A pioneering humanities program shaped a generation of students and brought acclaim to a public high school in Los Angeles.

But beneath the excellence lurked a culture of abuse.






By Seyward Darby

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Editor’s Note: In the wake of this story’s publication, a fifth lawsuit was filed by a Cleveland graduate against Bill Paden, a former Core teacher, and the Los Angeles Unified School District; the alleged abuse occurred between 2005 and 2007. According to the plaintiff, shortly after her graduation, another teacher, Richard Coleman, who is already a defendant in one of the lawsuits detailed in this story, initiated a sexual relationship with her. Dozens more Core alumni, whose graduation dates range from the late 1980s to as recently as a few years ago, have contacted the story’s author and the plaintiffs’ attorneys to describe systemic grooming and suspected abuse in the magnet program.

The earthquake hit at 4:31 a.m. For the next 20 seconds the ground shook, rippled, and roared. Cracks tore up the sides of buildings, and higher floors pancaked onto lower ones. Steel-reinforced concrete beams buckled as sections of elevated roadway collapsed. Transformers exploded, and burst water mains flooded residential streets.

People were jolted awake by what felt like a freight train barreling through their homes. When it stopped, before the aftershocks began rolling in, survivors saw stars. “They were so close to me and very bright,” one man remembered. The earthquake had killed electrical power in the San Fernando Valley, plunging it into darkness. For the first time many Valley residents could remember, they saw the night sky in luminous detail.

The earthquake of January 17, 1994, with a magnitude of 6.7, left 72 people dead, thousands injured, and tens of thousands homeless across the greater Los Angeles area. Damage was estimated in the billions of dollars. The event was dubbed the Northridge earthquake, named for a hard-hit part of the Valley, but the epicenter was actually farther south in Reseda, a diverse working-class neighborhood.

Some 11 miles beneath Reseda lay a blind thrust fault, so called because it can’t be seen on the earth’s surface. Unlike visible fissures such as the San Andreas Fault, blind thrust faults are difficult to detect and map. But where there’s one, there are likely to be many: By the early 1990s, according to the urban theorist Mike Davis in his book Ecology of Fear, scientists believed there was a “dense thicket” of hidden faults underneath Los Angeles, threatening to convulse the city.

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Grover Cleveland High School sat a few blocks from the epicenter of the Northridge earthquake. The school’s low-slung buildings suffered so much damage that students couldn’t attend classes for several weeks afterward. When they returned, they couldn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria because the facility had been condemned. Instead they ate in whatever nooks and crannies they could find—in hallway corners, on concrete quads, or in classrooms, sometimes with their teachers.

In E Hall, part of the northernmost section of campus, eating lunch in a teacher’s room was a badge of honor. The faculty of E Hall were celebrity educators, rock stars of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). They ran Cleveland’s renowned humanities magnet, an interdisciplinary program combining instruction in history, literature, art, and philosophy. “We were like a little Sarah Lawrence in the middle of a Title I school,” an alum told me, referring to the federal program that provides financial assistance for schools with a large population of low-income students. Since its founding in 1981, the magnet had been the subject of glowing news stories, and schools across Los Angeles had replicated its curriculum. The program, which called itself Core, produced so many graduates bound for top-notch colleges that some alumni referred to the University of California at Berkeley as “Core north.”

Core teachers prided themselves on being radicals. They encouraged students to eschew taboos, expand their horizons, and question conventional wisdom. They lectured on systemic racism and postmodernism, and they treated the teenagers they were tasked with educating as “young men and women,” a phrase the program’s founder, Neil Anstead, was fond of using. In turn, the students worshipped them.

Chris Miller was an object of particularly intense adoration. Miller, who taught American history and social studies to juniors, had been with Core since its founding. His students read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. They discussed the imperative of dismantling white supremacy and the patriarchy. A white man approaching fifty, Miller wore Birkenstocks and jewelry, and had a long ponytail that he adorned with a threaded hair wrap, the kind popular among aging hippies and teenage girls. He hugged students and urged them to talk about their feelings; crying wasn’t unusual in his classes.

The fall semester after the Northridge earthquake, Jackie* began eating lunch in Miller’s room. Jackie was petite, with dark hair and a wide, winning smile. But, entering the 11th grade, she felt insecure. “I basically advertised within those first few weeks that I was an incredibly vulnerable 16-year-old girl,” Jackie told me. She assumed that her friends were smarter than she was, and her parents’ rocky marriage was taking an emotional toll. Meanwhile, she struggled to navigate the sexual attention that men and boys had begun showing her.

*Asterisks denote pseudonyms The Atavist is using for women who requested that they not be identified in this story. 

Miller made Jackie feel comfortable in his class right away. “He was teaching us things other people were afraid to teach us,” she said. “He was brave, he was a pioneer.” When they talked one on one, she felt that he treated her like an adult, asking her about her life and listening when she spoke. He gave her The Celestine Prophecy, a popular novel about a man’s spiritual awakening, to read and discuss with him. Barely a month into school, Jackie wrote in her diary that Miller was “so fucking cool”—and also a “big flirt” and “very sexual.”

One day, Miller asked Jackie if he was right in sensing an attraction between them. Jackie felt like she had to say yes or he would be disappointed. Besides, maybe she did like him, or should. When Miller asked if she’d ever had sex, Jackie told him she had, which was true. In response, Miller drove her to get an HIV test. Jackie felt like he was taking care of her.

They started seeing each other off campus—teachers and students in Core often interacted outside school, so Jackie didn’t think twice about it. But then, according to Jackie, Miller began sexually abusing her. Once, while giving her a ride to a friend’s house, he pulled over and lunged across the console between them. As Miller kissed Jackie, he placed her hand on his erection. On another occasion, he took her to the beach with two of her friends, both male Core students. The group sat on the sand, with Jackie leaning against Miller’s legs, his arms wrapped around her, and his hands on her breasts. That night, as Miller drove Jackie home, he told her that she could “use” him to work through the problems in her life. He suggested that they write letters to each other and leave them in a filing cabinet in his classroom. He told her to call him “Journey” in the correspondence.

Miller said he loved her. Jackie wanted to believe him. It would be more than two decades before she learned that she wasn’t the only student Miller pursued—and that Miller wasn’t the only Core teacher who allegedly targeted students for abuse.

“They put the magnet program’s reputation over a student’s well-being,” Kate said. “That hurts, you know?”

In 2021, Jackie and three other Jane Does filed lawsuits claiming they were groomed and sexually abused while they were students in Core. Four former teachers, including Miller, are named in the suits as perpetrators. The alleged abuse happened between 1994 and 2009; during that same time frame, according to public records, two additional Core teachers were convicted of crimes involving students, including statutory rape, and a third Cleveland teacher whose classes were popular with magnet students was convicted of possession of child pornography.

Read the legal complaints filed by the four Jane Does and an open letter written by the first woman to come forward to report abuse.

An estimated 10 percent of U.S. students suffer sexual misconduct at the hands of a school employee before they leave high school. Over the past decade, LAUSD has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in response to abuse and harassment claims. What makes Core unique is the number of teachers accused of misconduct over a prolonged period, and the apparent use of the magnet’s curriculum itself to groom students. There is also evidence that some of the teachers’ colleagues and school officials were aware of what was happening but did little or nothing to stop it. “They put the magnet program’s reputation over a student’s well-being. That hurts, you know?” said Kate*, a classmate of Jackie’s and another plaintiff in the lawsuits. “At the end of the day, it was almost like they didn’t care.”

Like the blind thrust faults beneath Los Angeles, the network of suspected wrongdoing at Core is dense, and its capacity for devastation is enormous. This story is based on extensive interviews with the four Jane Does, dozens of other Core alumni, and multiple educators with knowledge of the program. It draws from hundreds of pages of depositions and other legal documents, as well as personal correspondence, yearbooks, journals, and social media postings shared by Core graduates. Two of the accused teachers, including Miller, are deceased; the others either declined to comment for this story or did not respond to interview requests. A spokesperson for LAUSD, which is named as a defendant in the lawsuits, said in a statement that the district “does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”

In 2021, Core celebrated its 40th anniversary. The program remains a crown jewel of LA’s public education system. The women who have come forward understand why: Core taught them to disrupt the status quo, expose injustice, and demand accountability for harm. Now they are doing just that.

Magnet programs were created to right wrongs. In the late 1960s, U.S. cities responded to persistent racial segregation by launching specialized courses of study—science and math, for instance, or language immersion—in public schools. Students throughout a district were invited to apply; acceptance was contingent on factors such as racial background and socioeconomic status. The programs were called magnets because they were intended to attract students from all walks of life.

In 1981, Cleveland’s principal asked Neil Anstead to develop a magnet program inside the high school. A Renaissance man, Anstead had been teaching social studies, economics, and art history at Cleveland for more than twenty years; he loved opera so much, he eventually offered a class in that, too. Anstead designed a program predicated on the idea that the humanities were for everyone—not just, in his words, “upper- and middle-class students,” or those of “higher ability.” Magnet students were bused in from across the Valley and other parts of Los Angeles.

The magnet’s curriculum was organized thematically: 9th grade focused on world cultures, 10th on Western civilization, 11th on American studies, and 12th on philosophy and modern thought. “Core” became shorthand for the program because magnet pupils took a nucleus of humanities courses together and attended classes in other subjects alongside the rest of the Cleveland student body. Magnet courses focused on writing—lots of essays, few tests—and were rooted in discussions of what Anstead described as questions “important to living more meaningful lives.” Among them: Is there free will? What is art? Should people be guided more by reason or by emotion? “In the hands of flexible and sensitive teachers,” Anstead wrote in a paper for the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, these questions “keep students hooked from bell to bell.”

Technically, Core was subject to the authority of Cleveland’s main office. In practice, however, it was a school within a school. Anstead served as the de facto administrator, making hiring decisions, managing budgets, and overseeing curriculum development. But magnet faculty enjoyed a great deal of autonomy—Anstead, who developed a reputation among Core students for being gentle and brilliant, if a bit absentminded, gave teachers free rein over their classes. Each grade had a faculty team led by a coordinator; the team co-taught some class sessions and graded students’ essays together. “Teachers must be workaholics,” Anstead once told the Los Angeles Times. “They must be prepared to spend evenings, weekends, and part of their summers together.” Magnet faculty tended to be charismatic: Some teachers were personable in class, forging friendships with students, while others engaged in argumentative dialogue or maintained the cool detachment of an august college professor.

The program was an instant hit. One early alum wrote in a testimonial for the magnet that graduate school “began where … Core classes left off.” Another alum told me that when she got to UCLA, her essays were of such high quality that her professors thought she was plagiarizing. Core became so beloved that before long there was a robust pipeline of alumni who, after finishing college, came back to teach in the program.

In 1986, the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, a nonprofit organization, decided to build on Core’s success by installing similar programs at public schools throughout the city. LAEP called the initiative Humanitas, and participating teachers shadowed Core faculty to learn how to craft and implement a humanities curriculum. Within five years, Humanitas had chapters in 29 schools, involving some 3,500 students and 180 teachers. “In most high schools, you just pass from class to class. If you’re lucky, you might have a teacher who understands you and tries to help you with stuff. But that was not the case here,” Judith Johnson, a former LAEP administrator, told me. “By bringing people into teams, the teachers had a community, and the kids had a community.”

“Stay away from Miller,” an older female student told Kappes at lunch one day. “He tries to sleep with students.”

When Kasia Kappes entered Core as a freshman in 1991, she was nervous. Bright and artistic, Kappes had attended a Catholic middle school, where she wore a uniform and the teachers ran a tight ship. Public school seemed chaotic by comparison. But in E Hall, in the bubble of Core, Kappes felt at home. The teachers were engaging, the classes were inspiring, and the students were enthusiastic. “I just thought sending me there was the best thing my parents ever did for me,” Kappes told me.

Like any high school, however, Cleveland had a rumor mill, and teachers were often the subject of gossip. There were stories about Core instructors who smoked with students. Two longtime faculty members were said to be having an affair. Students talked about an art teacher who was “creepy” with male students. Girls whispered about a math instructor who looked up their skirts in class.

One rumor gave Kappes pause, because it was accompanied by a warning. “Stay away from Miller,” an older female student told her at lunch one day. “He tries to sleep with students.”

Kappes decided to do what the student said, just in case she was right. That worked well enough until 11th grade, when she was in Miller’s class. One day he pulled Kappes aside and asked why she wouldn’t talk to him. “I wasn’t going to accuse a teacher of sleeping with a student,” Kappes said. “So I made something up.” He was friendly, and Kappes felt like he was being genuine. She decided to give him a chance.

Soon she was spending a lot of time in Miller’s classroom, a standalone building on a corner of campus facing an adjoining street. Miller was known to let students ditch school by climbing out his window. The room had Malcolm X and Bob Marley posters. When teenagers hung out there between classes, at lunch, or after school, Miller asked about their friendships and their crushes.

In class, Miller did more than ask questions: He encouraged students to talk about their personal lives in relation to the Core curriculum. Miller was the 11th-grade coordinator, overseeing units on classism, racism, and gender and sexuality, and when it came to sharing about those topics, nothing seemed off limits. Kids described trauma, anxiety, and problems at home. Students of color talked about encountering bias, a topic that was the subject of an annual class exercise called the power pyramid. Core juniors were corralled into a room and instructed to organize themselves according to race: Black and Latino students were on the floor, Asian students were on chairs, and white students stood over everyone. This, the kids were told, was how society saw them.

Miller also showed students provocative movies, including Oleanna, a David Mamet film based on his play of the same name, which depicts a female college student who accuses a male professor of sexual harassment. According to Kappes, Miller wanted to know what the class thought of the plot: “Was there inappropriateness going on between the two? Where do you draw the line on that kind of stuff?”

Kappes trusted Miller and confided in him. Once, after she got in a fight with her parents, he picked her up at home and drove her to a friend’s place. It wasn’t unusual for Core teachers to go above and beyond for a student. Kappes said that one teacher, Rene Shufelt, helped pay for her art school applications. Kappes also considered Richard Coleman, Core’s 10th-grade coordinator, a “legit friend.” She took care of his cats when he was out of town, and Coleman joined Kappes and her friends at movies, concerts, and Disneyland. Over Thanksgiving break in 1994, Kappes’s senior year, she and a few other girls went on a camping trip to Arizona led by Coleman, an avid hiker. According to depositions from Kappes and other students on the trip, the only other chaperone was Coleman’s friend David DeMetz, a paramedic in his mid-twenties.

Kappes and her friends weren’t sneaking around. “We’d come back to school and be like, ‘Oh yeah, we went hiking with Coleman.’ No one batted an eyelash at any of this,” Kappes said. “As weird as things seemed at times, it was also just kind of normal.”

Normal is a word many Core alumni use to talk about things that were anything but. A better word, perhaps, is pervasive. The blurring of lines between students and teachers was everywhere. So was speculation about lines being crossed outright. But a rumor is just a rumor, until the moment it isn’t.

One day when Kappes was a senior, Miller took her out to dinner with Jackie. Kappes was a year older than Jackie, and the two girls had become friends thanks to Miller; he seemed to have a knack for bringing students together, nurturing connections. Kappes knew that Miller and Jackie were spending a lot of time together, but she didn’t think it was inappropriate—she herself had grown so close with Miller that “he was like my dad,” Kappes said.

As they ate, Miller initiated a discussion about whether he and Jackie should have sex. Kappes was horrified but kept her feelings to herself as Miller began to rationalize the subject. “We were having intellectual—and I say that in quotes—conversations to justify these things,” Kappes told me. “It kind of felt like an extension of class.” Miller took the position that sleeping with Jackie wouldn’t be wrong, because if people have feelings for each other, they should act on them. “He was trying to get us to tell him it was OK,” Kappes said. She remembered Miller looking to her especially for support, and being confused as to why. A conversation that took place after the meal was clarifying. “He goes, ‘Well, you understand how this is because of you and Coleman,’ ” Kappes said. “It dawned on me later that he thought I was in a relationship with Coleman.”

At a sleepover after the dinner, Jackie asked Kappes what she should do. Kappes didn’t know what to tell her, and the girls never talked about the discussion with Miller again. Neither did they tell anyone else about it. Jackie buried the encounter so deep in her mind that, as an adult, she would have trouble remembering it at all.

What she could never forget were the moments Miller got her alone. He urged Jackie to join a community group that provided peer education about HIV/AIDS. Meetings were held once a week, and Miller offered to drive her. He held hands with Jackie in the car. Sometimes he did more. Jackie remembered sitting in his car in a parking lot, aware of the smell of his head, his shampoo—Miller was embracing her, crying as he told her that he loved her.

If you or someone you know has been sexually abused, help is available. RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual-violence organization, operates a 24/7 hotline (1-800-656-4673) and provides other resources for survivors on its website.

One day, as Miller dropped Jackie off at home after a meeting, he said, “Write to me.” As he drove away, Jackie realized that her mom was in the garage and had heard him. Her mom, who until then had thought Miller was simply a supportive teacher taking an interest in Jackie’s future, demanded to know what he meant. Jackie didn’t want to talk about the notes she and Miller were leaving for each other in his filing cabinet, so she said he was just telling her to do her homework.

Not long after that, Jackie’s mom was putting laundry away when she spotted a stack of letters tucked inside Jackie’s dresser. She picked one up and saw that it was full of compliments about her daughter, including how beautiful she was. The letter was signed “Chris.” Jackie’s mom put two and two together and bolted for her car. “I drove to Cleveland like a mad woman,” she told me.

Jackie’s mom went to Miller’s classroom, pounded on the door, and demanded that he come out. “I just remember going crazy,” she said. “I had a letter in my hand. I said, ‘What is this? What are you doing?’ And his face went completely white and just blank.” Students in nearby classrooms could hear Jackie’s mom yelling. “She ripped him a new one,” Kappes said, “telling him to stay away from her daughter, that she was going to get a restraining order.”

According to Jackie’s mom, Miller cried and told her that he was having a hard time in his personal life, that his wife was sick and he couldn’t afford to lose his job. In a faculty meeting shortly after the incident, Miller told a different story. “He stated that he told her that if she truly believed” he was abusing Jackie, “she was welcome to join him as he went to the principal’s office to resign,” Denis Komen, a Core teacher at the time, said in a deposition. “It was very disturbing to me that a parent would come in and make such a statement, and I was surprised at his response.” (Komen stopped working at Cleveland soon after this incident.)

Jackie’s mom told me that she did go to the school administration. When she left Miller at his classroom door, she reported him to assistant principal Carole Spence. In an email, Spence stated that “no abuse was ever reported to me by anyone,” involving Miller or any other teacher. She added that “assuming this event occurred with some other person”—another administrator, perhaps—Cleveland’s principal should have been informed immediately. At that point, the school’s legal responsibilities would have kicked into gear.

In California as in all U.S. states, teachers and school officials are required by law to report known or suspected child abuse to law enforcement. When someone makes an abuse allegation or reports possible misconduct, it isn’t up to a “mandated reporter” to determine whether the claim is true—they are obligated to file a suspected child abuse report, or SCAR. But according to Jackie’s lawsuit, after her mom went to Cleveland’s main office, “no action was taken.” Records obtained as part of discovery in the suit contain no mention of a SCAR being filed against Miller at any time during his tenure at Cleveland. An additional request submitted to LAUSD “for information regarding any complaints involving, investigations involving, or disciplinary records” for Miller turned up “no responsive records.”

Apart from Denis Komen, the various teachers and school officials deposed thus far in Jackie’s lawsuit said they didn’t remember a parent confronting or reporting Miller. Most of them also said they didn’t recall ever hearing rumors that Miller was inappropriate with a student. But according to a former employee of Humanitas, the LAUSD-wide program modeled on Core, knowledge of possible misconduct went all the way to the top of the magnet.

The former employee, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, described a one-on-one meeting with Neil Anstead, Core’s founder and longtime coordinator, during which Anstead brought up Miller’s alleged behavior. Anstead indicated that he wasn’t going to pursue the matter. “He said, ‘You can’t fault someone for who they fall in love with,’ or something,” the former Humanitas employee recalled. “It was a very romanticized version of something that sounded scary to me.” (Anstead died in 2020.)

According to Jackie, after her mom found the letters in her bedroom, Miller knew he couldn’t be seen alone with her, so he came up with new ways for them to spend time together. He told Jackie that they should meet for lunch in Vivian Atkin’s classroom. Atkin had joined Core in 1994. She taught freshman English and was on the 11th-grade faculty team. Miller assured Jackie that they could confide in Atkin, who had helped him burn the letters Jackie had written him. “They were destroying evidence, but it was presented to me that it was ceremonious, like a cleansing,” Jackie said. (Atkin didn’t respond to interview requests.)

In a deposition, Jackie stated that Atkin was present for discussions about Miller’s romantic interest in her. “The conversations would basically be about how people don’t understand, you know, our relationship,” Jackie said. “Ms. Atkin understood.” Jackie didn’t know that Atkin and Miller were sexually involved. Atkin, who like Miller was married to someone else, said in a deposition that the affair was brief—a claim disputed by alumni interviewed for this story and by witnesses in the current lawsuits.

Miller also encouraged Jackie to start spending time with Claudia*, another junior. Sometimes he joined them. In May 1995, he went with the girls to a reggae concert, where they smoked pot together. According to Claudia, Miller made advances toward her, but she could sense that she wasn’t his primary target. “He was very focused on [Jackie],” Claudia said in a deposition. “He encouraged my relationship to her … to get her away from the pack, in a new pack.”

It worked: Jackie pulled away from her closest friends to spend time with Claudia and Miller. People who cared for her didn’t know where to turn. “I certainly never felt like there was somebody at the program or the school that I could go talk to about my suspicions,” a childhood friend and fellow Core student said in a deposition. “It didn’t feel like they would be on my side.”

Kasia Kappes put it more succinctly. “It doesn’t matter if your mom knows,” she told me. “Nothing is going to happen.”

Coleman asked how old she would be when she graduated. Kate said she would be 18. “We should go on a date then,” he replied.

One day in the summer of 1995, a few months after Jackie’s mom came to campus, Kappes got a phone call from Richard Coleman. That in itself wasn’t unusual. Kappes, who graduated from Cleveland that June, had talked with Coleman on the phone frequently when she was a student. But on this particular call Coleman seemed anxious. “I messed up,” Kappes remembered him telling her. “I kissed Kate*.”

For the second time that year, Kappes was stunned by something a teacher was telling her. Like Jackie, Kate was a rising senior. She and Kappes were close, and together they hung out with Coleman. The three of them bantered; they had inside jokes. Coleman once described them in a letter he wrote to Kappes as an “awesome (if not somewhat kinky) trio.”

On the phone, Kappes told Coleman he was an idiot. He knew Kate had a crush on him; Kappes had told him so. Why would he lead her on?

Kate had admired Coleman since sophomore year, when she’d been in his class. On the first day he told students that his essay tests were so demanding, most of them would never finish. Kate studied all weekend before the first one. In class she wrote dozens of pages, capping them off with the triumphant words “I FINISHED.” When she got the essay back, Coleman had replied, “YES YOU DID.”

The following year, when Jackie started spending her lunch period in Miller’s room, Kate did the same in Coleman’s. Other girls were often there too. Coleman, who was in his mid-thirties, was aloof in an appealing way, and many female students found him attractive. He had long brown hair and a beard, prompting comparisons to Jesus. Kate found Coleman intelligent and charming. They talked about art and music; they had the same taste. Soon she was writing about him in her journal.

One day, according to Kate, she and Coleman were alone in his classroom when he asked how old she would be when she graduated. Kate said she would be 18. “We should go on a date then,” Coleman replied. He wrote his phone number down. Soon they were talking on the phone after school. Coleman told her that he had feelings for her.

In a deposition, Kate recalled Coleman saying that he wanted to plan a weekend away, just the two of them, in Joshua Tree. But then he called one day to say they should do a shorter hike in Los Angeles instead. According to Kate, Coleman explained that he had talked to a friend of his who’d told him it was a bad idea to be alone with her for a weekend. The friend was a former Core teacher who, according to multiple sources interviewed for this story, and one who testified under oath, was rumored to have pursued a sexual relationship with a student and subsequently to have left the magnet to be with her.

During their hike, according to Kate, Coleman asked, “What are we? Are we friends?” She sensed he wanted them to be something more, and she thought she felt the same way. But the first time Coleman tried to be physical with her, Kate pushed him away. Eventually, she didn’t say no to Coleman’s advances, although her discomfort remained. One day he kissed her in a parking lot. According to Kate’s deposition, the abuse later intensified, becoming more sexual. It continued into the spring of her senior year. (Coleman declined an interview request, noting, “I cannot comment while this matter is under litigation.”)

In her deposition, Kappes said that when Coleman called to tell her that he’d “messed up” by kissing Kate, he was also “very angry” Kate had written about the incident in her journal. What if someone read it? No one did; keeping secrets was torture, but Kate did it anyway. She kept her journal to herself, and stayed quiet about the emails Coleman sent her describing himself as an “oral sex fanatic” and signing off “miss you and your flesh.” About a smiling Miller asking her one day if she was “keeping Coleman happy.” About how Miller wasn’t the only teacher who seemed to know or suspect the truth.

In a journal entry, Kate recounted a conversation that Coleman told her he’d had with Ray Linn, a philosophy teacher and Core’s 12th-grade coordinator. Linn had spotted Coleman driving Kate away from school in his Jeep, and suggested it was a bad look for teachers to be seen giving rides to students. (In a deposition, Linn said he didn’t remember this conversation, and never heard or suspected that Coleman was inappropriate with students.) According to Kate, Marty Kravchak, another Core teacher, approached her more than once to ask if anything was “going on” between her and Coleman. “I don’t know if I actually said no, but I didn’t say yes,” Kate told me. “That’s what I did with a lot of people.” In her deposition, Kate recalled Kravchak referring to Coleman as a “dirty old man.”

Kravchak, who didn’t reply to interview requests, stated under oath that she didn’t recall talking to Kate. “I must have really blocked that out,” she said. Kravchak did remember female students who had a crush on Coleman—“drooling in his presence comes to mind.” She said that she told him to keep his classroom door open, “because those girls are going to be a problem.”

At least one teacher could recall being concerned for Kate. Lori Howe, a Core graduate who joined the magnet faculty in the mid-1990s, overheard students joking one day about how Coleman would be taking Kate to the prom, since they seemed to be dating. In a deposition, Howe said she “immediately” went to Anstead. “He said that just because students say things … does not make them true and that he would look into it and take care of it,” Howe said. A request to LAUSD for documentation of complaints against or investigations of Coleman turned up “no responsive records.”

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At the time, Jackie and Kate didn’t have a word for what they were experiencing. Today, as adults, they know it as grooming. According to both women, Miller and Coleman were isolating them, complimenting them, encouraging them to be vulnerable, earning their trust, and normalizing inappropriate behavior. The men were also gaslighting them, exploiting their friendships, and stoking adolescent jealousy to draw them closer. In response, the girls experienced a flurry of contradictory emotions: They felt flattered and uneasy, empowered and beholden, attracted and revolted. Unsure how to manage these feelings, they took cues from the very adults who were abusing them. After all, they’d always been taught to trust their teachers.

High school provides a convenient framework for cycles of abuse. Students are around for only a handful of years, and the pool of potential targets is constantly replenished. According to Kate’s deposition, as her time in Core drew to a close, she watched Coleman turn his attention to a younger female student. At first she was heartbroken. But by the time she graduated in 1996, Kate had convinced herself she was ready to move on. Years later she reached out to tell Coleman about studying abroad and her career plans. “It might have been a little more like, ‘Look at how well I’m doing in spite of you,’ ” she said.

Jackie’s dynamic with Miller started shifting the summer before her senior year. He encouraged her to attend Brotherhood-Sisterhood Camp, a program started by the Los Angeles chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews that facilitated interracial, interfaith dialogue among high schoolers. Jackie found the experience transformative, but when she mentioned to a female counselor at the camp that Miller was helping her deal with challenges in her life, she sensed something was off. Without specifying why, the counselor told Jackie that Miller wasn’t a good person for her to lean on.

As the fall semester began, Jackie distanced herself from Miller. He didn’t object. In fact, he soon alerted Jackie and Claudia that the three of them shouldn’t spend time together anymore. The impetus seemed to be a family member of Claudia’s reading her journal, including details about Miller’s behavior; according to Claudia’s deposition, this prompted a conversation with school administrators. After that, Miller brought the girls into Vivian Atkin’s classroom one day. He played a Simon and Garfunkel song and gave them gifts: a poster for Jackie, an anklet for Claudia. It was as if he were saying goodbye. But he assured them that if they needed anything, they could always reach out to him through Atkin.

Claudia left Cleveland soon after that—she couldn’t take the stress of Miller’s manipulations, which had become the subject of school gossip. “Everyone knew,” Claudia stated in a deposition. She also attributed her leaving Cleveland to “a blind eye turned by the school…. You were supposed to continue walking through school like everything was OK, and it was not OK.”

Jackie made it to graduation. For her, college was the struggle. She didn’t trust male professors. If they complimented her work, she assumed they were trying to coax her into a physical relationship. Eventually, she quit school and started waiting tables and bartending.

Over the years—and with therapy—Jackie unpacked the baggage of Miller’s abuse. She would never be rid of it, but at least she could see it for what it was, assess it, call it wrong. She also began to reconsider the way Miller and other Core faculty approached teaching. As a teenager she’d found it stimulating, even revolutionary, but what if there was another side to it?

A particular class exercise stood out to her. As part of the 11th-grade unit focused on gender and sexuality, Miller had instructed male students to line up all the girls in his classroom in order of attractiveness. The lesson was supposed to be about how beauty is subjective, but all Jackie could remember was the fear churning in her stomach over where she’d be placed in line. “It was like this weird psychological torture,” she told me.

Jackie wasn’t the only Core student to feel that way.

A familiar name came up more than once in interviews with Core alumni: Jane Elliott. An elementary school teacher in Riceville, Iowa, Elliott rose to prominence soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when she divided her all-white third-grade class into two groups: children with blue eyes, and children with brown eyes. She told the children with blue eyes that they were genetically inferior, denied them access to playground equipment, and prohibited them from drinking water from school fountains. The next day, she reversed the children’s roles. The point was to demonstrate how racism functions.

While the “blue eyes, brown eyes” experiment made Elliott a local pariah—her own children faced harassment, and the family dog was poisoned—it also made her a national sensation. She appeared on TV and became a sought-after voice on racism, running workshops that expanded upon her famous experiment. She was invited to schools, corporate retreats, even a White House conference. Today she remains a highly regarded diversity educator.

But Elliott isn’t without her detractors. When Stephen G. Bloom, a journalism professor, began writing a book about Elliott several years ago, he found that the majority of interview subjects were critical of her legacy, including people who had participated in her work. These sources described Elliott using targeted insults and blunt manipulation, and refusing to listen to feedback. “The experiment was a sadistic exhibition of power and authority—levers controlled by Elliott,” Bloom concluded. “Stripping away the veneer of the experiment, what was left had nothing to do with race. It was about cruelty and shaming.”

Several Core alumni told me that Chris Miller admired Elliott and modeled some of his teaching methods on her work. Tallie Ben Daniel, who graduated from the magnet in 2001, shared a YouTube video in which Elliott singles out students in a classroom for criticism and asks how it makes them feel. According to Ben Daniel, this was “beat for beat what class was like” for Core juniors.

At the beginning of the 11th grade, magnet students were given an IQ test and lined up according to their scores. There were protests and tears. Before the bell rang, students were told that the test was fake and that IQ was a useless measurement. “There was just always this gotcha,” Ben Daniel told me.

The power pyramid was also fraught. In a deposition, Brandi Craig, a Black alum who attended the magnet in the aughts, said the exercise—like “a lot” of activities in Core—seemed to exploit the trauma of students of color, perhaps for no other reason than to ensure that white students had “an interesting experience to talk about on their college essays.” (At the time, about 40 percent of Core students in a typical cohort were white, while Asian and Latino students each constituted about a quarter. Black students made up the remaining 10 percent.) Other alumni found the exercise one-dimensional in its assumptions of who holds social power and why. One year a white student burst into tears and said he didn’t belong at the top of the pyramid because he lived in a car with his mom. When Ben Daniel suggested that being queer might modulate her advantages in life, Miller “laid into” her. “Look at the people of color sitting on the floor,” she recalled him saying. “How dare you deny the reality that’s in front of you, that you have privilege and they don’t!” Ben Daniel said she “took it,” and felt rewarded as a result.

At the time, there were three other people on the 11th-grade teaching team: Vivian Atkin, as well as Donna Hill and Bill Paden, both of whom were Black. Paden liked to debate Core kids and push them to defend their intellectual positions. Adam Titcher, a 2000 alum, said that even after graduating, he and Paden had heated discussions on the phone about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In interviews and depositions, many alumni also described Paden as flirtatious. Rachel Becker, who graduated in 1998, recalled him joking about her breasts in front of other students. “He said, ‘When Rachel Becker does jumping jacks, she gets a black eye,’ ” she stated in a deposition. “It was the most humiliating experience of my teenage years.” (Paden did not respond to interview requests.)

During the 11th-grade unit on gender and sexuality, Core teachers encouraged girls to share their experiences with sexual violence. Sometimes female faculty told stories of their own. Alanna Bailey, a 2003 graduate, described “the floodgates” opening one day. “Almost every single female in the class was saying things like ‘I was raped by my father,’ ” Bailey said, “or ‘so-and-so molested me,’ or ‘I’ve been raped three times at parties.’ ”

No alumni interviewed for this story recalled mental health resources being made available to them while they attended the magnet. “Core just ripped stuff out of us,” Bailey told me. “We had nowhere to put it.” Several graduates said the program drilled into them the message that if a situation in class made them uncomfortable, they should ignore their gut—their apprehension was just an expression of the social expectations Core was helping them to slough off. Many alumni also said the faculty instilled a belief that talking about Core with anyone who wasn’t in the program wasn’t worth their time; only people on the inside, who shared their experiences, could appreciate what the magnet was doing. Permission slips for class experiences that focused on mature content were often opt-out: Parents only had to sign if they didn’t want their kids to participate, which meant students could shove a slip in a backpack and forget about it. “From day one, you’re trusting the teachers,” Ben Daniel said, “because they’re doing this for your own good.”

