Porambo

Porambo

A fearless journalist wrote a seminal account of police brutality during the 1967 race riots. Then he wound up on the wrong side of the law.

By Greg Donahue

The Atavist Magazine, No. 77


Greg Donahue is a writer and documentary filmmaker based in New York City. He has produced stories about refugees, vertical farms, North Korean abductions, and youth boxing. You can see more of his work at gregjamesdonahue.com.

Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Adam Przybyl
Cover Image: Essex County Files

Published in March 2018. Design updated in 2021.

1983

The night Ron Porambo was shot in the head, he told his wife that he was going out to meet a friend. It was late, but that was when the 44-year-old newspaper reporter did his best work. As he had countless times before, Porambo slid into his Volkswagen hatchback and cruised through the dark into downtown Newark.

Outside the car windows, Newark’s row houses looked like gathering ghosts. Block after block, the battered wooden structures loomed three stories tall. Their facades caught the dull glow of the streetlights that flickered on when the sun set each day; the broken lights—and there were many—had been that way for as long as Porambo could remember. Below sagging front stoops, where cracked asphalt met stained sidewalks, garbage clogged the gutters.

Newark had been decaying for decades. Crime, corruption, and disenfranchisement had led Harper’s magazine to dub it “the worst American city.” Porambo, though, saw it as scrappy and resolute. He saw himself in much the same way: as a man with something to prove.

Porambo drove to 186 Ridgewood Ave., the address where he was supposed to meet his friend. After pulling to a stop at the curb, he cut the ignition and waited. He’d made a career out of consorting with hustlers, sex workers, and drug dealers to unearth gritty investigative stories about the city’s poorest residents. Most of his sources and subjects were black. Porambo, who was white, wrote about the people he believed had the most insight into suffering, inequality, and resilience in America. “They know,” he once told a fellow reporter.

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A man approached his passenger-side window. It wasn’t the person Porambo had expected to see—or if it was, the greeting was a terrible shock. The man raised a .38-caliber handgun and pulled the trigger.

Three bullets penetrated Porambo’s skull. Another lodged in his left leg. He slumped over the steering wheel, filling the streets of Newark’s South Ward with the drone of a car horn. The sound must have scared off the attacker before he finished what he’d come to do. A rag was later found stuffed in the car’s gas tank; lighting it on fire would have blown the hatchback, and Porambo, to oblivion.

As blood poured from his head and thigh, Porambo struggled to open his door. A 16-year-old girl who lived down the street walked by just as what remained of the bullet-riddled window shattered onto the pavement. She ran home to call the cops. By the time they arrived, Porambo was unconscious. He would later recall feeling like he’d slipped into a dream. He was weightless, flying.

The crime, committed on May 19, 1983, made headlines in New Jersey. It wasn’t the first time Porambo had been in the news for finding himself at the wrong end of a gun. His meticulous reporting on Newark’s 1967 race riots had culminated in his opus, No Cause for Indictment, a book that implicated law enforcement in the unjustified killings of nearly two dozen black residents. The New Yorker heralded it as “probably the most moving and instructive book yet written on any of the bloody civil disturbances of the sixties.” After it was published, an unknown assailant caught Porambo in his car unawares and shot him in both legs. Porambo claimed that the attack was retribution for his reporting. His publisher took the opportunity to place a full-column ad in The New York Times promoting the book in block letters: “LAST WEEK THEY TRIED TO MURDER THE AUTHOR.”

In a different world, Porambo might have joined Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Truman Capote, and Jimmy Breslin in the pantheon of 20th-century journalism’s giants. No Cause for Indictment might have become mandatory reading in classes on investigative reporting and urban studies. Today, it might be referenced in articles about police brutality—a subject Porambo covered relentlessly—and Black Lives Matter. Instead, scarcely anyone knows Porambo’s name.

That’s because, by the time he was shot on Ridgewood Ave., his life had gone off the rails. Porambo seemed to carry two opposing selves, one as bitter as the other was generous; his wife sometimes called him Jekyll and Hyde. During the years that should have been his journalistic prime, his dark side won the battle for his soul. On that particular night in May 1983, he wasn’t attacked for his reporting, but for his second, unlikely career.

When he awoke after surgery in a Newark hospital, Porambo still had a bullet in his brain. Doctors couldn’t get it out, leaving him with permanent speech and motor deficiencies. He couldn’t remember who’d shot him, but that didn’t matter. Porambo had been handcuffed to his bed. The cops who’d pulled him from the Volkswagen were investigating the fearless writer for murder.

1965

The bar where Porambo spent late nights while working at his first full-time newspaper job, in Kingsport, Tennessee, was called the Bloody Bucket. The name honored the vicious brawls that frequently broke out there. Little more than a two-room shack that looked like a place where firewood would be stored, the bar teemed with sex workers, johns, and moonshine bootleggers. In 1965, the year Porambo arrived in town, police arrested the Bloody Bucket’s owners for “running a Negro house of prostitution catering mostly to white customers.”

