before the surgery center switched to computerized charts, staff added a sticker to a patient’s file when they came in for a procedure. White found it odd that there were long rows of stickers in the records of some of Perwaiz’s younger patients, who were statistically less likely to require multiple gynecological surgeries.

One of the patients who had multiple surgeries with Perwaiz was Jen*, who moved from New York City to Virginia in 2006. She wanted to start seeing a gynecologist, but as anyone who’s ever been to one knows, the initial appointment can be especially stressful. You have to take off your clothes and open your body and your life to a stranger. Topics of discussion are immediately intimate: Do you want to have children? How many sexual partners do you have? Have you ever had a sexually transmitted infection?

Jen felt like she’d be in good hands when a coworker recommended Perwaiz. The coworker had been a patient of his for years; he had delivered her kids. Jen made an appointment.

Jen was glad to see a diverse group of patients when she arrived at the office: old and young, pregnant and not, white and also Black like her. She liked Perwaiz right away. “He was super cool, very easy to like,” she told me. Over time she noticed that he had expensive taste in cars. She’d see his Mercedes in the parking lot, or his Jaguar.

Her first surgical procedure with Perwaiz took place about a year after she became his patient. After doing an exam, he told her she had HPV and recommended removing abnormal tissue he’d identified. He set up an outpatient appointment for her.

A few years later, in 2012, Jen told Perwaiz that she was experiencing abdominal discomfort, and after she had an ultrasound, he told her that she had a fibroid. He put her on birth control, a common treatment for the symptoms of fibroids, which include pain and bleeding. When that didn’t help, Perwaiz suggested that she might have endometriosis, a condition where tissue similar to the kind lining the uterus grows elsewhere in the body. Endometriosis can cause intense pain as well as infertility, and sometimes the only way to diagnose it definitively is via a surgical procedure known as a laparoscopy: A doctor makes a small incision in the abdomen, then inserts a scope to look for evidence of the disease.

According to a recent study in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, it can take patients as long as 11 years to finally be diagnosed with endometriosis. In part, researchers found, this is because of the normalization of gynecological pain: Patients and health care providers alike often see this kind of discomfort as a fact to be tolerated, not a condition to treat. Moreover, some doctors lack sufficient knowledge of endometriosis to help patients who suffer from it. Yet here was Perwaiz taking what Jen said seriously and offering to help her. She agreed to have the laparoscopy.

Not long after scheduling the procedure, Jen had an appointment at her general practitioner’s office. She told the medical assistant that she was having a laparoscopy soon. The assistant asked who her doctor was. After Jen gave Perwaiz’s name, the assistant said something she found strange: “Everybody I know who goes to him has to get that same surgery.”

Based on the laparoscopy, Perwaiz diagnosed Jen with endometriosis. From then on, it felt to Jen like every time she saw Perwaiz, he told her she needed another procedure. She got fibroids and cysts removed. She began to feel anxious whenever she had an appointment, to the point that she sometimes had to take a Xanax to calm down. “I was just afraid that he was going to tell me I needed surgery again,” she said.

In 2018, when Perwaiz told her that she had another cyst, Jen said she didn’t want it removed. She was done with surgeries. She asked what would happen if she didn’t have the procedure. Perwaiz told her that he could monitor the cyst to see if it grew. Jen hadn’t realized that this was an option; she couldn’t recall Perwaiz informing her about it during previous appointments.

About a year later, she had an ultrasound at Perwaiz’s office. Afterward he told her that the cyst was gone. Jen was glad, but later she wondered: If a cyst could resolve on its own, had Perwaiz really needed to remove all the others?

In mid-2019, a patient came into the waiting room and began yelling that all Perwaiz wanted to do was cut people open. The woman was put in an empty exam room, and Perwaiz told staff that she just wanted more pain medication, that she was an addict.

The medical technician who performed the ultrasound on Jen was Courtney Ciccone. But Ciccone was more than Perwaiz’s employee: She was also his patient. In fact, Perwaiz treated several of his staff. He also treated some of their family members. Lisa Strong, the medical assistant Perwaiz once instructed to rinse scopes instead of sterilizing them, recommended that her mother start seeing him.

Strong would later testify that she did this in spite of growing unease about her boss. She was often in the room when Perwaiz saw patients, and she noticed that he sometimes put a detail in a chart that didn’t correspond with what had happened in an appointment: He’d write that a patient’s menstrual cycles lasted longer than they reported, for instance, or list a lower blood pressure reading than what Strong had measured. Still, she thought Perwaiz was a good doctor. “I felt that he would take good care of my mother, which he did,” she said under oath. “And with me being there to, I’ll just use the word oversee things, not that I even really had to with her, I felt comfortable.”

In 2016, Strong’s adult son died. She took time off work to grieve, and her mindset about Perwaiz changed. She felt guilty for sensing that things weren’t right at the practice and not acting, and she decided that she had to quit. It was a difficult choice; she needed the job. But she finally gave notice in the summer of 2018.

Before she left, Strong spoke regularly with Diane Coleman regarding her concerns about Perwaiz. Coleman, who handled insurance claims for the practice, had some of her own. From her desk, she sometimes heard patients in the hallway make comments about having to get yet another surgery. She knew that most of the patients who had repeat surgeries were on Medicaid. In mid-2019, a patient came into the waiting room and began yelling that all Perwaiz wanted to do was cut people open. The woman was put in an empty exam room, and Perwaiz told staff that she just wanted more pain medication, that she was an addict.

Coleman later stated under oath that Chesapeake Regional at one point asked Perwaiz to start scheduling and billing abdominal hysterectomies as inpatient procedures, since they usually required an overnight stay post-op. Perwaiz didn’t want to do this, because insurance companies took longer to authorize inpatient procedures; calling them outpatient made for less hassle. According to Coleman, Perwaiz said that if Chesapeake Regional didn’t like his approach, he’d take his surgeries elsewhere.

The sheer number of procedures Perwaiz performed meant that Coleman sometimes worked seven days a week doing data entry and filing insurance paperwork. On weekends, when Perwaiz was done with his surgeries, he’d typically text Coleman to let her know, so she could use her work laptop to enter post-op information into the hospital’s computer system. Doctors usually did this themselves, but Perwaiz had Coleman do it because of his aversion to computers. Among other things, he would tell her when he’d altered a surgical plan in some way, since it affected the bill sent to the patient’s insurance provider. Coleman noticed that Perwaiz’s changes almost always involved adding components or complexity to surgeries. A vaginal hysterectomy became an abdominal one; ovaries were taken out along with a uterus. In general, the more complicated a surgery, the larger the insurance reimbursement.

Coleman took issue with the way Perwaiz worked, and she thought that he didn’t always give her the respect she deserved. She was feeling particularly stressed and underappreciated in September 2019, when an FBI agent knocked on her door. The bureau wanted to talk to her about her boss. Coleman immediately said that Perwaiz was an asshole.

By then federal agents already knew that at least one other person felt the same way: Debra.

3.

The FBI declined to comment for this story, and the bureau has never revealed exactly why it started investigating Perwaiz. All it has said is that, in 2018, an anonymous tip came in from someone at Harbour View—a nurse, perhaps, or another staff member suspicious about the Perwaiz-a-thons at the surgery center.

As the FBI began to dig into Perwaiz’s past, it found a complaint Debra had filed with Virginia’s medical board as part of her quest to hold Perwaiz responsible for performing surgery on her that she didn’t want. In February 2019, Debra got home from work and found a business card on her front door from an FBI agent, along with a note requesting that she get in touch. Debra didn’t know what the feds wanted with her, but she figured it must be serious. She called right away and made an appointment to visit the bureau’s Norfolk office.

When she arrived, Debra found a district attorney and two investigators waiting for her; all three were women. When they told her they wanted to speak with her about Perwaiz, Debra broke down. One of the women handed her a tissue and told her to take her time. “They patted me on the back, they comforted me, and then they gave me hope,” Debra said.

It had been several years since her surgery, years when she’d felt utterly alone and furious that Perwaiz was getting away with malpractice. “I thought nobody was listening to me. I felt like the system had failed me,” Debra said. “But these three women picked up the ball and they ran with it. They made me feel like I was a part of it.” She told them her story and agreed to cooperate going forward.

By the time the FBI got to Diane Coleman’s door several months later, investigators were looking for current patient records. They wanted to prove that Perwaiz was still doing the kind of thing Debra claimed he’d done to her. At first, Coleman was hesitant to cooperate, but at the end of her conversation with the agent who visited her, she walked to her car and grabbed some documents; she was often so busy that she had to bring work home with her.

Coleman shared the documents with the agent. It felt like the right thing to do. Over the next several weeks, she provided investigators with additional materials, including at least one document Perwaiz had planned to destroy.

Perwaiz kept a bin under his desk, and whatever he put in it was supposed to be shredded by an employee once a week. The document Coleman came across was a standard patient-intake form; it had been filled out, but there was an X drawn across it. Coleman checked the patient’s file and found another copy of the form. She later testified that Perwaiz had “rewritten” the form, filling it in with “different” information: The version he wanted shredded indicated that the patient had no gynecological complaints, while the one on file described them reporting pelvic pain and pressure, persistent cramps, and irregular periods. Any of those symptoms might justify gynecological surgery. Coleman shared both versions of the intake form with the FBI.

Coleman also told agents about Layla*, a patient who in the past few months had experienced some serious health issues. Intermittent but severe uterine bleeding had landed Layla in the ICU, where she required transfusions. After her hospital stay she followed up with Perwaiz, who had been her ob-gyn since 2014. Based on a physical exam and an ultrasound in February 2019, Perwaiz told Layla that she had fibroids that needed to be removed, because they were large and might be cancerous. (The vast majority of fibroids are benign.) Perwaiz performed a procedure known as dilation and curettage to scrape the fibroids from Layla’s uterine wall.  

Layla went back to Perwaiz that September. She wasn’t having her period, which meant that she might not be ovulating, and she wanted to have a baby. Layla underwent an ultrasound on September 26, after which Perwaiz told her that she had a small fibroid he wanted to remove before it got any larger. (Fibroids can disrupt a person’s menstrual cycle.) Layla agreed to have the procedure the following month. 

But while reviewing Layla’s file, Coleman noticed that, in fact, her most recent ultrasound didn’t show any fibroids at all. Perwaiz had scheduled Layla for a procedure to remove a growth there was no evidence she even had. In the plainest of terms, he seemed to be lying. Coleman provided the FBI with a copy of the surgical plan for Layla’s procedure, along with the conflicting ultrasound results.

On October 10, investigators visited Layla at her home. They said that they had reason to believe Perwaiz was performing unnecessary procedures on patients, including her. They talked about what was in her medical file, the information that didn’t match up. In addition to the normal ultrasound results, Perwaiz had noted in her file that she was experiencing heavy, painful periods, when in fact she wasn’t menstruating at all.

The investigators asked Layla to call Perwaiz to talk about her upcoming surgery, to see what he said. The FBI would record the conversation. Layla was on hold with a receptionist for a few minutes before Perwaiz picked up the phone. “I have some quick questions for you,” Layla said.

She told him that her boyfriend wanted to know more about the surgery she was scheduled for. Could Perwaiz explain the procedure? Perwaiz told her that it was for fibroid removal. Layla then asked how long she’d need to be off work, since she was starting a new job. He told her one week. She asked why the recovery was longer this time than it had been for her last surgery.

“Because we’re making a bikini incision,” Perwaiz said, referring to a type of surgical cut in the abdomen.

“You didn’t cut me in that area last time, so why are you cutting me in that area this time?” Layla asked.

“Because we are removing the tumor. These are big tumors, you cannot remove them through [a] belly-button incision.”

Perwaiz was describing multiple large fibroids, not a single small one, contradicting what he previously told Layla about why she needed surgery. She had caught him in a lie.

“Are there any other options as far as the surgery?” Layla asked. “That sounds kind of scary.”

“Then don’t do it,” Perwaiz said. “We’ll cancel it and hopefully you get pregnant. How about that?”

Layla agreed, they said their goodbyes, and she hung up the phone.

On Monday, October 28, two special agents from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Virginia Medicaid Fraud Control Unit arrived unannounced at Perwaiz’s practice. The agents, Tamika Williams and Paul Hastings, were shown to Perwaiz’s private office, where they introduced themselves and showed him their credentials. They said that they had a complaint they needed to resolve, which required asking Perwaiz some questions.

They started off with a basic one: How many patients did he see in his practice? “Thousands,” Perwaiz replied. “I’ve been in practice for 39 years. One hundred patients a week, 400 maybe a month, maybe 5,000 a year.” The agents asked some more general questions about Perwaiz’s office and the types of procedures he did there, including hysteroscopies. Perwaiz described the procedure and answered questions about the equipment he used. Then he excused himself to see a patient.

When he got back to the office, Perwaiz abruptly ended the interview. “If there’s any complaint, I absolutely want that addressed,” he said. “But I don’t think I should answer these questions anymore. I have already probably answered too many.”

The next day, the FBI raided his office. Agents took medical devices and the contents of trash cans. They snapped photos. And they seized medical records, loads of them. They took more than 3,400 files from shelves in the front office and from a storage space in the attic. The material filled 80 bankers boxes.

After the raid, authorities assumed that because he was under investigation, Perwaiz would voluntarily stop seeing patients. But he didn’t. One of the women still in his care was Tessa*.

Tessa is an exuberant person—she likes to sing and is quick to laugh. She was once in an abusive marriage but got out with her three children. She went back to school and remarried, and soon she wanted to have a child with her new husband. Tessa was in her forties then, but other women in her family had had kids later in their reproductive years, so she thought she could, too. Then her general practitioner identified what might be a tumor in her uterus and referred her to Perwaiz.

At her first appointment, according to Tessa, Perwaiz looked at an ultrasound from her GP’s office and confirmed that she had a tumor. He told Tessa that if she didn’t have a hysterectomy soon, she would get cancer. She asked if there were other options, since she wanted to have another baby. Perwaiz said no.

Tessa’s mother, grandmother, grandfather, and uncle had all died within two years of each other. Her father had just survived his second bout with cancer. She was overwhelmed by the stress of all the illness and loss around her, and she worried about her kids being left without a family if something happened to her. She agreed to have a hysterectomy but decided to keep her ovaries. Her surgery was scheduled for October 19.

Tessa had complications from the operation almost immediately. She called Perwaiz’s office to let him know that she was going to need more than a three-day prescription for pain medication. She could tolerate a lot—she had delivered three kids, after all—but this was too much. Perwaiz told her to take two Tylenol.

Tessa didn’t get mad, just like she hadn’t when she was still in the hospital and Perwaiz told her, “Good luck having more babies.” However intended, it seemed like a cruel thing to say to someone who’d just had her uterus removed. But Tessa didn’t want to come off as a stereotypical angry Black woman, so she kept her mouth shut.

On October 26, Tessa’s postoperative pain got so severe that she went to the emergency room. When she explained her situation, staff members remarked that she’d seen “the weekend doctor.” Tessa didn’t know what that meant, so someone explained that they were talking about Perwaiz, “because he does so many surgeries over the weekend.”

Tessa went home the next day, but the pain didn’t go away. She also felt faint and short of breath. Her husband took her to the general practitioner who’d referred her to Perwaiz, and the doctor expressed surprise that Tessa had undergone major surgery so soon after Perwaiz first saw her.

The GP did an ultrasound, then sent Tessa back to the ER, where she had a CT scan. After reviewing the imaging, her doctor told Tessa that her ovaries were gone. Perwaiz had removed them, forcing her into early menopause. 

A few days later, in early November, Tessa was at home in bed recovering from the ordeal when Perwaiz’s face appeared on the local news. She screamed. Her husband, who was cooking dinner, ran into the room.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“This motherfucker is on TV!” Tessa said.

Perwaiz had been arrested. He was charged with just two counts: health care fraud and making false statements relating to health care matters. The prosecutor’s office expected that there would be more charges, but it decided to proceed with the first two to compel Perwaiz to cease practicing.

4.

One by one, Perwaiz’s patients learned of his arrest. Jen looked at a news site on her work computer and saw his face on her screen. Another patient got a text about Perwaiz from her cousin and thought, That’s weird—that’s my doctor’s name. It took a second for it to click: He was her doctor. Brittni DuPuy-German was one of the last patients Perwaiz ever saw; she had an appointment with him on November 7, the day before his arrest, and he’d scheduled her for surgery. She found out that he was behind bars when a friend texted her a news article.

Debra hadn’t told anyone she was talking to the FBI, but her loved ones knew about her effort to sue Perwaiz. When they heard about his arrest, they celebrated with her. Got him! they said. Debra agreed to be a witness at Perwaiz’s trial: She was ready to do everything she could to make sure he never saw another patient.

Within weeks of Perwaiz’s arrest, the FBI was contacted by hundreds of people he’d treated. Some were sure they’d had surgeries they didn’t need. Others were just now realizing that might be the case. Many didn’t know what to think, but were scared. “This man may have very well taken any ability I had to bear children of my own forever,” one email stated. Another read, “I have recently learned that I’m missing a fallopian tube and an ovary.” The flood of contacts became so great that the government set up a hotline for potential victims.

The following June, the prosecutor’s office filed a new indictment against Perwaiz, expanding its case against him. It listed 26 counts of health care fraud and 32 counts of making false statements relating to health care matters. There were also three counts of aggravated identity theft: Perwaiz was accused of using patients’ names and Medicaid information to try to obtain insurance money.

The details in the indictment were shocking. The government accused Perwaiz of “routinely” lying to patients and falsifying medical records in order to perform unnecessary surgeries. He told numerous patients that they had cancer when they didn’t, scaring them into hysterectomies insurers reimbursed him for. He told other patients, including Layla, that they had fibroids or cysts that would become cancerous if entire organs weren’t removed immediately, when in fact the accepted standard of care for those conditions called for far more conservative treatments, such as monitoring or medication, before surgery. One woman who began seeing Perwaiz after she had an abnormal pap smear in 2012 told investigators that she underwent no fewer than seven procedures, including a diagnostic hysteroscopy and a laparoscopy, in just nine months. Later she had a hysterectomy. Perwaiz told the patient’s insurer that the reason for the hysterectomy was uterine prolapse, a condition the patient was never diagnosed with.

Perwaiz was also accused of inducing labor before 39 weeks so patients would give birth on days he was already scheduled to perform surgeries, thus ensuring that he, and not some other doctor on call at the hospital, received the insurance payments associated with the deliveries. Of the more than 80 births Perwaiz billed Medicaid and Tricare, another insurer, for in 2019, at least 33 involved patients induced before 39 weeks with no medical indication that they needed it. (Early induction is not recommended unless the health of a fetus or the person carrying it is at risk.) According to the indictment, to avoid dealing with questions from insurers, Perwaiz sometimes falsified a patient’s estimated due date so it appeared they were past 39 weeks when he induced them.

Many of the patients listed in the indictment described suffering “serious bodily injury” as a result of what Perwaiz did. But there were also allegations of crimes involving no bodies at all. The indictment stated that, between 2010 and 2019, Perwaiz billed insurers for more than $2.3 million in procedures and surgeries, including “hysteroscopies and colposcopies, that he did not actually perform.” In other words, there were procedures he’d simply made up.