“This” included more than just the encouragement of soul-baring in class. In sophomore English, while reading the play Equus, students were sometimes urged to act out a scene in which a character reaches sexual climax. Juniors watched The Accused, the Academy Award–winning film about a brutal gang rape. In the 12th grade, according to multiple sources’ interviews and depositions, Ray Linn openly mocked students in his class—several alumni remembered him calling them “idiots.” Students got the sense that if they didn’t understand that Linn was being ironic, it was their problem. Judith Johnson, who sometimes sat in on Linn’s classes as part of her work with LAEP, told me she “would cringe when he would critique a student in front of all the other students.” She said she expressed concerns about Linn’s “degrading” methods to Anstead, who assured her that “the kids responded to Ray.” (Linn did not reply to interview requests.)

One former Core student told me, “It felt like you had no choice but to conform to what your teachers were telling you, and not only about the curriculum. You were obligated to buy into their view of you.” Impressionable teenagers did just that. As adults, some remain fervent advocates of the program. “You stand behind your journalistic integrity, yes?” one alum asked in a Facebook message, in response to an interview request. “Because CORE is a solid program, and shining a disingenuous spotlight on it would do more harm than good.”

Shapiro didn’t remember Atkin saying anything, but her presence seemed to serve a purpose. “I remember having this thought, like, well, there’s a woman in the room with me right now, and if she’s in here, this must be OK,” Shapiro said.

Michael Leviton was a rarity in Core, a student who thought that much of the pedagogy was flawed and self-indulgent. The 1998 graduate said so to anyone who would listen, and often to people who didn’t want to. Extreme candor was the defining feature of his life: Leviton’s parents insisted that he should never lie, and should speak his mind no matter what, because not being honest was a personal failing.

Leviton, who is a friend of mine and the person who informed me about the Core lawsuits, would be the first to say that his view of the magnet was influenced by coming of age in a “little honesty cult.” Still, his upbringing gave him a finely tuned bullshit detector—and no one set it off quite like Chris Miller. As Leviton saw it, Miller “got off on the power of manipulating teenagers.” But whenever Leviton objected to how Miller taught, he was shot down by fellow students or other teachers.

During senior year, right before graduation, a friend confided in Leviton about an encounter she’d had with Miller. The friend and another senior, Rachel Shapiro, were Miller’s favorite female students at the time—he always seemed to have a few. One day he took them out to eat off campus and told them that he liked them. “He says to my friend, ‘I want to date you,’ and to me he says, ‘You make me feel warm and fuzzy inside,’ ” Shapiro recalled. After the meal, the girls climbed into their car and laughed uncontrollably.

Several days later, Miller pulled Shapiro into his classroom during lunch. In a deposition, Shapiro said that Vivian Atkin was there, too. Miller told Shapiro that he’d noticed she and her friend had distanced themselves from him since the meal. “He basically laid it out and was like, ‘It’s your choice, but there’s nothing wrong with this, and these feelings are real,’ ” Shapiro told me. Miller indicated that he’d had relationships with female students before.

Shapiro didn’t remember Atkin saying anything, but her presence seemed to serve a purpose. “I remember having this thought, like, well, there’s a woman in the room with me right now, and if she’s in here, this must be OK,” Shapiro said. “Because if somebody else knows about it and it’s not a secret, then what’s wrong with this?” Still, Shapiro rebuffed Miller.

When Leviton learned what had happened, he was more confident than ever that something was terribly wrong in Core. Armed with the truth—and in the habit of telling it—he went to his mom, Linda, who called the school. According to Linda, she spoke with principal Eileen Banta and they scheduled a meeting with Miller. In Linda’s recollection, which she shared under oath and in an interview, Miller came into the room and said that he had no idea what she was talking about and that he didn’t have time to be there.

Afterward, Miller continued teaching. Shapiro said that she and her friend never spoke to the school administration. In a deposition, Banta said that she didn’t remember meeting with Linda and Miller or otherwise hearing about the allegations against Miller. “I wouldn’t forget something like that,” Banta said.

But Linda still has her personal calendar from when the meeting took place. “About Miller” is scribbled under August 4, 1998—four years after Miller reportedly began grooming Jackie, and one year before he allegedly set his sights on yet another student.

Like many kids, Zoe* had a hard time in middle school. Core, which she entered in 1997, felt like a fresh, exciting start for a creative and opinionated teenager like her. “Students were seen and treated as the intellectual equals of our teachers,” Zoe said. “There was this feeling of, you’re here, you’re special, this is a special place, these teachers are super special, don’t fuck it up.”

Over Zoe’s four years in Core, students branched off into cliques centered on particular teachers. Black students and athletes—cheerleaders in particular—tended to be devotees of Bill Paden. Budding journalists hung around Marty Kravchak, who advised the student newspaper. Girls who were into art or drama gravitated toward Coleman, who, in addition to coordinating the 10th grade, taught AP Art History.

Zoe bonded with Atkin during freshman English. Atkin sang a few bars of music every time she saw Zoe and told her they were kindred spirits. When Atkin said Zoe and Miller would get along, Zoe believed her. In 11th grade, Zoe became a devout Miller disciple. She threw herself into class discussions and exercises, and also spent time alone with Miller and Atkin. The Matrix had come out that year, and Miller showed the film to students. It became the framework for talking about the 11th-grade curriculum: The Matrix represented society’s strictures, and Core was what extricated students, or “unplugged” them. Miller sometimes called himself Neo, the name of Keanu Reeves’s character in the movie. Privately, he referred to Zoe as Trinity, after the leather-clad heroine played by Carrie-Anne Moss. Other times he called her Rapture, and referred to himself as Journey—the same nickname he’d told Jackie to use for him in the letters she once wrote him.

According to Zoe, Miller and Atkin became involved in her relationships with her classmates. “They would insert themselves into the drama or conflicts that we were having with one another,” she told me. Miller also made sexually provocative statements in front of students—for instance, that anyone with a penis was a potential rapist, save for a few enlightened men like himself. He once asked Zoe how she felt about the taboo of being attracted to one’s own sibling; later she wondered whether he was gauging her response to the notion of forbidden desire. After that encounter, during a field trip, Miller sat next to Zoe on the bus, where he held her hand and touched her legs.

One day, Miller and Atkin took Zoe to the school library to tell her something important. “They wanted me to know that they were in love with each other. They said they had a positive, liberated relationship,” Zoe said. She was honored that they trusted her. At the end of the conversation, they all hugged. (In a deposition, Atkin said, “I’m sure we must have told her about the involvement, but I can’t remember when and I can’t remember doing it…. I had become so much of a friend that I told her things I shouldn’t have told her.”)

After that conversation, according to Zoe, the three of them kept in closer touch than ever, including over the summer after her junior year. They talked on the phone and sometimes met up at a California Pizza Kitchen. At a certain point, Miller began physically abusing her. He called what was happening love. On at least one occasion, Zoe said under oath, Atkin participated in the abuse. In her deposition, Atkin denied this allegation. She admitted to letting Zoe paint her bare chest as part of a “healing” ceremony after she had a mastectomy. Miller was present when this happened. “It was not erotic at all,” Atkin said. But according to Zoe, after the ceremony, her teachers touched her and one another sexually.

Zoe told me that Miller, who by then was in his mid-fifties, used the word “bifurcate” to explain how she should navigate her relationship with him and Atkin. After spending time together, “they have to go back to their spouses and I have to go back to my parents’ house. We have to put it aside, compartmentalize it,” Zoe said. “They were teaching me how to dissociate.” She told no one what was happening, not even her closest friends, and tried to convince herself that she was guarding a precious secret.

Deep down, though, Zoe felt conflicted. She attempted more than once to end sexual contact with Miller, but he punished her by cutting off communication. “It never lasted longer than maybe a day or two days, because it was fucking torture for me to lose this person that I had come to completely depend upon,” Zoe said. She told me that she sought advice from Atkin, who said her discomfort with Miller was just internalized ageism.

Other students knew Zoe had a close bond with Atkin and Miller. Some of them thought they should be so lucky. But not everyone was comfortable with what they witnessed. In a deposition, a 1995 Core alum who came back briefly as a teacher described seeing Zoe crying at school one day and being aware that it was “connected to Chris Miller.” She said that she went to Anstead, who “said he would follow up.” She never heard anything else about it.

After Zoe graduated in 2001, she enrolled at UCLA, and Miller told her he was leaving his wife, so he could see her whenever he wanted. (Miller’s wife did not respond to interview requests.) But when Zoe visited Miller’s new apartment, she knew she didn’t want to spend time there. “What was I going to tell all my peers when they wondered what this old man was doing, picking me up from school, from my dorm, and taking me somewhere?” she said. Zoe began to pull away from Miller and everyone she knew from Core. “I just didn’t want to have contact,” she said.

One day, Miller, Atkin, and some of Zoe’s former classmates came to UCLA to stage an “intervention.” They sat in a sculpture garden next to the theater department, and one by one the group told Zoe how she’d hurt them by disappearing from their lives. When it was Miller’s turn, he cried and yelled. He ripped grass out of the ground and threw it at Zoe. “I hung my head down. I couldn’t look at any of them,” she told me. “I was consumed by guilt.” (In her deposition, Atkin confirmed the visit to UCLA, but said she didn’t remember it being described as an intervention or Miller becoming upset with Zoe.)

Zoe’s contact with Miller and Atkin ebbed and flowed after that. So did her trauma. In November 2007, she met with her former teachers at a restaurant in Northridge to confront them about their “inappropriate relationship”—she wasn’t yet ready to call it sexual abuse. “I started off by saying, ‘I have a lot of things I want to share with you, and I don’t want you to speak until I’m done,’ ” Zoe recalled. (In her deposition, Atkin stated that Zoe told them “she felt she had been spoiled for any other relationships because this relationship was so powerful,” but that “sex was never once mentioned.”)

According to Zoe, Miller, who had since returned to his marriage, apologized for not being “the adult you needed me to be.” He said that if she ever had any “angry feelings,” she should reach out to him. But Zoe didn’t. After she left Northridge that day, she never saw Miller again.

For a long time, it seemed as if the culture of Core would never change—not the curriculum, the emotional expectations, or the way teachers treated students. Some young faculty attempted to speak up, but nothing came of their complaints. When Lori Howe, the teacher who said she reported a rumor about Coleman and Kate to Neil Anstead, heard in the late 1990s about Miller instructing male students to line up their female classmates according to attractiveness—and to include Atkin in the exercise—Howe was “outraged.” She told Miller as much. “He basically blew off my concerns,” Howe said in a deposition. Soon after, she stopped teaching and became a counselor in Cleveland’s main office.

By the early 2000s, other Core alumni who’d become teachers found the magnet’s environment to be toxic, for both faculty and students. Ariane White, who’d graduated at the top of her class in the mid-1990s, became disillusioned with the men who’d once taught her, chief among them Ray Linn. Known for his wild mane of white hair and his colorful shirts, Linn had a teaching style that some alumni called Socratic but others, including White, described as bullying. In a deposition, White referred to class handouts Linn created consisting of sentences pulled from students’ essays. “It would say things like ‘Whoever wrote this should kill themselves,’ ” White said. When she shared her concerns, she felt belittled by Linn and dismissed by other teachers. She soon left Core for good.

There were other departures, the kind bound to happen when an academic program has existed for an appreciable amount of time. After working at Cleveland for nearly half a century, Anstead retired in 2004; the same year, he received a plaque on the Walk of Hearts, an installation in the Valley honoring exemplary teachers from the area. Miller and Atkin retired in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Around the same time, Coleman left Core and took a teaching position at a nearby community college.

These exits occurred on the heels of departures of a very different nature. Chris Biron, an art teacher in Core, was arrested in 2003. According to the LAPD, Biron had asked a male student to pose for him after school wearing “only his underwear.” Biron offered the boy $20 an hour. A criminal investigation ensued, and “based on the evidence seized,” police issued an arrest warrant. “It is believed that there may be additional victims,” the LAPD stated in a press release. Biron pled no contest to two charges: contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and possession of child pornography. (Biron did not respond to interview requests.)

Two years later, Michael Helwig, a former Cleveland math teacher, was making headlines: He was swept up in a law enforcement operation investigating child sex offenses, and was convicted of three counts pertaining to the possession and duplication of child pornography. Helwig, who by the time of his arrest had moved to another high school, hadn’t been part of the Core faculty, but magnet students had filled his accelerated program of honors and AP classes. According to multiple female alumni, Helwig called them pet names and commented on their appearances. In a deposition, a student recalled him asking if she went to nude beaches. Another said he once offered to give her an A if she got him a date with her elder sister, a senior at the time. (Helwig told me that if he made those comments, they were meant in jest, and that it surprised him any Core student thought otherwise. With regard to his criminal activity, Helwig said, “The arrest was the result of a mistake I made and I have moved on from it. I am proud of the person I have become and the life I have created.”)

No arrest was more seismic than the one that came next. Biron and Helwig weren’t among the giants of Core—the teachers who had the greatest clout and were the most widely admired among magnet students. But Bill Paden was.

In fact, Paden was an inspiration in every corner of Cleveland. In 2003, along with two other Black teachers, he’d called an assembly of Cleveland’s Black students to discuss their low test scores relative to their peers. Paden and his colleagues wanted to understand how to help the students reach their full potential. After the assembly, the teachers formed Village Nation, a program offering Black students tutoring and mentoring. (The name came from the much quoted phrase “It takes a village to raise a child.”) Black students’ test scores leapt, and national media took notice. In 2007, Village Nation was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. “The more you engage young people and give them an opportunity to actually critically analyze and think,” Paden told Oprah, “you’ll see a tremendous change in culture and how they think about themselves.”

By then, Paden had another feather in his cap: He was the new coordinator of Core’s 11th grade. The curriculum was much the same as it had been under Miller. The power pyramid was still an annual exercise, with some modifications, and students were still encouraged to share intimate details of their lives, to the point where it seemed like their class performance depended on it. “We were just crying at the feet of these teachers,” a student at the time told me. “There was always a sense of wanting to be the most broken.”

One day in the spring of 2008, a student asked if she could speak to a Cleveland counselor privately. She said it was about Paden. The student revealed that a recent female graduate had told her that, when she was a student at Cleveland, Paden had had sex with her. The counselor reported Paden to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. Soon after, Paden was escorted off campus and never came back.

At first his students didn’t know what had happened. “He was just gone,” said Brandi Craig, a Core junior at the time. The faculty didn’t formally address the matter with students or parents. Tara Jacobs, a Core alum who had returned to teach, stated in a deposition that the faculty “spent a lot of time talking about how did this happen,” but were outwardly focused “on making sure our students did not feel like their lives were turned upside down.” Eventually, students and other people with ties to Core learned that Paden had been convicted in a jury trial of misdemeanor statutory rape.

“It was an abusive organization,” Tallie Ben Daniel said. “The individual didn’t matter. It was the system that mattered.”

The news of Paden’s misconduct prompted Zoe, who had confronted Miller and Atkin in Northridge only a few months prior, to finally confide in her friends from high school about what had happened to her in Core. “I wish someone had reported Miller,” Zoe told them. Tallie Ben Daniel described Paden’s arrest as “the thing that broke the spell” for a lot of alumni. If students had missed warning signs about so prominent a teacher, what else had they misinterpreted—or been manipulated into ignoring—as kids?

In hindsight there were red flags everywhere. The lack of boundaries between teenagers and adults. The way faculty compelled students to expose their secrets. The feeling that what happened in Core stayed in Core. Rachel Shapiro told me “everybody was being groomed” to accept impropriety. Ben Daniel likened Core to a cult. “It was an abusive organization,” she said. “The individual didn’t matter. It was the system that mattered.”

But even as some alumni began to reevaluate Core’s culture, current students were in the thick of it. Brandi Craig, who graduated in 2009, said they idolized students who were teachers’ pets—the kids who did everything they could to impress their teachers, who projected vulnerability as a virtue, who dedicated themselves unwaveringly to Core’s ethos. “I can look back and see how the grooming was leeching through them,” Craig said.

Emma*, a classmate of Craig’s, admired Core faculty so much that she was once voted most likely to return as a teacher, a yearbook superlative. She was the kind of student who would laminate her notes before an exam so she could study them in the shower. Heading into senior year, she was the president of two clubs and the editor of the school newspaper. She was eyeing journalism programs at East Coast colleges. “I really felt like I could’ve done anything,” she said.

Emma met the newest magnet teacher shortly after the 2008 fall semester began. Brett Shufelt’s connections to Core ran deep: He’d graduated from the program in 2001, and his mom, Rene, was the teacher who’d once helped pay for Kasia Kappes’s art school applications. The summer before he began teaching, other faculty had told Shufelt to conduct his relationships with female students with the utmost care—they didn’t want even a hint of another Paden situation. “[We] had specific conversations with him about proper behavior and protocol and things like that,” Tara Jacobs said in a deposition.

Emma took an early bus to school every day, traveling some 14 miles from her home in a heavily Mexican-American corner of the Valley. One fall morning she asked Shufelt, who also got to campus early, if she could sit in his classroom to do homework before first period. Soon she was going to his room first thing most days. When she asked him to look at the outline of an essay she was writing, he told her it was “really smart.”

They started messaging on Facebook, and Emma began staying late after school to talk to Shufelt about classwork, college applications, and politics. He told her about being a Core student: how the curriculum had taught him to think deeply, how the yearbook had dedicated a page to his ever changing hairstyles. Ben Daniel, a close friend of Shufelt’s in high school, described him as smart and artistic, with an affinity for mosh pits. Shufelt told Emma that coming back as a Core teacher had always been his dream.

When Emma visited Emerson College in Boston, where she was offered a full scholarship, Shufelt was “really sour about it,” she recalled. He asked why she would want to go so far away from home. That question planted a seed of doubt she couldn’t shake. She ended up applying early to Mills College, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Over Thanksgiving break, Emma had tickets to see a production of the musical Spring Awakening. None of her friends could go, so she asked Shufelt if he wanted to join her—after all, Emma told me, “people went out with teachers all the time.” They watched the show, the plot of which centers on teenagers experiencing the first stirrings of sexual desire, in the theater’s front row. Afterward Shufelt asked if Emma wanted to get dinner. Emma ordered rice and beans, and Shufelt teased her for her “banal” order—the first time she’d ever heard that word. He paid for the meal, and they walked to an art exhibit before finishing off the evening with ice cream. “If he’d been 16, it would have been a great date,” Emma told me. “But he was 25.”

After Thanksgiving, Shufelt asked Emma to help him grade exams one day. They started at a Denny’s in the Valley, then moved to his house around the corner, where he said he’d forgotten a stack of students’ work. “His house was what I always thought that my adult house would be like—full of books, full of papers, art everywhere,” Emma said. When they finished grading, Emma moved to leave through the front door. Shufelt reached over her head to shut it. He kissed her, then drove her back to Denny’s so her mom could pick her up.

Sex followed a few nights later, again at his house. Shufelt said they needed to keep a low profile until Emma turned 18, which wouldn’t be until after graduation. Emma confided in a friend on Facebook, “He told me he loved me and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me.”

According to Emma, before winter break Tara Jacobs learned of the outing to see Spring Awakening, and she pulled Emma out of class to speak with her and Shufelt about it. Jacobs urged Shufelt to tell Emma what the two teachers apparently had discussed before the meeting. “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t have feelings for you, I don’t want to see you again, it shouldn’t have happened,’ ” Emma recalled. Later, in private, Shufelt told her he didn’t mean it. (In a deposition, Jacobs said she didn’t remember whether she met with Emma and Shufelt.)

Soon after, Emma’s mother read some Facebook messages Emma had exchanged with a friend, including one in which she said Shufelt had kissed her. Emma’s parents confronted her, and she alerted Shufelt. According to Emma, Shufelt told her that, at a Core faculty meeting held over winter break, he would announce that he was in love with a student and would be resigning.

After the faculty meeting, Gabriel Lemmon, the coordinator of the magnet since Anstead had stepped down, filed a SCAR. The document, dated January 8, 2009, states that “Brett Shufelt … met with a student at a restaurant,” and that “according to Shufelt, [the] student kissed him at conclusion of meeting—and he reports that he did not stop her.” When the spring semester began, Emma’s parents went to the principal’s office to talk about getting law enforcement involved in the situation. According to Emma, an administrator asked if her parents really wanted to put her through an investigation when she was so close to graduating—after all, she and Shufelt had only kissed.

Emma, who was present for the conversation, was too humiliated to tell the administrator that she and Shufelt had done far more than that. Her parents decided not to pursue an investigation. Emma went to class.

Emma overheard peers say she was “not hot enough for you to risk your career over.” On Facebook, a classmate said he wanted to “bash her brains in.”

Like Paden had less than a year prior, Shufelt vanished from Cleveland without explanation. Core teachers didn’t address the situation with students, except to announce that faculty and students could not be Facebook friends. Emma felt like she was left to fend for herself. “I would advise you to ask the teachers if they may have any information, because I have none to provide,” Emma wrote on Facebook in response to another student asking if Shufelt was coming back to Core.

Before long, the tone of gossip congealed around a single idea: It was Emma’s fault that Shufelt—a young, well-liked teacher—had left. She overheard peers say she was “not hot enough for you to risk your career over.” On Facebook, a classmate said he wanted to “bash her brains in.” A rumor circulated that Emma was pregnant.

In a deposition, Emma said she asked teachers for help, and recalled Jacobs telling her that the situation would blow over. (Jacobs said she didn’t remember whether Emma came to her.) Emma said she also talked with a female counselor at school, who in turn spoke to Lemmon, the magnet’s coordinator. Lemmon was teaching a class at the time, and his students overheard pieces of the conversation. “After that, I just didn’t feel comfortable telling her anything,” Emma said, referring to the counselor.

Emma was in Ray Linn’s class that semester. She liked Linn, and didn’t find him as abrasive as some other students did. According to Emma, one day as she was packing up to leave his classroom, Linn asked her, “How’s he doing?” It was clear to Emma that he was referring to Shufelt.

Emma was still seeing Shufelt in secret. She would ditch school early so they could spend a few hours together before she had to catch a bus home. When she cried about what was going on, he told her it wasn’t her fault. He called her “kiddo” and his “little center of attention.” When it came time for prom, he decorated his house and bought Emma a corsage so they could celebrate; she snuck out of the actual event to spend the night with him. Shufelt also set up Facebook accounts with fake names so they could communicate on the platform again. He once wrote, “I’m going to be good to you for the rest of our lives.” It was “exactly what I wanted to hear,” Emma said, “especially as a teenager.”

Emma graduated and went to Mills, where Shufelt visited her, hung out with her dorm mates, and bought them alcohol. When Emma turned 18, she and Shufelt went public with their relationship. Some people couldn’t shake their discomfort. Emma’s best friend recalled her mom seeing a picture of Emma and Shufelt together on Facebook and asking, “Who is that pedophile?” When Ben Daniel learned that Shufelt was dating a former student, she confronted him. “We got in a huge fight,” she said. The two friends never spoke again.

One day Shufelt told Emma that he’d bumped into his old teacher Chris Miller in the Valley. Emma knew Miller, who had retired just before she reached 11th grade, by reputation only—he was a mythic figure in the pantheon of Core faculty. Shufelt told Emma that Miller had said he was happy things were working out between them. “He was giving Brett his blessing,” Emma said, “for the way that everything happened.”

Emma felt grateful and reassured. In time, that would change.

Amy* had a routine. Once a week, starting around 2018, she typed the same search terms into Google: “Cleveland High School Reseda sexual abuse.” When she didn’t get the result she was looking for, she wasn’t discouraged. It would come. It had to.

Amy graduated from Core in 2001. According to her deposition, as a student she was close with Atkin, who told Amy that the first time she saw her, as a freshman, she knew she loved her and “needed to find out why.” Amy confided in Atkin about her insecurities and about clashes with her parents. Atkin “played the role of caretaker,” Amy said.

When Amy returned to Cleveland as a substitute teacher shortly after college, she started spending a lot of time with Atkin and Miller. In her deposition, Amy recalled Miller telling her that he and Atkin considered themselves “sexual mentors” for young people. “He would leave me phone messages, just giving advice on sex,” Amy said, “telling me the kinds of sex acts to do and how, what to say while I was doing these things.” According to Amy, Miller and Atkin also asked her to take photographs of them having sex. (In a deposition, Atkin denied this.)

When Miller indicated that he wanted to sleep with Amy, she told him she wasn’t attracted to older people—by then Miller was in his sixties. “He said I was ageist and … too looks-oriented,” Amy stated in her deposition. “He said I should try blindfolding myself when I had sex so that the person’s appearance wouldn’t matter so much.” According to Amy, her relationship with Miller never became physical.  

Brett Shufelt had been a classmate of Amy’s. When his resignation from Core became public knowledge in 2009, Amy recalled Miller saying it was “ridiculous that he had to leave Cleveland, because even the parents of the female student are supportive of their relationship. He twisted it into a thing where everyone was happy.” Miller also complained to Amy about former female students who suggested that he’d been inappropriate with them in high school. It seemed that one of the women was Zoe, who had graduated from Core the same year as Amy. Amy remembered hearing a rumor in high school that Miller was in love with Zoe. Back then she’d thought that, if it were true, “it just seemed to fit in with everything they were teaching us”—about removing barriers in their lives, about “free love.”

According to Amy, Miller and Atkin told her about Zoe confronting them in 2007, shortly after it occurred; she said they emphasized that nothing physical had happened with Zoe until she turned 18. In a deposition, Amy said Miller told her that he once let Zoe explore his naked body. “Vivian framed it as this wonderful, beautiful experience,” Amy told me. (In a deposition, Atkin said she told Amy “multiple times that there was no sex involved” in her and Miller’s relationship with Zoe.)

When Miller and Atkin said Zoe had a therapist who was putting “bad ideas” in her head, Amy was reassured. Then, in 2015, she reconnected with Zoe—the two women happened to be living in the same city when Miller died suddenly of natural causes a month before his 70th birthday. They spoke on the phone about his passing and later met for brunch, where Amy heard Zoe’s accusations firsthand. She was horrified. Some of the details sounded familiar, except that what Amy experienced as a young adult happened to Zoe when she was a minor, and had reportedly progressed to sexual abuse. The allegations were also in sharp contrast to the fond memories that, in the wake of Miller’s death, some former students were sharing on Facebook. “I remember him as someone who in teaching us about the world, helped us to discover ourselves,” one alum wrote.

Amy felt guilty for ever trusting Miller and Atkin. She also felt betrayed. “I know who they are now completely,” she told me. “They gravitated toward young females … who would be susceptible to the allure of the special attention and mentorship they offered.”

Amy’s weekly googling started a few years after she met with Zoe. The #MeToo movement was in full swing by then, and the cultural conversation about sexual abuse was more robust than ever. It seemed as though new women came forward every day to demand that powerful men be held responsible for their crimes or transgressions. Many survivors described abuse that happened years or even decades prior, which time, distance, and maturity had helped them finally reckon with.

In California, the law seemed to be catching up to the moment: On January 1, 2020, the state implemented a new statute of limitations on claims of childhood sexual abuse. Previously, survivors had been required to file suit by the age of 26 or within three years of realizing they’d been abused. Now survivors must do so by the time they turn 40 or within five years of the recognition of abuse. California also created a three-year window in which survivors previously barred from suing their abusers can file claims.

Amy was sure someone from Core would come forward, and on February 5, 2021, she finally got the search result she’d been waiting for. “Woman sues LAUSD, claiming 2 Cleveland High teachers groomed, manipulated and sexually abused her,” a Los Angeles Daily News headline read. The woman was a Jane Doe, but Amy was sure it was Zoe.

Zoe was on a plane when a friend sent her a link to an article about the changes to California’s statute of limitations. She began to cry—it felt like a door was finally opening. In the five years since Miller’s death, she’d been wrestling with how to process what happened during high school. In true Core fashion, she’d considered going the route of transformative justice: requesting that her friends and Atkin meet in a communal space to discuss the harm done and what accountability might entail. But the more she thought about it, the more inadequate that approach seemed. “I can’t do transformative justice with LAUSD, because they don’t care about my healing,” Zoe told me. “So I started to consider which route to take for more widespread recognition, for more possibility of larger systemic change.”

Zoe contacted Taylor & Ring, an LA law firm that specializes in sexual abuse cases. She told them her story, and that she was certain she wasn’t the only victim. “I can’t talk about my abuse without talking about all the abuse,” she explained. “It’s this massive onion, layer after layer after layer.” It was an apt metaphor: Onions can rot from the inside out. On February 3, 2021, Zoe sued Atkin and LAUSD.

Like Amy, Emma learned about Zoe’s case in the Daily News. Reading the details felt like discovering a trove of puzzle pieces that, when she fit them together with ones from her own life, revealed a disturbing picture. Emma had no idea who the plaintiff was—several years separated their time in Core. But she knew the woman had been classmates with Shufelt, because they were both 37.

Emma and Shufelt had remained together for a few years while she attended Mills. When she decided to study abroad, Shufelt had paid for her visa and flight. They agreed to be nonexclusive while she was away, but she never thought he’d start seeing someone else seriously. She was shocked when he began dating a woman closer to his age.

In 2019, Emma started having nightmares about Shufelt and the anxiety she’d felt after he quit Core. “I was slowly coming to the realization that the relationship was wrong, and the way that I was treated was wrong, and those adults should have done something,” she told me, referring to the magnet faculty and the Cleveland administration. Two years later, reading about Zoe’s lawsuit was eye-opening. “This Cleveland stuff is way more than I thought,” Emma texted a friend.

She realized that her experience might be part of a pattern. She and Shufelt were both “products of the program,” Emma said, “and this is how it ended”—with him hurting her the way two Core teachers had allegedly hurt his own classmate, and with Emma believing it wasn’t abuse because she’d been taught that she was different, exceptional, impervious. Emma remembered Miller congratulating Shufelt on their relationship. In retrospect she found it disgusting.

Emma called Taylor & Ring and left a message on the office’s answering machine. “I said I one hundred percent believe that this happened exactly the way she was describing it, because I had a very similar experience,” Emma said. On February 10, 2021, Emma filed her own lawsuit, against Shufelt and LAUSD. At the time, Shufelt was teaching in the Valley, working with teenagers and young adults pursuing their high school diplomas through alternative programming. California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing contains no record of disciplinary action taken against him after what occurred at Cleveland. (Shufelt took his own life in October 2021, a month after being arrested for soliciting a female undercover police officer posing as a sex worker.)

For Jackie, the news about Core came out of the blue: A high school friend sent her a link to the Daily News article about Zoe’s case, with no message attached. “I had never really talked to her about what happened,” Jackie said of her friend, “but she knew enough.” When Jackie read the article she cried. “In some ways it was this comforting thing, knowing I’m not alone,” she told me. “On the other hand, I wasn’t special.” At 42, Jackie still had the residue of what Miller had made her believe about herself lodged in her psyche. “Even though it’s gross, that stuff runs really deep,” she said.

Jackie knew right away that she wanted to help Zoe. “I was in awe of this person coming forward,” she said. “I had to let her know she wasn’t alone.” She started furiously typing an email to Zoe’s attorneys, then told herself to take a breath, to sit with her feelings for 24 hours. But they didn’t change. She was ready to talk. On March 12, 2021, Jackie filed a lawsuit against LAUSD.

Kate was returning from a beach vacation with her family when she, too, got a text from a high school friend about the lawsuits. “Wasn’t Mr. Coleman inappropriate toward you?” Kate’s friend asked. Kate had remained intensely private about her experiences in Core. Over the years, fueled by glasses of wine, friends had sometimes tried to cajole information out of her, to confirm if the rumors they’d heard about her and Coleman were true. “I never appreciated that,” Kate told me. Now she needed time to process what the text said, to let the news sink in. “It was a crazy school with what seemed like little administrative oversight,” she eventually wrote back. “Really horrible.”

In her own time, Kate contacted Taylor & Ring. Initially, it was just to share information; she didn’t know if she wanted to pursue a case. In her mind, even though he’d hurt her, Coleman wasn’t a monster. As survivors of grooming often do, she felt to some degree protective of her alleged abuser. “It took me some time to realize how inappropriate it was, and how it was abuse, and what I thought was all good or almost all good really wasn’t,” Kate said.

If you wish to talk about experiences in Core, including alleged abuse by teachers, contact the author at seyward@atavist.com.

The facts of the other cases helped sway her. Zoe’s alleged abuse began three years after Kate graduated from Core; Emma’s occurred more than a decade later. In all that time it didn’t seem like the magnet, the Cleveland administration, or LAUSD had taken any meaningful steps to protect students. “Broadly, I want to hold them all accountable,” Kate said.

On March 15, 2021, she filed suit, naming Coleman and LAUSD as defendants. She became the fourth and, for now, final plaintiff. “We’re convinced that there are absolutely more victims,” said John Taylor, one of the attorneys representing the Jane Does.

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In depositions and interviews, there have been many more revelations about the behavior of Core teachers that, while not necessarily illegal, was distressing to the alumni who experienced it. A classmate of Emma’s recalled a conversation she had with a female teacher in 2009, soon after Shufelt resigned, in which the teacher said it disturbed her that Shufelt got involved with Emma, who had “a little girl’s body.” In a deposition, Emma’s classmate described the female teacher saying, “Out of all the girls that he could have picked, and I’m not saying that he should have picked any of you, but some of you … are, like, very well developed for your age.”