It was exactly the kind of rough-and-tumble joint where Porambo liked to cultivate sources for his stories in the Kingsport Times-News. Municipal buildings and politicians’ offices he could do without. The same went for the manicured suburban existence of his childhood.

He was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on Thanksgiving Day in 1938, to Millie and Frank Porambo. They owned Franchett’s, a wholesale bakery; his father had patented a device to manufacture double-twist crullers. The Porambos were traditional Italian American Catholics, hardworking and dutiful. Thanks to the doughnut business, they were also quite wealthy. As a kid, Porambo liked model boats and comic books, and he developed a fascination for the culture and history of Native Americans. He considered their collective plight to be America’s original sin and was apt to decry it to whoever would listen. “He was always for the underdog,” Ron’s uncle Mike Magnolia once told a reporter.

By his early teens, Porambo was restless. The sober experience of Catholic school was becoming unbearable for the energetic, socially conscious kid. Hoping to find their son an outlet, his parents encouraged him to sign up for a youth-boxing program in nearby Newark, run by Jack Reno, a police officer and local sports legend. Most of the young men Porambo encountered in the gym came from Newark’s poor black neighborhoods. In the ring, the hierarchies that plagued society fell away. A boxer proved his worth by fighting and winning, nothing more. Porambo was enthralled.

At first he came off as a rube to the native Newarkers. “He used to show up at the gym, and he’d be wearin’ these big thick suspenders and plaid shirts,” sparring partner Chico Belleran told a journalist at New Jersey Monthly years later. But his opponents quickly found out that Porambo could punch. After only a year in training, he won the 1955 New Jersey Golden Gloves. He turned pro and earned a reputation as a middleweight who, rather than use footwork to avoid getting hit, relished slugging it out. When Reno asked Porambo why he didn’t try to out-box his rivals, the young man replied, “You know, Jack, that’s my style.”

“He’d get to talking to his opponents before a fight, get to feelin’ sorry for the guy and all that. Then he’d go out an’ lose.”

The teenager was fiercely independent, and his time in Newark created a gulf between himself and his family. He started dating black women and brought them home to meet his stunned parents. He asked Reno to save his boxing earnings in an account to help him pay for college, so that he wouldn’t be beholden to anyone. Supporting himself as a prizefighter, he explained to a friend, was the “right thing to do.”

Porambo landed a few big fights in his early twenties, including bouts at Madison Square Garden and one in front of John Wayne on the undercard before the historic Ingemar Johansson–Floyd Patterson heavyweight championship in Yankee Stadium. His softer side, though, derailed his career. “He was a terrific puncher, but he didn’t have that killer instinct,” Belleran said. “He’d get to talking to his opponents before a fight, get to feelin’ sorry for the guy and all that. Then he’d go out an’ lose.”

As his boxing ambitions waned, Porambo looked for other ways of making a living. He joined the military, but that ended abruptly in 1963, after he rowed a boat away from his posting at Fort Slocum, New York, for a midnight rendezvous with a woman he’d just met. He toyed briefly with joining his older brother, Carl, in the family business, but Carl was as eager a rule follower as he was not. Finally, Porambo settled on attending Rutgers University’s journalism program. He later told The New York Times, “I knew that was the only course I could conceivably pass.”

After graduating, Porambo took to his new profession with characteristic doggedness and an instinct for landing a knockout punch. Within a year of starting the job in Kingsport, one of his features won a state journalism prize. He was willing to cover topics other reporters wouldn’t: Kingsport’s black neighborhoods, for instance, and the city’s homeless population. He once wrote a story about an abandoned parking lot nicknamed “the jungle” where alcoholics drank grape juice mixed with Solox, a shellac and paint thinner consisting of ethyl alcohol, methanol, and gasoline. Ingesting it caused the individuals to fall into a nearly comatose condition. During his reporting, Porambo counted some 75 empty cans of Solox scattered around the jungle. Kingsport’s public-safety director called Porambo’s report an exaggeration, so the journalist went back to the lot and gathered every can he saw—76 this time—and photographed them stacked neatly in the Times-News’ offices. The image ran in the paper with the headline, “All Right, Jim, You Count ‘Em.”

Porambo was also audacious when it came to love. One night at the Bloody Bucket, the 27-year-old spied a pretty, stylish young black woman across the room. She eyed him, too, the white guy with a roguish grin and heavy-lidded brown eyes. Thanks to a strict routine of push-ups, sit-ups, and running, Porambo’s coltish, five-foot-eleven frame remained chiseled, though he’d given up boxing. His lips were thick and his ears misshapen from getting knocked around the ring, giving his visage the raw look of a sculptor’s first pass at a clay bust.