The more money Perwaiz made, the more the hospitals where he performed surgeries benefited. According to trial testimony, from 2010 to 2019 Chesapeake Regional made $18.4 million from Perwaiz’s use of its facilities, while Harbour View made $3.1 million.

Perwaiz’s trial began in October 2020, and lasted four and a half weeks. Former employees, coworkers, and patients took the stand to testify about what they’d seen and experienced at Perwaiz’s practice or while under his care. A nurse described complications suffered by babies Perwaiz delivered via unnecessary early induction. Women described the trauma of realizing that they’d had organs removed without their consent or surgeries based on false diagnoses. One former patient said that she was so scared when Perwaiz told her she would likely get cancer if she didn’t have surgery that she left his office and immediately bought life insurance.

During Debra’s testimony, the prosecution shared documents related to her surgery, including her consent form, where someone had scribbled “possible abdominal hysterectomy.” Debra didn’t remember seeing those words on the form when she signed it. Perwaiz’s progress notes on the procedure also contradicted what he and Debra had talked about in her appointments. “Patient wants to have ovaries removed through abdominal incision,” Perwaiz wrote. “Risks/benefits, including need and risks of hormones, explained at length. All her questions answered.” Meanwhile, the post-op report stated that after Perwaiz closed her up, he was alerted to blood in Debra’s urine, but he decided it wasn’t enough to worry about and sent her to recovery.

“I did not tell you to cut my guts,” Debra said on the stand. “That wasn’t what was agreed upon.”

Some of Perwaiz’s staff who were also his patients described seeing procedures they hadn’t consented to described in their own medical files. Additionally, employees testified that they were instructed to write details of patients’ medical histories and complaints on Post-it notes during appointments, leaving Perwaiz to transcribe them himself into the patients’ files later.

Margo Stone, the longtime nurse in Perwaiz’s office who was also his ex-girlfriend, agreed to testify against him in exchange for immunity; she had never reported the financial support he gave her to the IRS. Many former patients and staff learned at the trial that Perwaiz himself had a history of tax problems. In April 1996, he was convicted of filing false returns after he claimed the value of personal items, including a Ferrari and a Mercedes, as business expenses. He was put on probation and in-home confinement, and his medical license was briefly revoked. Two decades later, he lied on a form required by an insurance provider: When asked if he’d ever been convicted of a felony, Perwaiz indicated that he hadn’t—he characterized what happened in 1996 as merely “tax issues.”

Perwaiz told the same insurance provider that he’d never had his clinical privileges revoked by a medical facility, but investigators discovered that this also wasn’t true. In October 1983, Perwaiz lost his staff membership and surgical privileges at Maryview Hospital in Portsmouth after administrators found that he’d performed unnecessary procedures. That December, the CEO of Maryview, J. Bland Burkhardt, wrote a signed letter to his counterpart at Chesapeake General Hospital, Donald Buckley, alerting him that Maryview had cut ties with Perwaiz and explaining why. Chesapeake General would later be renamed Chesapeake Regional. (Buckley retired from the hospital in 2005 and now teaches at Eastern Virginia Medical School. He declined to be interviewed for this story.)

On June 22, 1984, the Virginia Board of Medicine sent an official notification to Perwaiz that he was being investigated regarding his time at Maryview. The letter detailed 11 instances in 1982 when he had performed a hysterectomy despite there being no medical indication that the patient needed the procedure. The same went for a diagnostic laparoscopy Perwaiz performed on a 17-year-old girl. The letter also noted that he’d had a sexual relationship with one of his patients, which Virginia law defines as unprofessional conduct that might be grounds for discipline.

Members of the medical board met on July 27 to determine Perwaiz’s professional fate. Based on evidence from the investigation, they had four options: They could exonerate him, reprimand or censure him, place him on probation, or recommend a formal hearing, where the question of revoking his medical license would be considered. The board chose to censure Perwaiz for poor record-keeping and for lack of professional judgment. The censures became part of his permanent record, and he continued treating patients and performing surgeries at hospitals where he had privileges.

In the ensuing years, there were at least four complaints about Perwaiz filed with the Virginia Department of Health Professions. One of them was submitted by Debra and had led the FBI to her door. At Perwaiz’s trial, the prosecution revealed a complaint from 2010 filed by a woman who felt Perwaiz had coerced her into inducing birth. WAVY, an NBC affiliate in Virginia, found another complaint about Perwaiz, this one filed by a woman named Linda Jackson on August 15, 2013, after a series of surgeries and complications. She believed that Perwaiz had harmed her and that Chesapeake Regional was covering for his mistakes. “Please help me!” Jackson wrote in her complaint. “I don’t know what to do!” In all three cases, the Virginia Board of Medicine did not pursue disciplinary proceedings. (The board declined to comment for this story, citing a Virginia law prohibiting it from doing so.)

The other known complaint, also found by WAVY, predated the others by at least two decades. On June 4, 1991, Susan Pullem wrote a letter asking the medical board to investigate Perwaiz. He had operated on her six times between April 1987 and July 1988, then performed a partial hysterectomy in October 1988. The following February, Pullem went to a new gynecologist, who told her that the hysterectomy had probably been unnecessary; had Pullem been his patient, he would have treated her symptoms with medication. The new doctor also told her that the lining of her vagina was “paper thin” because of the numerous procedures she’d had in such a brief span of time.

When bills arrived from Perwaiz’s office, Pullem refused to pay them. “The way I figure it, you owe me!” she wrote in an October 1990 letter to Perwaiz. “I am sure all of my surgeries bought you at least one or two more of the Mercedes that you are so fond of.”

Perwaiz sued Pullem for payment. In a letter submitted to the court, Pullem described what had happened to her and said that she’d spoken with dozens of other women who’d had similar experiences with Perwaiz. One woman told Pullem that Perwaiz had cut her bladder while performing a hysterectomy. “He didn’t even notice it and completed the surgery,” Pullem wrote. “This same woman was recently hospitalized again with complications from that surgery.” The situation sounded remarkably similar to what Debra endured beginning in 2012.  

“I hope that the courts will look at all of the evidence presented and come to the same conclusion that I have. Dr. Perwaiz is a disgrace to his profession and has taken advantage of trusting women for too long,” Pullem’s letter to the court continued. “Between the monies paid him by myself and the insurance companies, I feel he has been paid very well indeed for ruining my life.”

The court sided with Perwaiz. Pullem later filed her complaint with the state medical board. She said she never got a reply.

As Pullem professed, Perwaiz’s patients made him rich, a fact all the more disturbing because so many of them were Medicaid recipients, which by definition meant that they earned very little money. In the years immediately leading up to his arrest, Perwaiz made about $1 million annually. (Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average estimated salary of an ob-gyn in the United States in 2020 was about $239,000.) And the more money Perwaiz made, the more the hospitals where he performed surgeries benefited. According to trial testimony, from 2010 to 2019 Chesapeake Regional made $18.4 million from Perwaiz’s use of its facilities, while Harbour View made $3.1 million.

Throughout the trial, Perwaiz maintained that he was a good doctor who did right by his patients. In testimony, he said that the surgeries he performed were justified, even if his approach to paperwork left something to be desired. He said that he saw the number of patients he did because he didn’t want to turn people away, especially those who might not have reliable access to transportation. “I had a standing policy and instruction to my scheduling people that if a patient calls, new or an established patient, bring her in the day she wants to come in. And if it [was] that day, we made it happen,” he said. “It was never a[n] ‘I’m too busy’ kind of office.” Perwaiz attributed his rate of surgeries to his “patient mix,” as he put it. “Seventy-five or probably more close to 80 percent of my patients are Medicare/Medicaid patients,” he testified. “They’re [at] higher risk when they are pregnant, and they have more gynecological issues because they don’t do preventative things, and so forth.”

But the evidence against Perwaiz was overwhelming. On November 9, 2020, a year and one day after he was arrested, a jury found him guilty on 52 counts. He was sentenced to 59 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of more than $18.5 million to the insurance companies he defrauded.

His former patients got nothing. Legally speaking they weren’t victims in the case—only the insurance companies were. In the eyes of the court, Perwaiz’s victims were witnesses, testifying about the wrongs done to insurers through the harm done to their bodies.

At the sentencing hearing, Tessa gave a statement addressing this fact. “Women have been fighting all of our lives to matter … just to be smacked in the face, a reality that we aren’t as important,” she said. Tessa described how she and other patients hurt by Perwaiz needed help: medical care, mental health support, financial compensation. But many of them couldn’t file a lawsuit even if they wanted to, because of Virginia’s statute of limitations on medical malpractice suits. “The fact that we have yet to find assistance,” she said, “is a clear statement that we still don’t matter.”

Perwaiz’s most recent patients were able to file suit, and more than a dozen did. Tessa was among them, and she eventually settled with Perwaiz out of court. When Brittni DuPuy-German filed her own suit, she named the Chesapeake Hospital Authority, the governing body of Chesapeake Regional, as a defendant alongside Perwaiz. DuPuy-German alleged that the hospital administration had been negligent in failing to properly evaluate his credentials and in granting him surgical privileges. Attorneys for the hospital argued that it wasn’t liable for Perwaiz’s actions.

In April 2021, a judge sided with DuPuy-German, but in the appeals process the hospital invoked sovereign immunity, a legal concept derived from English common law that prevents public entities from being sued. The Chesapeake Hospital Authority was established by the state legislature, and its members are appointed by the Chesapeake city council. In February 2022, a judge ruled in the authority’s favor and dismissed it from the lawsuit.

There is longstanding precedent in Virginia for the court’s decision. The legal logic is that public bodies must be able to perform their essential functions without fear of lawsuits. But according to critics of sovereign immunity, this can leave victims of institutional wrongdoing without recourse. “At Safeway, if there is a salad bar, and somebody slips and falls because an employee didn’t pick up the salad off the floor, then Safeway is vicariously liable for the actions of the employee—that’s a very typical arrangement,” said Anya Bidwell of the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm in Virginia. “But when it comes to government entities, they are somehow special, they are exempt from this…. What ends up happening is a culture of unaccountability.”    

DuPuy-German said that she feels Chesapeake Regional is “hiding behind sovereign immunity.” (She settled separately with Perwaiz.) “They pretty much got away with this,” she told me, “even though in my opinion they were just as negligent as him, because they were notified by multiple different people in their own facility, and they didn’t do anything about it.”

More than a half dozen suits are still working their way through the legal system, including one filed by Layla, who’d let the FBI record her phone call with Perwaiz. (She declined to be interviewed for this story on advice of her attorney.) But most of Perwaiz’s victims, of which there are likely hundreds, have been left without a clear path to restitution. The FBI designated a victim coordinator to connect former patients with mental health services and to communicate information about the investigation and trial to people requesting it. The bureau told potential victims that, as a first step in addressing any harm done to them, they could request their medical files from Perwaiz’s office.

Jen, who underwent multiple surgeries with Perwaiz, drove to his office to get her file. She recognized the female employee who was handing out documents to the former patients coming in the door. Jen also requested her records from Chesapeake Regional. She took everything to a new gynecologist, who didn’t see any evidence to validate the endometriosis diagnosis Perwaiz had given her. It was hard to hear, even harder to sit with. “I realized there really wasn’t going to be much I could do about it,” Jen said. When she sees a doctor now, Jen’s anxiety still spikes, but she also feels like she has a better understanding of what good care looks like.

Others haven’t been so lucky. Former patients who spoke at Perwaiz’s sentencing hearing or were interviewed for this story said they’ve struggled to find doctors to support them. When one woman told a new gynecologist what Perwaiz had done to her—a hysterectomy based on a false cancer diagnosis—the doctor said she should see it as a good thing, because it was a permanent form of birth control. “I let her finish her exam, I cried, and I left,” the woman said. Other former patients, including Tessa, said that they’d encountered health care providers who seemed to be on Perwaiz’s side. Tessa was in the middle of an exam when her new ob-gyn said that they’d heard Perwaiz was an awesome doctor.

“If an insurance company dies, nobody gets hurt,” Debra said. “But if I die, my sons grow up without a mom.”

After Perwaiz’s arrest, Tessa slipped into depression. She had panic attacks; she felt paranoid. She also experienced the effects of the early menopause—mood swings, specifically—brought on by a surgery she hadn’t consented to. “I have been battling through the stages of grief as if I lost someone, because I have. I’ve lost myself,” she said in her witness statement. “I’m not the woman I was before, and it’s a daily challenge trying to find myself again.”

When the trial ended, Tessa sent email messages to local politicians requesting support for Perwaiz’s victims. She asked that hospitals be held responsible when people are hurt in their facilities. She asked that laws be changed to protect women like her.

She never heard back.

Jen has talked to her therapist about Perwaiz, and she sees what he did as an all too common betrayal. “It’s somebody that you trusted. Somebody that you’re taught to trust your entire life. Somebody that you put your life in their hands,” Jen said. “As a woman, and on top of that as a Black woman, it’s always this way, you know? We have to face so many barriers.”

Other former patients I spoke with felt similarly, and some believed that Perwaiz specifically targeted poor Black women. In their comments were the echoes of history: of the Tuskegee experiments, when the U.S. Public Health Service left Black people to suffer and die from syphilis so doctors could study the effects of the disease; of Henrietta Lacks, whose cervical-cancer cells were taken without her permission for biomedical studies; of the enslaved Black women whom J. Marion Sims performed experimental surgeries on—surgeries that would earn him the moniker “the father of gynecology.”

These echoes pushed Debra to fight to be heard, even when it seemed like no one cared to listen. She still mourns the children she can never have because of what Perwaiz did. And while she’s glad she finally got to tell her story in court, she’s angry that the legal system’s priority wasn’t to help Perwaiz’s victims. “If an insurance company dies, nobody gets hurt,” she said. “But if I die, my sons grow up without a mom.”

Debra, who now lives in Mississippi, has more she wants to say and do. She’s channeling some of that momentum into a new career: She recently took a job at the Department of Justice, as a program specialist focused on initiatives to de-escalate police violence. “In my little life,” Debra said, “I want to be in a position where I can bring some kind of equity to people’s lives, to help them.”

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A filmmaker was producing a documentary series on the Iran hostage crisis. Then her father went missing overseas.

By Lucy Sexton & Joe Sexton

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LUCY

I am the daughter of a newspaperman.

Throughout my life, I’ve used a version of this sentence to talk about myself: in college application essays and internship cover letters, on first dates, and now in this story. At 32 years of age, my pride in stating what is a core fact of my existence hasn’t diminished.

My dad, Joe Sexton, began his career as a sportswriter at the City Sun in Brooklyn, New York. One of his earliest stories was about the Rikers Island Olympics. He later covered a young Mike Tyson; he sat ringside, and had the blood on his clothes to prove it. When he made it to the sports desk at The New York Times, he spent years terrorizing the Mets and their ownership for crimes of mediocrity and incompetence.

Then, at 34, Joe was suddenly a single father of two daughters. I was just shy of three at the time. If memory can be trusted, I have a few vivid images—random snapshots captured through my toddler’s eyes—of the good and the bad: my tiny cowboy boots against shimmering asphalt; a stash of candies in a porcelain pitcher; being in a dark, frightening hotel room. When it became clear that my mother had demons she would need to wrestle with alone, Joe gained custody of me and my sister.

Here’s another memory: a late-night bottle of milk Joe gave me while friends, presumably fellow reporters, were visiting our house. Joe was simultaneously holding his family together and building a high-profile media career. Work meant that he was on the clock 24/7, and the Times became a second home for our family, a place where we were surrounded by people rooting for the three of us. When Joe jumped from the sports desk to the metro section, the newsroom served as a backup babysitter. When a story demanded that Joe’s feet hit the pavement, two little girls weren’t the worst accessories in pursuit of a quote.

Joe helped the Times garner a fistful of Pulitzer Prizes and covered everything from 9/11 (he dropped me off at school in Brooklyn that morning, and I didn’t see him for days afterward), to the sex-abuse scandal at Penn State, to the ousting of two New York governors. Eight years and more stories and prizes followed at ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization.

Early on, our lives could feel unstable—we moved more times than I can count, and my mom cycled in and out of our orbit—but Joe was always solid, secure. Despite the brutal work hours, he made sure to cover beats that kept him close to home. Weeks after turning 17, I began a decade of doing the opposite: I adventured across the globe, first to Argentina and Ghana, then to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and South Korea, on to France, and back to East Asia. I volunteered, produced documentaries, did investigative research, worked at Vietnam’s national English daily, fell in love, opened a restaurant, got a master’s in international security, and flirted with intelligence work and law school before settling back into documentary filmmaking.

Why the constant need to uproot myself? I’m sure a therapist could find some link to childhood trauma. I was too busy to question it; I was living as freely and fearlessly as possible. Joe, with his daily news grind in New York, was the only anchor I needed.

In May 2021, Joe upended this comforting metaphor when he told me that he’d be going to Libya to report a story. It sounded like a good one. But heading to a country racked by violence and without a U.S. embassy didn’t seem like something the careful and even anxious dad I knew would do. Joe and my stepmom had twin girls who were not yet in middle school. Beginning foreign correspondent work at the age of 61, on a dangerous story no less, was an interesting life choice.

Still, I put my travel and reporting experience to work helping him prepare. Jailbreak his cell phone so a foreign SIM card would work? I could do that. Secure a rapid PCR COVID test for travel? I could do that, too: For the previous six months, I’d been navigating strict protocols while filming an HBO series about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, when the U.S. embassy and staff in Tehran were held captive for 444 days.

The one thing I couldn’t help Joe with was taking his health more seriously. Just before his trip, he revealed that doctors had found a macular hole in one of his retinas. Left untreated, it could compromise his vision, which was already so bad he was legally blind without his glasses. He didn’t address the defect before going to Libya, nor did he plan to deal with it upon his return. Joe had always been cavalier about taking care of himself—his diet, sleep, and mental health all suffered. Perhaps this stemmed from his Irish Catholic upbringing, which glorified hard work, sacrifice, and personal neglect. Perhaps it came from his lifelong tendency to see himself as invincible when he was on a mission for work or for his family, which he almost always was.

I had seen Joe that way, too—until now. For the first time in my life, I found myself worrying about a future in which I would have to take care of him.

On a spring day, Joe and I sat on the porch of our house in Brooklyn, ignoring my concerns and discussing our respective reporting projects instead. I googled directions to a shop on Coney Island Avenue that sold burner phones in case my neophyte dad needed them on his journey. A few days later, Joe was on a plane to Libya and I was on my way to Washington, D.C., for the HBO project.

For me, the project was a moment of reckoning. I was nearly 62; there weren’t going to be many more shots at foreign correspondence. Did I have the stones for it?

JOE

Mitiga International Airport in Tripoli looked like something out of a Mad Max movie. The runways were pockmarked, the hangars appeared abandoned, and the ghostly shell of a scorched, half-collapsed airliner sat in one corner of the tarmac. I all but expected Lord Humungus to poke his masked head out of one of the plane’s blasted windows. The scene was no surprise: The airport had witnessed successive sieges during the years of civil war that followed the violent toppling of Libya’s longtime strongman, Muammar Qaddafi. The real shock was how exactly I’d found myself landing there on a hellishly hot afternoon in May 2021.