The same classmate said that Shufelt had flirted with her once when she was a student. They were alone in his classroom when he put his arms on either side of the desk where she was sitting and called her a “special girl.” Later, after Shufelt quit, he told Emma, “If it wasn’t you, it would have been her,” referring to her classmate.

At the time, Emma awkwardly laughed off the idea that she and another student could be interchangeable to a man who said he loved her. Emma also dismissed an uncomfortable experience she had with Coleman, who had taught her in the 10th grade, just before he left Core. They reconnected after Emma graduated, becoming Facebook friends and chatting online. “We would email these long emails and he would say, ‘I really miss you,’ ” Emma recalled. In one message, Coleman said he wanted to kiss her.

Emma is one of numerous women who have described Coleman flirting with or pursuing them after they graduated. One alum read me Coleman’s inscription in her senior yearbook, describing a memory he had of her as “erotic.” Rachel Becker said under oath that Coleman sent her a love poem when she was in college. Another Core alum said in a deposition that Coleman asked her out in 1999, when she was 22, and that they dated for several months until she realized he had “a pattern of behavior” in which he became “sexually and romantically involved with women who were far, far younger than him.” To her mind, there was “really only one source where he would be meeting these women.” In a written message obtained as part of discovery in the 2021 lawsuits, Coleman himself told a Core alum that he “date[d] an ex-student and we were together for seven years.”

After she graduated from Core, Kasia Kappes exchanged letters with Coleman for a while. He wrote, “if you were older i’d marry you,” and said she was his “favorite.” Kappes attended college in Los Angeles, and during her freshman year—at the same time he was allegedly abusing Kate—Coleman said he had feelings for Kappes and invited her over to his house for a lobster dinner. When she backed out at the last minute, Coleman “was so mad,” Kappes recalled. “He yelled at me, called me immature.”

One of the things Coleman riffed on in his letters to Kappes was the 1994 camping trip he’d taken female students on to Arizona. Ariane White, the alum who later gave up teaching at Cleveland because of conflict with veteran teachers, was on that trip—she was a senior at the time. In a deposition, White said that the other adult chaperone, David DeMetz, kissed her when they were alone in a tent. White recalled DeMetz telling her, “Richard said as long as I don’t have sex with you, it’s fine.” In an interview, White told me that the comment had made her feel “safe,” because “I’m here with my teacher and he said … nothing bad will happen.” (DeMetz stated in a deposition that he didn’t remember the kiss or Coleman telling him not to have sex with the students.)

Another female student on the camping trip, who briefly taught in Core after college, was one of two former faculty members who in depositions said that Miller encouraged his colleagues to read the book Teaching to Transgress, by bell hooks. In one chapter, hooks, a longtime college professor, describes being sexually attracted to a former student. To the Core alum turned teacher, Miller’s implication was clear: “It’s OK to date students,” she said under oath, “because … love is love, and love transcends power dynamics.”

Dani Bedau, who graduated in 1985, with one of the first cohorts of Core students, told me that Miller tested personal boundaries right from the start of the program. He invited Bedau to meals off campus and told her she was exceptional. On Miller’s recommendation, Bedau participated in Brotherhood-Sisterhood Camp—the program Jackie would attend a decade later, where a counselor warned her away from Miller. After college, Bedau went to work for the camp’s parent organization, which was how she learned that Miller, formerly a volunteer camp counselor, was no longer welcome in the program. Bedau didn’t know the specifics of what Miller had done, but she remembered a rumor from her time at camp about him getting into a hot tub with a teenage girl.

Lori Nelson, Bedau’s boss and another former camper, had heard about the incident firsthand: At a sleepover with Brotherhood-Sisterhood attendees in the early 1980s, a girl arrived late and described being caught in a hot tub with Miller by his wife. Nelson said that, after she took over administration of the camp in 1988, “Chris Miller stepped not one foot in it.” She described him as adept at “psychological seduction” and criticized some of the teaching methods he introduced to Core. Nelson said the power pyramid was once a Brotherhood-Sisterhood activity, but that staff stopped using it in the mid-1980s because they felt it gave adults too much agency at teenagers’ expense. “Guys like Chris, they like the big drama where they are in the position of power,” Nelson said.

A Cleveland alumni Facebook group exploded with activity when Daily News articles about the 2021 lawsuits were posted there. Some graduates expressed dismay at the accusations. Some said they weren’t surprised—to them, teachers sleeping with students had practically been an open secret. Other alumni expressed a kind of grief. “Looking back I see so much boundary pushing that should never have taken place, but at the time seemed normal,” one woman wrote. Referring to Miller specifically, she added, “It’s hard to grapple with the truth that the same qualities that made him a favourite were the same ones that allowed him to successfully groom and abuse students.”

Marty Kravchak participated in the Facebook conversation, writing that, as a fellow teacher, she “never had any hint” about Miller’s behavior. “I wish someone had trusted me enough to confide in me,” she commented. When an alum wrote that she was aware of “three male teachers who had relations with girls in 88 and 89,” Kravchak, who retired from Core in 2007, asked if the former student ever told her parents. “Nobody said anything because we were not in positions of power,” the alum replied. “We had everything to lose.”

The majority of Core alumni interviewed for this story are educators, activists, artists, or caregivers. They are the kind of people who, in early 2022, applauded the unionization of Amazon workers on Staten Island, and later raged over the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. They oppose banning books in school libraries and believe that America’s history of systemic racism should be taught in public classrooms. All of them, including the Jane Does, praised Core for pushing them to dive deep into subjects that most high schoolers never so much as skim.

Many of the alumni I spoke to know their stories might be used in service of a right-wing agenda to destroy programs like Core, but they won’t be cowed from telling the truth. They have aimed their grievances at the people once in charge of the magnet, the pedagogy the faculty used, and LAUSD’s apparent resistance to corrective action over many years. “I don’t care how many people get into college because of this great humanities program,” said Amy, who is now a teacher. “If the safety of children is not a priority, you cannot claim to have any dedication to social justice.”

Today, Core is thriving. From its perch at Cleveland, which is now a public charter school, it has been designated a School of Distinction by the Magnet Schools of America. There is a waiting list for admission: In 2020, some 450 students applied for the roughly 250 spots available to incoming freshmen. Monica Ramallo-Young, a parent of twins who graduated in 2022, said that what impressed her most about the magnet was students’ passion for the curriculum. “Kids in Core say they’re studying the most fascinating stuff and learning so much,” Ramallo-Young told me. “They develop a love of learning.”

The curriculum remains much the same as it has been for the past several decades, with some updated materials. Juniors, for instance, now watch 13th, Ava DuVernay’s award-winning documentary about mass incarceration. “If a program like this were implemented across the country, it would solve a lot of our country’s current problems,” Ramallo-Young said. “It does a good job teaching compassion and humanity, and helping you grow as a person.”

Ray Linn, the last of the old-guard faculty, retired in 2018. More than one-quarter of the current magnet teachers are alumni of the program—former “Corebabies,” as magnet students call themselves. The program’s coordinator, Jennifer Macon, has been on the faculty for more than twenty years. Her own daughter is a Core student.

In a deposition, Macon described the allegations made by alumni—some of whom were once her students—as a “gut punch.” Yet she said she isn’t concerned about any of her colleagues crossing the line with students. “My radar is very heightened,” she said. “But we haven’t had substantive conversations about what all of this means for us as a program in terms of relationships with students, because I don’t see it as a problem.” If there was abuse in Core, Macon emphasized, it is firmly in the past.

“Having a 15-year-old daughter is incredibly helpful for me having compassion for myself,” Jackie said.

For the Jane Does, the past is the point. Illuminating and grappling with it can offer vital lessons about what it takes to open young minds while protecting them, at Cleveland and beyond. It can also help a person heal.

On their lawyers’ instruction, the plaintiffs have not spoken or otherwise interacted with each other. Some of them don’t even know the other women’s identities. They all expressed to me a profound desire to meet one day, when the time is right. But for now, in her own way, on her own terms, each woman is navigating the emotional aftershocks that come with reporting abuse.

Zoe asked to be interviewed on a beach in Malibu—she felt at peace there, she said. She invited a friend to be with her. Zoe referred to the Core alumni supporting her through the lawsuit as “my team.” They take care of each other now in ways they never knew how to as teenagers. On the beach, Zoe’s friend encouraged her to take breaks and sip water while telling her story. Zoe is a visual artist, and she’s creating a series of pieces that represent her high school experience. She hopes to stage a show one day, and to bill it as a Core reunion.

Kate asked me detailed questions and offered research ideas—in another life, she might have been an investigative reporter. Her high school journal, the one Coleman was nervous someone would read, now stands as a testament to the truth. The Jane Does have asked for jury trials, and as of this writing, Kate’s is scheduled for May 2023. If it goes forward, she will face Coleman in court and have a chance to describe how his alleged abuse shaped her. The grooming, Kate said, is what had the most powerful impact—Coleman muddled her sense of self, and of what is safe and not, triggering internal conflicts that she still sometimes struggles to resolve.

Emma’s apartment in Los Angeles is plastered with labor rights posters. She increasingly dabbles in her two passions—writing and progressive politics—despite being anxious about public-facing work. In some ways, Shufelt’s alleged abuse isn’t what wounded her the most: The way people reacted to it was. She sometimes worries about bullies coming for her like they did when she was 17.

Jackie met me at a bustling restaurant where songs by No Doubt and Sublime, pop hits from the end of her high school days, pulsed through mounted speakers. She confessed that she once harbored a “grain-of-rice-size feeling” that she could have stopped Miller’s abuse, but her own child becoming a teenager has softened her propensity for self-blame. “Having a 15-year-old daughter is incredibly helpful for me having compassion for myself,” Jackie said. “I look at her and think, If you came to me and told me this happened, there is not any size feeling I would have that you had put yourself in that position.”

When she filed her lawsuit, Jackie told her daughter what Miller had done, and she offered advice she wishes someone had given her: Trust your intuition, and walk away if you feel even the tiniest bit unsafe or unsure. “If you’re not comfortable telling me, let’s talk about the people that you are comfortable talking to,” Jackie told her daughter. “You have to tell somebody, because when you don’t, it happens again and again. If we have the opportunity to stop someone from getting hurt, we should do that.”

Jackie’s interview took place over her spring break—she went back to school full-time a few years ago. Once, in a speech class, she had to deliver a eulogy for someone. She chose Miller. “I mostly talked about the things he taught me, and all the pieces of him that stayed with me,” she said. “My wrap-up was about how people aren’t always what they seem.”

Jackie is now a semester away from earning her college degree. She plans to become a social worker and help adolescents. She relishes learning, something that for so long she felt had been denied to her by the actions of a teacher. Being a student is like reclaiming a piece of herself that Miller stole. “I love it,” Jackie said. “I feel like I want to be in school forever.”

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Andres Beckett dreamed of competing in a punishing rodeo event known as the Suicide Race. But more difficult than charging down its dangerously steep track was earning a spot at the starting line.

By Jana
Meisenholder

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1. The Acceleration

On a Thursday night in August 2021, hundreds of people gathered along the banks of the Okanogan River in the small town of Omak, Washington. The air was thick with smoke from recent wildfires and shot through with tension. The crowd craned their necks to see the top of a nearby hill, which on one side plunged straight into the river. At the hill’s crest, illuminated by floodlights, more than a dozen men sat on horseback wearing helmets and life preservers. An ambulance was stationed below. Some spectators began to pray.

In Omak, the second week of August is synonymous with Stampede, an annual four-day rodeo featuring saddle bronc riding, steer wrestling, and Native American drumming and dancing. Stampedes like the one in Omak are common across the American West, but the big draw here—the grand finale of each day’s festivities—is unlike anything else in the country. Riders like the ones atop the hill spur their horses to top speed, fly over the crest, and charge down a precipitously steep dirt track. After crashing into the Okanogan, they cross to the opposite bank and—if they make it that far without serious injury—dash 500 feet to the Stampede’s main arena. The thrilling, grueling spectacle is known as the Suicide Race.

The jockey with the best showing over four days earns the coveted title King of the Hill. There are men who have won once, twice, or several times, making them local celebrities. Omak sits on the edge of the Colville Indian Reservation, and the vast majority of riders are Native. Competing in the Suicide Race is a matter of pride: Many riders’ forefathers “went off the hill,” as locals say, and the event echoes Native traditions dating back centuries.

In 2021, most of the riders were repeat contenders or past winners, but one man was both an outsider and an underdog. Around Omak, which has a population of fewer than 5,000 people, Andres Beckett was known as “the rookie.” Twenty-nine years old and Mexican-American, Andres mostly worked construction. His forebears didn’t go off the hill, and he had to fight for years to get to the race’s starting line—a streak of white paint hastily sprayed onto the ground. Jockeys in the Suicide Race need skill and grit, but even more important is mentorship. The tight-knit community of legacy riders know the course in detail—how to train for it, survive it, master it—and they don’t share that expertise with just anyone. Wannabe racers have to prove themselves, earn the privilege of learning from the best.

Andres had done that, enduring setbacks and humiliations before securing the guidance required to compete. Now he waited impatiently for the starting gun to go off. Between his legs was the muscled mass of JD, his horse. Andres’s boots were taped into the stirrups of his saddle—falling off was not an option. He knew JD could sense his nerves; whenever he gripped the reins, the horse’s ears twitched. “Let’s have some fun, JD,” Andres said. “Let’s get it.” In his head he heard music, the eerie melody of a song by a Russian electronic band he’d listened to while preparing for the race. It made him feel close to death.

Bang.

Fuck it, Andres thought.

He hollered at JD, and together they galloped for the edge.

Andres’s origin story is fraught, which is to say it’s quintessentially American. His maternal grandfather, Crecencio “Chencho” Ovalle, left his wife and children in Mexico in the 1980s to find better economic opportunities in the United States. Ovalle was caught trying to cross the border several times and sent back. When he finally made it through, he continued as far north as he could get, finding work picking fruit in the apple, berry, peach, and plum orchards around Omak, which is less than 50 miles from the Canadian border. Ovalle was one of only a few Mexican immigrants in the area. Soon he sent for his wife, and together they saved enough money to pay a coyote to smuggle their two daughters and the girls’ aunt into America.

One of those girls was Andres’s mother, Adela. She was 18 at the time. She gave birth to Andres almost exactly nine months after she arrived in Omak. Right from the start, he was different from the rest of the family. “My hair was blond, my eyes were blue,” Andres said. In the early 2000s, during a family trip to Denver, Andres threw food across the dinner table at his cousin and ignored the adults who told him to stop. His uncle George looked at the rambunctious ten-year-old and said, “You’re going to be crazy, just like your dad.”

Andres was confused. The man he believed was his father, José Muñiz, was reserved and disciplined. Muñiz had crossed from Mexico into the United States with his best friend, only to watch the friend be crushed to death as the two of them hid under train cars to evade Border Patrol agents. “I’m talking about your real dad,” George explained, “your white dad.”

Here was the truth: In the spring of 1991, a 23-year-old named Tony Beckett, who had spent a few years in the Navy, got on a Greyhound bus in Nashville that was bound for Seattle, where his mother lived. Adela, recently arrived in America, boarded the same bus—she was headed to Omak to reunite with her parents. Tony, who was athletic and had blond hair and blue eyes, asked if he could sit next to her. Adela didn’t speak English, and Tony didn’t speak Spanish, so they communicated through hand signals and smiles. In the several days it took to drive across the country, their romance blossomed. When they arrived in Seattle, Tony wrote his phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to Adela.

But she didn’t call him, not even when she learned she was pregnant. In fact, she told no one about the baby, wearing loose dresses and covering her stomach with pillows, fearful that her family would reject her if they knew. Only when her water broke did Adela finally share her secret. She asked José Muñiz’s sister-in-law, María, to drive her to the hospital. Andres would later credit this decision with the closeness he felt with his aunt María his whole life. “She watched me be born,” he said.

Adela’s family was baffled: Where had this baby come from? Who was the father? She finally contacted Tony when Andres was two months old, but made it clear she was in a relationship with Muñiz, who would raise Andres as his own. Still, Tony insisted on meeting his son. Uncle George, who later would let the truth slip to Andres, picked Tony up at the bus stop in Omak. 

During his visit, Tony made a deal with Adela: She could raise Andres until he was ten, then the boy would live with his father until he was ready for college. Adela, an undocumented immigrant at the time, felt like she had to agree. Back at the bus stop, Aunt María assured Tony, “I’ll look after Andres and make sure he grows up good.”

After Tony left, Adela panicked. She didn’t want to give up Andres—not ever. A relative suggested a place where she could raise her son and remain hidden if Tony ever came to take him: a secluded 35,000-acre property in the mountains owned by a man named Ben Whitley, who was looking to hire a ranch hand in exchange for lodgings. Muñiz became that ranch hand, and Whitley, who was in his fifties at the time, was like a grandfather to Andres. “He could tell that I was the outcast of the family, so he took me under his wing,” Andres said. “Every day I hung out with Ben.” It was Whitley who taught Andres how to drive a tractor and ride a four-wheeler, Whitley who showed him how to prepare steers for auction at the county fair.

Andres was a curious, active kid, with a fondness for unorthodox pets: a rattlesnake, scorpions, a nest of baby mice. “I either connected with the animal or I didn’t,” he said by way of explanation. Muñiz taught him how to shoot a gun when he was just a toddler. As he got older, Andres helped with tasks around the ranch, bucking hay bales, changing sprinklers, and assisting with the birthing of calves. Every year he and his family went to the Omak Stampede. He was mesmerized by the Suicide Race and the hero’s welcome the jockeys received from spectators. When the Stampede wasn’t happening, Andres and his friends took turns tumbling down the Suicide Race’s legendary track. But his first love was bull riding: men holding on for dear life to massive, undulating beasts, and somehow making it look elegant. He wanted to be just like them.

One day at a local coffee shop, Whitley asked his friend Larry Peasley, a Colville tribal elder known for his work at rodeos, to teach Andres how to ride. They used a mechanical bull and started out slow, going over the fundamentals, working on body positions. “He was a quick learner,” Peasley said. Andres’s best friend, Jerid Peterson, came over to Peasley’s ranch to practice with him. “Sometimes we pretended to be world champions,” Andres recalled.

Peasley saw natural ability in Andres. “He was doing well,” Peasley said, “and then I don’t know…” He trailed off.

“One of the opportunities I pissed away,” Andres chimed in. There was a tinge of guilt in his voice.

2. The Drop

When Andres learned about his biological father, it brought on an identity crisis. Sometimes he wondered if he was the progeny of a bad man from a bad family. In other moments he considered what life would have been like had he grown up with his dad. Destitution is a reality for many people in Omak, where a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Andres’s mother and stepfather struggled to make ends meet; sometimes all they had to eat was deer that Muñiz had shot himself. “That was our grocery store right there,” Andres said. When he thought about a childhood in Seattle with Tony’s family, he imagined wanting for nothing. “What if they’re just really good people, and I could have a good, normal, white-people life?” he said.

Andres got angry when he learned that his mother was throwing away child support checks Tony sent to Omak. Why was the family eking out an existence when there was money right there to be deposited? “I don’t need anything from him to raise you,” Adela said. Tony had never demanded that Adela make good on the deal they’d struck when Andres was a baby. Still, she worried he might.

In 2009, Andres’s sophomore year of high school, his mother and stepfather announced that the family—which by then included Andres’s three younger siblings—would be moving to Wenatchee, a town two hours from Omak and about six times the size. Right before they left, Andres was hanging out with his friends, saying goodbye, when he spotted a dark-haired girl in volleyball gear getting out of a car. Her name was Indra Renteria. He approached her and they exchanged numbers. She was also the child of first-generation Mexican immigrants. Andres was smitten.

He left with his family, but he didn’t last long in Wenatchee. A year later, he moved back to Omak by himself, to be closer to his friends and to the girl he now loved. (Renteria wasn’t allowed to date in high school, so she had to sneak out of the house to see Andres.) His mother and stepfather were so furious they cut off contact for a while. At 17, Andres was responsible for paying his own bills, plus monthly rent to the extended family he was staying with in a dilapidated mobile home. Despite their circumstances, Andres noticed that his hosts never seemed to worry about finances the way his parents did. “Money wasn’t an issue,” Andres said. “They would eat really good. I knew something was up. They wouldn’t tell me what it was until later on, when they saw they could trust me.”

Their secret source of income was drugs, namely cocaine and methamphetamine. One day they tasked Andres with driving up north to meet a guy who they said would give him a bag. Andres was instructed to bring it back, and was paid in cash for his efforts. After several of these trips, his relatives began teaching him more of the business: how to weigh out the drugs in twenties, grams, eight balls, halves, and by the ounce. Before long he was dealing.

His popularity at Omak High School skyrocketed, especially among the juniors and seniors who, as enrolled members of Native tribes, had each received a lump-sum payment on their eighteenth birthday. (Known as “18 money,” these payouts from trust accounts are common in Native communities.) Andres started wearing Nike Air Force shoes and other expensive clothing. “I was constantly rolling up with a fresh hat and shit people would trade me for drugs sometimes. I had a chain and a little ring,” he said.

In the fall of 2010, there was a drug bust in a nearby town, and local suppliers got spooked. Andres was instructed by a family member to hide duffel bags filled with pistols, assault rifles, and shotguns. Then they rushed together to the storage units where the family kept their drug supply. They grabbed everything they could, along with a few bottles of bleach and a knife. Back home, Andres cut open the pink and white bricks and flushed their contents down the toilet. He didn’t want to get caught, didn’t want to go to prison.

Before 7 a.m. the next day, the authorities turned up and banged loudly on the door. They arrested one of the relatives Andres was working for, cuffing and detaining him on the front lawn just as a school bus full of kids pulled up to the house. The police didn’t have anything on Andres, so they let him board the bus like it was any other day.

After the raid, word got around that Andres was no longer dealing, and his life came crashing down. His popularity evaporated. He wasn’t making money. “I didn’t even have enough to invest in an ounce of weed I could turn around and flip. I was so broke,” Andres said. “This is when I found out who my friends really were.” Renteria stuck by him, as did his childhood buddy Jerid Peterson. Still, he fell into a deep depression.

When he found someone willing to front him an ounce of cocaine, he jumped at the chance. But the remaining family members he was living with were trying to rebuild their lives after the bust, and they kicked him out. His aunt María, the one who was in the delivery room when he was born, and her husband, Ramón, agreed to take Andres in. They lived in a small, run-down house in Eastside, a neighborhood a mile south of Omak’s Stampede grounds. Andres rented a storage shed from them, where he slept and dealt drugs—without his aunt and uncle knowing. Andres described María and Ramón as “really good, innocent, humble people that the whole town knew and liked.” He didn’t want to hurt them.

Gang violence had increased in recent years on the Colville Reservation, which poverty, limited law enforcement, and jurisdictional challenges made an easy target for criminal enterprises. “By far the highest incidence of known gang activity occurs in the Omak district,” Brian Nissen, a member of the Colville Tribal Council, told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in 2009. Some of the gangs were Native; others were Hispanic. “Much of the violence associated with gang activity on the Colville Reservation appears to be focused on recruitment of new members and the gangs’ defense of their prospective territory,” Nissen said. “These territories are important to the gangs in part due to drug distribution.”

Andres saw firsthand what gangs were like—not because he was affiliated with one, but because he sold them drugs. His operation had middlemen and regular customers in the Native Gangster Bloods (NGB). In retrospect he described the group as “a bunch of sketchy motherfuckers,” and said he believed that one of them, whose father also happened to be a cop on the reservation, broke into his shed. “Stole my coke, stole all my cash, stole all my jewelry, anything that I had that was worth anything he stole,” Andres said.

After that he was back to zero, and he still owed money for the ounce he’d been fronted. He started looking for legitimate work and approached Dan Yaksic, the co-owner of a local glass repair business. With his first paycheck, Andres paid off his debt. With his second and third, he invested in more drugs. Once word spread about Andres’s new workplace, he began dealing out of the shop behind Yaksic’s back.

Members of the NGB broke into Andres’s shed again, this time with guns and pit bulls. They also followed his aunt María around. In response Andres bought an AR-15 rifle. He also begged Yaksic to front him cash, but instead his employer sat him down for a talk. “I know what you are. I can tell what kind of shit you do,” Yaksic said. He warned Andres to avoid doing anything drastic, because it would end one of two ways: He’d either die or go to prison. “Let all that go,” Yaksic said, referring to Andres’s life as a dealer.

Andres didn’t listen to Yaksic’s advice, at least not right away. He was offered an opportunity to move $25,000 of cocaine into Canada, a windfall. He planned on trekking over the border on a mountain trail, wearing a camouflage outfit and carrying the brick of coke in a backpack. But Andres couldn’t shake what he called a “bad feeling.” Ultimately, he let someone else take the job. He later heard that the person who’d replaced him was murdered. After that, Andres decided to leave drug dealing behind for good.

But that wasn’t the end of his troubles. Around the same time, he met his biological father for the first time and learned that Tony had schizophrenia. Because the condition tends to run in families, Andres began to worry he might develop it, too. Then, in 2014, Aunt María fell into a coma after developing an infection while recovering from open-heart surgery. Andres slept on the couch in her hospital room every night. One day he noticed his aunt’s feet were changing colors. María had gangrene, which required a double amputation. Eventually she died from post-surgery complications.

Andres considered filing a malpractice lawsuit with the help of a local attorney whose lawn he had mowed for pocket money as a kid. But Andres didn’t follow through. Instead he daydreamed of confronting the doctor who had operated on his beloved aunt, following him home from the hospital and gunning him down. Andres went as far as to wait outside the doctor’s office one day, pulling on a bottle of Maker’s Mark behind the wheel of Aunt María’s old car. But when the doctor drove off after work, Andres didn’t move. “I broke down crying like a fucking kid,” he said. “I realized I couldn’t do that.”

What followed was “a dark, dark stage,” Andres said—“a year or two where I didn’t care about anybody, I didn’t care about nothing.” It was bookended by yet another tragedy. In August 2016, right around Stampede time, Jerid Peterson was killed in an accident while apprenticing as an electrical lineman. He had just turned 23. Renteria attended Peterson’s funeral with Andres, and afterward she noticed a change in her boyfriend. “He just wants to do everything and anything, and that definitely picked up,” she said. “I think Andres feels like he has to live his life like it’s going to end tomorrow.”

With his best friend gone, an idle dream Andres sometimes indulged in as a kid started to coalesce into a plan. Peterson had shared the same fantasy. “We always promised each other that we’d do the Suicide Race together,” Andres said. Maybe now he could run it for them both.

Before the arrival of European colonizers, the Columbia Plateau, which forms swaths of present-day Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, was home to several Native tribes, including the Nez Perce, Wenatchi, Palus, and Colville. Foreigners brought with them disease and destruction. They also brought horses. “It was probably the best gift the white man ever gave us,” the late Stampede organizer and horse trainer Eddie Timentwa told author Carol Austin, who wrote a book about the Suicide Race in 1993,

By the 1700s, horsemanship had become an integral part of Native culture. The animals assisted in transportation and territorial expansion. “Mounted war parties could strike enemies at greater distances and with greater force than ever before,” writes anthropologist Deward Walker. Horses also led to larger traditional gatherings, allowing more people from a wider geographical range to come together. During salmon-spawning season, plateau tribes would meet at the confluence of the Sanpoil and Columbia Rivers to harvest and dry the coming winter’s supply of fish. Horses served as entertainment and objects of sporting competition. Riders paraded horses adorned with tribal regalia and beaded stirrups and bridles before running perilous mountain races.

After the plateau tribes were forced onto the Colville Reservation, the tradition of horse racing continued, and people wagered on riders. Stories of these events were most often passed down through oral tradition, but in 1879, Erskine Wood, a U.S. military officer, wrote of one horse race, “It did not take long for the excitement to grow and soon the bets were showering down and the pile swelling visibly with such great rapidity that it was marvelous how account could be kept. Blankets, furs, saddles, knives, traps, tobacco, beads, whips, and a hundred other things were staked.” (Wood wrote positively of many of his encounters with Native tribes, but also participated in the violent removal of the Nez Perce from their ancestral land.)

In the 1920s, Hugh McShane, a white man married to a Colville woman, introduced a mountain race at the rodeo in Keller, Washington. The race, described by Austin as “a half mile, pell-mell down a nearly vertical, boulder-strewn chasm in the face of a mountain,” quickly became a crowd favorite. But it wouldn’t last: The construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in the 1930s flooded Keller, forcing residents to relocate. In Omak, about 60 miles northwest, Claire Pentz, a furniture salesman in charge of publicity for the town’s rodeo, heard about McShane’s event and decided to stage one of his own. Locals brainstormed what to call the starting location, a precipitous incline on the Okanogan’s southern bank. Murder Hill was floated, but organizers settled on Suicide Hill. “The suicide race draws only the most nervy riders,” The Omak Chronicle declared.

In 1942, a jockey named Bev Conners drowned in the river during the race. Since then, according to various sources, no other jockeys have died. But injuries are common, including grievous ones. Larry Peasley, who taught Andres how to ride a mechanical bull, has two adult children who were nearly killed in the race. In 2002, his daughter Naomie—one of only a few women to ever run the race—suffered a skull fracture and flatlined on the way to the hospital. Doctors were able to revive her. A few years later, Peasley’s son Tyler went somersaulting off his horse and was trampled by oncoming riders. He fractured his ribs and suffered a broken pelvis and hip.

It’s not hard to see what makes the race so dangerous. There’s the hill itself, more than 200 feet of earth pitched at a harrowing angle—according to one race organizer’s measurement, it’s steeper than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Riders charge down the slope at full gallop, reaching speeds up to 30 miles per hour by the time they hit the river. Then there’s the lack of any hard-and-fast rules about how the race should be run. Horses aren’t lined up in an orderly fashion at the starting line. What happens on Suicide Hill is a free-for-all, with mounted jockeys jostling each other, fighting for a competitive spot. The aggression only escalates during the race. Riders violently whipping other jockeys in the face with their crops, attempting to throw them off balance or slow them down, is a common tactic, and often a successful one.

The best Suicide Race jockeys are adrenaline junkies, as athletic as they are knowledgeable of the event’s 1,260-foot-long course. They’ve meticulously mapped out the quarter-mile and know what to do when: Lean back before this point, lock your knees here, sit forward just after that section, pull back the reins there. Riders have incredible core and leg strength to help them stay in the saddle, and they know how far their bodies can tilt sideways if need be, to avoid injury or inflict it on a competitor.

In 2002, the race’s all-time reigning champ, Alex Dick, passed away at the age of 83. He had 16 King of the Hill titles to his name; his obituary in a local newspaper noted that Dick, who was Native, “set a record that will probably never be broken.” So far it hasn’t been. Yet if there’s a first family of the Suicide Race today, it’s the Marchands. Three brothers—Loren, Francis, and Edward—have followed in the footsteps of their grandfather, Jim, an endurance racer who died after a horse fell on him in 1990, and an uncle, George, who holds three Suicide Race titles. Loren, now 34, has been crowned King of the Hill seven times, most recently in 2015. Francis and Edward have never won the overall title, but they’ve come close.

As the dominant force in the Suicide Race, the Marchand brothers have a wealth of tips and tricks, and they know all the best places around Omak to practice. But the race is a tradition most often shared among kin, and the Marchands are notoriously wary of letting people who aren’t blood, or at least Native, into their inner circle. They also reject weekend warriors and wannabe jockeys who are in it purely for the exhilaration. “The Marchands don’t fuck with anybody,” said Conner Picking, a Suicide Race jockey and a great-grandson of one of the founders of the Omak Stampede.

That didn’t stop Andres from trying to get their attention.

3. The Scramble

By the summer of 2018, Andres, now 26, had cleaned up his life and was working construction and picking up jobs as a handyman. He was also holding fast to his desire to learn from Suicide Race royalty, looking for a way in to their good graces. One day he accompanied a welder to a small ranch in Eastside owned by Preston Boyd, a Colville elder renowned for breeding and training thoroughbreds for flat-track racing. Boyd needed the men to fix his broken horse walker, a motorized machine that leads horses in a circle. While Andres worked, Boyd took a good look at him. He noticed Andres’s height—just five feet six inches. He probed the young man about his weight.

Boyd was searching for a new rider to exercise his racehorses, because his usual guys were getting too busy. Among them was his great-nephew, Francis Marchand. Francis was helping Boyd break some new horses that summer, but his schedule was increasingly packed with rodeos—a formidable horseman, Francis regularly competed in saddle bronc and bareback riding. Andres’s specs were promising for the kind of rider Boyd needed. Sure, he couldn’t gallop a horse yet, but he could learn. Boyd told Andres he might fit the bill.

Andres knew he was being given a rare opportunity—a chance to get to know Boyd and one of the Marchands, and to show that he had what it took to run the Suicide Race. But months went by and nothing happened. Boyd never followed up with Andres about exercising his horses.

Omak is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, and sometimes Andres bumped into Francis at social gatherings. He would bring up Boyd’s suggestion that he was rider material as casually as he could, to see if Francis knew anything about his great-uncle’s plans. Andres also asked about going off the hill—what it felt like, what it took to win. Francis recognized Andres’s ambition, and in early 2019 he told him to stop dithering and get to the point: If he wanted to become a rider, he should go to Boyd and say so. “You want to do this? Look him in the eyes,” Francis said. “In any culture, you grab a guy, shake his hand, and tell him you want this.”

Andres took the advice to heart, but he didn’t want to seem desperate. He waited until he ran into Boyd at a gas station one day, then asked if he could help exercise his horses. Boyd said sure, and Andres showed up at 7:30 the next morning to start learning.

Unlike bull riding, which Andres took to easily as a boy, riding racehorses was challenging. Though short, he was stocky and muscular; working construction had made him strong, but he wasn’t nimble or quick to respond to a horse’s stride. Montana Pakootas, a seasoned jockey who helped out on the ranch, had to constantly remind Andres not to yank the reins, but to pull them gently, if he wanted to slow a horse down. “Use your wrist, not your whole arm,” Pakootas said. Otherwise, when a horse was going full speed, Andres risked throwing it off balance.