The woman’s name was Carol Scott, and she was 19, with a seven-month-old daughter named Glenna. Porambo liked Carol because she was strong-willed and curious. She liked Porambo’s intellect and brio. Soon after they met, she started wearing his college ring on a chain around her neck. “It just got serious right away,” Carol told me in a recent interview, snapping her fingers. “I didn’t have a fear of going out with him.” Her attitude was bold, given the politics and social mores of Tennessee. Interracial marriage was illegal. Six months after meeting Carol, Porambo proposed anyway.

In early 1966, the couple drove to New Jersey and holed up in a motel near Porambo’s parents’ house. He called his uncle Mike to the hotel and asked him to break the news of the impending marriage to the rest of the family. Maybe hearing it from him would help smooth things over, he thought. It didn’t. To Porambo’s parents, dating black women when he was a rebellious teenager was one thing; marrying one was another.

Porambo argued with his mother about the relationship over the phone. When his parents finally had the couple over for dinner, Carol sat uncomfortably at a table as the hosts, who barely addressed her, disparaged black people. Porambo admonished them. “What do you mean by ‘those people?’” he demanded. “They’re people just like we are!” By the time the dinner ended, it was clear that he and Carol would be getting married without his family’s blessing.

1966

For all the time he spent in dive bars, Porambo rarely drank to excess. Yet he showed up to his own wedding plastered. He and Carol had recently moved to Albany, because it was legal for them to marry in New York. As Porambo staggered into the Catholic church, the quick-thinking priest corralled him into a side room to offer some counseling—and, in all likelihood, a large glass of water.

Carol waited patiently at the altar, beaming in a blue chiffon dress and white veil. Glenna, whom Porambo had adopted, played on the floor with the young son of the wedding’s only invited guests: Fred Bruning and his wife, Wink. Bruning and Porambo both worked at the Knickerbocker News, a local paper, and the two had become fast friends; their families spent evenings together cooking Italian food or playing marathon games of carom billiards. Because the Brunings weren’t Catholic, the priest had asked two female church employees to serve as witnesses. They looked on wide-eyed as Porambo eventually emerged from the side room and walked unsteadily across the sanctuary’s marble floor to his southern bride. When the priest asked Porambo if he took Carol to be his lawfully wedded wife, Porambo threw back his head and yelled, loud enough to shake the rafters, “I do!” After the ceremony, the newlyweds returned to their basement apartment with the Brunings to celebrate. The party quickly shrank to three as Porambo found a comfortable spot on the bathroom floor and slept through his wedding night.

Family photos. (Courtesy: Carol Porambo)

Porambo cut an equally blunt figure at the Knickerbocker News. On his first day in the office, he wore a black beret cocked sideways across his forehead and carried an electric teakettle tucked under one arm. A full-bend pipe was clamped between his teeth, and a wake of spicy tobacco musk trailed him through the newsroom as he walked to his desk. Before long, water was boiling in the kettle and Porambo was on the phone hunting for stories. He hadn’t yet introduced himself to his coworkers.

In the 1960s, city newsrooms hummed with excitement; they were the beating hearts of a robust industry. Reporters bustled down narrow aisles yanking sheets of copy paper from messy desktop stacks and hammered away at Underwood typewriters. Ink from hot-metal Linotypes hung in the air in thin clouds. Writing styles were evolving, particularly at big New York outlets. Journalists were becoming household names by bringing personality to formerly stodgy newswriting. They experimented with voice, perspective, and structure. Porambo read and idolized hard-nosed, humane writers—Jimmy Breslin, in particular—for providing an unflinching glimpse into the lives of blue-collar workers, marginalized minorities, and crime lords. He promised to bring a similar voice to Albany, which he saw as a launchpad for fame in a bigger market.

In exchange for his talent, he wanted autonomy. “He was going to write what he wanted to write, in his own particular way, at his own particular length, at his own particular rhythm and rate,” Bruning recalled. But Porambo’s editor, Bob Fichenberg, didn’t agree. Fichenberg was a by-the-book executive who wasn’t impressed with his new hire’s independent streak. Porambo’s first drafts were often an ungainly mess, and he was savagely unyielding when copy editors altered his work. Time and again he found himself in Fichenberg’s office, engaged in a shouting match over the timeliness of an article or the quality of his prose. In a matter of months, Porambo was fired.

Over the next year and a half, he bounced around half a dozen papers: the Morning-Journal in Lorain, Ohio; the Suffolk Sun in Deer Park, New York; and the Toronto Telegram, to name a few. Editors tried to tame him, but Porambo grew increasingly arrogant and unmanageable. Sometimes his tenure lasted only a few days before he got fed up or was canned for refusing to neuter his style for a publication he considered unworthy of his talent.