Some backstory might help. I spent 25 years as a reporter and editor at The New York Times, and ten years into that run, I was asked whether I might like to be a foreign correspondent in Africa. At the time, I’d also wound up a single dad of two young girls. Just seeing that the dishes got done, the socks were properly matched, and the hastily made bologna sandwiches made it into their lunch boxes felt like heroic accomplishments. My life’s ambitions, rather jarringly, had shrunk to this: Get the girls to 18 years old unharmed. So the idea of living in an armed compound in Nairobi while responsible for covering nearly a dozen often troubled East African countries seemed an imprudent reach. I demurred.

Truth be told, I wasn’t sure I had the guts for it anyway. I was not a particularly brave person. Was I also a coward of sorts? This was a chastening worry that would stay with me over the decades after I turned down the chance to go to Nairobi. Then, in 2021, shortly after going freelance, I fell in with Ian Urbina, an old colleague from the Times who’d started the Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit committed to some of the most daring reporting on the planet. Piracy on the high seas; slavery on fishing ships; the secretive, illegal dumping of oil into the ocean—Ian was covering all that and more. He was looking for an extra hand and said that I could start by joining him on a reporting trip to Libya. I agreed to go.

Libya struck me as a place of mystery and menace. Seventh-century Phoenicians had laid claim to the territory, and the Greeks and the Romans followed suit. The Spanish and the Ottomans came after that, and then, in the early 20th century, Italy planted its flag. Following the second World War, Libya won its independence, and for close to 20 years it was a U.S. ally, a country of petroleum riches and strategic geopolitical significance. American oil companies flocked there, and Washington leased a major military base. Then, in 1969, Qaddafi staged a coup. The ardent Arab nationalist installed himself as both chief of the armed forces and leader of Libya’s new governing body, the Revolutionary Command Council. Forty years of calculated cruelty and international misdeeds ensued. Under Qaddafi, Libya was seen by the U.S. government as an agent of terror and an enemy of Israel.

Qaddafi met his end during another revolution, the Arab Spring of 2011, and in the years that followed, Libya became a failed state. We would be going there to report on a darkly astonishing story taking place within the country’s borders: the brutal mistreatment of migrants trying to make their way from poverty and conflict to the safety and promise of Europe. The European Union was increasingly unwilling to accommodate these desperate people and their dreams, but it had effectively outsourced the dirty work of halting the flow. Libya, riven by rival militias and foreign mercenaries, was the EU’s most eager and immoral proxy, ramping up a veritable industry of abuse. Migrants on flimsy rafts were captured on the Mediterranean, transported to grim detention facilities inside Libya, and subjected to what the United Nations has since deemed crimes against humanity, including torture, rape, and murder.

A month before we set out for Libya, a 28-year-old migrant from West Africa was shot dead by guards inside one of the country’s most notorious migrant jails, a cluster of converted warehouses in Tripoli known as Al Mabani (the Buildings). We didn’t have the name of the migrant or know where his body had wound up. Still, we meant to tell his story. It may have been a Libyan gunman who shot the young man, but his blood was arguably on the EU’s hands.

There would be four of us working together, and though we would arrive in Libya with the help and blessing of the Red Crescent, an aid organization, our safety briefings made plain the risks we faced. We were given tracking devices in case we went missing. We were told to make photocopies of our passports and put them in the soles of our shoes. An action plan was created, to be set in motion by people back in the U.S. if we went silent for 24 hours.

For me, the project was a moment of reckoning. I was nearly 62; there weren’t going to be many more shots at foreign correspondence. Did I have the stones for it? My second child, Lucy, had shown herself capable of risky work. She’d even been a whistleblower in Ghana during a semester abroad, reporting fraud at the orphanage where she volunteered.

In the lead-up to the trip, I didn’t have trouble sleeping as I feared I might. I didn’t have panic attacks either, although they’d afflicted me at times throughout my life. If I was fooling myself, it was working. Soon I was on a plane to Amsterdam, then to Istanbul, and on to Tripoli. Out the window upon our descent, Tripoli—in its heyday an outpost of beauty and charm on the Mediterranean—had the look of a washed-up prizefighter: scarred and nicked, teeth knocked out, face sagging from a thousand beatings.

Red Crescent officials met us at the airport. There was an awkward wait as our bags were examined, but we were cleared to enter and soon were in a van with our security: three local men in T-shirts and sunglasses. Arrangements had been made for us to stay at the Corinthia Hotel, said to be Tripoli’s most luxurious accommodations. The place had a violent history. In 2013, the Libyan prime minister was kidnapped from the hotel. Two years later, ten people were shot dead when a militia stormed the place. Just a week before our arrival, the latest set of gunmen had turned up in a show of force, but no one was hurt.

We never made it to the Corinthia. Instead we were taken to the Royal Gardens, a nondescript four-story hotel on a side street near Tripoli’s central square. No explanation for the change was given. The Royal Gardens had the feel of some sort of front, as if the clerks and concierges were playing a role. It was hard not to be a little spooked.

I didn’t wear glasses, but Joe did. I couldn’t remember an occasion when I’d seen him without them, save for an occasional swim in the ocean.

LUCY

As a story producer for the HBO series, I was responsible for historical and political research, and for developing compelling characters and storylines. The origins of the Iran hostage crisis date back to well before 1979 and are anything but settled. The dynamism and nuance of Iran’s history, culture, and people challenge even rigorous academics. And I, no academic, belong to a generation of Americans who have only known Iran as an isolated, theocratic, dictatorial country—a “pariah state” and sworn enemy of democracy.

It wasn’t always so. Cyrus the Great, who built a mighty Persian empire during his reign in the sixth century B.C., was known for his tolerance of religious and cultural diversity. A prominent statesman, Cyrus is credited with fostering ideas about human rights and centralized governance. Thomas Jefferson was an admirer and drew from Cyrus during the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Fast-forward to the modern era, when Iran and the U.S. began to build a strong if complicated friendship. In the late 19th century, American missionaries founded hospitals and schools in Iran. When the Soviet Union refused to leave occupied lands in Iran’s Azerbaijan region after World War II, President Harry Truman brought international pressure to bear to encourage withdrawal. The countries’ relationship tightened again when Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi came to power in Tehran.

In 1953, the CIA helped coordinate a coup that quelled a pro-democracy challenge to the monarchical ambitions of the Shah, who would go on to establish increasingly authoritarian rule while proving an indispensable ally to a series of U.S. presidents. America relied on the Shah for oil, military contracts, and intelligence. In an effusive New Year’s Eve toast, President Jimmy Carter declared Iran an “island of stability” in the Middle East.

Just a year after Carter uttered those words, the Shah fled Iran as supporters of revolution rallied behind the Islamic clerics who’d been his harshest critics. Ten months later, on November 4, 1979, a group of students seized the U.S. embassy, an act meant as a rebuke of America’s friendship with the deposed Shah. According to the students, they intended to take embassy staffers hostage for a short time, but the situation lasted more than a year. In Tehran, the wave of nationalism and anti-American fervor that erupted around the crisis became a veil behind which repressive religious forces stepped into a political vacuum. The theocracy ushered in by cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini continues to this day.

The team behind the HBO documentary hoped we could put the people at the center of this complex story back into the frame. Earning and protecting the trust of subjects is a great privilege of the work of a documentary storyteller, and on this project I came to know a rich and varied cast from around the globe: American hostages and their families; academics and analysts who covered the crisis; Iranians who either supported or opposed the revolution; journalists who met Khomeini during his brief time in France, before his triumphant return home, or who captured events in Tehran at great personal risk.

Learning these people’s stories often meant asking them to relive traumatic events. Parvaneh Limbert, wife of hostage John Limbert, described the horrible moment when she learned that her husband had been seized half a world away. During one of my visits to the Limberts’ home, Parvaneh showed me pictures of her life in limbo as she cared for two kids alone; there were photos of Christmas trees, family dinners, bedtime routines, and trips to Washington, D.C., all without John.

The documentary’s archival team amassed a library of footage, photos, and news clippings that brought me closer still to the agony of uncertainty. I watched the hostages’ families give heartbreaking press conferences. Some recounted nightly rituals of scanning the news for a glimpse of their loved ones in footage released from the embassy. Newscasters described how Michael Metrinko’s family went months without knowing if he was alive.

Former hostages told me about the anxieties and fears that came with being cut off from the world. The only certainty was disorientation. Several people recounted the horror of being blindfolded, led outside, and lined up as if before a firing squad. They heard their captors load guns and count down—in place of “zero” came the mocking click of an empty chamber. Despite the decades that had elapsed, the former hostages’ terror remained fresh in the telling.

A catalog of rarely if ever seen footage from inside the embassy also provided glimpses into the hostages’ experience. One clip in particular stuck with me. In it a hostage explains to a Red Cross doctor that his eyeglasses had been taken from him on the first day of the crisis and were never returned. It was painful to imagine what he experienced—the blurred vision, the headaches, the world circumscribed.

I didn’t wear glasses, but Joe did. I couldn’t remember an occasion when I’d seen him without them, save for an occasional swim in the ocean.

JOE

Becoming a single dad ended my sportswriting career; I couldn’t make a West Coast swing during baseball season while responsible for two young girls. So I moved to the Times’ metro desk and became a decent city reporter, doing a mix of hard news and feature stories. Over the years, my girls tagged along on some of my assignments, from the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island to a Hasidic mother in Brooklyn who was one of the most sought-after nitpickers during a plague of lice in local schools. When the Times asked me to help conduct in-house seminars on street reporting, I made a point of telling younger reporters that success is often determined before you get out the door. If you’re fatalistic about getting what you need, failure awaits. If you force yourself to believe that an improbable reporting coup could happen, often as not it does. Corny maybe, but also true, at least in my experience.

I followed my own advice with Libya, trying before I arrived to imagine what reporting there would be like. I foresaw secretive conversations with friends and relatives of jailed migrants in dusty streets outside detention facilities. Maybe there would be a way to talk to prisoners through barred windows. Notes might be exchanged.

I felt naive, then, when two members of our team returned to the Royal Gardens after venturing out to Al Mabani. Their driver had refused to even slow down while passing by the jail, so fearful was he of being stopped at gunpoint.

Needless to say, the landscape of the city was less than ideal for the kind of street reporting I knew. To merely venture out, by foot or by car, was to risk being confronted by the armed men stationed at a convoluted pattern of checkpoints throughout Tripoli. And then there was the matter of our security team. Though they had been assigned to us with the help of the Red Crescent, a little googling showed that the firm they worked for seemed to be run by a former Libyan military official accused of war crimes. Were they actually government minders monitoring our doings? Militia members themselves? Did it matter?

Libya, I was discovering a little late, was an inscrutable place.

In addition to me and Ian Urbina, our team included Dutch documentary filmmaker Mea Dols de Jong and Pierre Kattar, a video journalist who’d spent years at The Washington Post. Against the odds, we soon got some reporting breaks. A variety of aid organizations had done years of work documenting abuses and offering comfort to the tens of thousands of migrants swept up and detained inside Libya. One of those organizations was able to provide us with the names of the young migrant shot dead at Al Mabani and of a witness to the killing. The dead man was Aliou Candé, a farmer and father of three from Guinea-Bissau, captured by the Libyan Coast Guard as he tried to make his way to a new life in Italy. The witness was a man from Ivory Coast named Mohammad David; he had managed to escape Al Mabani in the tumult that followed Candé’s murder. We had a cell phone number for him.

On our first night in Tripoli, three of us made it to Gargaresh, an area that had become a migrant ghetto. Militias liked to make brutalizing sweeps of Gargaresh’s mix of hideouts and encampments. Along the neighborhood’s main drag, a blur of neon lights, furtive figures, internet cafés, and cheap food joints, we met Mohammad David. He spoke French, and Pierre, whose father once served as a translator for the U.S. embassy in Paris, could make out enough of what he said to extract a rough narrative of Candé’s killing.

There had been a fight inside one of Al Mabani’s crowded, fetid cells. Guards fired their automatic rifles indiscriminately. Candé was struck in the neck, and his blood streaked a wall as he dragged against it before falling down dead. Other detainees didn’t allow his body to be removed from the cell until they were granted their freedom, which was how Mohammad David made it to Gargaresh.

The incident was a stark reminder that Al Mabani, like many other jails in Libya, was run by one of the violent militias that had divided Tripoli into wary, sometimes warring fiefs. These forces extort the families of jailed migrants for ransom payments, steal aid money meant to help feed and clothe their captives, and sell men and women into forced servitude. Candé’s killing, for a rare, brief moment, gave some of his fellow prisoners leverage over their captors.

In the days that followed our conversation with David, other unlikely reporting triumphs piled up. We found a man who served as a kind of informal liaison for migrants from Guinea-Bissau eking out a living in Tripoli. He brought us to Candé’s great-uncle, who showed us police documents pertaining to Candé’s death; a “fight” was listed as the cause of his demise. The liaison said that Candé had been buried in a vast walled-off expanse of dirt that served as the graveyard of Tripoli’s unwanted. We hired a local photographer to launch a drone camera over the acres of burial mounds, most of them unmarked. He managed to locate one into which someone had scratched the name “Candé.”

In subsequent days, our team snuck two other men who’d spent time at Al Mabani into our hotel. One of them, a teenager, told us that he’d taken a bullet in his leg the night Candé was killed. We pushed the limits of prudence in pursuit of these reporting coups. Pierre had brought a drone camera with him, which he flew above Al Mabani. The scene he captured looked a lot like a concentration camp: men huddled under threat of violence after being fed in a courtyard, then marched back to their cells single file, beaten in the head for so much as looking up at the sky.

It soon became clear that our security guys were reporting back to their bosses, whoever they were, at least some of what we were up to. At one point, we got a visit from an American expatriate who said she worked for the security outfit. She warned us that what we were doing was dangerous and demanded we apprise her of any further proposed reporting efforts outside the confines of the hotel.

One morning we notified Red Crescent officials that we wanted to visit the morgue where Candé’s body had been taken. Mea and I got in a van and made our way through Tripoli’s streets. The morgue was part of a complex of squat buildings shielded by an imposing set of walls and fences. Inside was a man at a desk. We asked to see Candé’s records, and he rifled through several filing cabinets.

A freshly wrapped body lay on a gurney in the middle of the main room. In a side room, a worker ran water from a hose over another body. Behind a set of curtains was a wall of refrigerated chambers that could hold perhaps two dozen corpses. It was impossibly hot and completely quiet.

Mea recorded what we were seeing from a small camera set discreetly against her stomach, until someone noticed and reported it to the man at the desk. It was time for us to go.

LUCY

Many of the people we interviewed for the documentary emphasized that we didn’t have to go as far back as 1979 to hear about the experience of being a hostage in Iran. The country still holds U.S. citizens in captivity, using them as pawns in its efforts to have various political and monetary demands met. This fact led me, shortly after Joe’s departure for Libya, to a law office in D.C. near Dupont Circle. I hoped to gain insight into the current situation by talking to Babak Namazi and his family’s attorney, Jared Genser.

The Namazis’ experience is tragic: They have suffered not one but two loved ones being taken hostage in Iran. Babak, the eldest of two sons, was born in Iran not long before the revolution that forced his family and many others into exile. The Namazis became American citizens and built a successful life; they’re especially proud of the decades that Baquer, Babak’s father, spent working at Unicef, fighting for vulnerable children around the world. During a visit to Iran in 2015, Babak’s younger brother, Siamak, was seized by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC, an agency born out of the revolution and tasked with maintaining Iran’s internal security, is known to use surveillance, unlawful detention, and torture against foreigners and Iranian citizens alike. Since 1979, it has used hostage taking to gain political leverage in negotiations with Western countries. Increasingly in the past decade, the IRGC targeted Iranian dual citizens and permanent residents from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and other nations.

In 2016, Baquer traveled to Tehran based on a promise that he would be permitted to visit his son in prison. Instead he was taken hostage by the IRGC as soon as he got off the plane. Both he and his son were held on spurious charges of collaborating with a hostile government. Trials to convict IRGC hostages are little more than cynical nods at justice: Often there are no witnesses, no time allowed to build a defense, no opportunity to dispute the charges before a judge.

Babak and I had spoken at length about his family’s ordeal, and now I would be spending some time with him as he made the rounds in the U.S. Capitol. Families of hostages are left to push congressional leaders to act and to ponder cruel questions: What can lawmakers do to help them? What sort of financial, political, or nuclear deal or prisoner swap will be enough to secure their loved ones’ release?

For me, relief from this emotionally weighty work came from the stream of texts I received from Joe in Libya. We always kept each other up to date on our respective projects, from the minutiae of storylines and quotes we loved to the journalistic joys of acquiring crucial evidence or getting a key source to open up. Joe sent me photos from Tripoli that captured the travails of finding good iced coffee, which his New York blood desperately needed. We texted about the excitement and strain of overseas reporting—the translators, the logistics, the agencies that are “dysfunctional even when they’re on your side,” as Joe put it.

But it wasn’t all levity: There was a video of a dead man in a morgue, and photos Joe and his colleagues obtained of poetry scratched into the walls of cells. There were images of paper scraps with poker scores kept by migrant men trying to kill time, and footage from a drone the team had flown over a notorious prison. Joe mentioned dodging undercover intelligence, perhaps even local militias.

I knew this was dangerous material to be exchanging between our personal phones, but I wasn’t particularly keen to tell him to stop, to cut myself off from him and his journey. We’d worked hard to get where we were—a journalistic duo, a bonded pair.

Our father-daughter relationship was not uncomplicated, as evidenced by the fact that, even as kids, my sister and I called our dad Joe. Therapists refer to it as “adulting” when children are forced to mature rapidly and parent themselves or others. Our household was one of silent, industrious survival. Joe was a stoic workaholic. I shared in his anxiety about empty bank accounts, which resulted in my habit of hoarding money along with the Halloween candy in a dresser drawer.

Once, while Christmas shopping, we ran into a reporter Joe knew. In a well-meant aside, the man told me that I should appreciate the career sacrifices Joe made to stay close to his girls. I felt a deep mix of guilt and anger. Yes, he’d made sacrifices, but if we’re being honest, Joe wasn’t home all that much. On school nights, hours after falling asleep, I’d wake to join him as he caught up on the day’s sports scores and ate a midnight dinner. It was the only time I could reliably be close to him.

His work shaped our relationship in other ways large and small. Help with homework wasn’t common, but when I was in the third grade he edited one of my writing assignments and added the word “divine” to a sentence. In a way only the child of a writer ever could, I argued: This wasn’t “my voice.” Did he even know what a third-grader’s writing looked like? I made it a point that Joe Sexton of The New York Times would not be permitted to edit anything else of mine until it came time for me to apply to college.