Andres’s riding improved, and by the summer of 2019 he was exercising Boyd’s newest racehorses for several hours most days of the week. Boyd expected his riders to stick to a routine, for the horses’ sake. “I take Wednesdays and Sundays off to let their muscles, if they get sore, to give them a little rest,” he said. On training days, it was Andres’s job to guide horses to a trot around a local track for a quarter of a mile, getting their blood pumping and helping them build stamina. Eventually he would get them up to a gallop. As a horse became more aerobic, Andres learned to increase its speed against its pulse, maintaining a low heart rate even while the horse worked hard over varying distances. After weeks or months of training, when a horse was comfortable running at top speed around the track in Omak, Andres took the horse to Emerald Downs, a race facility in Seattle, not to compete but to get acquainted with crowds and the whirring sound the starting gates make when they open.

Andres exercised Boyd’s horses for free, and he and Renteria, who was selling Amway products at the time, sometimes struggled to cover the bills. Andres picked up odd jobs where he could, but not anything that took away from his time with Boyd’s horses. The Suicide Race was never far from his mind. He watched videos of past races over and over, studying them. “He’d always say, ‘I hope I go down the hill one day,’ but I never thought he would actually be in it,” Renteria said. Sometimes Andres was surprised he still had a girlfriend at all. “He told me that he thought I’d break up with him since all he did was ride,” Renteria said, smiling.

One day, when Andres had been working with Montana Pakootas for a while, he decided to tell him about his ultimate goal. Pakootas, who had run many Suicide Races and was crowned King of the Hill in 2004, was hosing down a horse at the time. In response to what Andres said, he turned and sprayed him in the face. That’s how the hazing began. Another time Pakootas dumped a boot full of water on Andres’s head. “You scared of getting wet? Because that water fucking feels like it just whips you in the face,” he said, referring to the dive into the Okanogan River. Andres was humiliated, but he kept showing up, kept taking shit.

When Boyd asked him to come along to Emerald Downs for an official racing event, Andres jumped at the chance. At the Downs, Andres awoke every morning at 4:45 to feed the racehorses, then got them ready for the day’s competitions. Francis Marchand and his brother Edward were there, helping care for Boyd’s horses, and they picked up Andres’s hazing where Pakootas had left off. “Edward wasn’t easy on me, that’s for sure,” Andres said. The eldest Marchand brother, known for his success in the extreme sport of Indian relay racing, in which a rider changes his mount mid-competition, seemed to notice every mistake Andres made while warming up the horses. “It’s almost like he waited for me to fuck up,” Andres said, “just so he could go off on me and drive me away.”

Andres persevered, and over margaritas at an Applebee’s one day, he felt bold enough to say it to Edward straight—what he wanted, what he was sure he was capable of. What did he need to do to go off the hill? Edward, who had placed second overall in the 2018 Suicide Race, shook his head in response.

“You don’t have what it takes,” he said.

“What’s it take?” Andres asked.

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t got it.”

Andres has a generally calm disposition, and he looks younger than his years, almost childlike. He is always clean-shaven. Most days he wears a purple trucker hat and a belt with a bottle opener on the buckle. He almost always has a piece of green or blue chewing gum in his mouth. But his comportment and appearance belie a rash streak, a tendency toward recklessness.

Like the time he yanked on the wheel of his car and did a U-turn in traffic to come alongside a disheveled man he saw walking at the side of the road, with a small, scruffy dog trailing behind him. Andres pulled up to the man, jumped out of the car, and got in the stranger’s face, reprimanding him for letting the dog wander so close to traffic without a leash. It turned out the dog didn’t belong to the man, so Andres grabbed it. “Fuck, man. That heated me up,” he said. “The fact that he was just gonna let it get hit.”

Andres drove to Renteria’s sister’s house and left the dog there—never mind that she wasn’t home at the time. He took a shot of apple-pie-flavored moonshine, got back in the car, and ignored Renteria’s sister’s phone calls until the next day. When they connected, he explained what had happened; eventually the dog was reunited with its owner.

The thing about Andres’s impulses is that they’re almost always in service of what in his mind is the right thing to do. “He does have some trauma, obviously, but he has the kindest heart,” Renteria explained. “He really does.” Maybe that’s why Andres didn’t lash out at Pakootas whenever he was hazed, or at the Marchand brothers when they rejected him. But just as important as Andres’s hard-won goodness and maturity are the adults in his life—parental figures who have helped ground him. When asked why people seem so keen to nurture him, Andres replied, “Because I do right things while doing wrong things.”

Preston Boyd is high on the list of people Andres credits with giving him a leg up, and more. Though approaching 70, Boyd can toss a hay bale over a fence and carry a bag of horse feed slung over his shoulder with the ease of a younger man. When he isn’t working on the ranch, he’s watching the news, college basketball games, or televised flat-track races, always with a pen and a notebook in hand. He wears glasses he peers over when talking, and he smokes Marlboro Reds. The fourth of 12 siblings, Boyd never had kids of his own, but armed with master’s degrees in education and social work, he worked for many years as the program manager of Children and Family Services on the Colville Reservation, helping place kids in foster care. After the Marchand brothers’ mom died unexpectedly when they were young, Boyd took in Edward, who was then a wayward 16-year-old. Nearly two decades later, the two men still have dinner together every night. Edward’s four children with his partner, Carmella, are Boyd’s surrogate grandkids.

Once Andres was exercising his horses, Boyd took him under his wing, too. They started meeting for breakfast regularly at a restaurant called Appaloosa, where Boyd knew Andres loved the homemade raspberry jam. Andres took to affectionately calling Boyd “P-Word.” Sometimes when Andres shot a deer, he brought the tenderest, most coveted cuts of meat to Boyd’s home and left them in the freezer.

Renteria could see what the blossoming relationship meant to her boyfriend. “I like Preston because he has a lot to teach—to be a hard worker, be on time,” she said. “I feel like he sees something in Andres, or he just feels something for Andres.” Boyd encouraged Andres to become a better horseman and find his way into the Suicide Race, even when hurdles appeared in his path, ones that went well beyond the struggle to secure a mentor. Andres had hoped to finally persuade someone to train him for the event in 2020, but then it was canceled, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, for just the third time in its history. That November, Andres’s uncle Ramón succumbed to the virus. Faced with yet another devastating personal loss, Andres mourned, but he also continued riding. He kept his eyes trained on the hill.

The following May, almost two years after Andres’s conversation with Edward Marchand at Applebee’s, a racehorse named Tiz that Andres had bought and trained himself won a flat-track race at Emerald Downs. With that accomplishment under his belt, Andres decided it was as good a time as any to make another play for the Suicide Race, which organizers had recently announced would return that August. This time he managed to do it with all three Marchand brothers present, including Loren, the ultimate King of the Hill. He wanted to know if one of them would train him.

Loren laughed and asked if Andres had ever been on a horse. Then he leaned in, bringing his face close to Andres’s. “I’m talking about a real horse,” Loren growled, “not just a fucking tame racehorse.”

Loren instructed Andres and his brothers to jump into his truck. He drove them all to Boyd’s ranch, where Loren was stabling his own Suicide Race mount, Augustus, a beefy animal. The horse had only a halter around his head—no reins, no saddle—but Andres jumped on the horse’s back without a second thought. Augustus immediately began spinning. When Andres started to slide off one side, Loren reached over and grabbed his other foot, twisting and stretching his ankle until it hurt like hell. “Let go! Let go!” Andres begged him. Loren did, and Andres dropped to the ground.

“Fuck, let me on him again!” Andres yelled.

He mounted Augustus once more, and the horse panicked tenfold. He started running, then tried to turn, but his hooves slid and he fell forward onto the ground. Andres didn’t let go, absorbing the tremendous shock of the landing through the animal’s neck and chest. The Marchand brothers sprinted over and caught the horse before he—or Andres—got seriously hurt. Once they’d calmed Augustus down, everyone took a moment to catch their breath.

“Fuck, that felt good,” Andres said. He told the Marchands he could feel Augustus’s heartbeat between his thighs.

“That was the first time anybody rode him bareback,” Loren said.

A few weeks later Francis finally agreed to train Andres for the Suicide Race. Most riders prepare for at least a year before the event. Andres would have only the summer. What he was attempting would be difficult, Francis warned. “You can’t just show up and ride, you know?” he said.

Andres knew. He also knew he needed to find the right horse—his own horse.

4. The Stretch

Some Suicide Race horses are caught in the wild on the Colville Reservation. Others are rescued from slaughter. Still others are purchased from reputable breeders. What riders look for is a rare combination of traits: responsiveness, sure-footedness, strength, and bravery. After all, the horse has to be willing to charge off a cliff again and again. “A suicide horse is a study in diversity,” Carol Austin writes in her book. “It walks calmly through bustling crowds of onlookers and weaves through vehicles like a police horse. It gallops into the rodeo arena before thousands of screaming fans, a seasoned performer. It waits patiently for more than an hour on top of Suicide Hill while loudspeakers blare.… It possesses the speed of a racehorse, the courage of a charging cavalry mount, and the savvy of a wild mustang.”

Horses can sustain injury or, worse, die as a result of the Suicide Race, a fact that draws scrutiny from animal rights organizations, some of which have attempted to shut the event down for good. According to the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, a Washington nonprofit, “Since 1983, at least 22 horse deaths have been documented. In 2004, three horses were killed in the first heat alone.” PAWS lists “heart attacks from overexertion, broken bones from shocking collisions and tumbles, and even horrifying death by drowning” as a few of the race’s many offenses. The event has been the target of protests, angry editorials, and even bomb threats. “If you go on any video on YouTube and you start reading the comments, it’s nothing but hate,” Andres said.

Race supporters maintain that riders love their horses, bond with them, and become so attuned to their movements that man and animal practically move as one. To ride in, or better still win, the Suicide Race is to hearken back to a time when horses carried Native Americans to other kinds of triumph. Eddie Timentwa, the late race organizer, once described the event as “symbolic of the warrior that rides first into battle and receives recognition from the tribe and the elders.”

Once a horse can no longer run the race, often after several years of competition, it receives a dignified retirement. It’s released into the nearby mountains to run free, resold as a working ranch horse, or allowed to live a life of leisure in a pasture. A horse’s premature death is always a tragedy. After Coors Boy, a veteran rider’s horse, was killed during the Suicide Race, a public memorial service was held, and people from all around Omak paid their respects. Some riders bury their horses in their own backyards.

Andres didn’t have much time before the 2021 race to find his horse. Nor did he have much money to pay it. (Typically, a jockey either owns their horse or runs one owned by a trainer in the area.) But the Marchands had an idea: A few years prior, Loren had been given a chestnut-colored quarter horse, so called because the breed is fast over short distances. Francis had noticed the horse’s spunky personality and had plans to use him in ranch work. “He ain’t going to get tired on me,” Francis said. The horse wasn’t broken to ride, and he didn’t have a name. One night, after hours of drinking and chasing wild horses on the reservation—tribal authorities offer a bounty per horse caught—Loren proposed a bet: If Francis could ride the horse bareback, he could have him. Francis did it, and the brothers named the horse Drunk Deal, soon shortened to JD. (The letter j, they agreed, sounded like the d in “drunk.”)

Francis sold JD to Andres for cheap. When he first met the horse, Andres was shocked by how skittish he was. “He was wild as shit and would kick at us,” Andres said. Every day, he would approach JD inch by inch, letting the animal know he wasn’t a threat. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. “He was so crazy, we couldn’t even get shoes on him,” Francis said. Eventually JD got used to Andres, who would grab the horse by the head and baby-talk to him, assuring the animal that everything was OK. Before long Andres was riding JD. “It was green on green,” Boyd said. “The horse and him were both going through a new experience.”

There are four distinct stages of the Suicide Race, starting with the acceleration at the top of the hill, across a 150-foot flat. That’s followed by the drop—a moment of weightlessness after which horse and rider descend the steep dirt track to the river. Then comes the scramble, the effort to get across the river—a sandy-bottomed incline littered with rocks—and onto the opposite bank. Finally there’s the stretch, during which a horse must sustain a full gallop beyond the length of a football field. Each stage requires a different training method.

Francis had Andres start by running JD on the rugged land behind his house seven days a week. They practiced galloping at full speed on flat land and on slopes, both during the day and at night—the first three runs of the Suicide Race take place after the sun has set, which means both horse and rider need to be accustomed to running in the dark. Sometimes Francis glimpsed Andres atop JD on his property after midnight, silhouetted against the mountain range in the distance. Francis sent video of the training sessions to Loren, who offered feedback about how Andres was holding his reins, sitting in the saddle, or wielding his crop.

Once JD was comfortable on land, Andres introduced the horse to water. First he sprayed JD in the face with a hose, just like Montana Pakootas had once done to him. Then he took the horse to Omak Lake with the Marchands to practice. The first time Andres and JD hit the water together at full speed, the horse reared his entire body back and his head smacked Andres in the face so hard he got a black eye. But in time JD got used to the water, and the sensation of running through it.

One day as August approached, Andres had breakfast with Boyd and Larry Peasley. Andres took the opportunity to apologize for taking Peasley’s training and guidance when he was a boy for granted: “I let you down because I fucking gave it up.” Peasley told him not to worry about it. “We all do that at one point or another,” he said. When Andres said he was planning to go off the hill, Peasley started showing up to practice sessions to give advice.

Andres took to putting his chest against JD’s every day when they were alone in the stable. “We’re going to fucking do this,” Andres said. He felt JD’s muscles tense in response. By early August, they were ready to go through the steps of qualifying for the race. Elimination runs are held on Suicide Hill and usually draw a small crowd of onlookers. If a horse accelerates toward the drop and balks, it’s immediately disqualified. There is also a veterinary check, to determine if the horse is in good condition, and a swimming test in the river. Andres and JD met all the criteria.

When the race lineup was announced, Andres was hanging out with Edward Marchand at the horse barn on Boyd’s property. Edward hugged Andres and told him he was proud. “Let me hear your war whoop,” he said. Andres, feeling shy, let out a small cry.

Edward slapped his back. “Come on, really fucking do it!” Andres tried again, louder.

“Fuck that—this is how you do it,” Edward said. The man who once told Andres that he didn’t have what it took threw his head back and let out a long, deafening wail. To Andres it sounded like acceptance.

The Omak Stampede is cacophonous. There are screaming teenagers strapped into carnival rides and deep fryers sizzling with french fries and corn dogs. Enthusiastic voice-over announcements compete with Top 40 country played at full volume. The cheering at rodeo events is a dense, steady roar, while at the Native encampment the pounding of drums provides a rhythmic pulse for traditional dancers.

The Marchands took Andres away from all the noise the morning before the first run of the Suicide Race. They drove deep into the Colville Reservation, to a sweat lodge in the mountainous Desautel Pass. There the brothers let Andres join their private prerace tradition, a smudging ceremony in which they burn sage. The rite is intended to purify the spirit and proffer good luck.

Back in Omak, Jerid Peterson’s uncle handed Andres a necklace strung with a single AK-47 bullet casing holding some of Jerid’s ashes. “I felt safer knowing Jerid was with me,” Andres said. He also wore his uncle Ramón’s pants, his aunt María’s wedding ring, his favorite hat, and black cowboy boots Renteria had bought for him. Edward immediately cut holes in the boots with a knife so they wouldn’t fill up with water.

During race betting, which happens four hours before the starting gun, at least one person put money on Andres after they found out that the Marchands were in his corner. Just after sunset, all 22 Suicide Race jockeys entered the main Stampede arena on their horses and jogged around in a circle as an announcer called out their names one by one. An AC/DC song pumped through giant speakers, and the crowd screamed and stomped their feet. Andres could tell JD was nervous. “He was flaring his nostrils. I could start to feel it myself,” Andres said.

At the trailers where riders dress for the race, Andres scrambled to put on all his gear. Life jacket, gloves, helmet. Wait—his whip. Where was his whip? Then he remembered that JD’s legs hadn’t been wrapped, which is important to protect a horse from injury. Andres grabbed a pair of scissors. But where was the tape? Edward ran over to help him. “He had my back big time,” Andres said.

When Andres joined the other riders to prepare to go up Suicide Hill, he didn’t talk to anyone. Instead, he watched carefully to make sure no one messed with JD—some jockeys were known to loosen competitors’ saddles or commit other forms of sabotage. Andres also attended to his feet. Loren had told him to use thick rubber bands to keep them in the stirrups, but Andres decided on Gorilla Tape. He wrapped three layers around his boots. “When I go down that hill, I’m ready to die with JD,” he said.

The jockeys were escorted to the hill by police. As they approached the starting line, they all went silent. “I looked around and could see the looks on some of the cowboys’ faces,” Andres said. “You could tell they were scared.” He had heard that the first night’s run was always the worst.

Andres’s family was in the crowd to support him—even his mom and stepfather, who had moved to Nashville several years prior, had come out to see him race. Larry Peasley was filling his usual duties as one of the race’s outriders, which meant that he would be waiting at the bottom of the hill to help if anything went wrong during the most dramatic part of the event. On top of Suicide Hill, Andres lined up next to Montana Pakootas, who wore an eagle feather in his helmet for protection. Loren Marchand was at the other end of the starting line. Andres was glad some of his mentors were there, even as his competition.

In the distance, Andres heard the drum circle at the Stampede’s Native encampment—the sound would go all night. “Before the race,” Carol Austin writes in her book, “the riders share a feeling that they are related, and in fact many are brothers, cousins, nephews, fathers, and sons. But as soon as that pistol pops it will be every man for himself.” Andres remembered what Francis taught him: Think what your horse thinks. “We got this,” he whispered to JD.

The gun went off. Jockeys immediately started whipping each other. Andres yelled as loud as he could, an exhalation of fear as much as a command to his horse. It was just him and JD now, against the world. They galloped across the flat—it was pitch-black ahead. “It was like dark, dark, dark, then drop,” Andres later said.

Andres and JD flew over the edge, and for an instant they hung in the air. Andres felt his guts go up into his chest, as if he were on a rollercoaster. His lungs froze. “I couldn’t breathe for a second,” he recalled.

When they landed on the slope, JD kept his balance. Dust clouds exploded around them as one by one the riders made the treacherous descent. Andres saw a horse’s hooves in the air and a rider wreck in front of him. But there wasn’t time to assess what was happening, who was up and who was down. He and JD just kept hurtling down the hill.

The river hit violently, as Pakootas told Andres it would. Sharp rocks under the water’s black surface sliced open one of JD’s front legs. Andres held on to the reins. “Head up, JD! Head up!” he screamed. But instead he felt the horse going down, and himself going down, too, pulled by the tape keeping him in the stirrups.

Thousands of pounds piled on top of Andres and JD as jockeys who’d been behind them on the hill crashed into the river. Water was in Andres’s mouth, then his lungs. I’m going to die right here, he thought. Instinctively, he protected the back of his neck with his hand.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over. Other riders and horses swam by and made it onto the far shore. Andres and JD had survived, but they couldn’t race—both were injured. They finished the race, straggling across the finish line, but there would be no more runs that year.

“I never wanted something so bad before,” Andres said. “We trained all fucking summer. We did all this to just fucking have it end tonight.”

5. The Reprisal

On the Colville Reservation, there is a formation known as the Omak Rock—a huge boulder, estimated to weigh some 40 tons, that appears to balance precariously atop a much smaller rock. It has stayed in this position through numerous natural disasters, including the 1872 North Cascades earthquake. The boulder is the thing people talk about, what tourists come to see, but without the smaller rock the formation would be just another chunk of granite.

Andres knows that both he and his ambitions would be nothing special without the people who hold him up: the Marchands, Pakootas, Peasley, Boyd, Renteria. After he washed out of the Suicide Race, his circle of support gathered to dissect what went wrong, and to think ahead to next year. Andres would heal; JD would, too. There would be another Suicide Race to run.

In early 2022, with several feet of snow on the ground, the Marchands invited Andres to bring JD and go horse chasing with them on the reservation. It would be good training, they told him, since it would help improve JD’s stamina and confidence in the wild. Plus, being part of a pack would hone his competitiveness. But JD lost his footing in the powder and ended up reopening his leg wound. Andres feared this meant he couldn’t go off the hill again come August, that he’d have to wait another year for a second shot at making a name for himself.

Francis had a solution. He said he would help Andres train and ride Frank Cartel, an eight-year-old dark-brown horse that Francis had recently bought from Boyd’s cousin. Andres met the horse but didn’t feel a connection. Frank Cartel had only run flat-track races and wasn’t used to the terrain of the Suicide Race. Plus, he didn’t have JD’s untamed nature, something Andres identified with. “I just trust JD more,” he said. “I’ve got a better bond with him. He’s crazier.”

During the first half of that year, Andres continued to exercise Boyd’s horses between construction jobs in Oregon. He started a honeybee farm, hoping to sell honey, candles, and lip balm at the local farmers market. He also bought and renovated a mobile home with plans of renting it out. But these were just things he did while he waited. The Suicide Race was the organizing principle of his life, the thing everything else revolved around. The hill had never abandoned him, and he wouldn’t abandon it.

After six months of healing, JD was ready to be checked out by the Suicide Race’s official veterinarian. In early summer, she gave the all clear for the horse to run. Andres was ready—he had everything he needed. Together, he and JD could charge toward the precipice once more. 

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In the waning days of the Cold War, Rainer Sonntag helped fuel a neo-Nazi movement that still plagues Germany today. He was also a Communist spy—and worked for Vladimir Putin.

By Leigh Baldwin and Sean Williams

Published in partnership with SourceMaterial

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1.

As the sun set on May 31, 1991, the streets of Dresden crackled with energy. All day the city had been abuzz with the rumor that there was going to be a riot in the city’s nascent red-light district. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall some 18 months before, the smog-choked, bomb-scarred city in East Germany had changed. Suddenly, it was filled with new imports from the West, including drugs, gambling, and prostitution. Kiosks that once sold Neues Deutschland, the dour Communist Party propaganda sheet, now carried German editions of Playboy and Hustler. One man had sworn to clean house. His name was Rainer Sonntag, and he was a far-right vigilante—an avowed neo-Nazi.

Sonntag was born and raised in Dresden, but had fled across the Iron Curtain to West Germany five years earlier. By the time the wall fell, Sonntag had become one of the West’s leading neo-Nazis, thanks to a willingness to roll up his sleeves and fight. When he returned home, he recruited a ragtag army of acolytes to rid Dresden of influences he claimed were noxious. Most of his followers came from the grim maze of housing projects in Gorbitz, on Dresden’s western edge. The buildings there were filled with young people who had been stripped of stability and purpose by Communism’s implosion. Sonntag had charisma and an uncanny ability to channel the energy and anger of Gorbitz’s youth. They flocked to him, calling him the Sheriff.

Sonntag’s gang of neo-Nazis had started their supposed purification of the city by targeting the hütchenspieler, three-card swindlers who plied their trade on Dresden’s central Prager Strasse. They handcuffed the men and handed them over to the local police. Then the youth hounded the city’s Vietnamese cigarette sellers. Now they were eyeing brothels. Never mind that not so long ago, Sonntag himself had worked in a red-light district in the West; he timed an assault on a Dresden brothel called the Sex Shopping Center for midnight on the last day of May.

Throughout the evening, far-right youth—some with shaved heads, others with the feathery mullets still fashionable in the Eastern Bloc’s dying days—gathered in nearby bars and outside the boarded-up Faun Palace porn cinema, just down the street from the brothel. From behind the wheel of a parked car, Sonntag waited to give the signal to attack. The Sex Shopping Center was run by a Greek pimp named Nicolas Simeonidis and his business partner, Ronny Matz.

Around 11:45 p.m., as Sonntag’s army assembled beneath the Faun Palace’s faded neon sign, Simeonidis and Matz arrived in a black Mercedes to confront them. Simeonidis, a compact amateur boxer with a 16-1 record, brandished a sawed-off shotgun. “Get out of here!” he yelled at the forty or so young men gathered in the street. Simeonidis waved the shotgun in a wide arc, sending the neo-Nazis scattering for cover behind cars and bushes. “Leave us in peace!” he shouted.

Sonntag opened his car door and emerged. He was of average height and stoutly built, with dark, wavy hair and a round, friendly face that even now seemed on the verge of breaking into an infectious smile. Sonntag had charm to spare and a vicious stubborn streak. He wasn’t likely to back down just because his target had a gun—especially not with his troops watching. “Go on, then! Shoot, you coward!” Sonntag called out, removing his jacket and advancing steadily on Simeonidis.

From their hiding places, the neo-Nazis sensed a shift in the balance of the situation. One by one, they emerged to join their leader. They were willing to follow him anywhere.

But Sonntag’s young disciples didn’t know his darkest secret. While outwardly he was a neo-Nazi, he was also a spy for East Germany’s feared secret police, the Stasi. Not only that, he had ties to the KGB. In fact, right up until the Iron Curtain fell, one of his handlers was a young, ambitious Russian officer stationed in Dresden. The handler’s name was Vladimir Putin.

The story that follows is based on dozens of interviews with neo-Nazis, eyewitnesses, and former spies, and hundreds of pages of Stasi files and court records. It is the story of how, more than thirty years before Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, under the disingenuous banner of “de-Nazifying” the country, he and some of his closest intelligence associates helped nourish a neo-Nazi movement across Germany. Their preferred tool for sowing hate and discord was Rainer Sonntag.

2.

Born Rainer Mersiowsky in 1955, Sonntag never met his biological father and took his stepfather’s name. His mother struggled to keep him on the straight and narrow, and he managed to graduate high school only by repeating his penultimate year. Teachers described him as insouciant, weak-willed, and hot-tempered. He needed constant validation and lacked ambition, they said. He was repeatedly disciplined for disrupting lessons.

When he was a teenager, the Free German Youth assigned Sonntag the role of agit-propagandist; he was also a drill leader in Dresden’s Gymnastics and Sports Federation. He had an apprenticeship as a machine worker and was soon tapped to join a paratrooper regiment in the army. But Sonntag wasn’t interested in being a Communist stooge or enduring a lifetime of drudgery for a meager wage. He began acting out. In 1972, police investigated an incident at a local ice-skating rink, where Sonntag had punched some kids in the face “without provocation.” Worse yet, as far as the authorities were concerned, he showed signs of bucking the ideological yoke. Teachers caught him singing a ribald song about the Soviet Union during a football match—a permanent black mark on his fattening police file.

By 1973, as Sonntag stared down his 18th birthday, his future looked bleak. That February, he had drinks with three friends, including a former schoolmate whom authorities referred to in official documentation as “Hans Peter.” They met at the Gasthof Wölfnitz, an old-fashioned beer hall, to discuss a daring plan: escape to the West. Like many people their age stuck behind the Iron Curtain, they dreamed of a life of freedom and material abundance, glimpsed by most East Germans only when they illegally turned their TV antennas toward the West. Around 150,000 East Germans had fled their country since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Many more had tried and failed.

One of Sonntag’s friends told the group at the Wölfnitz that his little brother had found a pistol in a nearby park. It was rusty and broken, but together they had cleaned and repainted it. They hoped to have it service ready soon in case they needed it during their escape. Another of Sonntag’s friends was in a mountaineering club and had a skill set that could help them navigate the rugged terrain near the border. The young men plotted their route: first to Czechoslovakia, then to Austria, and finally to West Germany. They set a departure date for later that month, drained their beers, and headed home.

It was summer before they acted on the plan, and only Sonntag and one of his friends decided to go. In July, while Sonntag’s mother, stepfather, and brother were on holiday, he rummaged in the family’s television cabinet, looking for the envelope he knew was stashed there. When he opened it he found 350 East German marks, and a second envelope containing 120 Czechoslovakian koruna. He intended to pay his parents back once he got to West Germany and found a job.

He and his friend boarded a bus to Altenberg, a pretty, medieval town high in the mountains on the East Germany border with Czechoslovakia. To avoid suspicion, the young men decided to tarry for a couple of days rather than cross into the neighboring socialist republic right away. Two days later, they woke early and changed their remaining marks into koruna. At 9:45 a.m., carrying nothing but a couple of sweaters, two knives, and his identity papers, and with money hidden in one of his shoes, Sonntag approached the border.

He and his friend were quickly separated and interrogated: What were their plans in Czechoslovakia? Sonntag told a border guard that they were headed to a parachuting competition in Prague. But his friend said they were planning to stop in Teplice, a spa town. Then the patrol found the money in Sonntag’s shoe.

Even if the friends had kept their stories straight, they never stood a chance. Their entire escape plan was already documented in a Stasi file, labeled “Machinist.” The Stasi had gathered every scrap of information they could from Sonntag’s colleagues and neighbors, the Dresden police, and a secret informant: Sonntag’s friend Hans Peter.

Sonntag and his companion were back in Dresden being interrogated by the Stasi that afternoon. “I knew I was forbidden to go to the capitalist West,” reads Sonntag’s confession, part of more than 230 pages of documentation now at the Stasi Records Archive in Berlin. “Although I knew this, I wanted to leave.” His sentence was 18 months of hard labor.

Authorities bounced Sonntag between several prisons during his sentence, including the notoriously tough Bautzen jail, a crumbling brick building known as the Yellow Misery. No matter where he was, Sonntag rebelled. He mocked the guards with his seeming obedience. “I show them a perfect cell, pretty as a picture,” he once wrote. “Three times they searched me and found nothing.” Prisoners spent much of their free time covering one another in primitive tattoos, and Sonntag, whom Stasi informants had noted possessed a talent for sketching, often came up with the designs.  

In February 1974, he wrote a letter that he intended to smuggle out to his family. “The guards would love to throw me in solitary but they can’t get to me, I’ve been clever,” he wrote. Sonntag’s cockiness proved misplaced. On his way to the visiting room that month, warders frisked him and found the letter tucked in his sleeve. They punished him with three weeks in solitary.

While it is hard to know whether Sonntag began his drift to the far right while in prison, it would have been next to impossible to avoid exposure to National Socialism behind bars. The East German prison system was practically a university for Nazism; lockup was filled with extremists, and war criminals flaunted their radical views and groomed new recruits. According to Ingo Hasselbach, a reformed far-right activist who spent time in prison in the late 1980s, on Adolf Hitler’s birthday Nazi prisoners would paint swastikas on toilet paper and fashion them into armbands. “It may sound pathetic, but it was an incredible provocation,” Hasselbach wrote in his memoir, Führer-Ex. “Those people had a big influence on me, and on others.” Some prisoners viewed Nazism as the purest form of opposition to communism, the ideology whose agents had put them behind bars. Indeed, embracing far-right beliefs was, ironically, a demonstration of anti-authoritarianism. 

For its part, the Communist Party was in denial. “Officially, in East Germany, Nazism didn’t exist,” said Bernd Wagner, a police commissioner who warned of a rising tide of neo-Nazism in 1985, only to see his report to the Politburo hushed up. His bosses’ response was as simple as it was naïve: “In a socialist paradise, Nazism is impossible.”

After Sonntag was released from prison, he again clashed with authorities. They issued him an ultimatum: work as an informant for the Dresden police or go back to prison. His freedom now depended on spying on his friends. He agreed to be an informant, but became more determined than ever to get out of East Germany. Sonntag was soon plotting another break for the West.

It would be tougher this time round, not least because his criminal conviction had resulted in the police confiscating his identity papers. Crossing the border legally would be out of the question. Over beers at the Rudolf-Renner-Eck pub, he formulated a new plan: Sonntag would hide in the trunk of a car while accomplices, including a young woman with a child, distracted guards at the border between East Germany and Poland, hoping to prevent the officers from searching the vehicle. Once in Poland, they would sell the car to buy passage across the Baltic Sea and out of the Eastern Bloc. But the authorities were several steps ahead of him: This time, the young woman’s mother was the one who ratted him out.

By 1975, Sonntag was back in jail, charged with “attempted flight from the Republic.” While he was behind bars, the Dresden police continued to use him as an informant. Snitching on fellow prisoners could bring all sorts of benefits in East Germany, from cigarettes to a comfier cell to a shorter sentence. Still, it was dangerous work. The faintest whiff of suspicion could be fatal. Sonntag took the risk anyway. When he was released after three and a half years, it didn’t take long for him to be arrested once more, again for theft. He got out two years later, in 1981, this time for good.

Sonntag had little to show for himself, and his dream of escaping to West Germany seemed more distant than ever. But things were starting to change in the East. For years the authorities had ransomed prisoners and criminals to the West as a way of raising hard currency. In the early 1980s, they expanded the practice, and thousands of East Germans began applying to leave. In theory, leaders in West Germany were paying for political dissidents of conscience; in practice, they never knew who would be shipped over. “East Germany palms its neo-Nazis off on us,” one West German politician complained to the newspaper Die Zeit in 1989. 

The authorities turned down far more ransom applications than they approved, but Sonntag had little to lose. In 1984, he put in his official request. If he had ties to the far right at the time, which seems likely given his numerous prison sentences, he kept it under wraps. He told his drinking buddies that if he was allowed to leave, he would join the West German army or find work as a private detective.

As ever, the Stasi was listening. In one of the police state’s many paradoxes, “people who asked to leave were, unsurprisingly, suspected of wanting to leave,” writes Anna Funder in Stasiland. In other words, the requests were legal, but the authorities could also choose to view them as a smear against the state. Based on his ransom application, Sonntag was immediately placed under investigation.

Apparatchiks drafted a 16-point operational plan to preempt the escape plan they were sure Sonntag would hatch if his application was rejected. The Stasi’s ubiquitous network of code-named snitches—Peter, Berger, Nitsche, Pilot, Sander, Roland, Eberhard, Brinkmann—monitored Sonntag’s every move. They followed him to his job packing goods, sat across the room at his favorite watering holes, and even hid outside his apartment.