As it happened, it wasn’t until that rite of passage occurred nearly a decade later that Joe and I started to build a deeper relationship. Once I was in college, I sent a rather frank email to my mother, with Joe cc’d, making it plain how little anyone had ever told me about what happened with our family. Joe’s reply included a lengthy PDF attachment titled “The History of Us.” I later got those words inked on my shoulder.

In time Joe became dad, then friend, and later, when I got into journalism, collaborator. The gift of our admiring, candid relationship felt precious. It also made me susceptible to tears when it came to stories about fathers. Rewatching The Lion King? I was a mess. Working on the Iran project, I found myself especially sensitive when hearing about hostages with children, be it John Limbert in 1979 or Baquer Namazi in 2016. Babak hadn’t seen his dad in five years; I had just sat next to Joe on the porch a week prior. The idea that my dad might never come home was impossible to fathom.

JOE

The takedown was efficiently executed: Several cars moving in tandem. Men with automatic weapons. Commands hollered in Arabic for us to keep our heads down. It was close to 8 p.m. on May 23, a Sunday evening, about a day and a half from our scheduled departure from Tripoli.

Hours earlier, after visiting the morgue, our reporting trip had taken another surprising turn: We were informed that the Libyan Coast Guard might allow us aboard one of its patrol boats. That would mean actually getting out on the Mediterranean, perhaps even witnessing a roundup of migrants trying to reach Europe. In recent years, the Coast Guard had been accused of firing on or capsizing migrant rafts. People pulled aboard Libyan vessels reported being beaten and terrorized.

We were excited that our efforts might end on a fruitful note and proposed to our security team that we go to a restaurant for a celebratory dinner. There was a good Turkish place across town. Ian stayed behind at the Royal Gardens; his teenage son needed help with his homework over Zoom.

On almost every trip through the city, our security team had been wary of men in white cars. The significance of the color was hard to decipher—maybe it indicated undercover police—but their worry was intense and constant. When looking for a spot to launch the drone over Al Mabani, for instance, they’d abandoned several options after white cars were seen nearby.

Now, about halfway to the restaurant, there were suddenly white cars all around us. Our driver wheeled into the thick of Sunday evening traffic to turn around, then floored it, intending to dash back to the hotel. We didn’t get far. In a roundabout below an overpass, there was a crash to the right side of the van. We came to a stop.

“They’ve got guns,” Mea said.

The front doors of the van were thrown open. Our driver was pistol-whipped and yanked from the vehicle. The security guy in the passenger seat was heaved out, too; taking his place was a young man of perhaps 21, his face electric with excitement and an AK-47 in his hands. Our van had been tricked out with goofy interior lights and an array of cup holders—it always struck us as a cut-rate prom-night vehicle. Now it was a scene of shouts and silent prayers. I put my head down as directed and pulled my windbreaker over it.

The van sped off. This had taken perhaps 30 seconds.

Rocketing through Tripoli I was strikingly calm, but I wasn’t feeling courage so much as an altered sense of reality. It seemed as though we were in a movie, not a potentially deadly abduction. If I was deluded, at least that felt better than panic.

We listened for any sense of where we were headed. There was a sharp turn and a sudden stop, then the scraping and clanging of what sounded like a gate rolling open.

Ordered from the van, we were marched along, heads pushed down. I thought of the detainees in the courtyard of Al Mabani unable to look up at the sky. Inside wherever we’d been taken, we were blindfolded. I’d worn glasses since the third grade at Saint Saviour grammar school in Brooklyn, and probably hadn’t been awake without them on for more than five minutes in the five decades since. Now my glasses were gone, and what sight I had was blocked by cloth.

Standing, then forced to sit, it was hard to cope with the expectation of being hit. Instinctively I braced myself, my head turned sideways to soften a blow. Our captors shouted at us in Arabic, turning a gorgeous language hideous. There were bits of broken, angry English, too.

“Libyans are not stupid,” one of the men hollered.

“Who is Mohammad David?”

It became clear that these men had been to our hotel. My guess was they’d found David’s name and number in our phones. The thought occurred: Maybe our captors were members of the militia that ran Al Mabani.

I heard Ian’s voice. He’d been taken, too, hooded and stomped on by men who stormed his hotel room. He’d been on a call with his wife, who heard the men and her husband’s cries as two of his ribs were broken and he was dragged from the room barefoot. Whoever they were, they had all of us, along with all our stuff: notebooks, cameras, drone, recorded interviews, computers and hard drives, passports, money, tracking devices.

“Who killed George Floyd?” somebody screamed derisively. I had to assume that they’d found our concern about Candé’s death inside Al Mabani ironic, given Floyd’s murder by police in America a year earlier.

Our captors soon zeroed in on Pierre. Born in Lebanon, Pierre was invaluable to our reporting, with his gift for languages: English, French, Italian, some Arabic. Now the men who’d taken us hit him in the head, and the words they yelled implied that they regarded him as a traitor.

Libya’s record on the treatment of people in its jails and prisons is miserable. I’d researched it before the trip and copied a passage from a UN report into my notebook:

Torture continues today in Libya. It is most frequent immediately upon arrest and during the first days of interrogation as a means to extract confessions or other information. Detainees are usually held without access to lawyers and occasional access to families, if any…. From late 2011, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya has recorded 27 cases of deaths in custody where there is significant information to suggest that torture was the cause, and is aware of allegations about additional cases which it has not been able to fully investigate.

Were we being held by the government? A militia? Even knowing that there might not be much of a distinction, the latter still felt more frightening. If militias were involved, I feared that people back home learning of our abduction might be a more remote possibility, and that our status as Americans might matter less to our captors.

While I was blindfolded, my sense of the passage of time faded. Every once in a while I’d be moved; from where or to where, it was impossible to say. There were shifts in temperature—one spot felt air-conditioned, the next torrid. There was no talking. Our captors seemed to get a kick out of stepping on my feet every once in a while, grinding my toes. But was this just for their amusement? Perhaps it was a detention technique, or a way to kill time before shooting us.

On my checkered journey toward a college degree, I once went off to work in Wyoming, fixing track and building snow fences for the Union Pacific Railroad. The wages allowed me to save up enough for a year of school abroad, in Dublin, where one subject I was good at was the study of beer. An Irish poet and writer named Seamus Deane taught one of my classes, and he just so happened to be childhood friends with a rather more prominent poet, Seamus Heaney. Heaney came to read for our class one evening, and we had more than a few pints afterward. Thus began my most sustained love affair with a writer’s work, and among Heaney’s poetry I most cherish is a series of gorgeous sonnets he wrote upon the death of his mother. In one verse, he likens his mother’s absence to the loss of a beloved chestnut tree on his family’s farm in Northern Ireland—he calls what’s left behind “a bright nowhere.”

Contemplating being shot, this phrase came back to me. When I opened my eyes underneath the blindfold, the material appeared gauzy, whitish yellow in color. A bright nowhere. Maybe I’d already been shot.

After hours of silence there was a commotion, and once again we were on the move. Yanked to our feet, we heard guns being fiddled with and slung about. We were pushed outside. It was a hard, enraging thing to walk blindfolded. I held a hand out to steady myself against a possible fall and was shoved in the back of the head. It was hardly grave in comparison with what might happen, but it made me furious. Crazy as it sounds, I thought, Go ahead, shoot me, beat me, whatever, but do not fucking push me when I cannot see.

I could smell the Mediterranean, salty and thick. In our reporting, we’d heard multiple accounts of migrants being shot and dumped in the sea. Maybe it was time to take hurried stock of my life.

It had been rich in blessings. I found a second chance at love, a wife full of beauty and forgiveness. I got my two older girls to adulthood safe and healthy, and then, at 51, had two more girls—twins. I shared in a bounty of consequential reporting. Throughout that charmed life, I made a million mistakes at home and on the job, but they all proved survivable, for the people and institutions I sinned against and for myself.

In the Libyan darkness, I contemplated what I’d most like to say to the people I loved and served. “I tried my best” is what I landed on. I was instantly embarrassed at the self-serving ring to it. But it’s what I had.

Once more came the sounds of gates or doors scraping open, of car and motorcycle engines being revved. Then I felt the cold blade of a knife against my groin. I could hear my track pants tearing.

No God, please.

It turned out that the captors were just cutting the elastic string from my waistband. Hanging myself—not an idea I would have had—was evidently not going to be an option.

I was pushed to the ground and wound up on my ass. There was a mash of bellowing and then, once again, silence. I could tell through the blindfold that wherever we were, the lights had just been turned out. To my right I sensed another person. I could hear breathing. I guessed it was Pierre.

“You there?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Pierre said.

My rational brain told me that the only thing to do was get back to work. It’s what Joe would have done.

LUCY

It was around noon on May 24. I was at the head of a conference table, prepping for the following days’ work on the documentary. I don’t know why I chose that moment to check my personal email. When I’m in the field it can be hard to remember to eat. Perhaps it was a sixth sense that made me look.

Sitting at the top of my inbox was an email from my stepmother to everyone in our family, sent just a few minutes before. Joe and his three colleagues in Libya had been taken the night before and hadn’t been heard from since. It was suspected that Libyan intelligence was responsible. The Outlaw Ocean team was raising alarm bells with whomever they could. My stepmother had asked The New York Times’ director of global security for advice; she is a photo editor at the paper, and both Joe and Ian Urbina are beloved alumni.

I was taken aback. Was this real? I spent some time just trying to grasp the basic facts. What happened, when, and why? Few things were answerable.

My first struggle was practical and professional: how to explain this. I needed to let someone know what I was going through, worrying about my dad’s kidnapping overseas while running around Washington, producing a documentary about hostage taking. The coincidence was darkly poetic. In my head I started rehearsing versions of “I know this might sound crazy, but…”

I sought the best way to summarize my situation to my boss, the right words to use. Was my father captured? A prisoner? A hostage? All of the above? I called the series’ producer, who took the news and its ambiguities in stride, offering help and gracious concern. I then shot off a succinct reply to the family email chain: I was on call to help, I wrote, and felt “confident they will be out in no time.”

For the time being, I told no one else what had happened. In times of emergency, my consciousness switches to a kind of third-person observer, similar to how many of us experience dreams. I can step outside myself to see the larger narrative. Maybe this tendency lets me remain calm rather than deteriorating into tears. In this case, given my work on the series and everything I was learning about hostage taking, it also allowed me to keep perspective, to remind myself of the spectrum of precedent for this sort of incident. 

Then my rational brain told me that the only thing to do was get back to work. It’s what Joe would have done.

Late that night, when I returned to my hotel room, I looked through the last messages I’d exchanged with Joe. There were photos, videos, and details about evading men who appeared to be undercover officers. Our communication now felt careless, incriminating. How naive we’d been in dismissing the risks he was taking. Knowing Joe’s unsophisticated relationship with technology and passwords, Libyan intelligence operatives were probably scrolling through everything I was seeing on my phone. Our exchanges might be used against Joe and the rest of his team.

Sometime after 2 a.m. I spoke to my stepmother. “Who else should I tell about the texts I received from Joe?” I asked. Then, thinking on it further, I realized that there might be something else I could do—someone I could talk to. I was anxious to get to work, both for Joe and for the documentary. Sunrise was just a few hours away.

JOE

I assumed it was morning when I heard a door or gate bang open. I could sense light through my blindfold. Then, with no warning or explanation, the wrap was taken off. The men who removed it were gone before I really saw them. Pierre’s blindfold was off too. We were left—me barefoot, him in socks—in our tiny cell.

Without my glasses, it was hard to take in the details of our cramped quarters, but I did my best. We had been sitting on a thin and ratty foam pad. There was a high, narrow window that sunlight streamed through at an angle. Ants were everywhere. A blue metal door held a slat that slid open from the outside. There was a toilet, and two heavy wool blankets were heaped in a corner.

I was glad Pierre was there, but for a while we didn’t speak much, each of us making our own private assessments: Did surviving the night bode well? Mean nothing? Might we be released in an hour, or never? Back at the hotel, thinking ahead to our proposed embed with the Libyan Coast Guard, I’d checked the weather forecast. The temperature in Tripoli was supposed to climb above 100 degrees. Pierre and I could already feel the heat of the day start to cook us in the airless cell.

There is a grisly track record of American journalists abducted and harmed or killed overseas. The executions of Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal in Pakistan and freelancer James Foley in Syria are perhaps the most well known. I’d had friends and colleagues abducted as well. David Rohde was held for seven months by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan before he managed to escape. My wife had friends and colleagues who were taken by a Libyan militia in 2011 while they were on assignment for the paper. They were physically assaulted before being freed days later. “We were each begging for our lives because they were deciding whether to execute us, and they had guns to our heads,” one of the photographers, Lynsey Addario, said in an interview after the ordeal. “And I remember thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’ Like, ‘How much do I really care about Libya?’ And then I thought, ‘Will I ever get my cameras back?’ I mean, which is the most ridiculous thought, of course, when you’re about to die.”

That’s how my mind worked as the silent hours slipped by. I imagined having fingers cut off under interrogation, then minutes later wondered whether the captors would bring me my glasses and what they’d feed us for lunch. The idea that we might spend years in custody led me to daydream about the prospect of learning Arabic. Perhaps that would prove a valuable asset for a former sportswriter looking for work in his seventies. Assuming I lived or was ever returned to the U.S.

Pierre and I had met for the first time barely a week earlier, and now we shared our backstories. He lived in Rome and had a 20-year-old son. He worked as a freelance video journalist and filmmaker, traveling the world for major news organizations. I talked about my wife and four girls. Lucy shared his talent for languages and international adventure—Pierre would have gotten a kick out of her.

Shame soon became the dominant sensation, a lacerating inclination to blame myself for what was happening. Had coming to Libya been in any way sensible? Was launching drones above Tripoli or filming inside a morgue anything but provocative and reckless? The shame went beyond my own lack of care and formidable arrogance. Locked up, unable to see very well, startled by the simplest sounds, I assigned legitimacy to our captors: They were right to have taken us. We deserved it. I suspect those practiced in the art of detention know that captives often feel this way and exploit it.

It was hard to get comfortable in the cell. There wasn’t enough room for Pierre and me to stretch out. We could come close to spooning and at least get our legs extended, but this was awkward, and the hard floor ground into our hips and shoulders. Seated upright, we could prop our bent legs against the wall that held the toilet. Traffic was audible through the cell’s high window, but we could only guess where we were or what time it was.

At one point the slat in the door slid open. Two small bottles of water were passed through, then two small bags comically marked “SandOwich.” I had no appetite. I’d taken antidepressants for a decade, mostly to treat anxiety. What little I knew about the medication was that you did not want to come off it cold after long-term use. The side effects could be pronounced: nausea, vivid dreams, dizziness, headaches. I wouldn’t be getting my meds, that was for sure. And the food hadn’t come with coffee, another longtime drug of mine. Oh boy.

Pierre and I were eventually summoned out of the cell, one at a time, for a brief encounter with a man behind a desk. At last we could get some sense of the facility we were in. There appeared to be three cells on either side of a narrow corridor; the place had the feel of a particularly grim drunk tank. Was it a government building of some kind? A holding cell adjacent to a courthouse would be a stroke of luck, rendering the possibility that we’d be shot less likely.

Seated before my inquisitor, I fancied that I might at least get my glasses. I think he only showed me my passport, then sent me back to the cell. Night crept in; the lights went out. Human voices rose up now and again, but it was hard to say if these were people inside the facility or beyond its walls, and whether they were groaning or praying.

Morning brought more water and nothing else. In the weeks before our trip, I’d hired an agent and cooked up a book proposal. An email arrived when we were at the hotel in Tripoli; a publisher wanted to set up a Zoom call to talk about the idea. The meeting was scheduled for 10 a.m. the morning after we were taken. I got a perverse laugh out of thinking what that call must have been like: an agent and a prominent publisher left waiting for a prospective first-time author who never showed, and never bothered to reach out and explain why.

Pierre proved to be a charming and fastidious cellmate. He revealed that at one point he’d been a busker on the streets of Paris, playing guitar, singing, and evidently doing well with the ladies. Dylan songs were in his repertoire; “To Ramona” was a favorite. Amid our acute boredom and generalized despair, he sang it for me:

I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
With worthless foam from the mouth
I can tell you are torn
Between stayin’ and returnin’
Back to the South
You’ve been fooled into thinking
That the finishin’ end is at hand
Yet there’s no one to beat you
No one t’ defeat you
’Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad

It made me smile.

For the family of a missing or detained person, the worst fears come from a lack of information. Knowing nothing definitive, you can only imagine the conditions your loved one is in.

LUCY

May 25. Joe was still missing. We had gotten no news. The name we had for the U.S. deputy chief of mission for Tripoli was out-of-date. Joe’s friends and colleagues were trying to get the attention of government officials, but we still had no clear point of contact at the State Department.

Compartmentalizing gets a bad rap; it can be a useful tool, especially when your job, and possibly your sanity, is on the line. I spent the day listening to Babak Namazi tell the harrowing story of his brother’s seizure by Iranian intelligence, the family’s lack of knowledge about Siamak’s condition, the Iranian government’s offer of a visit with Siamak that had lured his 80-year-old father, in poor health, back to Tehran. Bearing witness to the emotional strain that accumulates over years of constant anxiety about absent loved ones was tough. I tried to focus on the details of the Namazis’ story and on taking notes, but at times my ability to box things up wavered.

When the intersection of my work and personal life felt particularly cruel, I reminded myself how relatively lucky I was. While my father and I were only on day two of our shared ordeal—or was it day three for Joe, given the time difference?—the Namazis had surpassed day 2,000 of theirs. My father was a foreigner pursuing a sensitive story that, while honorable as a journalistic matter, required traveling to a country he probably wasn’t equipped to be in. Siamak and his father were being held in the country of their birth, speaking their native tongue with their captors. Iran was a place they had every right to be.

As the hours with Babak passed, I discovered that, for the family of a missing or detained person, the worst fears come from a lack of information. Knowing nothing definitive, you can only imagine the conditions your loved one is in, and you worry about their emotional state and the motives of their captors. Not being able to do anything, and having to rely on governments to make the difficult calculus of how to maximize the odds of bringing a person home unharmed, was as maddening as it was terrifying.

Negotiating with hostage takers is fraught with both moral and mortal hazard. Capitulating to extortion encourages abduction, but frequently the only way to free a hostage is by meeting captors’ demands. Trying to muscle or shoot one’s way through an impasse can be extremely unwise. The tragedy of Desert One, during President Carter’s failed mission to free the hostages in Tehran by force, is vivid evidence of that.

The serendipity of spending time with Babak was that I’d learned of one person in Washington who was intimately aware of the unique difficulties of securing the release of hostages. Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, had handled some of the most intractable cases around the world, including the Namazis’. As it happened, Babak and his lawyer were scheduled to meet with Carstens the following day, and I was eager to come along—for the documentary and for Joe.

I got a call from Carstens’s director of communications, Joan Sinclair, to discuss the visit. With journalistic business squared away, I took advantage of the unhappy coincidence.

“So Joan, now I have a personal situation I need to talk about,” I said. “I hope you can help.”

JOE

On our second night in captivity, I was taken from the cell down a corridor, outdoors briefly, and then back inside to an office. Two men appeared to be in charge; both would tell me that they had once worked for Qaddafi’s secret intelligence service. One of them enjoyed making fun of my circumstances in the form of long, evidently hilarious riffs in Arabic. The other was a tall, doughy guy in sandals who carried a briefcase everywhere. He spoke English and mentioned that he’d received some training in the U.S., perhaps with the Department of Homeland Security. My goatee and full head of graying hair reminded them of Colonel Sanders. This cracked them up, and they took to calling me “Kentucky.” I laughed with them, both humiliated and grateful for the distraction.

Eventually, I was taken to a courtyard, and a phone was held under my chin. A State Department official was at the other end of the line. My captors told me to say that I had committed crimes but was being treated well. I think I managed to say that we’d been given water. I copped to no crimes. Back in the cell, Pierre told me that he’d been through the same routine.

I recalled that President Biden had recently named a special envoy to Libya. The envoy had his work cut out—he faced competing authorities, shifting alliances, and an overall sense of impunity for those interested in committing violence against migrants, neighbors, rivals, journalists. Still, I told myself that executing Americans was an unlikely outcome, given the international repercussions it might invite. Then again, by this point the only thing I felt confident about was that I didn’t really know anything at all.

The prospect of long-term imprisonment began to sink in. Given the dysfunction in Libya, we could become trophy captives, stuck here for months or even years. Pierre and I discussed what that sort of future might hold. Then we heard a faint tapping on the other side of the wall. We tapped back. We took the crude exchange to be evidence that Ian, Mea, or both were being held close by. Our spirits lifted slightly.

After James Foley’s brutal killing by the Islamic State in 2014, his mother created an advocacy group to track Americans held abroad illegally and to press the case for their release. There were an average of 34 U.S. hostages overseas every year between 2012 and 2022. Terrorist groups aren’t the only bad actors—foreign governments are, too, and in recent years the number of governments holding Americans hostage has grown from a handful to nearly twenty. The taken include businesspeople, aid workers, journalists. U.S. officials work hard to bring Americans home, but success is spotty at best.

I hated that my wife and kids were suffering with this knowledge, and with so much unsaid and undone between us. This was the slice of shame that cut deepest. I’d mythologized myself as a parent. Maybe all parents do this. It had sustained me to think that I raised my older girls well despite tough circumstances, and I entertained the notion that I was a more present dad to the twins. But cracks in this account appeared over the years. For me love was a demonstrative act: I did things for my wife and kids. I went to every soccer game, dance recital, school play. I sent the girls to summer camp, and we traveled to Ireland and Argentina, France and Mexico. Our home was always open to their friends. Holidays were rich with ritual. And I worked—too often, for too long, with obsession and insecurity. I gave too much of myself to the Times especially, but the paper was more than an employer. It provided me with purpose, and it allowed my girls to feel pride and community and safety.

But love as actual communication—an intimate connection of shared wonders and wisdom and worries—I wasn’t so good at. It was a painful pity. My elder girls, Jane and Lucy, weren’t hardships to bear, and they were more than good soldiers in our durable little platoon. They were among my life’s greatest gifts, a source of joy and comfort, women of grit and accomplishment. Parenting them was a labor, but of the best sort, powered by love and full of satisfactions. I wish I had told them that more often.

Again I put myself through the mental exercise of imagining a long detention. Would we be in a prison full of the destitute and ill, left to rot? Or perhaps a sun-bleached quarantine in the desert or on a Mediterranean shore, where the day-to-day depredations wouldn’t be awful, profound isolation and boredom the main punishments? Maybe in a place like that they’d let us read books.

I did the math—what would it mean to be gone a year, three years, ten? I’d had the thrill of officiating at the wedding of my eldest daughter, Jane, but Lucy was still single. The twins were barely in middle school. Maybe I’d make it back for another marriage and two college graduations. I could endure the wait. Or so I told myself.

LUCY

Every 17 years, dormant cicadas come to life, emerging from underground in a vast brood. As if the convergence of my work life and personal life hadn’t felt symbolic enough already, Washington was covered in a plague of the bugs as I awaited news about Joe. Standing in the grassy park in front of the State Department, I felt cicadas crawl up my legs.

A few minutes before, I was present when Babak met with Roger Carstens. The men had been in correspondence for years, and rather than stiffly shaking hands, they embraced. Then the men left me outside while they went to discuss sensitive matters.

When Carstens’s communications director called my cell phone a short while later, I expected it to be about interviewing her boss for the series. Instead she told me that Carstens would be coming back outside. He wanted to talk to me.

Carstens and I walked together across the grass by the Albert Einstein Memorial. Despite an earlier career as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Special Forces, he’s the kind of guy you immediately feel comfortable calling by his first name. Roger’s affable smile, youthful energy, and casual demeanor can put anyone at ease. These qualities make him well suited to his difficult role.

The job of the president’s special envoy for hostage affairs was created in 2015, around the time the Obama administration was making headway in talks with Iran. Those talks led to a nuclear deal and the release of six Americans. Under the Trump administration the nuclear deal was undone, but the position of hostage envoy remained. Its effectiveness was limited by turnover until 2020, when Roger took the job. Finally, hostages and their families had an advocate with staying power. Roger built meaningful relationships with the people he tried to help; his direct line was available whenever they needed it.

He kindly gave me what assurances he could. A team at the State Department, including people in Tunisia, were on the case, and they were going to do everything possible to bring Joe and his colleagues home. Getting the attention of the country’s most senior hostage negotiator made me feel like I had at least done something to help my father. Now if any news about Joe came across his desk, he would at least have a face—mine—to connect it to.

Soon after speaking with Roger, I got another call. An Associated Press reporter had learned what was going on in Libya and wanted to know if I’d be willing to talk. This was somehow the most disorienting aspect of the week so far. I had always been the one reaching out to people for their stories. Now I’d experience, even if just a little bit, the invasive nature of media attention. The idea that Joe’s abduction might be newsworthy hadn’t even occurred to me. I imagined the headline: “Four Journalists Seized in Libya; Still Missing, Day…” Wait, how long had it been? I did the math. It was now May 26—three days.

For the first time, I felt myself freaking out. But then my rational brain kicked in again. Make a call, send an email, make sure lunch was ordered, do something. Leaving the buzzing white noise of the cicadas outside, I hopped in a van with some colleagues and headed to the Capitol for more meetings.

En route, my phone rang again; Leslie Ordeman, the deputy chief of mission in Tunisia, was calling. He was involved with the case of Joe and his colleagues, and he was able to offer some concrete facts. The U.S. government had determined that they were in the hands of some arm of Libyan intelligence. No one had seen them in person, but they’d spoken briefly on the phone after days of being incommunicado. They seemed at least physically OK.

My stepmother had mentioned at one point that Joe would be without access to his medication. I thought about the hostages from 1979, the fear that formed in the silence of their personal silos, the embassy staffer who lived without his glasses for 444 days. My voice wobbled as I fought back tears.

Ordeman was concerned, knowledgeable, and anxious to move quickly. He said that the president and the attorney general of Libya were working with U.S. authorities. I pushed for information about the political climate in Libya, who the actors were, and what they might want by seizing journalists. I felt compelled to explain why I was unusually well informed about state-sanctioned hostage taking.

The call meant that my personal emergency was no longer a secret to my colleagues. At least now I had some concrete information to share. I asked the team to keep my situation quiet. I didn’t want to be a distraction, much less a retraumatizing presence, for the people we’d be interviewing for the documentary.

All four of us, together for the first time since the abduction, were brought into an office, where a table was set with coffee, ice cream, and pastries. We were told to sit around it and look happy.

JOE

The third day of our captivity was a rapid-fire mindfuck of hope and dread. It began with word that we’d be filmed in order to show American officials that we were alive. It was also suggested that this might be a prelude to our release.

The scene was preposterous. All four of us, together for the first time since the abduction, were brought into an office, where a table was set with coffee, ice cream, and pastries. We were told to sit around it and look happy. We spoke in whispers about trying somehow to signal in the proof-of-life video that all was not well. We decided to make a point of thanking the U.S. officials for their efforts and asked them not to stop, but we couldn’t know if this would be edited out before Washington saw it.

We did our best to comfort one another. Ian, who’d been identified as our team leader, worried that he might be kept even if the rest of us were let go. He pleaded with us not to forget him.

Back in our cell, Pierre and I now knew that Ian was housed next to us. He’d been the one tapping on the wall. Mea was in her own cell down the corridor. If we strained to listen, we could just barely hear one another speak. We talked about what to do and whom to contact if one of us was released before the others. If we were compelled to sign confessions, we decided, we’d add a coded message to the documents to later serve as evidence that they had been coerced.

But no one would go free anytime soon. Instead came hours of withering interrogation. Ian went first. He was accused of being a spy; our visa documents, the Libyans said, falsely portrayed us as doctors working with the Red Crescent; the Outlaw Ocean Project was accused of being a CIA front. The penalty for espionage, Ian was told, was death.

Pierre and I were taken to another room. Behind a desk was the same young gunman who’d helped commandeer our van by jumping into the passenger seat. Pierre and I were seated in chairs facing him. For two hours, not a word was spoken. The gunman doodled with pencil and paper. Then, with a sense of ceremony, he prepared to pray. He knelt on a rug; he spoke solemnly and at length. Was it merely a time of day when prayer was required? Or was this some sort of ritual they were doing before harming us?

Then the gunman took Pierre away, leaving me alone with a burly, silent older man. He put his pistol on the desk in front of me, the barrel pointed at my chest. He stared at me; I stared at my feet.

When it was my turn to be interrogated, I was moved to another room. The process began with more screams of George Floyd’s name. Two men were seated at computers. A man to my right took notes. On my left was a man I’d already met, the one who spoke English and boasted of being trained in America. Another man in a suit and tie served as interpreter.

Our captors evidently had researched us, taking advantage of our online presence and the reporting material they found in our possession. They’d also listened in on our conversations between cells. The guy who spoke English paced the room menacingly, asking questions and making accusations, alternately sarcastic and aggressive. What was the Outlaw Ocean Project? Whose money was behind it? Why did we think we could interview migrants and their informal ambassadors in Tripoli? We’d lied about our profession on our visa documents. We’d been caught videotaping inside the morgue. We’d broken laws. Why did we have copies of our passports in our shoes? What was the purpose of our tracking devices?

I am not a practiced liar. I’ve had a pretty close affinity with honesty throughout my life. Fibs, minor deceptions, self-promotional embellishments—I’m guilty of those, for sure. But a strategic deception? Not me. What was the right play here? Answer honestly and risk incriminating us all? Shade the truth and minimize my role? Mislead and risk reinforcing the idea that we were agents of some nefarious conspiracy? I had no time to weigh these options, yet I felt that whatever I said could determine my future.

I decided to answer honestly. I told the men that we were there to report on mistreatment of migrants. I placed the blame for that mistreatment on the EU. Libya, I suggested with emphasis but not sincerity, was a victim of Europe’s immigration policies. I had no idea why our travel documents showed that we were doctors.

At one point, the interpreter told me that the interrogation wasn’t going well. The men didn’t believe me or my colleagues. Our claims had been disproved. This prompted my first moment of sustained panic. For three days, I’d been surprised by my composure. I’d gutted out our gunpoint kidnapping, being blind for days, and coming off the meds that helped hold me together. I’d contemplated a bright nowhere and perhaps made some kind of peace with it. Now everything was crumbling. I thought of a line from an old Billy Bragg song: “A virtue never tested is no virtue at all.”

For the first and only time, I pleaded for my freedom. I have a wife and four daughters, I told the interpreter. Make them understand that. I’m not a spy. I need to go home. But the notetaker didn’t appear to be writing any of it down.

Then, almost as quickly as it had darkened, the mood in the room lightened. The men barraging me with questions were suddenly more interested in debating than in intimidating me. We talked about Middle East politics and life in New York. I’ve always been a wiseass, and it has sometimes served me well in tough situations, so I went for it. I joked, poked fun at myself, shit-talked America. Whether or not the men understood everything I was saying, they seemed amused. I was not above playing the clown to get out of this.

At one point, the English-speaking man put his hand on my forearm. He told me that everything would be all right. He didn’t say how or why. I realized that this could be a sadistic trick. Yet I trusted him.

They moved me to another room, where I sat with the young gunman who’d prayed a few hours before. He held a smartphone and was wearing earbuds. He gestured if I wanted to listen, and then gave me the earbuds. I heard a recording of someone reciting the Koran. For the first time in days, Arabic sounded beautiful again.

I smiled, gave the gunman a thumbs up, and returned the earbuds. He got up and returned with a tiny cup of Turkish coffee. I drank it slowly. I could have kissed him.

LUCY

After the call from Tunis, things moved rapidly, if unevenly. Within a few hours, I received word that Joe and his colleagues would be moved to a hotel, where they would receive a visit from local representatives on behalf of the U.S. The next update I got seemed to walk that news back—things had been either delayed or aborted. An hour later, the plan was back on track.

Despite the seesaw, the momentum felt positive, and by the end of the night the verdict felt clear to me: Your dad is alive and will be coming home. There would be red tape to negotiate, but now it seemed a matter of days until Joe and his colleagues were safe.

Slowly, the fear that their abduction could turn into months of negotiations—or worse—drained out of me. I shifted from wondering whether I’d get my dad back to worrying about the state he’d arrive in. From numerous interviews with hostages and their families, who were held emotionally hostage at home, I knew that trauma can last decades and manifest in unexpected ways. I wondered about the invisible wounds Joe would have to grapple with once he was back. Despite my relative calm at the moment, I wondered too what I might feel later.    

We tend to romanticize father-daughter relationships, feminine sweetness supposedly capable of softening the steeliest men into expressing protective, effusive love. I’ve never been particularly sweet—brash and sassy are better descriptors. Meanwhile, Joe never worried over bloodied knees. When my sister or I broke an arm as kids, he wound our casts in bubble wrap so we could keep playing soccer. “It builds character,” was his favorite refrain. Later, as adults, Joe and I learned to talk about our feelings—to express hurt, excitement, concern. Maybe this would change once he was back. Maybe all I could do for him was sit by while he watched sports or ate his meals in silence.

My childhood, at least, had prepared me for that.

JOE

It was late at night when we were brought out of our cells, gathered together in a room, and, one by one, presented with what amounted to a confession. The documents were in Arabic; we didn’t know what they said. Still, with release tantalizingly close, including a coded message in the documents didn’t feel so urgent. We signed hastily and without complaint.

We were hustled into two cars. I could smell the sea again, this time with less dread. I heard the scraping and clanging as a gate opened—the sounds that had welcomed us to our detention were now sending us off. The cars wound through deserted streets, then turned into a parking lot and stopped next to a loading dock. We were told not to say a word or otherwise call attention to ourselves as we were marched through the back door of a hotel. We were each given a room and barred from communicating.

A shower sounded exquisite, but I didn’t have the energy. I wanted to do as little as possible. I wanted to stay quiet, not push my luck, be prepared if we were moved again. I sat on a padded bench in the hotel room and listened to a blaring public broadcast outside my window—the morning call to prayer.

There were armed guards outside our rooms. The occasional knock was almost as jarring as anything I endured in captivity, each one jolting me into the prospect that we were being played, that the confessions we signed meant that we were headed for a long stint in prison.

One knock, though, brought a little comfort: the chance to tell my wife that I was alive. A phone was held in front of me. It wasn’t meant to be a conversation. I was to answer no questions and make no promises. I delivered my lines, and it was lovely to hear her cautious assent.

There was a television in the room. I had gotten my glasses back, and I briefly turned to a soccer match but wound up entranced instead by a video feed from Mecca, with hajjis walking counterclockwise around the Kaaba. I watched for hours and thought unceasingly of what days before had felt beyond hope—that I’d see my family again. Jane, my beautiful, stoic eldest. My youngest, the twins, masters of memorizing the globe’s nations. Libya, to them, was an answer on a geography pop quiz: What is the North African nation bordered by Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Niger, Chad, and Sudan?

And then there was Lucy. She was ten times smarter than me. If I’d bequeathed anything to her, it was stubbornness, tenacity, an ample supply of self-certainty. We relied on each other. And we argued like hell. I worried that she was frightened for me. I also worried that she’d scold me for my folly upon my return.

Finally, after two more days, in the draining heat of a Friday evening, Ian, Pierre, and I were taken to the airport. (Mea, a Dutch citizen, had been flown out earlier; she would meet representatives from her country in Istanbul.) We were told that we were being deported and would never be allowed in Libya again. That was fine with us. We didn’t ask why we were being let go, because we didn’t care. Laughably, we had to take a COVID test before we could get on our flight. Having our captors run a swab up each of our noses was one of the stranger indignities among the many we withstood.

The young gunman who appeared to warm to me had an AK-47 in his hands as we made our way to the terminal. The airport, it turned out, was under the control of people not affiliated with our captors. There was a brief, tense dispute about us and our fate, but eventually we made it to the tarmac.

Our captors couldn’t have been cheerier. The crisis, if it was that, was over. The mean stunt, if it was instead that, now had its final scene: The armed men extended their hands to shake. We then boarded a plane bound for Tunis. It taxied along the fractured runway, past the carcass of the incinerated airliner, and lifted off. The three of us held hands as Tripoli vanished beneath us.

In Tunis, we met with U.S. embassy officials. I realized that one of them was the woman I’d spoken to on the phone in the courtyard of the detention facility. She probably had the cell numbers of one or more of our captors in her phone. I made a note of it, figuring we might like to track down the fuckers one day.

The embassy arranged for Pierre to fly to Rome, and for Ian and me to fly to Paris, where we spent the night on the floor of the airport. When the time came, we hugged and made our way to our separate gates—he was heading home to Washington, D.C., I to New York. When the announcement came to board my flight, I trembled a bit. I had all my documents in order, including proof of my negative COVID test, but I was stopped by the ticket agent.

There had been a change. My boarding pass was no good. I almost threw up. Then the agent said I’d been upgraded to first class. Ian had done it secretly out of his own pocket. Tears snuck down my face.

There would be more. During the flight, I watched a Ben Affleck movie. He’s a washed-up onetime high school basketball star, divorced and angry and a drunk. He’s hired to coach his old school’s team. The film is banal, cliché. I loved it, and wept uncontrollably.

My return home, I realized, would be a rocky one.

LUCY

I first got to see Joe a couple of weeks after he got back from Libya. He’d asked for time by himself when he first arrived. Maybe he was processing, or avoiding, or just learning to breathe slowly and steadily again. The few details he shared about his ordeal made it sound worse than I had imagined.

Joe promised he would see a therapist and expressed how thankful he was to be home. Beyond that and sending long Seamus Heaney poems in the occasional text, he was soon back to comporting himself the way he always did. He still refused eye surgery. He didn’t tell his family about the cold sweats and racing heartbeat he woke up to every morning—that revelation would come nearly two years later, when he underwent multiple bypass surgery. (The doctors, stumped by the absence of any health issues or worrying cholesterol numbers, confirmed that stress really can weaken your heart.)