More often than not, they turned up intelligence that was painfully banal. “On October 6 I could confirm Sonntag and his girlfriend were in his flat,” reads a typical report from an informant with the code name Goldbach. “From voices in the corridor, and lights on in the kitchen and living room, I concluded that both people were at home. The extent to which other people were present I was unable to establish. It seemed to me however, that there were several women in the flat. I didn’t get the impression that anybody planned to leave the place in the evening.”

Behind the dull bureaucracy of police surveillance, however, more powerful forces were at work.

3.

Klaus Zuchold never called the short, blond-haired deputy at the KGB’s Dresden headquarters Comrade Putin. He was always Volodya: “Little Vladimir.”

Zuchold was a 28-year-old trainee spy handler when he first met Putin, at an early-morning soccer match organized by the Stasi in September 1985. Putin, 32, was a gifted sportsman who played striker. Like most spies of the era, he had an official cover: He was stationed in Dresden as a diplomatic translator, even though his German was rudimentary. He and Zuchold spoke Russian when they met.

Putin had arrived in Dresden from Leningrad a month before, followed by his wife and baby daughter. In the Soviet Union, he had worked in the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, the division tasked with fighting “ideological subversion” by using informants and agents to flush out anti-regime agitators and pamphleteers. Now Putin lived in a three-room apartment a few minutes by foot from the KGB’s modest Dresden headquarters, a suburban villa on the leafy Angelikastrasse.

The mid-eighties were a tough time in the Soviet Union. New premier Mikhail Gorbachev had just announced his perestroika reforms to counter shortages and long lines for food. But in East Germany, “there was always plenty of everything”—especially beer, Putin told the authors of First Person, a biography published in 2000. He often took intelligence contacts to pubs and breweries. He would later claim that he gained 25 pounds during the posting.

Berlin, the undisputed capital of Cold War espionage, lay 100 miles north. Dresden, by comparison, could seem like a backwater. The KGB had only six agents working out of the Angelikastrasse office, but they were busy. The city was a hub for contraband—diamonds, antiquities, and weapons, sales of which helped sustain sclerotic socialist economies. It was also home to Robotron, East Germany’s largest computer manufacturer, which owed its success to the theft of intellectual property from Western tech giants, including IBM.

The KGB’s biggest task in Dresden was to recruit agents from among the city’s left-leaning students, scientists, and businesspeople, who for one reason or another felt disenchanted with the West. Putin “knew how to be polite, friendly, helpful, and unobtrusive,” wrote a spy who published a book under the alias Vladimir Usoltsev. He shared a desk with Putin in the Angelikastrasse villa’s attic. “He was able to win over anyone,” Usoltsev wrote, “but men old enough to be his father were his forte.” Putin was no ideologue, according to Usoltsev: He could playact a convincing Communist, but in reality he was “a pragmatist, somebody who thinks one thing and says another.” Anything was on the table so long as it meant destroying his enemies.

Putin was soon promoted, becoming the KGB’s direct liaison with the Stasi, whose offices and prison in Dresden occupied a vast former paper mill. He also led a crack team comprising KGB operatives and members of the police force’s feared K1 division, which was responsible for rooting out citizens with a “hostile-negative orientation” and keeping tabs on people suspected of wanting to flee to the West. At any time, K1 had about 15,000 informants on its roster. Combined with the Stasi’s inoffizielle mitarbeiter, or IMs, East German security agencies had more than 200,000 informants—one for every 63 citizens. “Everyone was followed,” Putin says in First Person. “Of course that wasn’t normal. It wasn’t natural.”

The relationship between the KGB, Stasi, and K1 was a complicated one. Technically, K1 was an arm of East Germany’s police force and overseen by the Ministry of Interior. It was the Stasi, however, that called the shots, and not everyone in the Stasi was happy that a KGB officer had control over a K1 team. The Soviets were allies, but they were also occupiers—many East Germans remembered the brutality of the Soviet advance into their country in 1945.

Still, while the KGB and Stasi were far from friendly, they were brother agencies, and now that Putin had ascended the intelligence ranks, he had his own Stasi ID card and could come and go from the bureau’s Bautzner Strasse headquarters as he pleased. He was assigned a right-hand man named Georg Johannes Schneider, a K1 officer and former Dresden policeman with tan skin and close-cropped hair, who enjoyed hunting and restored old furniture for the large apartment he shared with his journalist wife.

It was Schneider who pulled in Klaus Zuchold to help the KGB recruit agents in Dresden. The two men first met at an event for law enforcement officers 17 miles southeast of the city, where Saxon forests fold into spectacular sandstone peaks along the Czech border. Almost everyone had gone to bed when Schneider approached Zuchold, a Stasi officer working under the alias Frank Wollweber, and raised his glass. “Prost Aufklärung,” Schneider toasted, according to a 2015 report by Correctiv, a German nonprofit newsroom. To espionage.

It was an indiscreet opening gambit, to say the least. With those two words Schneider outed himself as a shadow operator for the KGB. But Zuchold didn’t balk. The pair drank and agreed to meet again. Before long Zuchold was working surreptitiously alongside Schneider and Putin. When his Stasi bosses discovered that he’d been meeting with a KGB officer, they reassigned him, hoping to limit his access to information that might interest the Soviet Union.

Even still, Zuchold proved useful. Together he, Putin, and Schneider established a network of around 20 KGB assets, some of whom were paid a monthly stipend of as little as 50 East German marks—$38 today—to provide intelligence. Their recruits were mostly Dresden locals with contacts in the West. Zuchold’s operatives included a female journalist with an array of international connections, and a man he wouldn’t name who he said is now a senior German judge.  

Zuchold was good at his job, but Schneider was better. He was a maverick with little respect for the rules and the kind of energy and charisma that easily won over potential collaborators. One of his biggest coups was the establishment of a pipeline through which German-speaking Latin Americans, recruited as KGB agents, were funneled to West Germany.

Schneider took to wearing safari suits and dark glasses. “He looked like a mafioso,” Zuchold said. He was also good company: “He’d entertain everybody. And the people would all be taken with the man.” But Schneider had a dark side. Though married to a pretty redhead—whom Zuchold was sure Putin was jealous of—Schneider was a predatory womanizer. He slept with agents as well as the wives and girlfriends of his colleagues. He was rumored to have raped the ten-year-old daughter of an informant, though charges were never brought.

Thanks in no small part to Schneider’s recruitment efforts, Putin prospered, winning two more KGB promotions in short order. “All the success that Putin had in Dresden was first and foremost because of Schneider,” Zuchold said. Schneider was the person who came up with the idea of transforming Rainer Sonntag from a low-rung police informant into something else entirely.  

As a Dresden policeman, it was Schneider who recruited Sonntag. (Their relationship was first reported by Correctiv.) Sonntag had since become an ardent right-winger—one IM claimed that he had a side hustle selling Nazi memorabilia on the black market. When Sonntag’s request to be ransomed to the West landed on Schneider’s desk, he saw an opportunity: What if the East Germans—and by extension, thanks to Putin’s role in Dresden, the KGB—planted Sonntag as an active informant on the other side of the Berlin Wall?

At its peak in the late 1970s, the Stasi had more than 200,000 IMs on its books—one for every 63 citizens. “Everyone was followed,” Putin said.

The Stasi had a rich history of exploiting the far right for its own ends. When Adolf Eichmann stood trial in Jerusalem, the Stasi funneled cash to a campaign to defend the captured war criminal and forged letters from “veterans of the Waffen-SS” urging comrades to join the “struggle against Jewish Bolshevism,” all in an effort to humiliate the West German government. With the same goal in mind, in the late fifties and early sixties, Stasi agents smeared swastikas on Jewish graves across the country. Later, in the 1980s, the Stasi recruited Odfried Hepp, one of West Germany’s most wanted neo-Nazi terrorists, to report on far-right activity on his side of the Berlin Wall. When it appeared that Hepp’s arrest was imminent, he fled to East Germany and was smuggled to Syria under a new identity.

Author Regine Igel, who has studied extremism in modern Germany, believes that the East German intelligence apparatus was engaged in “massive and long-term support and direction of German and international terrorism,” exploiting extremists on both right and left to destabilize the West. By Sonntag’s time, however, the authorities’ approach to the far right may have become more pragmatic, concerned with heading off neo-Nazi attacks against border installations and countering the spread of the ideology in East Germany. “Following the logic of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ there was a basis for cooperation,” historian Bernhard Blumenau said. “This was realpolitik at its best.”

Unleashing Sonntag in West Germany was a gamble. He was a loner, with few personal relationships to ground him. There was a good chance that, once free, he would simply vanish. But he was about to surprise his handlers.

4.

When Sonntag arrived in West Germany in 1986, his first stop was Giessen, a refugee camp north of Frankfurt. There he boasted that he’d been “bought free,” or ransomed as a prisoner of conscience. Staying at Giessen meant routine questioning by West German intelligence officers, and possibly by their British, American, and French allies. He must have hidden his connection to Schneider and Putin well enough: Authorities quickly cleared him to leave Giessen and build a life in West Germany.

Before long, Sonntag gravitated toward Frankfurt’s underworld. With his prison record and quick fists, he blended in to the scene. He got work as a brothel doorman—a “slut minder,” as he liked to call himself. He even landed in court for weapons possession and assault. (The details of the crime have been lost; court records from the era were routinely destroyed.)

As Sonntag established himself among criminal elements in the West, he reported back to Schneider and Putin. It’s not clear how they kept in touch, according to Zuchold, but Stasi operational practice at the time would have allowed for a number of options. One was to meet in “socialist abroad” countries—states friendly to East Germany, such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Another common method was to rendezvous in Stasi-monitored service stations along the autobahn that connected East Germany to West Berlin. At least initially Sonntag was a low-grade informant, not someone to be trusted with courier duties or equipped with a clandestine radio. Nor was he worth the risk of his handlers crossing into the West to meet him.

That changed in 1988, when Sonntag caught the eye of West Germany’s most powerful neo-Nazi. The self-styled führer of the coming Fourth Reich, his name was Michael Kühnen. While Sonntag was a blue-collar rabble-rouser, Kühnen was a lean former soldier with a military bearing, sculpted cheekbones, and fastidiously pressed uniforms. He looked straight out of a Nazi propoganda movie. Kühnen was also a sophisticated strategist and provocateur. In May 1978, he and his neo-Nazi troops marched through Hamburg’s city center wearing donkey masks and placards around their necks declaring, “I’m a jackass who still believes that Jews were gassed in German concentration camps.”

Like Hitler, Kühnen wanted to gain power through legitimate elections. He and his followers started one political party after another, including the National Assembly, the National List, the National Alternative, the German Alternative, and the Covenant of the New Front. The complex network of entities flummoxed both academics and antifascist activists, but the organizing principle was simple enough: Whenever the government banned one of his political parties, Kühnen formed another one. “We didn’t found one great political organization but a lot of smaller ones, because it’s harder to ban all of them,” said Christian Worch, who served as Kühnen’s chief of staff in the 1980s and remains deep in the neo-Nazi movement today. This presented West German authorities with an endless game of Whac-a-Mole.

Behind the political front groups was a backdrop of terror. The violence had begun in 1970, when a Russian soldier standing guard at the Soviet war memorial in West Berlin’s Tiergarten was shot and wounded—the first in a series of increasingly grisly far-right attacks that, within a few years, escalated into bank robberies and bombings. In 1979, three neo-Nazis were arrested for planning an assault on a West German communist group’s offices. One of the men had stolen a large quantity of sodium cyanide. He had planned to poison the guards at Berlin’s Spandau Prison and free its only prisoner, the Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess.

The same year, Kühnen received a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence for inciting violence and racial hatred. While he was behind bars, the wave of brutality he helped unleash culminated in one of Germany’s worst peacetime atrocities: On September 26, 1980, a pipe bomb stashed inside a trash can at Munich’s Oktoberfest exploded, killing 13 and injuring more than 200. Three months later, a Jewish community leader and his partner were shot dead at their home. In 1981, security forces hunting the neo-Nazi gangs responsible for these crimes uncovered the biggest weapons cache ever found in postwar Germany: Buried in a forest in Lower Saxony were 88 crates containing 50 Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons, 14 firearms, 258 hand grenades, more than 300 pounds of explosives, and 13,500 rounds of ammunition.

Once freed from prison, Kühnen set up his headquarters in Langen, a town south of Frankfurt with pretty half-timbered houses huddled around a medieval square, like something out of a children’s picture book. A few blocks away, on the Strasse der Deutschen Einheit, was an altogether different building, a modernist complex built in the late-1950s to house East Germans who had fled Communism. It had since become home to refugees from all over the Eastern Bloc who were waiting to secure steady work and permanent housing. As bureaucracy slowed their relocation process and the complex became overcrowded, residents turned their anger toward local immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, many of whom had fled political violence or poverty to build new lives in Germany. “Just look how these asylum seekers live,” said a leader of the Federation of Expellees, a right-wing support group for Germans who had lost Eastern European property in World War II. “They all have the biggest TV sets, a video recorder, a car.”

That animosity helped make Langen the unofficial capital of West Germany’s rapidly swelling neo-Nazi movement. Far-right activists, including Kühnen, enlisted skinhead gangs to distribute racist flyers outside schools and stake out parks and playgrounds, beating up people of color who dared to use them. Their aim was to make Langen ausländerfrei, or “foreigner free,” something that would be far easier to do in a small town like Langen than in one of West Germany’s larger cities. “Twenty men in Langen are worth 200, 300, or 400 in Frankfurt,” Worch said.

By 1988, Kühnen needed people around him he could trust. Two years before, he had come out as gay, writing that “the sexual relations between men that arise from friendship and love and the deepening of devotion to the fellowship can never harm that fellowship.” Kühnen’s sexual identity had long been the stuff of rumors, but he had been forced to play his hand after he was diagnosed with HIV. As other neo-Nazis began to circle, looking to use his status as an excuse to push him from their movement’s ignominious throne, Kühnen made sure his inner circle was tight and full of proven friends.

Among them was Sonntag. It’s not clear when or how the two men met, but once they did, according to Worch, Sonntag quickly became Kühnen’s sergeant at arms. In practice this meant that he was the personal bodyguard and head of security to the most powerful neo-Nazi leader in West Germany. He was an enforcer, tasked with rooting out spies and traitors.

Sonntag also formed and commanded a platoon of hand-picked street fighters who waged running battles with left-wing gangs on the streets of Langen and Frankfurt. When the neo-Nazis attacked, Sonntag led by example. At protests, often under the gaze of the police, he fought with his fists. When he and other men guarded far-right activists distributing racist leaflets, he carried a club. Sonntag also sought opportunities to go on the offensive. Worch recalled driving him around Frankfurt to hunt down anarchists and punks. “Sonntag was always in the front line,” he said.

It was also Sonntag who dealt with the press—a responsibility that gave him control of one of the neo-Nazis’ few sources of income. Newspapers paid 550 marks for interviews ($660 in today’s dollars), while camera crews paid 950 marks ($1,280). A French TV team put up 2,000 francs ($800) for an election exclusive, and when the Nazis drove to an out-of-town rally, a Danish broadcaster bought the gasoline.

As Kühnen’s health declined, Sonntag’s prominence in the neo-Nazi movement rose even further. “Suddenly, he was the chief,” Zuchold said. “Kühnen was sick with AIDS, and Sonntag was next in line.” This made some within the neo-Nazi movement nervous. Sonntag “was not easy to trust,” said Ingo Hasselbach, adding that Sonntag’s work as a pimp was beyond the pale for many of his comrades. “We kept warning Kühnen. We said, ‘Something’s wrong with this guy.’ ”

But Sonntag’s fortune was a stroke of luck for Schneider and Putin. Available documentation doesn’t specify the information Sonntag provided his handlers, but what both the East Germans and KGB wanted most was influence and a direct line to people in power. The Stasi’s most famous coup in this regard had been to recruit Günter Guillame, a personal assistant to West German chancellor Willy Brandt, who resigned in 1974 after the agent was exposed. By the late 1980s, it was clear that neo-Nazis were emerging as a powerful political force. Sonntag, situated tantalizingly near its apex, was an invaluable asset to the prying forces of the East.  

By early 1989, riding the tide of xenophobia in Langen,  the city’s neo-Nazis had easily acquired the number of signatures needed to run their National Assembly party in a local election, with Sonntag as a leading candidate. Victory would have been a major step toward making Langen ausländerfrei. But then the West German authorities stepped in: They banned the party from the elections and raided senior leader Heinz Reisz’s home, seizing his favorite Hitler portrait live on national television.

As ever, the neo-Nazis regrouped. That November the Berlin Wall fell. While much of the world celebrated, and East Germans reveled in the newfound capitalist plenty of supermarkets and shopping malls, Kühnen’s men in Langen sensed an opportunity. What if they staged a far-right revolution in the GDR? People in the East were suddenly unmoored. National Socialism, with its vociferous rejection of the past half-century of Communist rule, could be their new anchor.

In some ways the neo-Nazis had already laid the groundwork. A flurry of groups had been created as cover for the banned National Assembly party. One of them, Deutsche Alternative, would provide the fig leaf needed to kick-start a political uprising in the East. “A party program will be formulated for the DA in Middle Germany in such a way as to allow it to be legally registered,” read the road map for revolution, referred to as Arbeitsplan Ost, or Workplan East. The next step was to win new supporters. Each Monday, up to half a million protesters filled a church square in Leipzig, East Germany’s second-largest city, to protest the lingering Communist regime. As peaceful protest spread across the crumbling GDR, the neo-Nazis wanted to nudge the participants—and thus the entire country—toward political extremism. By planting activists among the crowd, they planned to provoke a shift toward racism and xenophobia. “Our activists will take part in demonstrations and attempt to radicalize them,” the Arbeitsplan Ost document read.

But a neo-Nazi leader named Gerald Hess was worried the plan might fail, due to sabotage. He was convinced that someone within the movement’s leadership was leaking information about Arbeitsplan Ost to government authorities. At first, Hess’s suspicions fell on a filmmaker named Michael Schmidt, who only recently had become close to Kühnen. Hess and Schmidt were friendly. The filmmaker had even attended a home screening of a 1940 Nazi propaganda film depicting Jews as rats ravaging Europe with disease. But Hess was becoming increasingly paranoid.

In the summer of 1990, Hess invited Schmidt to have a beer and confronted him. “You know I like you,” Hess said. “But I don’t trust you anymore. Are you with the filth?” Schmidt talked Hess down, assuring him he wasn’t a traitor, but that only meant Hess’s suspicions needed to fall on someone else.

He turned his attention to Sonntag, who was also relatively new to the neo-Nazis’ ranks in West Germany. But Hess would never get the chance to confront Sonntag: Five days after his meeting with Schmidt, Hess was found dead in his bedroom, his chest blown apart by a shotgun. “Here in Langen, many believe that you shot Gerald,” Kühnen wrote to Sonntag in a letter dated August 24, 1990. “The circumstances are mysterious. Some point to suicide, others to murder.”

Hess’s death may have cast suspicion on Sonntag, but that mattered less than his utility. He soon returned to his birthplace. According to the Langen rumor mill, he brought along a shotgun and 6,000 marks stolen from Hess. With his intimate knowledge of Dresden’s drinking halls, alleys, and slums, he was the perfect man to put Arbeitsplan Ost into action. Soon he was leading the effort to establish an array of Kühnen-linked parties in the former GDR: National Resistance, Schutzstaffel-Ost, and the Band of Saxon Werewolves.

But before that, Sonntag made contact with his East German handler. In fact, it was the first thing he did when he returned home. When he arrived at a border crossing between West German Bavaria and East German Thuringia, he told the guards to summon Georg Johannes Schneider. Sonntag refused to deal with anyone else.

5.

Putin was gone by then. After heaping piles of KGB files into a furnace as an anti-Communist mob bore down on his office in Angelikastrasse, he returned home to the Soviet Union as the East German security apparatus collapsed. The vast majority of K1 and Stasi informants simply stopped being on the payroll overnight. But the lights at the Stasi’s Berlin headquarters, a sprawling forbidden city left blank on city maps, remained on for two days. When citizens stormed the complex, they realized why: Stasi agents had been destroying files around the clock—beginning with those of Westerners they had recruited as spies. In one building alone, there were over a hundred shredding machines.

The collapse of East German intelligence left Schneider where he had started: with the Dresden police. There he headed a department charged with tackling left- and right-wing extremism on Dresden’s increasingly unruly streets. Sonntag, newly returned, proved a great weapon “for stirring up trouble,” Schneider told Zuchold when the two men met for a drink in 1991. Zuchold had been sentenced to three years in prison in 1988, after East German officials discovered his unauthorized shadow work for the KGB. He was released when the wall fell and quickly recruited by German intelligence to spy on Schneider and Putin. (Zuchold alleges that the two men met several times between 1991 and 1993.)

In one encounter, Schneider told Zuchold that he was using Sonntag to play the city’s neo-Nazis off its punks and anarchists. Putin’s former right-hand man explained  that he used neofascists to keep the left in check, and vice versa. He didn’t want either side to control the streets; chaos was his preferred state. This meant that when Sonntag’s gang stalked Dresden, the police often looked the other way—and in some cases actively helped them. On one occasion, a police officer used his private vehicle to give Sonntag a ride to a neo-Nazi operation.

Sonntag’s attention was focused on Gorbitz, where he knew he would find like-minded individuals. On an underpass marking the neighborhood’s boundary was a spray-painted slogan alerting visitors that a “Heil Hitler” salute was the expected greeting. The message was flanked by swastikas. The pale youths who roamed Gorbitz’s monochrome streets were often armed with baseball bats, chains, and knuckle dusters. They were lost, in the words of one police psychologist, amid an “existential economic, psycho-social, and political adjustment.” In East Germany’s industrial heartland, state businesses had collapsed, and reunification was doing nothing to curb soaring unemployment.

As the cold paternal hand of the state withdrew, disillusioned youth drifted through Gorbitz’s gray labyrinth toward its grim focal point, a slab-built pub called the Grüner Heinrich. That’s where Sonntag, now 35, set up shop in 1990. He was always accompanied by his beloved German shepherd.

Kühnen had envisioned Sonntag’s homecoming as a keystone of Arbeitsplan Ost. But Sonntag molded a different reality. Gorbitz’s 35,000 residents had been born into a one-party state. Now they were gleefully ripping up their party cards; they hardly wanted to join a new one, not even Deutsche Alternative. What they did want was an outlet for their pent-up frustrations. Sonntag invited youth to Friday “Comrade Evenings” at the Grüner Heinrich, then marshaled them into bands that harried small-time criminals and foreigners. “I don’t have anything against foreigners,” Sonntag once told a local social worker named Hussein Jinah. “I just don’t want them here.”

The violence mounted as the number of Sonntag’s followers grew. In the early hours of Easter Sunday 1991, a young Mozambican slaughterhouse worker named Jorge Gomondai—one of 90,000 foreign contract workers who lived in special housing set apart from the city’s native population—was thrown from a streetcar by a gang of neo-Nazi youth. “It was a matter of life and death,” said Jinah, whose own immigrant status made him a target. “You heard these horror stories all the time.”

Around 7,000 Dresdeners attended Gomondai’s memorial service, but their concern was not enough to stem the rising tide of far-right activism and violence. In short order, Sonntag’s recruitment and provocations had made the city Germany’s new capital of neo-Nazism, and had earned Sonntag the nickname Sheriff of Dresden. Soon extremists from all over the country were visiting.

The extent of Sonntag’s success was most apparent when a film crew waited at Dresden’s central train station to capture the arrival of the führer himself: Michael Kühnen. Footage captured that day shows Kühnen on the concourse, surrounded by apathetic policemen and flanked by his most loyal lieutenants, including a smirking Sonntag, as the crowd chants, “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus!”—“Germany for the Germans, foreigners out!” 

In short order, Sonntag’s recruitment and provocations had made the city Germany’s new capital of neo-Nazism, and had earned Sonntag the nickname Sheriff of Dresden.

As Sonntag amassed power, Schneider worried that his asset was running wild. According to Zuchold, Sonntag “became gradually ill-disciplined and began to be uncontrollable.” In April 1991, Kühnen died from complications of AIDS, leaving Sonntag as one of the most powerful neo-Nazis in Germany. By then he had already set his sights on Dresden’s sex industry, which was sweeping into his hometown from the West. “Dresden must not become Frankfurt,” Sonntag told his street troops, who put local cathouses, including the Sex Shopping Center, under surveillance. “The brothels must be destroyed.”

The reality of the situation may have been somewhat different than the rhetoric. Sonntag had brought his underworld experience to vigilantism: When his gangs attacked the cigarette merchants, for instance, they stole the men’s wares to sell themselves, and rumor had it that the real reason Sonntag targeted the brothel was that the pimps had failed to pay him protection money.

On the night of May 31, Sonntag and his gang prepared to smash up the Sex Shopping Center. When Nicolas Simeonidis pulled out his shotgun, Sonntag didn’t hesitate to advance. Some people later said that he had a knife on him. Armed or not, Sonntag kept coming, arms raised, daring the brothel owner to fire at him. Simeonidis slowly backed away until he was up against his own car. He felt behind him cautiously, without taking his eyes off Sonntag, and lowered himself carefully into the passenger seat.

“Come on, shoot! You don’t have the balls!” Sonntag goaded.

As Simeonidis attempted to pull the car door shut, Sonntag jammed it open with his powerful grip. For a split second they remained locked in their positions. Then Ronny Matz, Simeonidis’s business partner, reached across the car’s interior from the driver’s seat and unloaded pepper spray in Sonntag’s face. From inside the cloud, a single gunshot rang out.

Matz stomped on the accelerator, and the Mercedes streaked away. Sonntag lay on the ground amid a slowly spreading pool of blood, the left side of his head blown away.

6.

When Sonntag died, Schneider told Zuchold it was “best for everyone.” But in truth perhaps the only thing more terrible than Sonntag’s life was his death. He immediately became a martyr to the neo-Nazi movement, and his followers took out their rage on Dresden. First they rampaged through the Sex Shopping Center, making good on their vow to destroy it. Then, in the days, weeks, and months that followed, they unleashed terror on the city at large.

Skinheads ransacked stores and attacked anybody they deemed foreign. Police showed up late to fights and crime scenes, or not at all. “Those of us with different skin color wouldn’t head out on the street after 6 p.m.,” Jinah said. “When the sun went down, we became afraid.” Gangs attacked him twice, Jinah said, and he barely managed to escape.

Nick Greger, who was 15 at the time, was inspired to run away from his home in Bavaria to join the nightly violence in Dresden. “It was very terrible,” said Greger, now a reformed extremist. “Our shoelaces were white, for white power, and I woke up one day and they were red. I thought, ‘Oh no no, I killed somebody.’ ” Another young neo-Nazi, a roofer named Sebastian Räbiger, set up a vigil for Sonntag outside the Sex Shopping Center. He would go on to become a leader of a German hate group called the Viking Youth and inculcate a new generation of neo-Nazis.

Soon the violence had spread to Hoyerswerda, a town 35 miles northeast of Dresden. There, rioting skinheads tossed Molotov cocktails into asylum seekers’ homes in September 1991. The same year, Hoyerswerda became the first German town to be declared ausländerfrei. Where they had failed in the West, the neo-Nazis were succeeding in the East.

Sonntag’s memorial procession, held two weeks after his death, was reportedly the largest gathering of neo-Nazis since the end of World War II. A crowd of more than 2,000 people walked beneath overcast skies, making their way toward the towering neo-Renaissance building that housed Dresden’s courts. They were accompanied by the heavy beat of drums and grew rowdier as they approached the courthouse steps. Many of the mourners were raised in the Communist wastelands of suburban East Germany and had come to pay tribute to a man they saw as a hero who promised a future free from poverty, crime, and disorder—only to be cut down in his prime. “He was no ordinary person,” a man with a megaphone cried. “He wasn’t one of many. He was a comrade to his comrades, a master to his followers, an outstanding campaigner for our shared ideals.”

The crowd raised their right arms, with three fingers outstretched to make the W for widerstand—resistance.  

“Rainer Sonntag is dead,” the man continued, “but Germany lives.”

The mob roared. “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

It wasn’t the last time Sonntag’s supporters would rally. In March 1992, Simeonidis and Matz were acquitted of killing the Sheriff of Dresden; a court ruled that they had acted in self-defense. Neo-Nazis rioted in response. The acquittal was overturned on appeal, and both defendants served time.

All told, the dynamics of Sonntag’s death couldn’t have been better-suited to far-right propaganda. “We always had this picture of foreigners as dangerous, killing Germans, and now we have this guy shot by Greeks,” said Ingo Hasselbach, the former neo-Nazi. “It just fit into the picture.”

A few years after the Iron Curtain fell, Schneider was arrested for collusion with Moscow, on the basis of intelligence gathered by Zuchold. He was fired from the Dresden police and worked as a private detective until 1999, when a group of men entered his apartment and beat him with an iron bar. Zuchold suspected some of the criminals Schneider had befriended as an agent turned on him. Schneider spent two days in a coma. After he woke up, he was never the same. “The man was unrecognizable,” Zuchold said. “When I had a conversation with him, sometimes he laughed, then he cried. There was really severe damage.” Schneider spent the next decade drinking at a local Irish bar and died, at the age of 62, in 2010.

Zuchold reinvented himself—first as a hotel receptionist, later as a security consultant. In 2017, he claimed that he was the target of an assassination attempt while on a train from Fulda to Leipzig. “At around 11 a.m. I was jostled from behind by an unknown man,” Zuchold recalled, with an intelligence officer’s regard for detail. “During that contact, he pushed a sharp object into my upper left arm. He said, ‘Excuse me,’ and exited the compartment in the direction of the front of the train.” Fatigue set in almost instantly, and Zuchold’s arm began to swell. A week later he was admitted to the hospital. Doctors operated for hours to address the swelling; after inconclusive lab results, they deemed it a “suspected abscess,” though similar tactics have been used by Russian operatives looking to eliminate enemies of Russia—and more specifically of Vladimir Putin.

If there is a winner in this whole sordid story it is Putin, now one of the most powerful men in the world. Since assuming the Russian presidency for the first time in 2000, he has distilled his nation’s fledgling democracy into an autocracy, murdering rival politicians and journalists and replacing them with oligarchs and a ruthless propaganda machine. Along the way, he has repeatedly instrumentalized the far right to his advantage. “Putin was never a good Communist,” said Anton Shekhovtsov, author of Russia and the Western Far Right. “It was the service to the state that was the most important thing.”

Putin has invigorated the far right at home. He has ridden with the Night Wolves, an ultraconservative biker gang, and created a national movement called Nashi—“Ours”—that enlisted football-gang members allied with Russia’s neo-Nazi underground. He has also built alliances with neofascist leaders across Europe. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s right-wing National Rally, borrowed roughly $11 million from Russia to fund her party’s quest for power. Italian Lega leader Matteo Salvini, who posed in a Putin T-shirt in Moscow’s Red Square, has called the Russian leader “the best statesman currently on earth” and has also sought funding from Moscow. As of this writing, populist leaders in Budapest and Belgrade continue to appease Putin as Russian tanks roll across Ukraine.

Putin’s influence can also be felt in present-day Germany, where the Kremlin has forged ties with members of the Alternative für Deutschland, a national political party espousing anti-Semitism and racism so virulent it has been placed under the official watch of domestic intelligence. The AfD’s heartland is in Saxony, the region encompassing Dresden. It has remained a stronghold of the German far right since Sonntag’s day.

In 2014, the city gave birth to the anti-immigrant group Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicization of the Occident). In 2019, city authorities declared a “Nazi emergency.” The following year, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned that a ceremony to mark the 75th anniversary of Dresden’s obliteration by British bombs risked becoming a rally for the far right. Steinmeier was right: In 2022, as dignitaries gathered in a cemetery to commemorate the bombing, some 750 neo-Nazis marched through the city center with loudspeakers blaring Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer.

Germany’s far right shows no sign of waning. “The scene will get bigger, in fine garb, and in the guise of neoconservative political parties,” Zuchold predicted. In a sense, Arbeitsplan Ost continues. This is the ugly legacy of Rainer Sonntag and his handlers.

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Above: Danny in Ann Arbor.

When the first annual PCAP exhibition went up in 1996, it boasted works by 50 artists from 16 Michigan prisons. Prices were set by the artists, ranging from $20 to $300. According to Janie, more than 400 people came over two weeks to see the show.

Danny created two works for the exhibition. One was a large Prismacolor drawing that he called Stereotypes, featuring a blue-skinned man and a pink-skinned woman embracing. PCAP set out a guest book where visitors could write notes about the show. “D. Valentine, I didn’t even know colored pencils could do that,” one entry read. “Amazing.”Danny’s second piece was a pen-and-ink reproduction of a work by the Czech Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Maria Mucha. Both pieces sold, and Danny got a cashier’s check for $150. With the money, he could buy snacks from the commissary and, of course, art supplies.

Danny soon realized that his talent afforded him more than money. Among some prisoners it gave him status, and with that came safety. According to Danny, he formed an alliance with the leader of a powerful faction of radical Black Muslims. Their leader asked Danny to help him with a creative project, a book intended to educate Black children about race and racism. Danny painstakingly drew dozens of scenes depicting village life in Africa and a young boy’s rites of passage—learning to hunt, for instance, and paying homage to the king. The book’s author paid Danny, but the greater reward was that he now had Danny’s back.

There were also men jealous of Danny’s success. A few who worked in the craft shop, making sculptures from the kinds of molds anyone can buy at a Joann or a Michaels store, would break Danny’s work in the prison kiln. Danny got permission to use air-dry clay, so his sculptures could set in his cell instead of the studio.

Things took a turn for Danny when the prison converted its cells to hold bunk beds. Spaces originally intended for one man would now house two. The situation was uncomfortable for Danny, not least because he had paruresis, or shy bladder syndrome. The sexual assaults he’d suffered made it hard for him to use the bathroom in front of other people, and his condition worsened as he got older. With a cellmate there was no chance of privacy, and the paruresis went from a nuisance to a health problem.

According to Danny, he devised a hack: If he acted suicidal, the guards were required to take him to what prisoners in one facility called the “bam-bam room”—a segregation cell. The upside was that he got to be alone, which meant he could use the bathroom without anyone watching or, worse, harassing him. The downside was that the room was a bare, concrete, windowless box. It didn’t even have a mattress. “You are stripped naked and put into a nylon drape resembling Fred Flinstone’s,” Danny said. “All you get is a tarp to lay on, not even a square of toilet paper, which you must request.” In a place where he literally had to ask permission to wipe his ass, access to art supplies was out of the question.

Though he sought the solitude of the segregation cell, it wore him down mentally. When Danny wasn’t spinning out, he was bored. He spent a lot of time staring straight ahead at the always shut cell door. One day he noticed some words etched into the metal: “To win the war, you must first win the battle of the mind.” Just as Buzz’s note had arrived right when he was ready to take his own life, Danny felt like a stranger was delivering what he needed at the moment he needed it. The words on the door became Danny’s mantra. He’d chant them over and over to keep himself from collapsing mentally.

By Danny’s estimate, from 2000 until the end of his time in prison, he spent at least half of every year in the segregation cell or mental-health ward of whichever facility he was in. (He was transferred more than once.) When he was in isolation, he lived inside his mind. He’d imagine the drawings and sculptures he’d create one day. He’d also meditate for hours at a stretch. “I decided to build a house brick by brick, in slow motion, like I was watching a movie,” Danny said. “Mixing the mortar, gathering the stuff to do the brickwork, envisioning everything that I needed, the wiring and the tools. I’d see myself going into the hardware store, arguing with the cashier about the price of drywall screws.”

Even though he’d never met them, he imagined Buzz and Janie inside the house. “We’d talk about what artwork they wanted to take for the show,” Danny said. When he was returned to his cell, he made sure to spend enough time in the general population, with access to art supplies, to create new work for PCAP’s annual exhibition. “That’s what I lived for,” he said.

In 2004, eight years after Danny began showing his work through PCAP, he finally met Buzz and Janie when the couple visited the prison where he was being held, to visit with various artists and look at their work. Janie recalled her bond with Danny as instant and profound. “I remember looking into his face and grabbing his hands between my hands. I could feel his presence as I had felt his presence in his drawings,” Janie said. “The intensity of the work comes partly from the content, which is often about loving relationships between mother and child, man and woman, but also from the intensity of the labor that goes into the drawing.” Danny remembered Janie’s physical touch as warm. “I felt the same kindred connection as when I opened that letter from Buzz the first time,” he said. “I felt like I had met the other half.”

In 2009, Danny saw Buzz and Janie again, just as he was coming off a hunger strike protesting double bunking. Danny hobbled into the visiting area with the aid of a cane. He had a scraggly beard and long, unkempt hair. “He was in his late forties, but he looked 65,” Janie recalled. He’d come with art to share. “He pulled out his drawings,” Janie said, “and they were luminous and light filled.” They were in stark contrast to Danny’s lived reality in prison.

Two years later, when Danny was up for parole, Buzz and Janie wrote a letter of support, singing his praises as an artist. The parole board denied Danny’s request, and he swore off going before the panel again. “I was not getting out of bed to go talk to these motherfuckers,” he said. “I made up my mind to max out”—to serve the rest of his sentence—“which was six more years.” But he wouldn’t have to wait that long. In 2013, he was told to pack his belongings. He was being paroled whether he liked it or not.

On October 15, Danny was called to the warden’s office and handed a sack of state-issued clothes: khaki pants, T-shirt, blue coat. His brother Randy, whom he had reconnected with a few years prior, was waiting in the prison lobby. They walked into the cold, damp day—the sun hung low and hazy in a faded blue sky. Then they set off in Randy’s sedan to what would be Danny’s new home: a halfway house just off the interstate outside Ann Arbor. They turned onto a long driveway flanked by lion’s head sculptures, and when they pulled up to the house, one of Danny’s new housemates opened the door. “Welcome to freedom,” the man said.

The problems had seemed small at first. Always a careful listener and conversationalist, Buzz now occasionally fell out of step when talking to people. He didn’t always answer questions—it was as if he hadn’t heard them or couldn’t understand.

Danny had six months to get his life together. He was in his early fifties by then, had never had a bank account, and didn’t know anything about smartphones. Now he needed both, as well as a job and permanent housing, neither of which would be easy to come by for someone on the sex offender registry. Randy had set aside the $10,000 that made up his inheritance from his now dead father. Danny used the money to buy a 2001 silver Dodge Caravan, a car he could live in if need be.

Danny had been out for a month when he looked up Buzz in the phone book. Buzz was ecstatic to hear from him. The next morning, Buzz and Janie had Danny over for blueberry pancakes. They talked about art, which Danny didn’t make much anymore—he’d lost the sight in his left eye. The last drawings he’d made were for a PCAP show; one of them depicted a set of three eyes. Whatever sadness she felt about Danny’s situation, Janie was delighted to see him out of prison garb. “He looked much younger now and freshened up,” she said. When she drove Danny back to the halfway house, they made small talk about cars.

When his parole was up, Danny moved in with Diane, his ex-wife, and the doctor she was still seeing, until she found him a run-down trailer overlooking an alfalfa field in the Upper Peninsula. The landlord said Danny could live there for free until he fixed it up. While looking in vain for a job, Danny survived on ham and cheese rollups. The first winter, without heat in the trailer, he bundled up in every layer he owned. He was no longer in prison, but he felt trapped.

A world away, Janie had a big, beautiful office with a window overlooking the University of Michigan campus. She spent time interviewing prisoners who had participated in PCAP programs. When Danny came in for his interview, before he moved up north, he told her about his upbringing and the abuse he’d suffered. He said he must have been reincarnated, because he was born knowing how to draw and sculpt. He admitted that his lonely life was taking a toll on him: He’d been thinking again about suicide.

Janie watched through the window as Danny got into his van to drive away. Her heart ached. After that she made a habit of checking on Danny, and later he made a point of coming to Ann Arbor to see her and Buzz. Sometimes, if Buzz was busy, Janie and Danny would spend time alone together, eating chili dogs at a local diner or sipping hot tea while they caught up.

Danny didn’t know it yet, but Janie was worried about Buzz. The problems had seemed small at first. Always a careful listener and conversationalist, Buzz now occasionally fell out of step when talking to people. He didn’t always answer questions—it was as if he hadn’t heard them or couldn’t understand—and sometimes his replies were totally off topic. Janie wondered if Buzz might be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, yet his memory seemed fine. It was how he spoke and interacted with the world around him that was becoming muddled.

In mid-2013, Janie and Buzz went to visit a friend who lived in the hills outside an old walled town in Italy. The town had picturesque stone streets, sienna houses, and a piazza where one day Janie and Buzz met a few people for pasta and prosecco. As the group talked, Buzz blurted out a story about his prison theater workshops without any prompting or context. As he rambled on, unaware of how confused his friends were, Janie became convinced that something was seriously wrong.

Not long after the pancake breakfast with Danny, Buzz saw a doctor, who diagnosed mild cognitive impairment. In January 2014, a neurologist ran more tests and changed the diagnosis to Alzheimer’s. The diagnosis changed again a few months later: Buzz, the doctor said, had a type of dementia called frontotemporal degeneration, or FTD. It can cause problems with language, behavior, and eventually motor skills. There is no cure.

Above: Sculptures from PCAP exhibitions.

Buzz’s decline was gradual at first—Danny hadn’t even noticed anything was wrong until Janie mentioned it. She took care of Buzz as best she could. She continued teaching at the university and managed to carve out bits of time for painting, though long hours in the studio were a thing of the past. Janie needed art like she needed air—the feeling of layering oils or stroking charcoal onto paper, images that emerged unplanned but turned out to be meaningful. When Janie painted a series of small, abstract watercolor and gouache pieces for a New York show titled Proximities, Buzz accompanied her to the opening. A friend of Janie’s kept an eye on him so she could relax and bask in the appreciation of her work.

A few years into the illness, Janie could sense it worsening. Buzz, who had never yelled at her, now did so at the drop of a hat. Once, when she was heating up some water to make tea, Buzz towered over Janie screaming “No!” for no apparent reason. His ability to take social cues diminished, and he came off to people as rude. Small tasks like washing dishes and folding laundry soon became overwhelming—Buzz seemed to get lost while attempting them.

Most devastating for Buzz, a stalwart intellectual, he also began to lose his hold on language. Communication through speech—choosing the words he wanted to say—was all but impossible. For a while, though, Buzz could still read aloud, and he would read his own poetry to Janie.

On any given day, Janie didn’t know which tasks Buzz could or couldn’t handle. He prepared his own breakfast every day, until one morning he poured the milk directly onto the counter. After that Janie made him breakfast. She took him shopping at Plum Market, an upscale grocery store in Ann Arbor, and one day Buzz left her side and began yelling as he roamed the aisles, alarming customers and employees. Standing between shelves of pasta and chips, Janie cried, “It’s OK, he has dementia!” When Janie decided Buzz could no longer take care of their big green lawn, she hired a landscaper. But as soon as Buzz saw a stranger mowing outside, he threw a patio chair at the man. In the future, it was decided, Buzz would need to be away from the house when the yard was being tended.

Between medical appointments, keeping her own work on track, and dodging the curveballs Buzz’s dementia threw at her, Janie was overwhelmed. It wasn’t just the effort that wore her down. Seeing her soulmate changing, diminishing, becoming helpless, was draining. “You are constantly trying to figure out what to do,” Janie said. “That tension is exhausting emotionally.”

Janie updated Danny on Buzz’s condition during his visits to Ann Arbor. On one occasion, in the summer of 2016, Janie asked Danny if he wanted to make a few hundred bucks helping organize the garage. It was one of those things she just couldn’t get to on her own that needed to be done. Danny came over to the house, and within a few hours the garage was in order. It happened to be around the time of Danny’s birthday, and banana pudding had been prepared for the occasion. Buzz sat silently during the visit, except when it came time to sing “Happy Birthday.” It saddened Danny to see a man he knew to be full of thoughts and ideas appear so reserved, so distant.

Janie hired a home health aide at one point, but soon decided the person wasn’t a good fit. She wanted someone who loved Buzz to care for him. His children were grown, with kids and careers of their own—they couldn’t drop everything to look after their dad. Janie called on two of her most trusted former students, ones who knew Buzz, to keep an eye on him when she couldn’t. They helped cook and keep Buzz safe. But after several months, they needed to move on with their lives. Janie was at a loss. There was no one left to call.

Right before Christmas 2016, Buzz became confused, walked out of the house, and fell, injuring himself. As Janie sat next to Buzz’s bed in the emergency room, she suddenly found herself thinking about Danny. Danny, who’d credited Buzz with saving his life, who’d spent time with Buzz and understood his condition. Danny, whom Janie had felt bound to from the moment she met him. Danny, who was looking for purpose and direction. Danny, who’d done one hell of a job organizing the garage.

She realized that Danny was who she could call. “I got the feeling that he was a person who took great care and was thorough and patient,” Janie said. “I had the idea that he might be a good caregiver.”

Janie called Danny on Christmas Eve, and the next day he left the Upper Peninsula. Janie asked him to stay for a few months, but it wasn’t long before Danny again made a choice: Buzz would be his reason for living, and this time Janie would be too. “I will stay,” Danny told Janie, “until the end.”

Above: Danny cutting Buzz’s hair. (Courtesy of Janie Paul.)

Danny moved into Buzz’s old home study, where he was surrounded by books he’d never heard of: The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal, Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee. “I’d never been in the academic world,” he said. “I was blue-collar all the way.” He was the kind of guy who, rather than get it cut, shaved off his hair or grew it into a ponytail, the kind who kept car parts in the living room to work on them. “The world I grew up in, we fixed our own shit,” Danny said. At Janie and Buzz’s, he had to be careful not to track dirt and grease inside.

At first Danny helped with basic chores around the house. He made Buzz’s bed, did his laundry, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher. If the tasks were mundane, they were also deeply felt: Janie could breathe again. As the weeks went by, she relied on Danny more and more. He shopped for groceries, tied Buzz’s shoes, brushed Buzz’s hair. After Buzz went to sleep, Danny and Janie would sit in her home studio talking about the new things Buzz was doing and the old things he couldn’t do anymore. They had the same goal: to make him feel loved.

People with FTD often develop obsessive-compulsive habits. For Buzz, this manifested as a constant need to make sure the lights in the house were off and opening and closing window blinds incessantly. He also liked collecting things from around the house—clothes, books, paintings—and making piles with them. Janie and Danny would awake to stacks of random objects, and the day’s work would include putting everything back where it belonged without Buzz noticing.

Gillian Eaton, Buzz and Janie’s best friend, described Buzz’s face during this period as a mask of terror. He was conscious that his brain was being destroyed and could do nothing to stop it. He couldn’t express the simplest thoughts. To communicate what he wanted, he screamed or grunted. Sometimes, rather than deal with his situation, Buzz simply refused to engage.

And then there was the excrement. It wasn’t so much that Buzz couldn’t control his bowel movements but that he’d forgotten where he was supposed to have them and what they were even for. Danny once opened the fridge and found a Pyrex bowl full of feces. Buzz would leave poop on the kitchen counter or on furniture, where Danny would quickly scoop it up to stop it from soaking into the fabric.

When Buzz awoke with soiled sweatpants, Danny cleaned him up. This presented another challenge: Buzz didn’t like showers or baths, because his condition made him extremely sensitive to stimuli. Danny’s only option was to sponge-bathe him. Buzz, who was a foot taller than Danny, would stand on a towel in the kitchen as Danny reached into a bucket of soapy water and asked permission to wash each part of Buzz’s body.

“Can I wash your feet?” Danny would ask. “You don’t want gangrene, so I need to get your feet.” Buzz would protest but eventually concede. It became something of a dance, with Danny almost singing his words. “OK, how about your arms?” he would intone. “Now we have to get your back.”

Eaton recalled coming into the house once to find Danny hunched over Buzz’s feet, clipping his toenails. “Raphael couldn’t have painted something more beautiful,” she said.

When Buzz lost dexterity in his hands and could no longer eat with utensils, Danny came up with a menu of finger foods. One of Buzz’s favorite things was watching Danny prepare meals: the delicate smearing of peanut butter onto bread, the slicing of a blueberry muffin into equal halves, the topping of toast with perfect squares of butter. After eating, Buzz seemed hypnotized by how Danny rinsed the dishrag, the way he twisted it into a ball to wring out the water, then unfolded it to full size again.

Danny became an expert at coaxing Buzz to do things Buzz was not inclined to do. “I don’t want you to catch a cold, come in now,” he would say when Buzz refused to get out of the car after returning home from a doctor’s appointment. When Buzz didn’t budge, Danny would say, “OK, you can stay there. Just come in when you’re ready.” That was usually all it took—Buzz would get out of the car and walk into the house.

Danny could sense when Buzz needed to be left alone, when he wanted poetry read to him, when he needed to eat. At certain points, Buzz didn’t want anybody but Danny around; he would get frustrated when Janie cared for him. At first this felt like rejection, but she learned not to take it personally—it was the illness pushing her away, not Buzz.

There were days when Danny took Buzz on long drives. They loved these outings. Their first stop was McDonald’s. “We’d order chocolate milkshakes, and he’d suck his right down and reach over and grab mine,” Danny said. Buzz still had his sense of direction, and he’d point Danny here or there, to a house where he once lived or the place on campus where his office used to be. One time, Danny recalled, “he started crying a little bit. He pointed, he tried to tell me something, and it sounded like speaking in tongues.”

“Yeah, Buzz, I know,” Danny said. “You worked there for 47 years.”

Buzz just shook his head.

Above: Danny and Janie, along with various artworks, in their home studio.

Danny’s presence freed Janie up to spend time in her studio making a new series of drawings, using oil pastels and charcoal. The collection, titled Still Here, included imagery influenced by Buzz’s condition. Sometimes, though, Janie didn’t use her time alone to work—she just sat still, decompressed, and let her mind wander. With Danny in the house, she often felt at peace.

Still, as she spent more time with him, Janie saw that Danny had a dark side. Decades in prison had damaged his psyche and left him with a mountain of trauma. He had mood swings and a temper. Sometimes he reacted to situations based on instinct and fear. Once Janie took him to Zingerman’s Roadhouse, a popular restaurant in Ann Arbor, to thank him for taking care of Buzz. When she asked him if she could compensate him for his time, the wires in Danny’s head got crossed and started to spark. As Janie talked about money, he suddenly feared that she was going to stiff him, cheat him, ruin him. Other people had done it—why not her? In that moment Danny was convinced that if he agreed to something Janie said, she’d betray him.

Janie was stunned by his reaction. For all the time she spent in prisons, she’d never witnessed so intimately the long-term effects of the carceral system’s abuse and isolation, which often compounds prisoners’ earlier traumas. Her mind raced. She wanted to help but didn’t know how.

They left Zingerman’s without resolving things, and it took a day for Danny to realize he’d been wrong. After that, Janie encouraged him to communicate his feelings as a way of managing his anger. She was patient when he went on paranoid tirades, and with time they happened less and less often.

Though they came from different worlds, Janie and Danny always had something to talk about. She listened without judgment to stories about his life. Danny told her how he’d cared for his art supplies in prison, making them last as long as possible. She was taken by his commitment to creating beautiful things in oppressive conditions. At night, sitting together with Buzz, they worked their way through long TV series, including The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. Sometimes Danny couldn’t look away from Janie. She was beautiful and sophisticated, kind and approachable.

To cope with her grief about Buzz, Janie tried to live in the present moment as much as she could. “It was unfathomable that he would be dead, and at the same time it was perfectly obvious that he would be dead,” Janie said. “There was no way to reconcile that.” When Buzz suffered an embolism and a doctor said he might not walk again, Janie made the painful decision to put him in a care home. But Buzz did walk again—so well, in fact, that he’d wander around the facility at night trying to escape. Danny went to visit Buzz every day. He couldn’t bear to see his friend so miserable.

After just two weeks, Janie and Danny took down the art on the walls of Buzz’s room, packed up his belongings, and moved him back to where he belonged. Together, at home, they would help Buzz live out his last days.

Danny had spent nearly three years caring for his friend; he knew what to do. He put Buzz’s favorite hat on his head and pulled the sheet up to keep him warm.

Buzz was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich one day when he started choking. It was a moment Janie and Danny had feared was coming: Some people with FTD eventually lose the ability to swallow food. Already Danny was practiced at using a finger to wipe away food stuck to Buzz’s gums and cheeks. Now Danny gave Buzz the Heimlich maneuver. By the time he was breathing normally again, the two men had tears running down their faces.

When Buzz started refusing food and water in September 2019, a hospice nurse gave him four, maybe five days to live. He spent that time in bed. Janie lay down beside him and put her arm around him. He wanted company, but no talking, no stimulation. When Buzz tried one last time to get up and flip the light switch in his room, Danny helped him back to bed.

Buzz’s breathing got noisier. His skin turned purple. “Any day now,” Danny and Janie kept saying to each other. Finally, on the twelfth day without food or water, Buzz stopped breathing.

It was 7 a.m. on a Thursday when it happened. Buzz’s daughter from his first marriage was with him. She woke Janie, who woke Danny. He went to Buzz. Danny had spent nearly three years caring for his friend; he knew what to do. He put Buzz’s favorite hat on his head and pulled the sheet up to keep him warm. He told Buzz that he loved him.

Before employees from the funeral home came to collect Buzz’s body, Janie pulled all the pots and pans from the kitchen cabinets. With the help of an Australian rain stick, a musical instrument, she and Gillian Eaton made a joyful noise while singing to Buzz. “We are with you on your journey,” they sang as he was ferried away.

Above: Danny in his workshop.

“Dannyyyyyyy!” Janie called downstairs. “Can you bring us a glass of water please? Oh, and a piece of that chocolate.”

Janie smiled as I reached to take a photo album from the shelf. We were looking at black-and-white pictures taken by Janie’s parents in 1941 in Guatemala, images of local people making food, textiles, art. There was so much of the past in the house. By the time I visited in late 2021, Buzz had been gone for two years, yet I almost expected him to walk into the room at any moment, because he was everywhere—in the books and the art, in the framed photos of the life he and Janie had lived together.

Still, there was a freshness in the house, too—a sense of life going on. The walls were recently painted. A white linen couch lacked any creases from long-term use. New Turkish rugs were soft underfoot. Janie pointed to a bookcase that Danny had laid on its side, converting it into a long, elegant shelf. “He just knows how to make things look nice,” she said.

Soon after Buzz died, Janie had asked Danny to stay with her. Buzz was her soulmate, but in a different way she loved Danny too. There was no question that he loved her. “She’s like seven Betty Whites,” Danny said. “She’s all that and a bag of chips.” When Danny told her one day that she looked good, something clicked for Janie: This was how it was supposed to be with them.

Theirs wasn’t a classic romance, but in a way it was deeper. “Even now, with Buzz no longer here, Danny and I still feel like there’s this circle of love,” Janie explained. “I want to maintain my connection to Buzz through Danny and me taking care of each other.” Danny described himself and Janie as “bound by memories of Buzz.” He’d taken to wearing a bracelet and a watch of Buzz’s. He often cried when he talked about his friend, about what three years of being by his side as he died had meant. “I wish him back every day,” Danny said.

Danny and Janie, Janie and Danny—now they were a pair, a package deal, born of necessity and intimacy. “They filled each other’s loneliness in a way I don’t think anyone else could,” Eaton said. “They needed each other to look after Buzz, but now they need each other to look after each other.”

During my visit, I watched as Danny brushed tenderly against Janie as they moved around the house. He called her “ladybug.” She bragged about his banana cakes—they were sugar- and gluten-free, she said. For breakfast one day, Danny made eggs and endless pots of strong coffee. When Janie scanned the pantry for peanut butter, Danny’s hand went right to the jar. After he did the dishes, Danny looked out the back window into the yard, where birds were sipping from a bath. “I think I’ll tackle the lawn next,” he mused.

Janie had bought Danny a sketchbook and told him he could use her studio whenever he wanted, to get back to making art. He said he might one day. It wasn’t his sight that made him hesitant, and he hadn’t lost his passion for creating. For the time being, Danny explained, he just preferred to run errands, do chores, and nurture the life he shared with the woman he loved.

“My world is right here, and this is all I care about,” Danny said. “Some people are good at writing, some people are mechanics. I’m good at taking care of people.”

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For more than half a century, the people of Easter Island lived under an oppressive colonial regime. Then a schoolteacher sparked an unlikely revolution.  

By Mike Damiano

SECRET

TO: VALPARAISO

FROM: EASTER

… THE SUBVERSIVE MOVEMENT IS MUCH MORE SERIOUS AND GRAVE THAN BELIEVED ON THE CONTINENT … THE SCHOOLTEACHER IS PREPARED TO GIVE HIS LIFE TO WIN FREEDOM … TO AVOID FATAL CONSEQUENCES URGENTLY SEND A SHIP TO RESTORE ORDER

Chapter One

No one in the Rapu household could sleep. It was early March 1955, and in the family’s three-room home in the hills above the village of Hanga Roa, Reina Haoa busied herself sewing clothes. Her husband, Elías, paced. The couple’s four eldest boys—Alfonso, Carlos, Sergio, and Rafael—huddled together in the living room watching their parents worry. There was not much to say. In the morning, 12-year-old Alfonso would leave Easter Island on a cargo ship called the Pinto. He would travel to the port city of Valparaíso, Chile. His parents could not tell him when he’d return home or when he might see them again, because they did not know. They also could not tell him much about where he was going. Neither of them had seen land beyond Easter Island’s shores.

The Pinto came once a year to deliver basic supplies: soap, flour, sugar, fabric. For the Rapanui, the annual arrival was bittersweet. Though other ships occasionally visited the island, they brought few if any of the necessities needed to sustain life. By the time the Pinto came in late summer, the pantries of Rapanui families were bare. Construction projects had stalled for lack of materials. The Pinto, the Rapanui’s only regular physical contact with the outside world, brought relief.

But for many, the ship’s arrival also provoked a simmering sense of dread. Along with supplies, the Pinto brought disease. Each year, in the weeks after the ship unloaded, kokongo—a catchall term for whatever germs the Chilean sailors were carrying—swept through Hanga Roa. It was common for kokongo to infect as much as half the population. By the time it abated, it usually had left several families grieving.

There was no one to complain to about these epidemics, at least no one who would listen. For several decades, the authorities on Easter Island had been foreigners who represented their own interests by keeping the Rapanui under their thumb. In 1898, a decade after Chile annexed the island, the Rapanui were rounded up and resettled on a few square miles of the western coast, centered on Hanga Roa. A network of fences known as the Wall, built by Rapanui men for menial wages, kept them there. Passage beyond the Wall—to visit ancestral lands, to explore or cultivate the countryside, or to leave the island entirely—was only possible with written permission from the island’s governor.

Over the decades, some Rapanui managed to leave the island, usually by taking jobs on the mainland with the Chilean military. Others resorted to more desperate measures. Some built rafts and set off over the horizon for Tahiti. A few of them made it, navigating the thousands of miles of ocean between Easter Island and French Polynesia by the stars. But the great majority—dozens of men—vanished in the vast Pacific.

Reina and Elías were born within the Wall, like their parents before them and their children after. There had been no way for them to leave. Their family grew almost every year, until Alfonso was the eldest of 11. He played soccer with friends and attended school most days. Like other young Rapanui children, he also spent long hours on his family’s plot of land, cultivating taro and sweet potatoes. Since there was no running water in Hanga Roa—and no ponds, streams, or lakes—the Rapu family collected rainwater in a cistern. It sometimes fell to Alfonso to skim the dead bugs and mold off the water’s surface.

There were other things—more brutal ones—that Alfonso accepted as normal at the time but would haunt him later. At the schoolhouse, nuns who delivered lessons in Spanish, a language their students barely understood, punished children with canes. At home, Elías was a menace. He chased Reina through the house and hit her. The children usually cowered; when they tried to intervene, Elías struck them. Domestic violence was endemic in Hanga Roa. A peaceful home was the outlier.

There were other horrors, including the constant threat of leprosy. When telltale sores appeared, breaking out on a temple, a forearm, or a bald scalp, the afflicted person was removed from the village and quarantined permanently at the island’s leper colony, at the base of the Terevaka volcano. When Alfonso was a child, his uncle worked at the colony, and sometimes brought him along to help. He got to know the place and the people condemned to live there. One man, Gabriel Hereveri, who had lost both hands and an eyelid to the disease, befriended Alfonso and told him stories of life on the island before the Wall went up, when the Rapanui were still free.

Alfonso had never seriously contemplated a life beyond the island. To the extent that he thought about his future at all, he imagined it taking place within the Wall. But Reina hoped for more. When she learned of a new program for educating Rapanui children in Chile—a humanitarian effort organized by the government—she lobbied her brother, who worked for the Navy, to ask his supervisors for a favor. Could they get her eldest son onto the list?

The supervisors said yes. Reina only found out the night before Alfonso was scheduled to depart on the Pinto.

The next morning, Alfonso and his parents went to Hanga Piko cove, where local fishermen launched their boats. The three gathered by the water’s edge, alongside 11 other children and their parents. Like Alfonso, these children, ranging in age from 12 to 15, were set to depart for Chile. They would be placed in boarding schools or with host families and enter the Chilean education system. They were the second cohort to participate in the program, and their families considered it a privilege.

Alfonso hugged his mother, who was weeping. When he turned to his father, he found that Elías was crying as well, which unsettled him.

Alfonso knew in a technical sense that he would board a ship, that the ship would sail over the horizon, and that he would disembark in a new land. But he had no ability to picture Valparaíso, a modern city of 400,000 people. He could not conceive of a journey of 2,300 miles, the distance to Chile, when the greatest expanse he had ever reckoned with was 14 miles on Easter Island—from the Poike Peninsula in the east to Rano Kau, a volcano, in the west.

Aboard the Pinto, he stood on the aft deck. As the ship shuddered and began motoring east, he kept his eyes fixed on Easter Island. For a couple of hours it receded. Then it disappeared over the horizon. All he could see was water. He broke down and sobbed.

In 1898, a decade after Chile annexed the island, the Rapanui were rounded up and resettled on a few square miles of the western coast.

Valparaíso came into view on the seventh day of the journey. As the Pinto approached, the city seemed to rise up over the ship. One of the busiest and richest ports in the Western hemisphere, Valparaíso buzzed with the activity of industrial cranes, thousands of car and truck engines, and the constant interchange of sailing ships, tankers, and tug boats. Ten-story towers and hulking neocolonial government buildings stood on the flat land at the water’s edge. The rest of the city—wealthy neighborhoods of Victorian houses and poor slums of multi-colored shanties—clung to the coastline’s steep hills, which residents ascended via funiculars.

Alfonso Rapu took in the staggering sight from the Pinto’s deck. He was about to set foot in a new world.

After a train ride over the foothills of the Andes, he arrived at a boarding school in downtown Santiago de Chile, a dense urban hub that was home to the president’s sprawling mansion and the headquarters of Chile’s banks and copper-mining corporations. The next several months were lonely and difficult. Rapu lived in a dormitory full of bunk beds, which during the week were occupied by children but sat empty on weekends; most students returned home to their families then, leaving Rapu alone. Yet even on weekdays he was isolated. He barely spoke Spanish. When teachers called on him in class, his speech was halting and accented. His classmates snickered and called him indio—Indian—a pejorative for anyone with non-European blood.

A 26-year-old social worker, Guacolda Zamorano, noticed Rapu at the school and worried over him. On weekdays, she checked on him during her breaks. On Friday afternoons, she left him with enough home-cooked meals to feed him through the weekend. Still, Zamorano felt she wasn’t doing enough. In the evenings, at her house in a suburban neighborhood, she talked to her husband, Manuel Nova, about Rapu. The boy needed more help, she said. He needed a home.

Early in the winter of 1955, Zamorano instructed Rapu to pack his things. She told her husband that the boy would be living with them for a while. He stayed for nearly nine years.

Rapu was given his own bedroom, a new wardrobe of chinos, button-downs, and loafers, and a makeshift family. Zamorano became, in every meaningful sense, Rapu’s second mother. She was warmer than Reina, who had always been protective of her children but came from a culture that tended not to shower them with affection. Children were liabilities and laborers; they were expected to fend for themselves and contribute what they could. Rapu had sometimes felt like a piece of property, particularly when his parents loaned him to the neighbors in exchange for an ox. The neighbors used Rapu for a day of labor in their field, while Reina and Elías used the beast to plow theirs. No one thought anything of the arrangement; it seemed like a square deal. But now that Rapu had seen something else—another life, another way to be a child—the memory rankled.

Zamorano tutored him in Spanish, and he made steady progress. Within a few years, he spoke the language fluently. He strove to catch up in other subjects, too. Every morning as he walked to the bus, he added up the numbers on his neighbors’ mailboxes to practice arithmetic. At school he started sitting in the first row of desks, focusing his attention on the teacher to help him ignore his classmates’ taunts, until finally, gratifyingly, they stopped.

As Rapu grew, his station among his classmates changed. By the age of 16, he had transformed; the scrawny child had become tall, muscular, and handsome. He was a capable soccer player and charming, with a winning smile and a quiet sense of humor. He had girlfriends. One summer he befriended the daughters of senator Salvador Allende. He spent afternoons with the Allendes by their pool. Once he even wore the future president’s swimming trunks.

For the first time in his life, Rapu had options, opportunities, and frivolous diversions—he had developed a weakness for orange Fanta. But in the midst of bourgeois bliss, something gnawed at him. He had not forgotten where he came from, and in a cruel way, the more comfortable he became in Santiago, the more distressed he felt whenever he thought of his family back on Easter Island.

One summer day in 1958, Rapu boarded the Pinto again in Valparaíso. He was headed home for his first visit since leaving the island three years earlier. After a weeklong journey, Rapu looked out over Hanga Roa bay as the ship’s crew dropped anchor. In the water below, he saw Rapanui men in white button-front shirts paddling fishing boats out to greet the Pinto’s sailors. This was a Rapanui custom that dated back centuries. When Dutch explorers first happened upon the island, men in canoes greeted them.

Rapu had watched this ritual from shore in his childhood. He knew these men; he had called some of them koro, a term of endearment that means “grandfather” in Rapanui. But now, as they approached the ship, he was startled by their appearance. He remembered them as strong and vital; these men looked hollowed out.

On shore, his parents and siblings greeted him. Reina and Elías looked unchanged, but his brothers and sisters were all new versions of themselves, some taller, some wider, some thinner. He had a week to spend with his family, the time it would take the Pinto to unpack its supplies and load up the annual production of wool from the sheep ranch that foreigners managed in the island’s interior. He spent most of his days with his brothers Carlos, Rafael, and Sergio. They had been his closest allies during his childhood, and he had missed them fiercely. But now that they were reunited, Rapu felt a distance between them that was difficult to bridge. When they asked him what life was like in Santiago, he didn’t know what to say. How could he explain attending soccer matches at Santiago’s 40,000-seat stadium? What could he tell his brothers, who were confined by the Wall, about weekends spent at his host family’s country cottage? What bothered him most, though, was that his brothers thought they were fine, that life on the island didn’t need to change. He had thought the same thing before he left.

Back in Santiago, Rapu spent long nights awake, staring at the ceiling of his bedroom, worrying about his brothers. As he neared adulthood, he also contemplated his future: which profession to pursue, where to live, what to make of his life. He decided to become a teacher.