In characteristic fashion, Joe needed little time to get back to work. On November 28, 2021, the reporting he and his colleagues had done before their capture resulted in an article in The New Yorker, a damning account of Libya’s mistreatment of migrants with the support of a willfully blind, even encouraging, European Union. Ian and Pierre worked to get a handful of the migrants who’d spoken to them for the story safely out of Libya. The article and Ian and Pierre’s noble efforts garnered multiple awards, including the James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism.

Meanwhile, over several months, Joe and I tried together to find some answers about what had happened to his team. We learned a bit more about who was behind their capture: An arm of Libyan intelligence, which it seemed was affiliated with a militia known as the Al Nawasi Brigade, controlled the black site where Joe and his colleagues were held. The Libyan government had recently named a new intelligence chief, and the taking of four foreign journalists might have been the old guard flexing its muscles, announcing that it still held sway in Tripoli. We learned that the proof-of-life video had alarmed Washington. Both the Libyan president and attorney general were enlisted to intervene, but the exact mechanics of the team’s release would remain a mystery to us.

I suspect it’s easier on Joe’s conscience not to know what, if anything, might have been extracted in exchange for his coming home. I hope that when he reads this, he will take what I say to heart, release any feelings of guilt and spend that energy on more worthy pursuits—on joy, on beauty, and, yes, on the work.

A profound lesson I learned from participating in the documentary about Iran is how powerful and cathartic it can be to tell your own story in your own time. The Namazis’ story has at least one happy chapter: In the fall of 2022, Baquer Namazi was given his American passport and allowed to leave Iran. I couldn’t help but cry with relief, joy, and sorrow when I heard the news. Siamak remains imprisoned, but after more than six long years, Babak was able to hug his dad. By then, I knew that specific kind of relief intimately.

JOE

When I made it back to New York, I was unsure how to conduct myself. I tried to stay busy, calling my agent to apologize for my no-show at the meeting with the publisher; buying a new phone; seeing how much material I could recover from the old one seized in Libya. But I was also paralyzed in some ways. The prospect of seeing my family felt overwhelming. I feared that I might come apart in a fashion that would unsettle more than reassure them. I needed space to regather my wits.

I called an old friend, one of the most accomplished war correspondents of his generation, and visited him at his home on the Rhode Island shore. We got in his boat at dawn one morning and went to dig for quahogs. It’s slow, laborious work, and we did it in restorative silence. Out on the water, shoulder to shoulder with a man intimately familiar with all forms of trauma, I recalled a quote from John Updike. His protagonists, Updike said, “oscillate in their moods between an enjoyment of the comforts of domesticity and the familial life, and a sense that their essential identity is a solitary one—to be found in flight and loneliness and even adversity. This seems to be my feeling of what being a male human being involves.”

I’d always found this both true and damning.

Soon enough I rejoined my family. There were tears and beers, and I learned how much had been done on my behalf—by them and by people at the State Department enlisted to help find and free me. I connected with a good trauma therapist, started to write my first book, juggled feelings of acute embarrassment and wonder at my good fortune. But of all the emotions—fear, shame, pride, regret—the most powerful by far was gratitude. I promised myself that I’d try to feel it more profoundly and express it more directly and often.

A little over a year after my return, I got an invitation from Lucy to attend a private screening of the Iran hostage series she helped produce while I was in Libya. The event was held in a sparkling new skyscraper on Manhattan’s West Side. There were filmmakers and former hostages, and I watched Lucy move among them—hugging, laughing, thanking. It was clear she’d done valued work, that she was cherished both by the families she’d gotten to know and by the veteran documentarians she’d ably assisted.

It was a moment of pride, and of recognition. She was indeed a newspaperman’s daughter. My daughter.

LUCY

It was nearly 6 p.m. on September 17, 2022, and I was running late. I was headed to the preview of the HBO series, Hostages, held at one of the enormous towers in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards.

I knew Joe was likely already there, still the anxious dad who arrived early to everything. He’d flown in from Vermont, where he now lived, to be my plus-one. I imagined him standing awkwardly alone and felt a sudden bolt of worry. Inviting him to watch the series might be triggering for him—how had that failed to cross my mind until now? I’d been caught up in my own nerves about viewing the project with an audience, including the documentary’s subjects, for the first time. Maybe I was also following his lead.

When I arrived at the crowded theater, it didn’t take long for me to spot Joe. He wasn’t standing awkwardly alone; he was pitching a story to a film director. In the aftermath of Libya, there was and would be much for him to fight for and against, but Joe was still Joe: curious, jovial, alive.

We took our seats and the lights went down. My worries about the audience died away. My dad—my best friend, my work partner, my anchor—was next to me. His was the opinion that had always mattered most. But regardless of his verdict, and in a signal of just how far we’d come since third-grade homework, I knew we could agree that just being here, together, was divine.

Correction: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect how long Lucy Sexton has known her stepmother.

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Gary Settle has helped dozens of federal prisoners get compassionate release. Will it ever be his turn to go home?

By Anna Altman

“The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

It was February 2019, and Mary Price had rarely seen her office so busy. A wiry woman in her sixties with shoulder-length straight hair, Price is general counsel at FAMM, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. FAMM is an acronym for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, and in addition to opposing severe sentencing, the group broadly advocates for the fair treatment of people in prisons across the United States. FAMM had recently sent out an edition of its newsletter, which supporters knew as the “FAMM Gram.” The response from readers began as a trickle, then became overwhelming, and for good reason: The newsletter outlined historic changes to the U.S. government’s compassionate release process.

Since the mid-1980s, federal prisoners have been able to seek compassionate release for what the law deems “extraordinary and compelling reasons”—including old age, terminal illness, and severe disability—by requesting that the Bureau of Prisons file a motion on their behalf in court. The BOP, however, rejects almost every request it receives. In January 2018, the Department of Justice reported that the BOP had approved less than 10 percent of the compassionate release applications it received over the previous four years, allowing just 306 people to go home. (Within the same time frame, 81 prisoners died waiting for the BOP to respond at all.) The DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General called the process “poorly managed,” with “inconsistent and ad hoc implementation [that] has likely resulted in potentially eligible inmates not being considered for release.”

For a long time, when the BOP denied a request, a prisoner had no recourse; the bureau’s decision was the final word. That changed in December 2018, following years of advocacy by FAMM and other groups, when Congress passed the First Step Act. Among other criminal-justice reforms, the law allowed a prisoner to file a motion for compassionate release directly with a federal judge if the BOP denied their request or didn’t respond to it within 30 days of receipt. FAMM was eager to share the news and connect eligible individuals with lawyers who could help them. Price knew the organization had to move quickly. “We were very concerned that people who were nearing the end of their lives or very sick would be going before judges without any help,” she said. “We couldn’t just leave these people on their own.”

FAMM’s newsletter was delivered to 40,000 incarcerated individuals via CorrLinks, the federal prison system’s email service. Price felt a thrill of anticipation—“a sense of stepping off into something that was unknown,” as she put it. She knew that sometimes a recipient would print a copy of the newsletter and pass it around the cellblock. Over days, then weeks, Price and her colleagues were inundated with hundreds of phone calls and emails from people seeking compassionate release or inquiring about the process for loved ones behind bars.

Amid the deluge, one inquiry stood out: It was written by a prisoner on behalf of someone else. The sender did not disclose his name. “I am writing this from the ‘Cancer’ floor of FMC Butner,” he wrote, referring to the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. The five-story facility provides health care to some of America’s sickest male prisoners; it includes a psychiatric unit, a unit devoted to orthopedic surgery, and a cancer ward. “This is directed at the situation of another patient,” the sender wrote. “He is terminal and is unable to contact you directly.”

The sick man, R. Smith, had lung cancer. As Price later wrote in an article for the American Bar Association, he was in persistent pain and dependent on a feeding tube. With a prognosis of less than 12 months to live, and a sentence lasting much longer for distributing drugs, Smith applied to the BOP for compassionate release. But instead of going home, he was bound for FMC Butner’s hospice ward.

The anonymous person who contacted FAMM said that he had heard Smith crying to his family during a call on the ward pay phone. A longtime recipient of FAMM’s newsletter, the man knew that Smith might now have another way to seek compassionate release. With Smith’s permission, he was using Smith’s CorrLinks account. BOP policy forbade prisoners from using one another’s accounts, and the sender knew he risked punishment for doing so, which is why he left the message unsigned. He asked: Would FAMM consider helping Smith?

Smith’s case was exactly the kind Price had in mind when she drafted FAMM’s newsletter. FAMM connected Smith with an attorney, who began to prepare a legal motion. Meanwhile, according to Price, Smith got sicker. One of his lungs collapsed, and the man communicating with FAMM from inside Butner reported that Smith had been moved to an outside hospital better equipped to treat him. Smith’s lawyer couldn’t get updated information about his condition, but this wasn’t unusual: The BOP can be especially evasive about medical details near the end of a person’s life. “There’s no more cruel part of the BOP than this,” said a former federal defense attorney who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Smith’s lawyer filed an emergency motion in federal court for his release. The court then ordered the BOP to provide an account of Smith’s medical condition by that afternoon. The BOP didn’t meet the deadline, so the judge contacted Smith’s doctor directly. Upon learning how poorly Smith was doing, the judge ordered his release within ten days, as soon as appropriate transport could be arranged. No one could reach Smith in the hospital to deliver the news, so Price sent a message to the person at Butner working on his behalf. She hoped that he would find a way to tell Smith that he didn’t have to die behind bars.

Smith’s case was a turning point for FAMM’s work on compassionate release because it offered a blueprint for helping qualifying individuals. FAMM worked with the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to expand the capacity of the Compassionate Release Clearinghouse, a newly created entity that recruited, trained, and supported lawyers representing sick or elderly prisoners requesting early release. In its first year, the Clearinghouse screened some 500 inquiries and placed more than 125 cases with lawyers.

Smith’s case also marked the start of a unique relationship. “Mr. Smith and his family are very lucky to have you in his corner,” Price wrote to the man who’d helped Smith. “We should all have friends like you.”

By then, Price knew the man’s name: Gary Settle. He was slow to tell her much about himself, but he continued to send CorrLinks messages to FAMM as he recruited more people at Butner for the Clearinghouse. In emails he sometimes used the moniker “P/H,” for “patient/helper,” in part to protect himself from BOP censure, and in part because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He felt that his personal story—including why he was serving 177 years in prison, along with his own cancer diagnosis—was beside the point.

Settle was born in 1966 in Hawthorne, California, a small city adjacent to South Central Los Angeles. His childhood had what he considered “storybook” elements: loving parents, a brother to horse around with, Little League games, family camping trips. In the summer his mother, Kay, took time off her waitressing job to drive the boys to the beach. Settle was bright—“so smart I could smack him,” Kay said. At age ten, he asked his mom for copies of Shakespeare’s plays, then named his cat Ophelia. “We weren’t rich in money, but we were happy, we had friends, there were always people over,” Settle wrote in a document he calls his “life story,” which he shared with me.

In time, Settle developed a rebellious streak. If Kay told him to stay within a few blocks of the house on his skateboard, he’d ride to busy areas downtown instead. When Settle was 13, his parents bought a farm in Ohio; his father thought the fresh air and country life would be good for the family. “We all had to learn on the fly all the farming tasks—feeding the cows, milking them and shoveling the other substances they produced by the wheelbarrow load,” Settle wrote. “If Green Acres hadn’t already been made, we would have had a great pilot.” It was a major transition for Settle: the unrelenting responsibility of farm work, the unfamiliarity of the local culture. His puka-shell necklace and faded Levi’s didn’t vibe with the rural Ohio style of bib overalls and John Deere hats.

Even so, he quickly made friends. He got into the habit of enlisting his buddies to help with household tasks. “Once, I told him he couldn’t go to a baseball game because he had to help with the chores,” Kay recalled, “and all of a sudden the whole team was weeding.” The town closest to his family’s farm had a single traffic light, two police officers, a barber shop, and “at least ten bars,” according to Settle. There was little to do, so he and his friends drank. Settle recalled being a happy drunk, outgoing and enthusiastic; he boasted that his charm was infectious.

Settle also liked to showboat—driving recklessly, hood surfing, doing motorcycle stunts. “I was not breaking any laws other than traffic ones,” he wrote. “Those I was shattering.” In fact, a juvenile court found him guilty of an offense when he was 17; the case records are sealed, but Settle said that the conviction stemmed from a fistfight he had with a man in his twenties. Looking back, he wondered whether spending his teenage years in a small town with few opportunities contributed to the course his life took.

In 1985, Settle got his high school sweetheart pregnant, and soon they married. At age 20, Settle had expenses and responsibilities, and he grew restless. When he heard about a gig with a construction company in Florida, he decided to move there with $400, two buddies, and no plan—he left his family behind for the time being. He and his friends arrived in time for spring break and blew all their money at Daytona. When Settle got a job, he had to sleep on a picnic table behind a church for a week, until he got his first paycheck.

Despite an inauspicious beginning in his new home, Settle worked hard, and he advanced from laborer to finisher and then to foreman. The construction company had contracts all over the Southeast, so Settle traveled, staying in motels. When the workday was over, he and his crew headed to strip clubs or hung out in bars.

Settle found a house big enough for his family; his wife gave birth to their son, Nathan, back in Ohio, then moved down to join him. In time Settle’s parents decided to relocate to Florida, too. Settle started his own construction company in Orange City, just north of Orlando. But for all that was changing, Settle still liked to spend his free time drinking with friends.

One day, after a few beers, he went to the drive-through window at a bank to deposit a check. He recognized the teller—she was a woman he knew from the local bar scene. “What do you want?” she asked with a smile. He replied, as a joke, “Give me all your money.” The woman bent out of sight and then reappeared holding a plastic container full of neatly stacked bills. “You mean this?” she asked, laughing.

A few weeks later, Settle ran into the woman at a bar, and she brought up their exchange at the bank, saying there had been $35,000 in the box. After their conversation, Settle couldn’t get the number out of his head. All that money, and so close he could have grabbed it.

At 27 years old, Settle was facing life in prison. It was all so uncanny—sitting there in a suit, knowing he would never be free again—that he almost felt compelled to laugh.

In October 1991, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported that a tall white man with long brown hair and a mustache had walked into a bank during a Tuesday morning rainstorm. He was wearing the waistband of a woman’s stocking over his face and carrying a white bag. He vaulted the counter and pulled out a semiautomatic handgun, then took a stack of cash before fleeing on foot into a wooded area. Heavy rainfall prevented the sheriff’s helicopter from tracking him, and the dogs and deputies chasing him lost his trail.

It wasn’t Settle’s first robbery; he’d begun holding up banks and stealing cash the year prior. Most of the time, he didn’t run away—he stole a car from a bank clerk or customer. One time he approached a car with an elderly woman sitting behind the wheel. According to Settle, when she informed him that she needed her walker if she was going to get out, he pulled it from the trunk, got her to her feet, and then sped away. He could hear sirens in the distance.

By April 1992, the FBI was pursuing what it described to the West Volusia Sun-News as a “serial bank robber on the loose.” They believed that he was responsible for as many as seven bank robberies and one attempted robbery over an 18-month period. The criminal, the FBI said, was “armed, dangerous, and ready to strike again.”

That account didn’t square with how Settle saw himself. “It is embarrassing to admit this, and shameful to acknowledge,” he wrote later, “but in a way, I thought of the whole thing as a sort of prank or practical joke, with a big cash payoff.” According to Settle, he didn’t encounter any law enforcement, and he had no problem persuading tellers to cooperate. He was never in a bank for more than a minute or two, and he never hurt anyone physically. He saw his plunder as “free and easy money.” (A woman present during one of the robberies would later testify that her encounter with Settle scared her so much that she quit her job, and that she would “never be able to work again or be able to be alone again in the future.”)

Settle had accomplices—sometimes he had one drive a getaway car—and in September 1992, two of them decided to rob a bank on their own. They were caught before they succeeded, and during their interrogation they fingered Settle as the mastermind of the operation. Shortly after, Settle, who was on a trip to Boston at the time, was arrested for running a stop sign and driving under the influence. When police in Massachusetts ran his name through their databases, they—and Settle—learned that he was wanted in Florida on federal bank robbery charges.

Settle was indicted on March 18, 1993, on nine counts of bank robbery, one count of attempted bank robbery, one count of conspiracy, and ten counts of carrying a firearm while committing a violent crime. The government alleged that, in total, Settle had stolen around $190,000. “If I would have done something worthwhile with the money, I don’t think I would feel any better about things, but I might not feel so foolish,” he wrote. “The only people who really benefitted from the robberies would be various bartenders, waitresses, and strippers.” By the time he was indicted, Settle had separated from his wife. He later described himself as being at his “reckless, selfish worst.”

Settle pleaded not guilty, and he later claimed that he rejected a plea bargain that would have come with a relatively scant 12-year sentence had he testified against his accomplices. (The prosecutor denied making such an offer.) During pretrial detention, Settle twice attempted to escape from county jail. When his case finally went to trial in Orlando, he did what he could to appear serious, wearing a suit and taking notes. On May 11, 1993, the jury found him guilty of almost all the charges against him.

With his conviction on the books, Settle was subject to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, a result of congressional hand-wringing about rising crime rates that was later called “the most dramatic change in sentencing law and practice in our nation’s history” by the United States Sentencing Commission. The act sought to address what elected officials considered “undue leniency” in the criminal-justice system, as well as inconsistencies in sentencing around the country. Among other things, it abolished federal parole and created a system of mandatory penalties for certain crimes, giving judges less discretion over sentencing.

By the time Settle was tried, the mandatory minimum for a violent offense committed with a firearm was five years. If a person previously convicted of such a crime carried a gun during a second violent offense, the mandatory minimum was 20 years. How, though, should a court sentence someone found guilty of armed robbery for the first time, but on multiple counts in a single legal proceeding? As it happened, that exact question had been addressed just prior to Settle’s trial, in the 1993 Supreme Court case Deal v. United States. In a 6–3 decision, the court ruled that the harsher mandatory minimum should apply even in a single indictment.

When Settle was sentenced on August 30, 1993, the case law was so new that Judge Patricia Fawsett had to review it over a lunch recess. When she retook the bench, Fawsett sentenced Settle to a mandatory 2,127 months in prison, or just over 177 years: 12 for the robbery and conspiracy charges, and 165 for carrying a gun into a bank nine separate times. She ordered that he serve them consecutively.

Fawsett wasn’t inclined to be lenient, telling the defense that Settle showed “utter disregard for the law,” “a complete lack of remorse,” and “lack of concern for the terror he caused.” Still, she seemed troubled by the length of the sentence. “I do not think this is an appropriate result,” she said, “but I feel bound by the law as I understand and explained to you.”

Settle felt that Fawsett approached his sentence as if it were just a problem to solve; she even asked the attorneys present to check her math. At 27 years old, Settle was facing life in prison. It was all so uncanny—sitting there in a suit, knowing he would never be free again—that he almost felt compelled to laugh.

Adeel Bashir, a federal public defender currently working in the Middle District of Florida, where Settle was tried, told me that he has “only ever seen one other person get 2,000-plus months.” It’s the kind of sentence that would make a criminal-justice professional wonder whether the defendant had killed a child or was a serial pedophile. “To date, people ask me if Gary’s sentence is a typo,” Bashir said.

When Settle was transferred to a new facility, he almost always ran into someone he knew. Butner was no different, except that many of the people he recognized were dying.

Early during his time behind bars, at a prison in Atlanta, Settle tried to escape along with two other men—one of whom was the actor Woody Harrelson’s father—by scaling a wall using a makeshift rope. They surrendered when a guard fired a warning shot from a tower.

Settle spent the next two decades on a tour of federal prisons. He was housed for a few years at the infamous supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, where prisoners are kept in solitary confinement for more than 20 hours a day. That’s where Settle was when his father died in 1996. He had already used the one 15-minute phone call he was allowed that month when he heard the news, so he had to wait until the following month to call his mom to grieve with her.

By 2016, he had landed at U.S. Penitentiary Beaumont, which sits in the southeastern corner of Texas, half an hour from the Louisiana border, in a place known as the Golden Triangle because of its rich oil reserves. It’s also sometimes called Texas’s cancer belt because of its high cancer mortality rate. At Beaumont, routine bloodwork showed that Settle had an elevated level of prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, which is often used as the first indication of a prostate cancer diagnosis. According to Settle, he was not informed right away. “It takes a while in those places for the mill to grind,” he said.

At his next stop, USP Hazelton in West Virginia, Settle “started to feel weird.” He had been diagnosed with Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder, and needed a double knee replacement. In 2018, doctors told him that his PSA was 50.5 nanograms per milliliter. Many physicians consider 4 ng/mL to be the point at which they recommend further testing to screen for cancer. Settle’s level, in other words, was astronomical.

He had a biopsy, which showed a very high likelihood of cancer. When doctors proposed removing his prostate, Settle declined; the surgery can have unpleasant side effects, including incontinence and erectile dysfunction. He asked for hormone therapy instead, and requested a transfer to a medical facility. After an extended back and forth, which Settle described as “a lot of gnashing of teeth and wailing of banshees,” the BOP sent him to FMC Butner for treatment.

After nearly three decades in federal prison, whenever Settle was transferred to a new facility, he almost always ran into someone he knew. Butner was no different, except that many of the people he recognized were dying. “I was shocked at the appearance and bearing of the prisoners I have known and the ones I did not,” he later wrote. “I was around people who looked like concentration camp inmates.”

Butner is one of seven federal facilities that serve very sick prisoners, some of whom wind up there because they didn’t get the treatment they needed to stave off serious illness. The law guarantees prisoners a constitutional right to health care—a right, ironically, afforded to no other group in the country—but in reality health care resources are limited behind bars, and potentially life-saving procedures are not always granted, even when they’re clinically indicated. A former federal public defender who spoke anonymously said that, in reviewing clients’ medical records, it’s not unusual to find someone who was told years prior by a prison doctor that they needed an immediate kidney transplant but never got one, or who had a heart condition requiring a visit to a specialist that the BOP never facilitated.

“Because most correctional health services are designed to cut costs and reduce perceived litigation risks, transparency and quality of care are not top priorities,” Homer Venters, a former chief medical officer for New York City’s jails, writes in his book Life and Death in Rikers Island. Prejudice also erodes standards of care. According to a DOJ report, “The belief that those convicted of serious crimes have somehow earned their suffering, as if the pain of illness and old age in prison were a part of the inmate’s just deserts … [is] widespread and intense among some custody personnel and … prevalent also among health care providers.”

Holding the prison system accountable for this bias is difficult. In a landmark 1976 case, the Supreme Court ruled that substandard medical care in prisons violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment only if it rises to the level of “deliberate indifference” and not just “mere negligence.” The difference between these two concepts is the subject of an ongoing debate that prisoners have little power to influence. (In a statement, the BOP said, “We make every effort to ensure the physical, medical, and mental safety of inmates confined to our facilities through a controlled environment that is secure, humane, and in line with community standards of care.”)

At Butner, Settle learned that there was a saying for someone whose health showed a marked or rapid decline: He’s falling down. Paradoxically, this meant going up—to the fifth floor, where the hospice ward is located. A BOP PowerPoint presentation about Butner describes the hospice cells as private, with small nods at comfort such as flower-patterned quilts, pillows that match the blue cinder block walls, or a cushioned chair next to a bed. When Settle arrived, Butner held a monthly memorial service for the recently deceased. He said that a single service often honored as many as 30 people.

After beginning hormone therapy and radiation, Settle was able to maintain his strength and physical independence, so he considered himself lucky. In turn, he did what he could to help others. He noticed that one cancer patient, wheelchair-bound and too weak to push himself, would lock his chair to that of his cellmate, who would shuffle his feet to get them both around the halls. Settle offered to wheel them to meals and chemotherapy appointments, and gave the same assistance to others who couldn’t walk. “You’re not even really supposed to do that,” said Richard Hodge, who was incarcerated at Butner at the time. “Gary could have been wrote up for breaking the rules.”

Settle also assisted with hygiene, changing diapers on grown men. “I’m just putting myself in their perspective,” he said. “It’s got to be very humbling.” Settle reflected that he hadn’t cared for his son much when he was a baby; perhaps this was a way of atoning for that. (Settle was long divorced and hadn’t been in direct contact with his son in many years.)

When he read the FAMM newsletter about the Compassionate Release Clearinghouse, Settle saw another way he could help people. What was more important, he reasoned, than someone living out their last days in freedom, ideally surrounded by their loved ones? He made R. Smith his first project.

Compassionate release is grounded in the idea that changes to a person’s health may weaken the justification for their incarceration. What reason is there for imprisoning someone with Alzheimer’s when he no longer understands that he is being punished? When someone with late-stage liver disease can’t get out of bed and is no longer a threat to society? When “rehabilitation” is no longer feasible because a person has advanced cancer? “We’re not doing any social good, if we were in the first place, in keeping them locked up,” Price said. “And we can do a great deal of good in terms of helping people repair relationships and comfort each other and say goodbye.”

There is also a financial calculus that works in the BOP’s favor, one noted prominently in a 2013 DOJ report on compassionate release: It’s almost always cheaper to release sick people than to keep them locked up until they die. One study found that the annual cost of caring for just 21 seriously ill prisoners in California was almost $2 million per person, while the median per capita cost of nursing home care in the state was $73,000 per year.

After a judge allowed Smith to go home, Settle noticed a shift at Butner. He later wrote an email to FAMM, trying to put into words what he was witnessing. “In this place of death and dying, among incarcerated men who are holding on to life with nothing but more cells, more keys, more misery in their future, your efforts are having real, tangible results. Your efforts are giving hope,” he wrote. “You are giving life back to people, and you are giving them the most precious gift of all, time. Time to heal old wounds, to take a last breath of freedom and to leave this world with peace and dignity.”

FAMM worked closely with Settle through the summer and fall of 2019 to help people at Butner. “We didn’t appoint him,” Price said. “He appointed himself.” Settle made copies of FAMM’s newsletter and distributed them to his neighbors. He kept an eye out for people whose health was worsening and approached those he thought might qualify for compassionate release. He told them what he knew about the First Step Act, which he had studied, and about the Compassionate Release Clearinghouse. He spent six to eight hours a day requesting medical records, addressing envelopes, and updating his contacts on the outside about various cases. Settle read medical records, cross-referencing terms with a diagnostic manual and a medical encyclopedia he’d ordered, so he could send the most pertinent information about sick prisoners to their lawyers. Before long his cell was covered with piles of paper.

Settle also relayed information from incarcerated individuals to their family members. He helped people who were too sick to make it to a computer, those who had been transferred off-site for care, and others who had never learned to read or write. Sometimes he wrote compassionate release requests himself, parroting the language he had seen in other applications. The ones that went to the BOP were all but certain to be rejected or ignored, but that was part of the process: For a prisoner to file a motion directly with a judge, they first had to “exhaust administrative remedies,” in legal parlance.  

Word got around Butner about what Settle was doing. He would leave his cell after a nap to find four or five guys gathered outside, some of them in wheelchairs with paperwork in their laps. He was willing to assist just about anyone—he said he only refused people convicted of sex crimes. “Gary is able to form relationships with all kinds of people,” said Juliana Andonian, an attorney who used to work at FAMM. “He didn’t want to make himself the center of the story. That was really notable, the lack of ego.”

It isn’t uncommon for people in prison to help one another with legal matters. Jailhouse lawyers—some with legal training, some without—review statutes in a prison’s law library, file paperwork, and perform other tasks for fellow prisoners, often for a fee or some other form of compensation. “Someone less sincere could make a lot of money or do a lot of harm,” Andonian said. Settle refused payment, even to cover the cost of emails he sent and phone calls he made. The mother of a man Settle helped go home remembered sending him a thank-you note. “That’s about all he let me send him,” she said.

One day a thought dawned on Price. “He is doing this job that the Bureau of Prisons should be doing,” she said. “They should be moving heaven and earth to be sure that people are connected to family and loved ones when they’re near the end of their lives.”

Among the people Settle helped was a man in his thirties named Victor Webster, who was originally from Montana. Webster was in treatment for Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer that occurs in or around the bones. He’d had the whole left side of his rib cage removed, followed by extensive chemo, but then a tumor developed on his chest plate. “His mental state was poor,” Settle said. “He assumed he was going to die in prison.” When Webster didn’t want to continue treatment, Settle pushed him in a wheelchair to his chemo appointments. He also got to work helping Webster obtain compassionate release.

Settle sent increasingly urgent emails to FAMM on Webster’s behalf, asking the group to move quickly. He visited Webster several times a day, until finally he was able to deliver the news that a judge had granted him immediate release. “I wish I had the ability to describe how the natural stoic look on his face collapsed or the strength of the hug I received from a guy I had been helping dress and stand up for weeks,” Settle said.

Webster went home in early July 2019. According to Settle, before he left he gave Settle a chain necklace with a cross, which he’d worn every day he was at Butner. Soon after he got home, Webster spoke with Settle and said he’d spent a wonderful Fourth of July with his family, including his nieces and nephews. They bought fireworks and set them off for him. Webster died that September. “It was sad it was just so short,” his mother, Debra Claassen, said of her son’s time at home.

The names and stories piled up. Von Skyler Cox, who had stage IV lung cancer and a prognosis of less than ten months, wrote to FAMM on behalf of “myself and my family and the ‘Patient/Helper’ ” after he was granted compassionate release in August 2019. “Your efforts have reminded me and many others that there are Great People in the world who have not forgotten us,” Cox wrote. Andonian printed out the email and put it on the office fridge. 

Settle noticed certain patterns—for instance, that a lot of the men granted release had been charged with crimes in blue states, where judges were perhaps more inclined toward compassion or less concerned about the political ramifications of releasing people from prison. (Recent research indicates that federal judges appointed by Democratic presidents are more likely to grant compassionate release than those put on the bench by Republicans.) According to Settle, some of the men who went home had been convicted of violent offenses, but he ruefully noted that they often had shorter sentences than he did.

He became swept up in the momentum. “Once I got going with it, I had to do it,” Settle said. “What type of person would I be if I did not assist people and their families at this most crucial time when I could?” He went on: “There is nothing I can do about the past, but I get to decide how I live the rest of my life.”

“Simply put, we are grateful for Gary, and awed by the care and compassion he shows for those in distress,” the FAMM letter said. “We have learned from him how to do our jobs better.”

In August 2019, about five months after they began corresponding, Price decided to meet Settle in person. “I want to make sure that he is safe doing this,” Andonian recalled Price telling her. According to Settle, the Butner staff were increasingly aware of his efforts to help people secure compassionate release, and their reactions were mixed. He had never gotten in trouble for using other people’s CorrLinks accounts, but some corrections officers told him he was “making them look bad.” He found that Butner employees with medical backgrounds tended to be more receptive, even expediting his requests for medical records and quietly referring patients to him. Still, to Settle they seemed jaded, like “how you would be if you worked in a dog pound and you get to see sick animals that they put down.”

Price’s job doesn’t put her into a lot of direct, consistent contact with people in prison. Rather, her role is usually to assess a person’s needs and connect them with resources. On her way to North Carolina, Price’s overriding feeling was curiosity—who was this person who had committed himself to advocating on behalf of others? She and Settle spent an afternoon together in Butner’s visiting room. As the hours wore on, Price asked Settle if he wanted anything from the vending machine; steadfast in his policy of not accepting any gifts, he politely refused. Water was free, “so we drank a lot of water,” Price said.

After the visit, Settle gradually began corresponding with Price as a friend. She told him about what she was growing in her garden and described a recent whale-watching vacation. He talked about his mother, Kay, whom he worried about all the time, and what he was reading. Price sent him books she thought he might like, including a trilogy by Ivan Doig and two books of poetry; one, by Ada Limón, Settle saved until Christmas to read as a treat. When Price was sick, Settle asked his mother to send her flowers.

That December, Andonian, Price, and another FAMM employee, Debi Campbell, asked Settle if they could write a letter to Kay. “I knew him well enough to know his mom was his treasure,” Andonian said. The FAMM team wanted to tell Kay how much Settle had come to mean to them. Settle consented.

“Gary, who calls himself the ‘patient/helper,’ impressed us immediately,” the letter to Kay read. “He follows up conscientiously on each and every person he works with. Beyond winning or losing, he cares about their spirits.” The FAMM staff said that, by their count, Settle had helped 19 people obtain release, allowing them to spend their last days with their families. “Simply put, we are grateful for Gary, and awed by the care and compassion he shows for those in distress,” the letter continued. “We have learned from him how to do our jobs better.”

Soon Settle’s assistance would become more urgent than ever.

Overcrowding, unsanitary facilities, poor medical care—those were just some of the reasons COVID was able to tear through U.S. prisons at astonishing speed. Within weeks of the virus being declared a national emergency, rates of infection in prisons far outpaced those in the population at large. By the end of April 2020, eight of the country’s ten largest COVID outbreaks were in prisons or jails. Still, the BOP was slow to implement masking, social-distancing, and testing policies. Some incarcerated individuals were scared to report symptoms because it meant being sent to solitary confinement.

Butner was hit particularly hard. With its medically vulnerable population, including many cancer patients, the facility was practically a showcase for the comorbidities that can make people who contract COVID especially susceptible to severe illness or death. By late July 2020, a remote inspection by the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General found that 1,020 people imprisoned at Butner had COVID, and that 25 of them, along with at least one staff member, had died. Later, in the fall 2021, the ACLU would report that Butner had more than twice the number of COVID fatalities as any other federal prison. (The ACLU and Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs filed a lawsuit against the BOP over its handling of COVID at Butner, but a judge dismissed the case over procedural questions.)

The BOP has policies about notifying family members if a prisoner becomes seriously ill, but these are not always strictly followed. At the height of the pandemic, loved ones often struggled to obtain updated information. One former federal defender who spoke on condition of anonymity described receiving calls from people who were desperate to know about their loved ones. I haven’t heard from my son in a month, they said; or I don’t know if my brother is in a hospital unconscious or just in quarantine. “It created so much panic for family members,” the former federal defender told me.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, passed in March 2020, expanded the BOP’s authority to place prisoners in home confinement for a portion of their sentence. Prisoners don’t have to apply for this sort of transfer, so Attorney General William Barr directed the BOP to identify “suitable candidates”—those with COVID comorbidities, convictions for nonviolent crimes, and low risk of recidivism. According to data from the Marshall Project, the BOP placed nearly 5 percent of its incarcerated population in home confinement by October 2020. But at Butner, among other places, the bureau dragged its feet. The DOJ would later estimate that although 1,070 people at Butner may have been eligible for home confinement as early as April 2020, the BOP had released only 68 by July.

Meanwhile, according to the Marshall Project, the BOP didn’t budge from its usual stance on compassionate release, approving less than 1 percent of the more than 31,000 requests it received in the first year of the pandemic. A 2022 NPR analysis later found that at least one in four federal prisoners who died of COVID had sought compassionate release. (In a statement, the BOP said that it “carefully followed updates from the CDC, and guidance was provided to our facilities” about protective measures. With regard to compassionate release, the bureau gave a brief summary of the request process and noted that “the decision on whether to grant such a motion … lies with the sentencing court.”)

Hoping that it could help people get home before it was too late, FAMM ramped up the work of the Clearinghouse, recruiting an army of attorneys and paralegals to get release requests before the courts. It decided to support appeals from prisoners with vulnerabilities to severe COVID infection, which under the unprecedented circumstances might legally qualify as “extraordinary and compelling reasons” for early release. Prior to the pandemic, the Clearinghouse had screened about 500 requests for assistance and helped some 60 people go home. From the start of the pandemic to the end of 2021, nearly 5,500 requests came in. People wrote about having asthma, compromised immune systems, cancer. They were terrified of contracting COVID and dying. From the flood of communication, Clearinghouse attorneys were able to file 1,069 motions for compassionate release in the first year of COVID, 205 of which were granted.

At Butner, Settle threw himself into helping people, including Richard Hodge, who was serving 98 months for conspiracy to distribute drugs. Hodge had received two organ transplants before he arrived at Butner, and when he contracted COVID, the virus hit him hard. As his body struggled to clear the infection, he could barely stand up to use the bathroom. He didn’t eat for ten days, and he lost about 30 pounds. He later claimed that, despite having a compromised immune system, he was given “no treatment whatsoever.” Hodge said that the Butner staff was indifferent, at most checking his temperature and blood pressure. “You either survive or you don’t, that was their mentality,” he told me. (In a statement, the BOP said, “We do not comment on anecdotal allegations or, for privacy and security reasons, discuss the conditions of confinement for any inmate or group of inmates.”)

Settle implored Hodge to seek compassionate release, lest there be a worse outcome if he got COVID a second time. “He kept after me,” Hodge said. “I didn’t think I had anything coming, but Gary kept insisting.” Settle helped Hodge file his compassionate release application with the BOP to exhaust his administrative remedies and connected him with FAMM and an attorney. “Gary had all the information,” Hodge said.

In March 2021, a judge granted Hodge’s request; he was a free man. He went home to Laurel County, Kentucky, where he could receive specialized care at a transplant clinic and spend time with his kids and grandkids. “It was all because of you my friend,” Hodge later wrote to Settle in an email. “I owe you so much, and I wish there was some way I could bring you out of there bub.”

“I have a very small family, but I dream of an opportunity to be part of their lives,” Settle wrote. “I am humbly asking that you please consider giving me that opportunity and you have my word, you will never have cause to regret it.”

In July 2020, Andonian encouraged Settle to seek compassionate release. Thanks to hormone therapy, Settle’s prostate cancer was in remission, but he had other medical conditions that could increase his risk of severe COVID. Initially, Settle was not in favor. “I felt I did not qualify,” he said. “I thought that the finite amount of resources FAMM had at their disposal would be better used to assist some of the very sick prisoners I knew.” Andonian urged him to reconsider. She told him how deserving he was.

After they spoke, Settle went back to his cell and broke down in tears. “I’m not sure if my familiarity with the process made it more powerful,” he said, “but it was an overwhelming sense of gratitude, happiness, and other emotions.”