As he neared university graduation in the early 1960s, Rapu considered various teaching positions—in Santiago, in the Lakes Region of southern Chile, and even one, offered through a U.S. State Department program, that would provide educational opportunities in the United States. But he could not push from his mind the circumstances of his brothers and the rest of the Rapanui. He had begun to wonder if there was something he could do to help.

He was still considering his options when he returned to Easter Island a second time, in 1962, and made a terrible discovery. The Rapanui community had suffered yet another trauma, and this one struck close to home.

In 1888, a Chilean delegation landed at Hanga Roa bay. They had come to lay claim to the island, one of the last uncolonized territories in Polynesia. There was a reason European powers had passed it over. It was distant from everything: 4,400 miles from New Zealand, 2,600 miles from Tahiti, 4,500 miles from Hawaii, and more than 2,000 miles from the South American ports of Valparaíso and Callao, in Peru. The island also seemed to hold little economic potential. The land was dry and hard to cultivate. There were no natural resources to speak of. And the population was too small—the number of Rapanui had dwindled to fewer than 200 by the time the Chilean delegation came—to be exploited as a labor force.

To Chile, though, the island had special value. Since the country had won its independence from Spain, it had strived to establish itself as a modern Western power. Chile’s elite—Spaniards and Italians with few familial ties to indigenous Americans—were expansionists and industrialists. They had turned the country into a mining behemoth and pushed its national boundaries south to the tip of the continent, taking land from the Mapuche people as they went, and north into territory seized from Bolivia and Peru. Now they were looking west. They wanted an offshore colony, a hallmark of the European powers they emulated. Easter Island was the best—really the only—option.

The leader of the 1888 delegation was a Navy captain named Policarpo Toro Hurtado, who was intent on colonizing the island. He had taken his case directly to the president, leaning on a combination of hyperbole and fantasy. In a report, he wrote that the island’s “fertile shores” would become Chile’s “Oasis in the Ocean,” even though the soil was volcanic and nearly barren. He claimed that the island lay in transpacific shipping lanes, which would make it a valuable stopover; in fact, Easter Island was hundreds of miles out of the way. The president had no way to verify what Toro said and didn’t care to. Now Toro had arrived to seize Easter Island for his people.

Chile’s first act of treachery on Easter Island was its first act of any kind there. Toro had brought with him two documents—one in Spanish, the other in a hybrid of Rapanui and Tahitian, the latter of which was commonly used in legal documents in the Pacific. The papers were intended to lay out an agreement between the Chilean government and native leaders. But the two texts didn’t match. The Rapanui and Tahitian words described a congenial alliance: Chile would become Easter Island’s protector and “friend of the land.” But the Spanish text said something altogether different. It stated that the Rapanui would cede the “full and entire sovereignty” of Easter Island to Chile, “forever and without reservation.” In front of Hanga Roa’s Catholic church, beneath a flagpole flying both the Chilean and Rapanui flags, the island’s king, Atamu Tekena, and a dozen other local leaders signed the Rapanui-Tahitian document with crosses drawn in black ink.

When Toro sailed off, he left behind three Chilean families. They were to be the first Chilean settlers on Easter Island, the foundation for the new colony that Toro envisioned. But things did not go as planned. The settlers’ crops failed, and they discovered that the only reservoir of fresh water on the island was inside the crater of Rano Kau, a four-mile climb up from Hanga Roa. They refused to ask for help from the Rapanui. After a disastrous year, two of the families abandoned the island, fleeing on a Chilean battleship. The third stayed behind but soon died. And just like that, Chile’s dream of a thriving colony in the Pacific collapsed.

Chile soon developed a case of buyer’s remorse and sought to offload its new territory. The Easter Island Exploitation Company, a joint British-Chilean venture, was glad to oblige. Under the terms of its long-term lease, the Company, as the Rapanui came to call it, could do as it pleased with the island and its people. Within a decade, the Company had confined the Rapanui, and leprosy, which had arrived with the Chileans, was spreading within the community.

In the summer of 1898, the Rapanui’s new king, Riro, marched to the Company’s island headquarters, a one-floor house with a wraparound balcony on a bluff outside Hanga Roa. Riro carried with him a list of grievances. He met with the Company’s manager, a Chilean named Alberto Sánchez Manterola, and demanded better pay and working conditions for the Rapanui men employed at the Company’s sheep ranch. When Sánchez refused, Riro asked for passage to Valparaíso. He wanted to appeal to higher authorities. Fine, Sánchez said—if he wished, Riro could even meet with the president of Chile.

A few weeks later, Riro departed for Valparaíso aboard the annual supply ship. He never returned. Nor did he ever meet with the president in Santiago. Upon Riro’s arrival, a Chilean employee of the Company took him drinking in Valparaíso’s taverns. The next day, the king died in a Navy hospital. The official cause of death was alcohol poisoning. The Rapanui, when they learned his fate, concluded that it had been poisoning of another kind. But no one would ever know for sure: Chilean Navy personnel dumped Riro’s body in an unmarked grave.

Riro’s death ended the first effort by the Rapanui to make their grievances heard in Chile. In the following decades, the government largely ignored Easter Island. Every ten years or so, a report about goings-on there, written by a passing explorer or a shipwrecked sailor, would make its way into the Chilean press. The dispatches described bleak conditions: crushing poverty, harsh discipline, disease. Next came a flurry of concern, often from Chile’s more humanitarian-minded Catholics: newspaper editorials, vows by politicians to aid the pascuenses (the Spanish term for the Rapanui), and recriminations against the Company. In 1947, a group of Chileans formed the Society of Friends of Easter Island to advocate for better conditions for the Rapanui. Members of the society lobbied the government to evict the Company from the island. In 1952, Chile did just that.

In the Company’s place, Chile installed the Navy. Now, instead of a corporate manager ruling the island and overseeing the sheep ranch, there was a naval governor. Usually a young captain looking for adventure, the governor served a term of one or two years, and he lived at Mataveri, the bluff outside Hanga Roa, in the same house the Company manager had occupied. During his tenure, the governor had total control over the island: He was ranch manager, police chief, mayor, judge, and jury.

How the Rapanui fared from one year to the next depended almost entirely on the current governor’s temperament. Some governors—the better ones—focused on ranch operations and mostly left the Rapanui to themselves. Others were cruel. In 1961, a particularly brutal governor arrived. A tall, fair-haired Chilean of British descent, John Martin viewed the Rapanui as disobedient charges who needed to be kept under control. Like the worst of his predecessors, he ordered his men to shave women’s heads as a form of discipline and locked men in the House of Stone, a small, square jailhouse that looked like a medieval castle in miniature. Martin let it be known that he would not hesitate to use violence as punishment for insubordination.

By the time Martin took command of Easter Island, Alfonso Rapu had been in Santiago for a few years. His brothers were now young men. Carlos, in particular, had undergone a dramatic change. At 15, he was the island’s star athlete. Fast and muscular, he was formidable on the soccer pitch. He was also a fitness buff. When he wasn’t playing soccer, he ran sprints. The Navy’s dentist on the island, a lieutenant named Julio Flores, took notice. Flores also passed his time working out—what else was there to do on Easter Island? Soon, Flores and Carlos were training together.

Reina and Elías were pleased. It was always good to have Chilean friends, who had access to better food and coveted goods, such as fabric and lumber. Once, Flores gifted the Rapus a radio, so they could listen to music on the island’s lone station. A relationship with a Chilean could also offer protection; the authorities were less likely to mete out capricious punishments to a Navy man’s friend.

Flores was charming, kind, and solicitous. His only quirk was that he disapproved of Carlos’s relationships with girls. When Carlos started dating a classmate, Flores complained to Reina that her son was spending too much time away from home, with his girlfriend. Reina figured Flores was just a traditional type who disapproved of frivolous romance.

But then strange things started happening. Once, Flores invited Carlos to go with him to Anakena, a beach beyond the Wall. Carlos jumped at the opportunity. But when he returned and Reina asked him about the excursion, he withdrew to his room and changed clothes. When she asked what was going on, he wouldn’t give an explanation. Another time, at a party, Flores hugged Carlos in a way that made the teenager uncomfortable and Carlos snapped at him. Later, Carlos told Hanga Roa’s mayor that Flores was a homosexual.

When John Martin heard of the accusation, the governor ordered his men to lock Carlos in the House of Stone. Here was an indio smearing the reputation of a Navy man; the governor wouldn’t stand for it. Carlos’s crime was lying. The next day, Martin’s men dragged Carlos out and beat him with a baton, just a few hundred feet from the Hanga Roa market, in full view of passersby.

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Rapu’s visit to the island, shortly thereafter, would prove to be even more impactful than the first. His family told him what had happened to his brother, and Carlos showed him the wounds from the beating.

Back in Santiago, Rapu was haunted by the image of his brother’s scarred back and by the question of what he should do. He looked for answers in the university library, reading newspaper clippings about revolutions and civil rights movements around the world. He borrowed a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, whose model of anti-colonialism—nonviolence combined with an inclusive form of nationalism—especially appealed to him. There were people elsewhere who had been oppressed and then freed, or who had freed themselves. Why not the Rapanui?

In 1963, after Rapu had completed his studies, the Ministry of Education appointed him to serve as Hanga Roa’s schoolteacher. He would be the first Rapanui to fill the role, if he accepted the post. Rapu decided he would. He did not want to make a life for himself in Chile or the United States; he wanted to return home. A few months later, in January 1964, he boarded the cargo ship bound for Easter Island. This time, his passage was one-way.

Chapter Two

Rapu moved into his parents’ house and started making a new life for himself. Every morning, he walked out of the hills to the schoolhouse in the village center, where he gave lessons in Spanish and math. His students included both Rapanui and Chileans—the children of Navy officers and government functionaries. The students loved him. He taught bilingually so the Rapanui students wouldn’t fall behind. He connected with the Chileans by sharing stories from his life in Santiago. He was different from his predecessors in never striking his students. He considered himself a pacifist.

Rapu ate lunch with the nuns who ran the schoolhouse. They were not the nuns of his youth. These were young women in their twenties and thirties, and they became some of Rapu’s closest friends on the island. After almost a decade in Santiago, he felt that he had more in common with them than with his fellow Rapanui. The nuns could speak about politics and world events. Rapu was grateful for the camaraderie, but it pained him that he couldn’t find the same bond with the men and women he had grown up with, however hard he tried. When he tried to strike up conversations about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or the fractious politics of mainland Chile, his Rapanui friends steered the conversation back toward familiar ground: fishing, the harvest, village gossip.

Rapu came to realize that he no longer fully belonged anywhere. He had been a foreigner in Santiago, and now he was an outsider on Easter Island.

He decided that the best thing he could do was educate people, and he wasn’t only thinking about children. If circumstances were going to improve for the Rapanui, he believed, they had to be literate in Spanish. Colonizers had deployed written language against the Rapanui from the beginning, when Policarpo Toro Hurtado used it to deceive the king. It was the secret code that had enabled generations of Company managers, in their frequent reports and telegrams, to represent themselves to the Chilean government as benevolent and responsible caretakers. Even visitors who had meant well—explorers and scientists, mostly—had described island life in their own terms, leaving the Rapanui voiceless before the wider world.

So in the evening, after the children went home, Rapu opened the schoolhouse to adults for literacy classes. These were well-attended, rowdy affairs. Fishermen, farmers, and homemakers packed the rows of desks. Rapu wrote Spanish words on the chalkboard and called on people to read them. When someone made a mistake, the class heckled them, but the mood was collegial. The adult students, Rapu saw, were like family to one another.

After class he trudged over the hills, exhausted, and collapsed into bed. During his first few months back home, this was all he did: fish, teach, and sleep. Was it what he had come back to do? Perhaps. But was it enough?

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While Rapu settled into his routine, another young man, Jorge Portilla, was establishing his own domain at Mataveri. Portilla was the island’s new naval governor, replacing John Martin. He had arrived just two months before Rapu, in November 1963, accompanied by his wife and three young children.

There was no special reason that Portilla was chosen for the role. A third-generation Navy man, Portilla had joined the service as soon as he was able. Now 34, he had risen to the rank of captain. When he heard that the Navy was looking for applicants to serve as governor of Easter Island, he thought he would give it a go. He had always found the distant colony intriguing. Here was his chance to see it, and to have one last adventure before settling into midlife.

During their first months on the island, Portilla and his wife held court at Mataveri, hosting barbecues primarily for Chilean officials, though sometimes they invited Rapanui. Portilla joined the Navy soccer team—he played goalie—which consisted of officers and their Rapanui employees. On weekends, they faced off against Rapanui teams.

Portilla was a less fearsome leader than Martin had been. Under his administration there were no Navy-sanctioned beatings or head shavings. But he wasn’t a reformer. He was a paternalistic authoritarian. No Rapanui could go beyond the Wall or leave the island without his written permission. In Portilla’s view, this was how things should be.

Every Monday morning, dozens of Rapanui men amassed outside the front door of Portilla’s office in downtown Hanga Roa. They wore work clothes and milled about, waiting. To an outsider they might have looked like day laborers hoping to secure an honest wage. But here the men knew they would not be paid. They were partaking in a ritual known as State Mondays, the polite term used to describe weekly forced labor sessions.

Eventually, Portilla walked out his front door, stood on the building’s single step, and assessed the crowd. Then he broke them into several groups and gave orders for the day. Some Rapanui would do road repair work. Others would mend fences or storm damage to Navy buildings. The tasks varied according to the needs and whims of Portilla and his men.

Occasionally, the Rapanui grumbled about the work. Though technically any resistance was grounds for imprisonment, Portilla instead offered the men a brief pep talk. The labor was for the good of their own community, he said; the Rapanui were improving the island for themselves. His comments never addressed how exactly spending a Monday afternoon gardening in a Navy official’s yard for no money would help any Rapanui.

Rapu was exempt from State Mondays, as were all Rapanui men who had jobs at Navy headquarters or on the sheep ranch. But the sight of his friends, uncles, and cousins trudging to Portilla’s office every Monday distressed him. It wasn’t dignified, he thought, to be forced to work under threat of imprisonment. Rapu was reminded of how he had felt on his first visit home from Santiago, that something here was not right. His people, he now believed, had been beaten down, and they had lost sight of who they are.

So Rapu embarked on a new mission at the schoolhouse. He wanted the Rapanui to remember where they had come from, that they were the descendants of a great civilization, one that had learned to survive on this inhospitable island and built its famous moai statues. By 1964, most of the moai lay toppled and covered in lichen, surrounded by grazing sheep. Rapanui farmers plucked rocks from the ahu—the platforms the moai once stood upon—to build walls around their fields.

Rapu wanted to remind his people that the statues weren’t just ruins that littered the coastline. They were relics of a proud history, sacred monuments to the Rapanui’s ancestors.

He wanted the Rapanui to remember where they had come from, that they were the descendants of a great civilization.

Around a thousand years ago, a double-hulled sailing vessel ran onto the beach at Anakena Cove, on Easter Island’s northeastern coast. White sand formed a crescent around the bay. Beyond the beach stood a dense grove of towering palm trees.

The people who stepped off the vessel were the first to set foot on Easter Island. They were Polynesian scouts sent on a mission of exploration by their king. Finding the island was a stroke of luck. It was uninhabited and big enough to support a settlement. The scouts returned home to report their discovery. Sometime later, according to oral tradition, a small fleet landed in the same spot at Anakena, this time carrying not just young men but also women, children, and older male leaders, as well as seeds, plants, pigs, and chickens. This was the Rapanui’s ark.

Over the subsequent centuries, people fanned out across the island. They organized themselves into a network of cooperating clans, each controlling one slice of the island and the natural resources it contained. One clan had the best fishing cove, another the best pasture. Yet another looked after Rano Raraku, the volcano—also known as the quarry. This was where workers carved the moai.

In the Rapanui cosmos there is no heaven or hell; souls do not relocate after death. They inhabit grasses, mingle among their living relatives, or—in the case of exalted ancient leaders—take up residence in the moai. The moai thus had power, mana, over earthly events, which may explain why over time the people of Easter Island made them bigger, taller, and more ornate. At the peak of moai production, the statues were towering monuments. The biggest stood 30 feet tall, with a highly stylized face: a sharp jawline and an overlong, flared nose.

Sculptors carved a moai out of porous volcanic rock, right where it had hardened to the earth. When a statue was complete, they pried it from the ground and, with a system of ropes, stood it upright. Then they jostled it forward, a few feet at a time; men tilted it left while others tugged it forward on the right, and back and forth. With this technique, they transported statues weighing as much as a commercial airplane across the island. When they reached the coast, they used levers and ropes to hoist the statues onto the ahu.

The moai always faced inland, watching over the population. There was no reason for them to look seaward. For centuries no ships came over the horizon. Easter Island was like a lone planet floating through space.

Then, in 1722, three ships appeared. They were sent by the Dutch West India Company, and they marked the beginning of a new era. Over the next century and a half, until Chile’s annexation of the island, commercial ships, explorers, and settlers periodically landed on the Rapanui’s shores. Sometimes they engaged in trade, but more often they delivered calamity. The first three ships set the precedent: After sighting the island on Easter Sunday—hence the name they gave it—the crews landed, and the captains took a tour, guided by Rapanui leaders. When they returned to where they had left their men, the captains found carnage. Sailors had opened fire on a crowd of Rapanui men, killing nearly a dozen and wounding many more.

Later ships brought smallpox, and Peruvian slavers abducted men and transported them to South America. In 1868, a French pirate named Jean Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier set about transforming the island into his own personal fiefdom. He won some Rapanui allies, armed them, and terrorized a band of Jesuit missionaries who had settled in Hanga Roa, driving them and their followers from the island. Dutrou-Bornier ruled with impunity until one day, in 1876, three Rapanui men bludgeoned him to death.

Twenty-five years later, after the Company had taken over, the Rapanui attempted to topple a manager named Percival Edmunds. Led by a Rapanui woman named Angata, who claimed to be a prophet, a band of men slaughtered the Company’s cattle and marched on Company headquarters. As Edmunds bunkered at Mataveri, fearing for his life, a Chilean Navy ship landed. The sailors arrested two of the revolt’s male leaders and carried them back to Chile, breaking the spirit of the movement.

The assassination of Dutrou-Bornier was the first Rapanui uprising against a foreign authority. Angata’s revolt against the Company was the second. Alfonso Rapu, the quiet schoolteacher, would soon lead the third.

Chapter Three

Rapu started looking for ways to expand programming at the school, with an eye toward teaching Easter Island’s history. He partnered with Luis Paté, a popular fisherman, known to everyone as Papa Kiko, who had made it his life’s work to keep alive traditional songs and dances from the precolonial era. Papa Kiko and Rapu founded a dance troupe of children and teenagers. On weekends they met at the schoolhouse to craft traditional clothes—grass skirts, headdresses made of dried reeds—and to rehearse Papa Kiko’s music and dance steps.

To naval authorities the activity seemed innocuous, a way for the Rapanui to keep themselves busy. For Rapu it was a way of reintroducing himself to islanders, regaining their trust after so many years away, and reasserting his Rapanui identity. He was also creating a sense of community. In short, he was organizing.

Another center of influence had emerged at a campsite on the edge of Hanga Roa. In February 1964, a 40-foot schooner dropped anchor near the village. It belonged to a French adventurer, Francis Mazière, and his Tahitian wife, Tila. They had come to Easter Island, they said, to carry out a major archaeological research project. Without asking many questions, the Chilean government granted them permission to do their work, and Portilla and his wife gave them a dignified reception. But the Mazières did not socialize with the Chileans much after that. They were put off by the way Portilla stressed Chile’s European origins, as if to distance himself and his country from the indigenous people his country had displaced and dominated, including the Rapanui.

The Mazières were more interested in spending their time with locals. They set up camp and hired Rapanui men and women to help them with their fieldwork. Soon they were hosting campfire soirées, where they dropped hints that they might have a solution for the Rapanui’s problems: Leaders of several French Polynesian islands, including Tahiti, were working to form a new nation, the Polynesian Federation. Perhaps, the couple suggested, Easter Island could break away from Chile and join.

Rapu, who rarely attended the Mazières’ campfires, didn’t share the prevailing sentiment at the gatherings: He was not hostile to Chile, where he had spent so much of his life. His hope was not for Easter Island and Chile to separate, but for them to draw closer—for all Rapanui people to experience the privileges and freedoms he had enjoyed in Santiago. He wanted civil rights, not secession.

What’s more, he believed that the Navy had a role to play in bringing about change. In his view, John Martin, the governor who had ordered his brother beaten, was a bad actor, but that didn’t mean that the Navy itself was rotten. Rapu hoped Portilla might become his ally. Rapu taught the governor’s eldest daughter at the schoolhouse—she was an excellent pupil—and he found Portilla to be a responsible and engaged father. On the soccer pitch, their competitions were friendly. But Portilla soon disappointed Rapu by stymieing an initiative at the schoolhouse.

From his own experience, Rapu knew that young Rapanui children were often left alone while their parents worked. So he told the school’s head nun, Sister Petronila, that he wanted to create a kindergarten. It would give parents a place to deposit their kids during the day, and it would give Rapu and the nuns the opportunity to start educating children early. All Rapu needed was a field: Since the temperature on Easter Island hardly ever dropped below 60 degrees, and the schoolhouse was occupied, the kindergarten would be outside.

Sister Petronila explained the proposal to Portilla and asked for a plot of land. Portilla agreed, but the land he offered was a scrap of dirt, covered in low brush, at the edge of the village. It was too far from the school, and not nearly big enough to give kids room to play. When Rapu complained, Portilla didn’t budge.

Rapu next asked Portilla for better personal accommodations. He had learned from the nuns that there was a house in Hanga Roa, a few hundred feet from the school, that was officially designated for the island’s teacher. By rights, the Navy should have handed it over to Rapu. Instead, a Navy officer had made it his own.

Sister Petronila sent another petition to Portilla, who, sitting alone in his office, viewed it as reasonable. But he was nothing if not deferential to the chain of command, and he was unwilling to evict a fellow officer from the house without consulting his superiors in Valparaíso. In late August, he sent a telegram asking for guidance, and in response Valparaíso rejected Rapu’s request. Because he wasn’t married, authorities determined, he could remain with his parents. Portilla, ever the loyal Navy man, presented the decision as if he fully endorsed it.

Rapu was incensed and began reassessing his view of Portilla. The governor was mild mannered, yes. But in his official acts he was imperious, just like his predecessors. Rapu concluded that the governor didn’t regard the Rapanui as fellow citizens; he saw them as serfs.

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On October 31, 1964, Guido Andrade, the Navy’s doctor on the island, threw a party. He had invited practically everyone in Hanga Roa to his small house, which he shared with his wife and daughters. The crowd overflowed from the living room onto the front stoop and into the street.

Andrade was perhaps the only person who comfortably straddled the divide between the Chileans and the Rapanui. If he received an invitation for a social engagement—a Navy dinner party or a backyard curanto, a communal cookout where pigs and yams were roasted in underground ovens covered by banana leaves—the answer was invariably yes. He could always be counted on to stay late and bring booze. And if he had once had a dalliance with a Rapanui teenager, well, most people chose to look past it. Life on the island could be monotonous, but Andrade never was.

No one else could have assembled the group that showed up that night. Portilla was there alongside island elders. Chilean sailors and young Rapanui men jostled for a spot near the bar.

At the end of the evening, Andrade quieted the crowd to give a speech. The intended audience, it seemed clear, was Andrade’s Rapanui friends, not the Chileans, much less Portilla. “Mi querido pueblo pascuense,” he began—my dear Easter Islanders. He had good news to share, he said. A new president had been elected in Chile. Eduardo Frei Montalva of the center-left Christian Democratic Party had promised in his campaign to be a reformer, and had even referenced the antiquated system of governance on Easter Island. The Rapanui should hope for a brighter future, Andrade said. Soon they might get relief from the “deficits of liberty” they had long endured.

Portilla, listening among the crowd, was furious. The next day, he summoned Andrade to his office.

“What are these deficits of liberty?” Portilla asked.

“There are many,” Andrade replied.

Portilla felt that Andrade’s speech was an act of insubordination. To Rapu it was an opening. It was the first time he had seen someone so brazenly defy naval authority. The episode made Rapu wonder what other kinds of resistance might be possible.

Germán Hotus, another guest at the party, had the same thought. Hotus had been a regular at the Mazières’ campfires, where he spoke openly of the Rapanui’s oppression and the need for reform. Throughout 1964, Hotus had spent many evenings visiting Rapanui families in their homes, listening to them talk about their hardships and telling them that life on the island needed to change. In the weeks after Andrade’s party, Rapu and Hotus met regularly at the schoolhouse or at Hotus’s home. They didn’t agree on all matters: Hotus was sympathetic to the Mazières’ separatism; Rapu still felt himself to be Chilean. But they shared the conviction that the Rapanui deserved a better life.

They also complemented each other. While Rapu could relate to the Chileans—and speak to them in Spanish—Hotus was a married father of nine who was employed at the village supply store. He was a man of the people. Rapu and Hotus became a team and started laying plans. They did not support violence, and neither aspired to be governor or king. Still, they believed that the Navy could be resisted, and that the regime on Easter Island could be prodded to change. They wanted to show the Rapanui how.

The Rapanui should hope for a brighter future, Andrade said. Soon they might get relief from the “deficits of liberty” they had long endured.

One day Rapu and Hotus learned that a Canadian naval ship had departed from Nova Scotia and was en route to Easter Island. Traveling on the Cape Scott was a team of scientists and physicians. They had received permission from Chile to land at Easter Island and study the Rapanui.

The whole idea bothered Rapu. What right did the Chilean government have to grant foreigners permission to inspect the Rapanui? But he and Hotus also sensed an opportunity. There was little that Chilean authorities and especially the Navy feared more than embarrassment on an international stage. With foreign observers on the island, Rapu and Hotus believed, the Navy would have to act with restraint, giving the two men more room to operate and to stage acts of defiance.

Rapu and Hotus began collaborating on a letter they intended to send to Chile’s new president. It would become a long document, incorporating the ideas of the men’s Rapanui allies: Rapu’s students from his night classes and Hotus’s contacts from his consciousness-raising tours of the community. It referenced Hotus’s interest in Easter Island seceding from Chile and joining the nascent Polynesian Federation, but it didn’t go so far as to endorse the idea. Longer passages were informed by Rapu’s Chilean patriotism, asserting a sense of common national identity and demanding full civil rights for islanders.

The men laid out the Rapanui’s grievances. “Mr. President,” they wrote, “what we want to say cannot be said here on the island.… We live under threat because if we speak freely the Governor says he will fire us from our jobs or send us to jail or that he’ll never let us travel to the Continent. This makes us live under a constant tyranny.” Their basic rights, they said, were infringed. They were not allowed to assemble without permission. Their Navy-controlled elections were not free and fair. They had been dehumanized by brutal punishments. They were confined to Hanga Roa. Their mother tongue was banned in radio communications.

In the face of these injustices, the letter’s demands were modest. They amounted, more or less, to a desire to be left alone. The Rapanui people, the letter said, were self-sufficient—“here, by our own initiative, we do everything.” All they wanted was a little bit of money to modernize. The funding should come from the proceeds of the sheep ranch, the letter said. The Rapanui would use it to buy machinery for a basic textile factory to avoid the cost of importing fabrics, for a woodworking shop to manufacture furniture, and for a cobbling facility to make and repair shoes. The Rapanui would also buy modern fishing and farming equipment. They would happily accept help from “civil, NOT MILITARY, technicians” to establish these new industries. Above all, they wanted the Navy to leave.

The letter was a cry for freedom. “We wish to be able to sing,” it concluded, “without being so ordered.” The plan was to smuggle several copies of the letter off the island and somehow, perhaps through the Chilean press, convey it to President Frei.

Rapu prepared the letter on a typewriter at the schoolhouse. Beneath the final paragraph, he typed the names of 45 influential Rapanui men; after each name he left a blank line. Then he sent two allies, Alberto Tepihi and Antonio Tepano, to collect signatures. He wanted the letter endorsed by the community’s prominent male citizens, which he hoped would make it more difficult to dismiss.

It was a risky gambit, because many of the men he listed opposed his vision for the future. Rapanui society was divided between those who wanted reform and those who didn’t. Some members of the Rapanui old guard, a contingent of men who held a variety of political sinecures doled out by the Navy, bristled at the notion of change. These men and their followers were a minority, but a sizable one, and they had access to more political power than Rapu’s supporters. Their leader was Hotus’s uncle Lázaro, the Navy-backed mayor of Hanga Roa.

Nonetheless, Rapu placed Lázaro’s name first on the list of signatories. He wagered it was worth a try to get the mayor and his allies to sign. Maybe asking them to sign a letter to the president would appeal to their egos. They might not even bother to read the letter—or they might not be able to. It was not lost on Rapu that, like the Chileans, he was exploiting his fellow Rapanui’s illiteracy, the very thing he was seeking to remedy in his evening classes. But in his mind, the ends justified the means.

Tepihi and Tepano spent a day crisscrossing Hanga Roa seeking out signatories. They added their own spin to Rapu’s plan: They told each man what they thought he wanted to hear. They told some that the letter was a New Year’s greeting for President Frei. They told others that it was a request for more resources for road construction. Around half the members of the old guard signed. When some, including Lázaro, refused, Tepihi and Tepano forged their signatures. When they returned to the schoolhouse, every signature line was filled out.

The next day, December 6, Hotus and Rapu convened a community meeting at the schoolhouse. They billed the event as an opportunity to discuss the upcoming election, scheduled for early January, for the positions of mayor and village councilors. All of Hanga Roa’s influential men showed up, including elders who supported Hotus and Rapu, and Lázaro’s cadre of loyalists. Lázaro opened the meeting. He listed the candidates—his political allies—who would be up for reelection, and who had been preapproved by Portilla. Then Rapu took the floor.

They should hold elections now, Rapu told the packed schoolhouse, and they should vote for whomever they wanted. When he asked the room who was in favor, almost everyone raised their hands. Lázaro tried to intervene, saying they couldn’t vote without the governor’s approval. Then Hotus cut in. The election, he said, was a matter for the Rapanui people and the Rapanui people alone. Never mind Portilla.

This was the second phase of Rapu and Hotus’s plan: to preempt the official election and hold a truly democratic vote. Hotus pulled out a page of handwritten notes and read the names of a new slate of candidates. They were fishermen and farmers, people who had attended Rapu’s literacy classes and the Mazières’ parties. Lázaro objected, saying that the new candidates were not suitable—they hadn’t been approved by the governor. Rapu backed up Hotus. The military, he said, should have nothing to do with the elections. Against Lázaro’s protest, the gathered men agreed to reconvene two days later for an election.

Lázaro marched to Portilla’s office and delivered a detailed report of the meeting at the schoolhouse. Portilla was alarmed by the Rapanui’s subversion of his authority, but he didn’t intervene. On December 8, Hanga Roa’s men returned to the schoolhouse to cast ballots. They elected the new slate of candidates and chose Rapu as mayor. Just as Rapu and Hotus had predicted, Portilla still took no action to punish them.

The Canadian ship was only days away. Nothing mattered more to Portilla than protecting the Navy’s reputation. He couldn’t lock up Hotus, much less Rapu. What would a team of Western scientists think if they discovered the island’s charismatic schoolteacher and newly elected mayor was a political prisoner?

On December 13, the Cape Scott dropped anchor in Hanga Roa bay. Portilla, accompanied by two military officials, greeted the foreign visitors. The expedition’s leader, Stanley Skoryna, would later write of how impressed he was by the young governor’s hospitality.

The next day, Rapu met Skoryna at the island’s naval hospital. As part of their research, the visitors wanted to conduct medical exams on every member of the Rapanui community. Rapu told Skoryna that he could help secure the cooperation of the village, as long as Skoryna agreed to some conditions: Women could only be examined by female doctors. All results would be shared with the subjects and their families. The Rapanui reserved the right to suspend the exams at any time. Finally, Rapu said, if the researchers wished to donate any supplies to the island as an act of goodwill, they should deal with Rapu directly, not the Navy.

A few days later, another opportunity to defy naval authority emerged. A cable from Chile’s Ministry of Public Works reached Portilla’s desk, requesting that the lone bulldozer on Easter Island be shipped to the mainland. The bulldozer had been brought in a few years earlier to dislodge a U.S. Air Force plane that had become stuck on the island’s dirt runway. Ever since, Chilean government functionaries on the island, alongside Rapanui laborers, had used the machine to build roads and boat ramps. The community had come to regard the bulldozer with a sense of pride: It was a symbol of modernity. No one in the Rapanui community would be pleased to see it go. Sure enough, as soon as Portilla instructed Navy officials to load the bulldozer onto the Cape Scott—the ship’s captain had agreed to transport it to Valparaíso—outrage spread through the village.

Within hours of Portilla’s order, Rapu told Humberto Paté, a Rapanui mechanic, to render the machine inoperable. The mission, Rapu told him, had to remain secret. That night, as Rapu taught his literacy class, Paté appeared at the schoolhouse door. The classroom went quiet. Paté held up a burlap bag.

“Teacher,” he said, “I’ve got the—”

Rapu cut him off. “Thank you, put it in the back,” he said. Turning to the class, Rapu said, “Humberto brought me some fuel.” In fact, the bag contained the bulldozer’s driveshaft.

The next day, when Portilla’s men tried to start up the bulldozer, they discovered that it was dead. Portilla was enraged. He had restrained himself up to that point, but he couldn’t tolerate sabotage. A few hours later, Sergio Piñeiro, the captain of the Chilean Air Force contingent on the island, approached Rapu outside the schoolhouse. “Teacher,” he said, “we’re going to Portilla’s.” Rapu got in the captain’s Jeep.

When he walked into Portilla’s office, Rapu found the room full. Portilla, two Navy officials, Lázaro, and two other members of the Rapanui old guard were seated around Portilla’s desk. Hotus was also there. Rapu sat down.