With Andonian’s help, two attorneys filed a motion on Settle’s behalf on January 27, 2021. It highlighted the threat COVID posed to him, his work helping people seek compassionate release, and his unusually onerous sentence. The First Step Act, which had made compassionate release more accessible, also gave judges expanded discretion to reduce sentences, especially mandatory minimums. “During his almost three decades of incarceration, Mr. Settle has grown from a reckless young man into a thoughtful middle-aged man known for the meaningful relationships he builds with others,” the motion read. “Mr. Settle’s extraordinary acts of service while in prison demonstrate his sincere rehabilitation and underscore that the period of incarceration imposed by the Court has served its intended purpose and should be amended to time served.”

The motion contained letters from people Settle had helped and from Victor Webster’s mother. They praised Settle for being “above prison politics” and for helping people exercise their rights. “In a place full of hate this guy oozed with love,” one stated. “[I] would love to see him in regular clothes, see how fast or how slow he drives.” A cancer survivor reflected on Settle’s compassion: “When I was mentally down Mr. Settle would come into my cell and sit for hours at a time listening to me.” Webster’s mother said she would be “forever grateful” that Settle helped ensure that her son could die at home in Montana.

Settle also made a direct appeal to the judge reviewing his request. He wrote that while he couldn’t explain the decisions he made as a young man, he had tried to be a better person since. What weighed on him most was being away from his family, especially his mother. “My own medical situation over the last few years has exposed me to the fragile nature of life and the importance and lasting value of family connections,” he wrote. He hoped to reconnect with his son, meet his grandchildren, and care for his mother as she aged. “I have a very small family, but I dream of an opportunity to be part of their lives,” he wrote. “I am humbly asking that you please consider giving me that opportunity and you have my word, you will never have cause to regret it.”

On March 5, 2021, Judge Carlos Mendoza of the Middle District of Florida denied Settle’s motion. He ruled that Settle’s health issues didn’t meet the criteria for compassionate release—he wasn’t terminal, and he could care for himself. “Covid-19 alone is not an extraordinary and compelling reason to grant release,” Mendoza said. In his view, reducing Settle’s sentence would minimize the seriousness of his offense, and “protecting the public remains a paramount consideration.” In other words, Mendoza considered Settle to be a threat to society.

The ruling was a gut punch to Settle and his supporters. “I was disappointed—I still am—by the shortsightedness of the judicial inquiry,” Andonian later said.

Eleven days after Settle’s request was denied, his physician contacted him with more bad news: The cancer was back. Mendoza had ruled on outdated information.

Settle knew of people who were granted compassionate release but, because they had no family to help them, died in prison as free men.

I began communicating with Settle in July 2021. I had read Price’s American Bar Association article about the work FAMM was doing on compassionate release, which referred to Settle’s crucial role without mentioning him by name. I asked the FAMM staff if the anonymous helper was amenable to having his story told. Andonian said that he was.

Settle and I had just one exchange on CorrLinks and a single phone call before his communication privileges were taken away. According to an incident report he later shared with me, he was written up for speaking to a member of the media without following “special mail procedures”—he had not obtained the prison’s permission before speaking with a journalist. Settle said that he was also placed in solitary confinement for two weeks. He eventually had his privileges restored, and for the next few months he called me several times a week. In chunks of no more than 15 minutes, due to the prison’s time limit on outgoing calls, he told me about his life and the people he’d helped send home.

That November, Settle wrote to say that his cancer had spread. A PET scan showed that it was in his lymph nodes, making it stage IV. He was starting treatment: hormone therapy again, along with eight rounds of chemo and perhaps radiation. He wrote that he saw cancer “as a challenge, as a fight I will be in till it’s over.”

He reported, too, that a social worker had told him he met the criteria for compassionate release—a coded way, Settle knew from his work with FAMM, of saying that he had less than 18 months to live. There was no guarantee he would get out, but given his new prognosis, he could ask the courts to consider his case a second time. Doing that would mean breaking his mother’s heart in a new way: Settle had avoided telling Kay about his cancer diagnosis—she thought that he’d filed his first compassionate release motion because his Graves’ disease heightened his COVID risk. He lied because Kay was a cancer survivor and because his father had died of the disease. He didn’t want to cause his mother anguish. Now, though, he had to tell her: If he requested compassionate release, the BOP would contact Kay to vet her as a suitable end-of-life caregiver. (Settle knew of people who were granted compassionate release but, because they had no family to help them, died in prison as free men.)

Settle said that telling his mom about his cancer was “the hardest thing I have ever done.” Kay told me she didn’t “scrape, rant, or rave” when she heard the news. She just asked “what number” the cancer was. “We’re going to beat this,” she told her son. Settle wept.

Settle found himself comparing his own situation with those of the people he was helping. He observed what happened to his neighbors as their bodies broke down and to the compassionate release motions of people with advanced metastatic cancer. He saw people with long histories of incarceration and multiple convictions, including for violent offenses, be sent home.

There were signs that his case might go the same way. Prison wardens are apt to deny compassionate release requests, stymieing them before they can even get to the BOP’s Central Office for final review, but Butner’s warden agreed that Settle met the criteria and recommended him for release. The response came as a surprise; for Settle it also confirmed just how poor his prognosis was.

While Settle waited to hear from the BOP, his legal team prepared to take his request to court if it was denied. Juliann Welch and Adeel Bashir, federal defense attorneys in the Florida district where Settle was originally tried, agreed to helm the effort, while Price and others at FAMM would offer guidance and support. Settle referred to them as Team Gary. The existence of a support squad strategizing about his case astonished him. “Up until a few years ago, I was Team Gary,” he said.

The omicron variant was racing through Butner when the BOP’s Central Office overrode the warden and denied Settle’s request, noting that his release “would minimize the severity of his offense and pose a danger to the community.” Settle and his lawyers now had to prepare to once again go before Judge Mendoza, who was still on the bench with jurisdiction over the case. Given Mendoza’s previous ruling, Team Gary hoped to get the U.S. attorney assigned to the case to support Settle’s release. It would be harder, they reasoned, for Mendoza to say no to both the defense and the state.

Welch and Bashir sent a package of materials to the U.S. attorney’s office, including character references and notes from medical experts who had evaluated Settle’s health records. A doctor concluded that although Settle would recover from the side effects of cancer treatment, he would require increasing amounts of assistance and ultimately need around-the-clock care, “either in a palliative or hospice setting.” A nurse at Butner who had cared for Settle wrote that she thought there was essentially zero chance he would reoffend. Research supported her intuition: The DOJ found in 2013 that only 3.5 percent of people granted compassionate release reoffended, compared with 41 percent of all individuals discharged from federal prison.

Still, Welch and Bashir offered concessions—a period of home confinement, for example, or an ankle monitor—that they hoped would guard against the judge’s concerns that Settle might still be dangerous. “The hurdle we have to get over is convincing the court that he’s also deserving,” Welch said, “because all of this is very firmly discretionary.”

Settle waited to learn about his fate. As weeks and then months ticked by, our email exchanges and phone conversations became less focused, more desultory. I had fewer pointed questions for Settle to answer before the phone line cut off. He told me about what he was reading: The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Neal Stephenson books. He bemoaned that his 82-year-old mother still insisted on climbing a ladder to clean her gutters. He told stories, including one about visiting his grandparents when he was a child. Settle recalled clambering up a cherry tree even though he’d been told it was too weak to hold him. When he fell, he was stunned more than hurt, but still he began to cry. His grandfather gruffly told him to get up, adding, “If you’re going to be stupid, you’re going to have to be tough.”

Settle told me he still tried to live by that way of thinking. “I brought this on myself,” he said, not for the first time, about his incarceration. There was no point in complaining. “Except about the sentence,” he added dryly. “I’ll complain about that.”

Sometimes Settle slipped into dark moods. He was serving a life sentence with a life-limiting illness, and he was surrounded by people in a similar position. It was a lot to bear. “Anxious and impatient could be my middle names,” he said.

He tried to stay busy, even while undergoing cancer treatment. He worked on compassionate release motions for his neighbors and spent time on his own case, hoping to help Team Gary. He sent Welch a copy of his medical records—even though she already had them—highlighting what he considered the most important parts. He kept track of side effects from his treatment, including mouth sores, debilitating fatigue, and a numb left leg, so that no one could claim he was tolerating it well. He counted how many pills he took: 39 on most days, 51 when he had chemo. He had never slept comfortably in prison, and the steroids he was now taking didn’t help. He made sure to exercise and drink plenty of water, but eating healthy could be challenging: According to Price, the prison gave Settle only one piece of fruit—a banana—per week, and the “salad” on offer was just lettuce.

Settle allowed himself to consider what life outside prison would be like. He wanted to speak to at-risk youth, to cook the food he liked to eat, to submerge himself in water for the first time in almost 30 years—“preferably swimming but I will settle for a good soak in a tub,” he said. Kay, too, fantasized about the contented time she might have with her son. She had a room ready for him in her home, and she looked forward to going to the beach and sitting on her patio together, enjoying the view. “It’s going to be a whole new world,” she said.

Settle also hoped that if he was released he might get better treatment, buy more time. Kay felt the same way—in our conversations, she kept mentioning the urgency of getting her son to a “good doctor.” Sometimes it felt as though Settle and his mother had allowed themselves to believe that the terminal diagnosis only applied within prison walls. I wondered, if Settle were released, how it would feel to face the knowledge that he would still die of a painful disease.

When Settle saw his oncologist, he peppered the doctor with questions: Why was he having pain in his back? Could it be an indication that the cancer had spread to his bones? Bone metastases were notoriously painful and hard to treat; developing them was one of his biggest fears. According to Settle, the oncologist told him, “You look too good to be that sick!”

Settle said that he didn’t keep in touch with many people when he was feeling low, but he spoke to me because it made him feel “muse-like.” He mentioned the author John Irving, who has said that he liked to start a new novel by writing the last line first. “With that idea in mind,” Gary wrote to me, “how does some variation of this ending sound: ‘And Gary walked out the prison door….’?”

After he heard the news, Settle called me and barked a mock headline for my story: “Not Terminal Enough!”

Early in the spring of 2022, the assistant U.S. attorney who had reviewed the materials sent by Welch and Bashir announced that she would not support Settle’s motion for compassionate release. She believed that, even in his diminished state, he posed too great a risk to society. A social worker who advocates for people to be released from prison due to serious illness told me that she often sees prosecutors take this approach: “They want them to be on death’s door.”

After he heard the news, Settle called me and barked a mock headline for my story: “Not Terminal Enough!”

Once again it felt as if a decision was being made based on out-of-date information. In April, a scan indicated that Settle’s cancer may have spread to his spinal column. His wrists had become so weak, likely from arthritis, that he was wearing splints that reached to his elbows. By May, he couldn’t hold a toothbrush and barely managed to secure the large buttons on his prison uniform. Due to weakness in one of his legs, likely caused by metastases pressing on his sciatic nerve, he was issued a walker. It went without saying that even if he wanted to rob a bank, he couldn’t easily enter one, much less hold a gun or get away quickly.

His deteriorating condition led to accidents: Settle burned his arm when he spilled hot liquid on it, and he had a couple of falls. He could no longer push his wheelchair-bound friends to meals. “This is a really hard time for him, a really hard transformation from being the person who gives and supports to being the person who has to be supported,” Price said after visiting Settle that spring.

There is no limit to the number of times a person can apply for compassionate release, but Settle’s attorneys believed that he probably had one more shot. For Team Gary, the question became whether to file the motion with Mendoza, despite the assistant U.S. attorney’s lack of support, or wait until Settle was even sicker. Settle was resolute: He wanted to file and be done with the uncertainty.

On May 27, 2022, he tested positive for COVID. The symptoms started with nausea and vomiting; eventually, he developed fever, chills, and trouble breathing. He was placed in isolation. He later told me that he survived for three days on cough drops and water.

Settle’s lawyers filed his motion for compassionate release on May 31, with a request that it be expedited because of his COVID infection. They laid out Settle’s “changed medical circumstances” and the Butner warden’s determination that Gary met the criteria for a reduced sentence, even though his superiors disagreed. They emphasized that with his “imminent, continued, and significant physical decline consequent to his incurable condition,” along with his utter lack of inclination to reoffend and his demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, he didn’t pose a danger to the public. Releasing Gary “does not undermine respect for the law,” the motion read. In an interview, Welch put it more bluntly: “His case is what the government had in mind when they wrote the compassionate release statute.”

In response to the motion, Mendoza called an in-person hearing—an unusual move. Settle and his lawyers hoped that meant the judge was seriously considering granting his release. The hearing took place on a hot summer day in Orlando, and it lasted about 45 minutes. Mendoza asked questions about Settle’s health and disciplinary record, and he raised several concerns: Why had Settle never sent apology letters to the people he had terrorized during his robberies? Why had he waited so long to express remorse? Welch read a statement Settle had written, and Mendoza seemed receptive. “It appears as if he’s accepting responsibility for what he did,” the judge said. Welch then requested that, should Mendoza not yet deem Settle ready for release, he consider abeyance—hitting the pause button on the motion—so that when Settle’s condition worsened, as it inevitably would, the motion could be considered again.

Mendoza said that he needed time to think. “This is a very difficult decision I’m being asked to make,” he said before adjourning the hearing.

A month later, Mendoza scheduled another hearing, this one by telephone. Within moments of starting the call, he dashed Team Gary’s hopes. The judge told Bashir, who attended the hearing on Settle’s behalf, that he saw no examples of Settle’s rehabilitation and remained concerned about his disciplinary record. Moreover, Mendoza said he found Settle’s statement of remorse disingenuous, given that he’d waited until he was seeking release to express it, and had never directly asked his victims for forgiveness. For those reasons, Mendoza concluded, the motion for compassionate release was denied. He did not allow for comment before ending the hearing.

Afterward, Price at FAMM got a call from Settle. He hadn’t been able to reach Bashir and figured Price might know how Mendoza had ruled. Price had heard the news. “I was deeply saddened by the denial and outraged by the form it took,” she wrote to me in an email. When she saw that Settle was calling, she didn’t answer—she thought it was better that he speak to his attorneys. But when he called a second time, she answered.

“So what happened?” Settle asked. Price, who had begun to weep, didn’t know what to say, so she hesitated. “OK,” Settle said in response to her silence. “I know.”

Settle then called Kay to tell her that he wouldn’t be coming home. “I am not going to say any more, as we are both going to cry,” he told his mom, though in truth he was already crying. Then he hung up the phone.

“It’s a process I trust and believe in that failed me,” Settle said. “I’m so glad the law exists even if it doesn’t help me. It’s my bad luck.”

I first requested a visit with Settle in April 2022, when Butner was still operating under tight restrictions because of COVID. In late summer, as case numbers went down and social distancing eased, I filed another request. Despite persistent prodding, months went by without a response. Price wrote to the BOP, reiterating that Settle had a right to speak to the press. “Mr. Settle is dying. Delay may be a denial,” she noted. Finally, in December, I was informed that I could have a one-hour visit with Settle. I would not be allowed to bring recording equipment.

On a bright, unseasonably warm January morning, I arrived in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. The sky was a limpid blue as I made my way to Butner, along pine-forest-lined roads with entrances to the corporate facilities of Novo Nordisk and Merck. When I turned onto Federal Center for Correctional Research Road, I was trailing an ambulance. The complex was eerily quiet. No one was in the yard, and no guards were visible.

Passing through security, I noticed wood cutouts of motivational phrases—Respect, Correctional Excellence, Integrity, Courage—hanging on the white cinder block walls. A TV screen in one corner flashed the phrase “Kindness is giving hope to those who think they are all alone in the world.” I was escorted to the visiting area by an officer wearing a bulletproof vest. Gray chairs were tipped against tables and stacked against the wall. There was no one else there. I asked the officer if I could shake Settle’s hand or hug him when he arrived and was granted permission.

Settle rolled into the room in his wheelchair wearing Timberland-style work boots and a jumpsuit with his name and prisoner ID number on the left breast. He stood up to embrace me, then moved to a regular chair. We had spoken on the phone scores of times, totaling a dozen hours or more, and I felt like I knew him well. But being in someone’s presence always brings new knowledge of them. Settle’s eyes were a bright golden brown, and his silver hair had been cut the day before, making it bristly.

The officer left us alone for the hour, and I decided to treat our meeting not as an interview but as a chance to be together. We talked about how angry Settle was when he first got to prison (“I just wanted to punch someone—I had no patience for anything”) and about forgiveness, namely his difficulty granting it to himself. He showed me photographs of his grandchildren and teared up when he talked about his mom, as he often did. He reflected on Mendoza’s denial and on the fact that he had allowed himself to hope for a better outcome.

Since the visit we have remained in touch, and almost every time we speak, Settle talks about a new compassionate release case he’s working on or another Butner prisoner who finally made it home. He told me that his story is “fairly well known” around Butner, and that people give him “pitying looks.” His friends, both inside and out, are frustrated on his behalf. “It really saddens me to know that with all he’s done for other people, and his medical condition now, that he isn’t at home with his family,” Richard Hodge wrote in an email. For her part, Price said, “He deserves better.”

Settle described compassionate release as “a process I trust and believe in that failed me.” With his own path foreclosed, Settle will likely die in prison. His only chance for a different end to his story is clemency, about which he is understandably pessimistic: Clemency petitions move through the Department of Justice at a glacial pace—it can be years before an answer comes—and a vanishingly small number are approved. The Trump administration approved only about 2 percent of the clemency requests it received, and the Biden administration is on track for roughly the same number. Still, Settle has decided to submit a request, with the support of Price and others.

Lately, Settle has been wrestling with whether he should continue cancer treatment. He has outlived his 18-month prognosis, and while his pain is constant and his mobility compromised, a recent CT scan showed that his tumors have stopped growing. His PSA has doubled, however, and doctors have recommended further hormone therapy. He isn’t sure he should bother. “I haven’t come to a full decision yet on whether to fight,” he said.

Before our visit at Butner, Settle sent me an essay he wrote—the title, a nod to Viktor Frankl, was “A man’s search for a reason to live.” In it, Settle reflected on his road to Butner and the toll of his cancer treatment, writing that it had “devastated” him physically and spiritually. “Maybe the latter was because I could not rationalize why I was undergoing such debilitating treatment when the effects of it were intended to extend my ‘life,’ ” he surmised. “This is not to say that I felt like dying during that time, or now. But my thoughts were simply, why? What do I have to look forward to?”

In trying to answer this question, he found himself reflecting on the work he’d done with FAMM. By his count, he had helped 42 people secure compassionate release. He wrote that he was glad to be part of an effort that brought hope to people in a hopeless place, and was honored to have met Price, Andonian, and others. “With my life experience it is not surprising that I was unused to communicating and interacting with people of this caliber,” Settle wrote. “That many of them have become dear and true friends is even more than surprising, it is humbling.”

“If I hang around for a little while, who knows what impact I can have?” he concluded. “In testament to the love and respect I have for my friends and to honor their work is reason enough for anyone to continue to live, even in here.”

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