Portilla launched into a diatribe, accusing Rapu of inciting a “subversive movement.” Rapu argued that Portilla shouldn’t have authority in the first place. The leader of Easter Island should be a “native,” he said. Portilla was indignant. “I’m the governor,” he said. But now Rapu was picking up steam. The Navy had no business managing the ranch, he said; it should belong to the Rapanui. The Navy also shouldn’t occupy homes in Hanga Roa, including the teacher’s house; these structures belonged to the island’s people. The Rapanui must be free to move about, to visit the lands of their ancestors, to fish where they pleased.

Lázaro pointed out that people were already free to fish where they liked, as long as they got permission first. Portilla asked Rapu to consider how much the Navy gave the Rapanui, and how much worse things would be without Chile overseeing the island. “It is the bare minimum!” Rapu shot back. “The Navy is exploiting the ranch and keeping the profits!”

Portilla, flustered, tried to change tack. He brought up the bulldozer and its missing driveshaft. Rapu denied being involved and, seeking a way to escape the office, agreed to get to the bottom of the matter and help recover the part. Portilla extracted a promise from him: Rapu would deliver the driveshaft the next morning or there would be trouble.

The following day Portilla waited, but Rapu never came. It was the final straw. Portilla decided that, to restore order on the island before the situation escalated any further, he would have to call for help. He sat down at his desk and tapped out a telegram to Valparaíso. For the first time, he told his superiors that there was trouble on the island.

“We have discovered a subversive movement carried out by the islanders against the Navy,” he wrote. “The movement is led by the schoolteacher Alfonso Rapu (a native). … We suggest transport for the schoolteacher.”

The next day, Portilla got an answer. The message read: “The Commander in Chief of the Navy has approved the return of Alfonso Rapu to the continent aboard the Canadian transport Cape Scott.”

Rapu argued that Portilla shouldn’t have authority in the first place. The leader of Easter Island should be a “native,” he said.

On an evening in mid-December, shortly before the Cape Scott departed the island, there was a farewell party—a traditional Rapanui sau sau, with singing, dancing, an open fire, and a roast. The researchers who had come on the ship would be staying for a while, so the islanders were sending off the Cape Scott’s foreign crew, as well as Dr. Andrade and his family. People thought Andrade was leaving of his own volition; he and his family had long said they planned to move back to Chile when the annual supply ship came—the Cape Scott just let them do so a bit earlier.

In fact, Portilla had ordered Andrade to leave. He suspected the doctor of being a collaborator with Rapu, and he had already sent accusations of subversion to his superiors. Andrade knew he was in trouble, but he didn’t let on at the party. He drank and danced, wearing white slacks and a white linen shirt. He didn’t want to spoil his last night on the island with any bad news.

Rapu was in attendance. He didn’t know about Andrade’s situation, or that Portilla was working to have him shipped to Chile, too. But as he chatted with friends, he overheard snippets of other conversations nearby.

“…the people who believe they’re educated and superior…”

“…disappear from the island…”

“…going to scare them off like rats.”

He wasn’t sure what the comments meant, if anything, but he found them strange.

That night around 11:30, on his walk home in the hills, Rapu saw a man coming toward him. In the dark, Rapu couldn’t make out who it was. When the man spoke, it was in a Chilean accent. “You need to hide,” the man said as he passed by and disappeared into the dark. Rapu was spooked. Instead of continuing home, he followed dirt trails winding through farm fields until he reached his grandmother’s house, where he had lived as a young child. He lay down on the floor with a blanket and went to sleep.

The next morning, Portilla ordered his men to find Rapu and Hotus, whom the governor also wanted to send to Chile, and bring them to the Cape Scott. Under normal circumstances, finding anyone in Hanga Roa was a simple matter. There were fewer than 2,000 people on Easter Island, and everyone knew everyone else. But as Portilla and his men canvassed locals, they found that no one knew where Rapu and Hotus were.

Juan Edmunds, a Rapanui man from the old guard, told Portilla that Rapu was hiding at his uncle’s house. Portilla drove across town in his Jeep, but Rapu wasn’t there. Another Chilean officer heard that Rapu was at the home of a government functionary, Nicolai Escalante, who was viewed as sympathetic to the Rapanui cause. Escalante, bewildered, pleaded ignorance. Meanwhile, Lázaro knocked on the door of his nephew’s home and demanded that Hotus’s wife turn him over. She answered, honestly, that she had no idea where he was.

Still bunkering at his grandmother’s house, Rapu sent his brother Carlos, who had joined him, down to the village to find out what was going on. As Carlos approached their parents’ house, he spotted Portilla, accompanied by several military men, at the front door. Hidden in the brush, Carlos watched Portilla talking to his mother. Then he raced back to warn his brother. The Navy was after him, Carlos said.

Rapu had been in a kind of denial—he had believed that if his intentions were pure, and people understood them, the outcomes of his actions would be just. Now he understood that the Navy meant to ship him off the island like the disappeared lieutenants of Angata, the supposed prophet, half a century before. He told Carlos to descend to the village again, carefully, to gather supplies and a few trusted friends. Then they would venture beyond the Wall, into the island’s interior.

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The Cape Scott departed on schedule, without Rapu or Hotus on board. Portilla had failed. The governor watched the ship leave, then returned to his office and notified Valparaíso. “It was not possible to embark the schoolteacher Alfonso Rapu,” he wrote in a telegram. “He is hiding, presumably on the island, protected by islanders. … The bulldozer was not sent to the continent [either] because it was impossible to move. … The situation is serious.”

Portilla wondered if the Rapanui who denied knowing where the men were had done so not out of ignorance but to deceive him. What if the whole village was behind Rapu and Hotus? Portilla’s fear only deepened when Lázaro came to see him and reported a rumor: Lázaro claimed that Rapu’s true objective was for Easter Island to secede from Chile. The schoolhouse election, the sabotage of the bulldozer, Rapu’s flight to the interior—these, Lázaro said, were the opening salvos in a revolution.

The accusation was false—Rapu had never sympathized with the secessionist agenda of the Mazières, who had departed the island in November—but the truth was not what mattered, at least for now. Portilla believed Lázaro’s claim, and it frightened him. It seemed clear to the governor that Rapu was the main instigator of the brewing rebellion. Now Portilla tried to mount a haphazard counterinsurgency campaign. He held conciliatory meetings with members of the Rapanui community at the schoolhouse and in his office. He hoped to show that he did care about the people, their well-being, their future.

But on December 23, after two days of these meetings, Portilla saw how futile his outreach had been. That afternoon a new rumor—another false one—spread through the village: Rapu had been detained, and the Navy was holding him as a political prisoner. By the evening, virtually every resident of Hanga Roa had heard this report, and Rapu’s supporters took to the streets. Wielding clubs and farm implements, they marched down the village’s roads. They descended on a government building where they believed Rapu was being held. In the dark, they shouted in Rapanui and Spanish, demanding the teacher’s release, until the crowd, realizing that Rapu was not there, dispersed.

The next morning, Portilla sent yet another telegram to Valparaíso. This time he asked for reinforcements. “The community supports the subversive movement,” he wrote. “The goal is to secede from Chile.” It was “necessary,” he went on, “to send a ship as soon as possible.”

Portilla did not know that another message was on its way to Chile. Sister Esperanza, a nun who was friendly with Rapu, had secured passage from Easter Island on the Cape Scott. She was carrying precious cargo: Sealed in an envelope and tucked in her bag was the letter addressed to President Frei, signed by Rapanui leaders, demanding liberty for their people.

Chapter Four

On December 26, in Valparaíso, second lieutenant Germán Goddard Dufeu of the Chilean Navy received word that there was trouble on Easter Island. The news was confusing—and alarming. There was talk of insubordination, foreign influence, and mutiny by a Chilean naval official (meaning Andrade). Dufeu and his crewmates soon received orders to prepare their ship, the Yelcho, and a contingent of marines to depart for Easter Island. At the Valparaíso barracks, men assembled supplies and armaments for the mission. Based on the little information available, they assumed they would ship out soon to quell a violent rebellion.

That same day, the news leaked to Chilean papers that there was trouble in the country’s island colony. Reporters in Santiago peppered government officials with questions. “Everything is normal on the island,” a Navy spokesperson said, insisting that the military was not in any way cruel to the Rapanui. The denials had little effect, and the news of turmoil on Easter Island soon appeared in international papers, including The New York Times.

On December 28, Frei met with his top cabinet ministers at his official residence. His administration was already under pressure from some domestic critics and a handful of international allies to reform the regime on Easter Island. The last thing Frei needed was a charismatic freedom fighter capturing news interest and intensifying these demands.

Another threat loomed—or at least the administration believed it did. Portilla had accepted as fact that Rapu wanted Easter Island to secede from Chile, and he had conveyed as much to the government. Now, in the December 28 meeting, defense minister Juan de Dios Carmona told Frei that a French warship was sailing across the Pacific toward Easter Island. It was a coincidence that the French vessel was in the ocean at the time, but that’s not how the government ministers understood it: They saw a provocation—a first move, perhaps. After all, Francis Mazière, one of the people who had encouraged the Rapanui to secede from Chile, was French. Maybe the ship was on its way to help the cause of independence.

Dios Carmona told the president the ship could not be allowed to reach the island. Frei ordered the Yelcho mission to proceed; he wanted troops in Hanga Roa as soon as possible.

The day after the cabinet meeting, the Cape Scott dropped its ramp onto a pier in Valparaíso. Reporters, Rapanui expats, and curious Chileans crowded the dock. As the press clamored for answers, Sister Esperanza emerged from the ship in her black habit. She ignored the questions shouted at her and advanced through the crowd, Rapu’s letter to the president still safe in her bag.

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Rapu didn’t know that he had sent his letter to a government that now viewed him as a secessionist, a traitor. Five days earlier, as the Cape Scott departed Easter Island, he had ridden into the island’s interior on horseback. He traveled with two of his brothers, Rafael and Carlos, and a friend, Sorobabel Fati, who had become a trusted lieutenant. With military Jeeps roving Hanga Roa’s dirt roads searching for him, Rapu decided that his best option was to disappear into the countryside. The Chilean Navy had never bothered to master the terrain. With the Rapanui confined within the Wall, and only a few government functionaries managing the sheep ranch, why would it?

Although confined for generations, the Rapanui still had knowledge of the landscape, passed down through oral tradition and preserved by whatever trips to the interior had been possible over the years. Rapu headed for the island’s caves. With the entrances hidden from view by tall grass, the caves were subterranean pockets in the island’s volcanic foundation. For centuries the Rapanui took shelter in them at moments of crisis: during the battles against the pirate Dutrou-Bornier, and during the Chilean crackdown following Angata’s revolt. Now Rapu needed them. He spent his first night as a fugitive in a cave just beyond the hills over Hanga Roa. (Hotus was hiding elsewhere, lest the two men be caught together.)

Down in the village, Portilla, Piñeiro, and their subordinates continued searching. Most of Rapu’s supporters didn’t know where he was—he’d kept his journey to the interior strictly need-to-know—but dozens of them decided to show their solidarity by setting up camp in his parents’ front yard. They held curantos, sang traditional songs, and debated the island’s political future. It was a kind of vigil, and also an act of resistance against the Navy.

Rapu moved to a new hiding spot every 24 hours. He spent one day at the base of the Terevaka volcano. The next night he trekked across the island and camped on the Poike peninsula. Friends shuttled food and supplies to him. During the first week, they also brought information, tidbits they’d gleaned from sympathetic Chileans who knew what was happening on the mainland. Andrade arrested in Valparaíso. Armed marines on the way.

In Hanga Roa, Rapu’s supporters sensed that a fight was coming. One evening, a Canadian doctor was walking with a Rapanui friend, a woman, when Portilla sped by them in his Jeep. The Rapanui woman gestured toward Portilla, as if holding a rifle. “There will be blood,” she said.

With military Jeeps roving Hanga Roa’s dirt roads searching for him, Rapu decided that his best option was to disappear into the countryside.

On January 5, 1965, the Yelcho anchored in Hanga Roa bay. The men on board were prepared for battle and its aftermath. Commander Guillermo Rojas would lead the contingent of marines onto the island. A Navy prosecutor, Aldo Montagna, was on hand to initiate criminal proceedings against any captured rebels. And John Martin, the brutal former governor who had ordered Rapu’s brother beaten in the street, was there as a purported expert on the island and a liaison to its people.

As the three men approached land, they heard singing. Drawing closer, they saw women on the coastline dancing in grass skirts. When they stepped onto shore, the women approached and hung flower garlands around their necks.

The Chileans were stunned, which was exactly what Rapu had hoped for. While in hiding, he had engineered the welcome party with the goal of psychologically disarming the marines. The plan seemed to work. Rojas took the welcome party as a sign that the Rapanui viewed him as their savior. “Extraordinarily affectionate reception for the Delegate,” he wrote in a report to his superiors, referring to himself. “Frightened community anxiously awaited [my] arrival.” (Rojas also concluded that Martin was “very loved” by the people.)

As the marines set up camp, Rojas marched into town. He had gotten wind of a meeting at the schoolhouse. When he arrived, he found the building full. Rapanui women and men—all supporters of Rapu—had gathered to draft a list of demands. When Rojas strode in, the room went quiet. He began explaining how he would solve the island’s problems. He would restore order and Navy rule. He spoke slowly, deliberately, as if to children. The Rapanui, he later wrote, lacked “sufficient mental agility to relate or comprehend multiple consecutive ideas.”

Rapu’s supporters responded politely and moved toward the exits. Rojas was pleased. “Very good disposition toward the Delegate,” he wrote in his report. “[The] meeting dissolved within five minutes once I explained how I am going to solve the situation.” Rojas concluded: “It appears the inhabitants do not desire laws that would deprive them of the Navy.”

Like his response to the welcome party, Rojas’s gullible reaction to the schoolhouse meeting seemed to lessen the risk of bloodshed. The next day, Rapu felt safe enough to come out of hiding for an interview with Rojas and Montagna, the prosecutor. Rapu still clung to the hope that if only he could explain what he wanted—integration with Chile, basic rights for his people—the authorities just might grant it. Perhaps, Rapu thought, Rojas’s mind had been opened by what he’d seen on Easter Island so far.

The men met at the courthouse. Rapu sat down across from Rojas and Montagna, and a Navy officer asked him to identify himself.

“Alfonso Rapu.”

“Twenty-two.”

“Single.”

“Literate.”

“Native of Easter Island.”

As the interview proceeded, Rapu presented himself as a leader of his people, but also as a good citizen not trying to cause trouble. “Throughout 1964, I carried out my work as the island’s teacher and met the obligations of my job in the normal manner,” he said. He emphasized that his loyalties lay with Chile. He had disliked the Mazières’ pro-Polynesian “propaganda,” because he viewed it as “anti-patriotic,” he said. Portilla, he claimed, was the true source of conflict, a volatile and paranoid leader who had brought Hanga Roa to the brink of violence. Rapu laid out some of the demands that Portilla had refused to accede to—demands, Rapu said, that came from discussions with his fellow Rapanui. Chief among them were that natives be allowed to move freely about the island, and that the results of their democratic elections be respected by Chile.

The interview ended, and Rojas dismissed Rapu. At the very least, Rapu felt that he had achieved a kind of détente, and he returned to his parents’ house to decide on his next move. Hotus was also interviewed by the Chileans and released.

These conversations convinced Rojas that Rapu was the leader with ideas and influence. Rojas wasn’t alone: Events on the mainland were raising Rapu’s profile—and changing the state of play on Easter Island once again.

On January 6, the Santiago newspaper Última Hora published the Rapanui’s letter to the president. “Exclusive! Pascuenses send a letter to Frei,” the headline read. “They describe abuses committed against them.” Along with the letter, the paper ran a glowing profile of Rapu. “Alfonso Rapu, a 22-year-old teacher, is the leader of Easter Island,” it declared.

The letter caused a sensation. In the following days, other newspapers in Valparaíso and Santiago covered it or ran excerpts. Inside the government, the letter heightened the sense of emergency. The schoolteacher seemed to have outwitted Frei’s administration, influenced media coverage, and shaped public opinion from 2,000 miles away. Among the letter’s accusations of head shavings, whippings, and other abuses, one line stood out to Chile’s leaders: “We have heard from people from other islands who share our Polynesian blood that our conditions would be better if we joined the Union of the Islands of Polynesia.” Rapu had tried to hedge, writing in the next sentence, “We don’t want to consider these propositions.” But it was the implied threat of secession—not the disclaimer—that attracted notice.

The Chilean congress passed emergency legislation that changed Easter Island from a territory into a “sub-commune” of the Region of Valparaíso. The new status was intended to more firmly attach the island to the country, making secession a complicated prospect. On the morning of January 8, word of the letter and the legislation reached Rojas on Easter Island via telegram. The message highlighted the risk of Easter Island joining the Polynesian Federation. It listed the name of every man whose signature appeared on the Rapanui’s letter. And it requested that Rojas and his men “investigate veracity of … the accusations” of abuse made against the Navy.

Rojas was blindsided. He had thought the situation on the island was under control. What the telegram reported was an outrage and a humiliation. The Rapanui were publicly questioning the integrity of Chilean officers, including John Martin, now serving by Rojas’s side.

When Rojas finished reading the telegram, he ordered his men to search Hanga Roa. They were to round up every Rapanui man who had signed the letter.

Within hours, officers were interrogating the men one by one. When Papa Kiko, the leader of the children’s song and dance troupe, was asked if he had signed the letter, he said that he had. Asked if the letter was accurate, he said that it was. Martin flew into a rage, his face turning red. He had known the Rapanui, and Papa Kiko in particular, to be docile, compliant. He was frustrated—offended even—that the old man had joined Rapu’s rebellion. “Now I’m hearing you’re with them, too,” Martin said. Papa Kiko refused to budge; he stood by the letter. The marines led him from the office and locked him in the House of Stone.

Other Rapanui men who affirmed their support of the letter were thrown in jail. Some disavowed it under pressure. And those whose signatures had been forged said as much—they blamed Rapu and Hotus.

Following the interrogations, Rojas sent a missive to Valparaíso. Rapu and Hotus were the authors of the letter, he reported, the contents of which were false. The signatures, he added, had been obtained “fraudulently.” Both Rapu and Hotus would be arrested.

Since his interview, Rapu had been at his parents’ house. On the afternoon of January 8, as Rojas and Martin questioned and jailed his supporters, Rapu received updates from friends. He saw that his options were narrowing. Judging from the reports he was receiving, the Chilean soldiers who had arrived on the Yelcho were becoming increasingly agitated. Even if he fled into the hills again, he could not hide forever. When the headlights of a Navy Jeep strafed his parents’ windows that evening, Rapu decided to turn himself in.

He walked out the front door to find Martin and a marine, both armed, waiting for him. Martin told Rapu that he was under arrest. The former governor also instructed him to summon his brother Rafael, who was only 17, but known to be one of Rapu’s most active and loyal helpers. The Navy wanted to speak with him, too. The two brothers walked down the steps from their parents’ patio and clambered into the Jeep’s back seat. As the vehicle rattled down the dirt road toward Hanga Roa, Rafael looked down at his elder brother’s legs. They were trembling.

When Rojas finished reading the telegram, he ordered his men to search Hanga Roa. They were to round up every Rapanui man who had signed the letter.

The Jeep rolled to a stop outside the courthouse. Martin escorted Rapu inside, to the same room where he had been interviewed before. Rojas and Montagna were there, and so was a Navy officer sitting behind a typewriter. (Portilla, whom Rojas had decided was an ineffective leader, had been sidelined.) Martin instructed Rapu to sit down, then Rojas placed a piece of paper on the table in front of him. It was the telegram Rojas had received that morning, describing the letter sent to Frei.

“Did you write the letter?” Rojas asked.

Rapu said that he had.

As the questioning continued, Rapu feared that it was little more than pretext, and that the marines would soon carry him to the Yelcho. He was certain that if he boarded the ship, he would never make it off alive. He imagined being thrown overboard, and the marines explaining themselves when they reached Valparaíso. They would say he leapt into the ocean like other Rapanui men before him, those who a century before had chosen death after being captured by slavers. Rapu would become a martyr to the Rapanui, but he would always be a fool to the Chileans, like Riro, the poisoned king.

After an hour, Rojas stood up. In the name of the government and the Navy of Chile, he said, “Lo declaro reo”—you are a prisoner.

Outside, unbeknownst to Rapu or his interrogators, a rescue operation was under way. After Rapu was arrested, his supporters had mobilized. Their plan was slapdash: The road to the government building where Rapu was being questioned was separated from the rest of Hanga Roa by a ditch dug into the street, with metal slats laid across it to allow vehicles to pass. Martin’s Jeep had trundled over them to deliver Rapu to Rojas. Now several of Rapu’s supporters pulled up the slats and threw them aside, leaving the road unpassable by vehicles. If the marines wanted to take Rapu to the Yelcho, they would have to do it on foot—and get past the Rapanui.

A mob of women, including Reina, Rapu’s mother, amassed behind the stone wall outside the courthouse. Their men stayed behind them; Rapu’s supporters had decided that women should form the front line, because the marines would be less likely to shoot them. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the women watched the building’s door, waiting for Rapu and his captors to emerge.

Inside, Rojas ordered two of his men to take Rapu to the marines’ encampment, to prepare for his removal from the island. As he was escorted toward the door, Rapu heard a murmur of voices outside. As soon as he walked out, the Rapanui women climbed over the wall and rushed toward Rapu and the marines, yelling. As the mob closed in, one woman, Herencia Teao, grabbed Rapu’s arm and pulled him toward her.

The marines tried to wrestle Rapu back into their custody, but the women struck them. One marine fired a pistol into the air—a warning shot—but the women did not relent. Keeping the marines at bay, and Rapu protected in their midst, the women moved as a group toward the coastline, until they reached the edge of the camp where the foreign researchers who had arrived on the Cape Scott were staying. This, the Rapanui believed, was the only safe harbor on their occupied island. As they pushed their way into the camp, chests heaving, several women told the bewildered researchers to start filming—the Rapanui were sure that the only thing that could protect them from foreign guns was foreign eyes.

Seconds later, a handful of armed marines came into the camp. One, brandishing a pistol, rushed toward Rapu. But Rojas, who entered the compound next, ordered the marines to stand down. Rapu, who had been hunched over catching his breath, stood up to face his adversary.

Rojas had two options. Outnumbered by the Rapanui, and in full view of Europeans and North Americans, he could try to take Rapu by force. Or he could deescalate. Rojas told his men to wait outside the camp and asked the foreign researchers to attend to any injured women. For the next two hours, Rojas and Rapu did a strange dance. Rojas walked through the camp speaking with groups of Rapanui, asking them to go home and assuring them that Rapu would not be harmed. Rapu, for his part, kept his distance. He did not want any Chileans to come near him. Eventually, Rojas sent Rafael Haoa—Rapu’s uncle, a Navy translator—to speak with him.

Were the rumors true, his uncle asked—did he want to secede from Chile? Rapu insisted once again that he wanted nothing of the sort. He wanted Easter Island and the Rapanui to be more Chilean, not less. The uncle returned to Rojas, conferred with him, and then delivered another message to Rapu. He was free to go, on one condition: He had to meet with Rojas peacefully the next morning. Rapu agreed.

Outside the camp’s rear gate, Rapu’s brother Rafael and another supporter were waiting for him with a horse. Rapu mounted it and rode out of the village alone, to spend one more night hiding in the interior. The next day, he had insisted, he would not go to the courthouse again. This time Rojas would have to come to him.

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Rojas arrived at Rapu’s parents’ house by Jeep, accompanied by Martin. Rapu told the men that Martin wasn’t allowed inside, so Rojas agreed to meet with him alone. The naval commander had come to make a deal.

The balance of power on Easter Island had shifted. The Chileans had guns, radios, Jeeps, and the only ship for thousands of miles, but Rapu’s little revolution had managed to render all these resources moot. It was clear he wouldn’t be taken without a fight, which was likely to create a political nightmare for Chile. The Rapanui wouldn’t stand for it, and the foreign researchers would bear witness to whatever happened. Plus, since the publication of the Rapanui’s letter, public opinion on the mainland had swung in the islanders’ favor.

Rojas told Rapu that he needed his help. Together, they had to turn down the temperature on the island, lest the circumstances become explosive. Rojas asked Rapu to reassure his followers that Rojas could be trusted. In return, Rojas would give Rapu something no Chilean had ever offered to the Rapanui before. “We’ll hold an election,” Rojas said, for local officials. If Rapu really represented the people’s interests, as he claimed, they could elect him mayor. Or they could vote for the old guard and choose the status quo. “We’ll let the people decide,” Rojas said.

The next morning, a Sunday, Rojas and Martin gathered the Rapanui community in the plaza in front of Hanga Roa’s Catholic church to make an announcement. Martin addressed the crowd in Spanish. New elections for mayor and three councilors would be held on Tuesday, he said. Any Rapanui could be nominated—no approval from the Navy was required. Then he described the qualifications for voting, including one important change: For the first time, Rapanui women would be allowed to cast ballots.

At eight o’clock sharp on the morning of January 12, voters lined up outside the schoolhouse. They wore their Sunday best: men in blue and tan suits, hair parted and gelled; women in dresses cinched at the waist. Each voter identified themselves, and then approached a chalkboard where a list of candidates was written. Alfonso Rapu was up there, as were Germán Hotus and Jorge Tepano, another of Rapu’s lieutenants. Representing the old guard were some of Rapu’s adversaries, including Felipe Pakarati and Miguel Teao. Each voter called out their choice, and a Rapanui official repeated it. A stick of chalk was used to add a mark beneath the candidate’s name on the board.

By four in the afternoon, there were 286 marks. Only four candidates had received more than ten votes. Pakarati and Hotus each had 56 votes, while Tepano had 65. Rapu, with 99 votes, had won decisively. He would be mayor, and the runners-up would be the village’s three councilors.

The next morning at the governor’s office, before a crowd of supporters, Rojas swore in Rapu as Hanga Roa’s first democratically elected mayor, recognized by the Chilean state. Navy officials hoisted a Chilean flag, and Rojas led a rendition of the national anthem. “Beloved homeland, may you be either a tomb of the free or a refuge from oppression,” the Rapanui and Chilean marines sang in unison.

When the anthem ended, Rapu’s supporters surged forward. Singing now in Rapanui, they embraced Rapu and threw flower petals in the air. Then they formed rows and, behind their new leader, paraded through Hanga Roa, singing songs passed down from their ancestors.

Chapter Five

The transition from military to civilian rule was not immediate. The Navy maintained some authority for another year, and there were setbacks even as the institution relinquished control over the island. In early 1966, a new naval governor, appointed by the Chilean government to replace Portilla, overturned the results of the mayoral election, the one Rapu had won, and installed Miguel Teao in his place. But the Rapanui wrote a new letter to President Frei, complaining of the usurpation, and Rapu won back his position in the next election.

No one accepted responsibility for the excesses of the regime. The only Navy men penalized for their conduct on Easter Island were Portilla and Andrade: Portilla for failing to control the Rapanui, and Andrade for supporting Rapu and his allies. (Andrade was convicted of mutiny and jailed; his son says that he was tortured in prison, and he later went into exile.)

In February 1966, Frei signed an act that came to be known as the Ley Pascua, the Easter Island Law. It granted the Rapanui the full benefits of Chilean citizenship and the same civil rights as those living on the mainland. The law’s passage marked the final triumph of Rapu’s movement: His people could no longer be abused with impunity. They could no longer be detained on their own land. They were no longer serfs.

One of Rapu’s first acts as mayor had been to install a freshwater well. He turned his attention to electricity next. Water, light, food—he started with the basics, eliminating the material deprivation that his people had long endured. After the Ley Pascua was enacted, modernization accelerated. The Wall, now an unpatrolled artifact of the old regime, was dismantled bit by bit and repurposed as fencing around Rapanui farmers’ fields. By the end of the 1960s, supply ships were arriving twice a year. The following decade, it was every three months. In 1984, the president of Chile appointed Sergio, Rapu’s brother, as the island’s governor—the first Rapanui to serve in the role.

By then, Rapu himself had long been out of power. After his two-year term as mayor, he had declined to run again, even though some of his supporters urged him to. He withdrew from politics and became a farmer.

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There is little trace of the revolution in present-day Hanga Roa. There is no Alfonso Rapu Avenue, no memorial honoring the women who rescued him in January 1965. It may be because Rapu himself simply got on with his life. His supporters did the same, or left the island for good. Germán Hotus was one of the first to go. After Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup, Hotus fled to Tahiti, where he lived the rest of his life in exile. Rapu’s brother Sergio eventually made a life for himself abroad, studying archaeology in the United States, before returning to the island and making major discoveries about its ancient history.

Some surviving members of the old guard eventually had a change of heart and decided that Rapu’s revolution was for the greater good. Others told me that Rapu “did things the wrong way,” and a few still insisted he was a separatist, despite all evidence to the contrary. Lázaro, Rapu’s onetime nemesis, was suffering from dementia when I met him in 2012. A niece tried to help us talk, translating between Spanish and Rapanui, but Lázaro grew frustrated: It seemed that he remembered the events I was asking about, but couldn’t form the sentences to describe them. Finally, he gave up and told me, haltingly, “You should go talk to Alfonso. He’ll tell you everything. But don’t tell anyone I sent you.”

When I arrived at Rapu’s address, I passed through a gate in a wall made of maroon volcanic stone. Inside was a courtyard bordered by banana trees. Rapu’s modest one-story home sat on one side; on another was a row of motel rooms. At the time, Rapu and his wife, Carmen Cardinali, rented the rooms to tourists who came to Easter Island, mostly to see the moai. Rapu, who at 69 was tall and tan, with a lightly weathered face and a slight stoop, emerged from a sliding door and welcomed me inside.

We took a seat at the kitchen table, and he poured me a glass of ice water with a pale-yellow tinge. He had used a pineapple shell to imbue the liquid with flavor, he said. He didn’t like to waste any part of the fruit that was his livelihood; Rapu now spent his days growing and harvesting pineapples.

Over the next several weeks, we met for hours at a time to talk. Rapu told me about the movement of 1964, but eventually he tired of sit-down interviews and said that if I wanted to hear more, I should join him on his farm. He could use another set of hands anyway. We would drive out to his fields after lunchtime. The route took us over the hills that border Hanga Roa and past his grandmother’s house, where he spent much of his childhood and first took refuge when the Navy tried to capture him. We rattled over dirt roads—Rapu drove a rusted pickup truck with barely functioning suspension—until we reached the low, rolling hills of the island’s interior. They were covered in high grasses; when the wind blew, they looked like waves. Before Rapu’s rebellion, this space was off-limits to any Rapanui not employed by the sheep ranch. (The ranch ceased operations in the 1970s.)

I asked Rapu if he harbored any resentment toward the people who had stood in his way. For instance, Lázaro could have gotten him killed—his whisperings to Portilla were a key factor in escalating the conflict between Rapu and the Navy. As we pulled up the weeds threatening to choke his pineapple plants, Rapu insisted that Lázaro and his ilk hadn’t meant any harm. “They were ignorant,” he said.

If his words sounded dismissive, he didn’t mean them that way. He was sympathetic to the Rapanui who had been trapped inside the Wall for generations with no way out, their only option survival by any means. They hadn’t benefitted, as he had, from leaving the island and seeing what was possible. “They didn’t understand what we were doing,” Rapu said.

We reached the low, rolling hills of the island’s interior. They were covered in high grasses; when the wind blew, they looked like waves.

One of the people who did understand was Cardinali, Rapu’s wife. They married in 1966. Like him, she had studied in Santiago, and returned to Easter Island to be a teacher. They had encountered many of the same difficulties: being an outsider on the mainland for years, only to feel alienation among their own people. During an interview in 2020, Cardinali lit up as she talked about their months of courtship, of falling in love. They married at Rapu’s parents’ house.

According to a relative, Cardinali’s mother did not attend. She found him rude, and brusque with guests, contrary to Rapanui custom. I always found Rapu to be deliberate but gentle—exceedingly so. Once I helped him lug a bucket of slop to a pen that contained a pig that must have weighed 400 pounds. “It was a gift,” Rapu said of the animal. He was supposed to have slaughtered it years before, for meat. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “He’s my friend now,” Rapu said. This was a man frugal enough to reuse pineapple shells, and so compassionate that he would commit to feeding a quarter-ton pig for life.

But he was also just that: a man. For all the ways that he had shifted the Rapanui’s political fortunes, he hadn’t escaped his people’s oppression, poverty, and trauma unscathed. According to three of Cardinali’s siblings, Rapu had hit his wife throughout their marriage, like his father before him. When I interviewed Cardinali, she was not living with Rapu anymore. After nearly 50 years together, she had left him.  

Rapu told me that he never struck Cardinali. In fact, he said, they had only one major argument in their marriage. When I asked Cardinali if Rapu ever hit her, she said that some things are private. “There are things that are mine that I don’t talk about,” she said, adding: “Nevertheless, I respect him.” Then she changed the subject—or so it seemed.

“A lot of people come to the island and ask for stories from before,” she said. “They ask about the society, the history, which is all fine and good. But they don’t ask about survival. Do you understand?”

I wasn’t sure I did.

“There is a sad story of water and survival here. I’m going to tell it to you. We had droughts. The earth became so dry that it cracked. The people had to go in search of water. I lived that, and it was a hardship.”

“We looked for water in the caves,” Cardinali continued, “where we knew there had been water before. But sometimes you had to search further, in other caverns, or in the crater of the volcano. Descend into the crater on horseback. Carry clothes to wash. Take water and carry it up again to the crater’s rim. It was a hard life. A mother would hand you a jar of water and say bathe yourself with this. You had to bathe yourself with that water. The scarcity of water—it was the most basic necessity.”

It seemed as though, for a little while, Cardinali hadn’t been talking to me exactly. But now she fixed her eyes on mine. “You realize,” she said, “this is true anywhere. If there’s no water, there’s nothing.”

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