Eventually, he landed back in his home state, at Camden’s Courier-Post. He wrote articles about work programs for the handicapped and rural land grabs. Most of his reporting, however, was set in the black slums of nearby Philadelphia. Porambo had long believed that the front lines of America’s most vital news cut through the tenements, factories, bars, and back alleys where the oppressed fought against the grinding teeth of poverty and prejudice. This proved true in what came to be known as the long, hot summer of 1967, when simmering racial tensions boiled over in some 159 cities. From Atlanta to Buffalo, Tampa to Detroit, black residents took to the streets to protest police brutality, segregation, housing discrimination, and other wrongs.

“Color breeds hatred in this country, and we’ve never known just how deep it went until 1967, the year of the riot.”

Porambo watched the events unfold and covered the impact they had in Philadelphia, where a riot three years prior had left hundreds injured. Authorities feared a repeat incident. For one story, Porambo visited a craps game at an apartment in north Philadelphia, where police claimed that dangerous militants were living. In the building, the reporter found only weary, poverty-stricken black residents whom city planners and social services had all but forgotten. “Color breeds hatred in this country,” Porambo wrote, “and we’ve never known just how deep it went until 1967, the year of the riot.”

He also noted that “stories are starting to come out about needless shooting” by police—injustice magnified by tragedy. Some of those stories were emerging from Porambo’s beloved Newark.

1967

A rebellion was all but inevitable. The immediate post–World War II economic boom had attracted workers to Newark and helped grow the city’s industries, but white residents soon began deserting the crowded urban landscape for the suburbs. After surging for decades, Newark’s population shrank by nearly 8 percent in the 1950s. Black residents, who had a harder time finding jobs and affording homes, stayed behind, and Newark soon became one of America’s first majority-black cities. It was still run by a white power structure, however, and corruption and inequality ballooned. Poor black neighborhoods were home to some of the highest rates of crime, unemployment, substandard housing, tuberculosis, and maternal mortality in the country. Residents’ patience with the status quo stretched thinner with each passing year.

The city was a combustion chamber primed for an explosion. All it needed was a spark. One finally came on the evening of July 12, 1967, when a man named John Smith flashed the high beams of his cab and drove around a police cruiser that was blocking his lane at the intersection of South Seventh Street and 15th Avenue. The cops quickly pulled him over. Smith was a reserved black man in his forties, originally from North Carolina. He lived alone, and when he wasn’t driving his cab, he enjoyed practicing the trumpet. He explained to the white officers that he thought he’d passed their cruiser legally, but they arrested him anyway. They told the woman in the back seat of Smith’s car that she’d have to find another ride home.

A few minutes later, an incapacitated Smith was dragged through the rear door of Newark’s Fourth Precinct. Residents of the Hayes Homes project across the street from the station watched it happen. Smith had been battered with a nightstick in the ribs and groin. Yet a rumor quickly spread that the police had beaten him to death.

Within an hour, dozens of people had gathered to protest outside the Fourth Precinct. The crowd quickly grew into the hundreds. When someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the building, police stormed out, batons swinging. The crowd dispersed, but later that night angry looters took to smashing liquor-store windows. Police director Dominick Spina advised his officers to let the situation lie, “because once you begin to look at problems as problems, they become problems.”

The plan backfired. Police stood by for nearly two days as the looting spread. White-owned stores were targeted; to signal plunderers away, black business owners scrawled “Soul Brother” on their windows with soap. When mayor Hugh Addonizio called in state troopers and the National Guard, he said in dismay to an arriving officer, “It’s all gone, the whole town is gone.” The sense of alarm spiked even higher when word came across the police radio that someone had swiped 24 rifles from inside a Sears-Roebuck. “The line between the jungle and the law might as well be drawn here as any place in America,” governor Richard Hughes told the press.

Over the next three days, Newark became a city under siege. Bridges were barricaded. Tanks rumbled down thoroughfares, cracking the pavement with their armored weight. State police converted a stadium into barracks and marched through the streets in formation, rifles at the ready.

Many of the officers were reservists, and their inexperience showed. They were quick to fire their weapons. They sprayed the Hayes Homes with bullets in response to suspected sniper fire, killing three women in their apartments. In another incident, ten-year-old Eddie Moss was shot in the head and killed as his father slowed the family car before a roadblock on the way home from a meal at White Castle. Michael Pugh, 12, was shot to death while taking out the trash. Jimmy Rutledge, 19, was left with 42 holes in his body after he was caught looting a liquor store. The majority of the wounds were shotgun blasts to the back. Six were in the rear of his skull.

All told, over five days, 13,319 rounds of ammunition were fired in what authorities described as a peacekeeping effort. Twenty-six people lay dead, ranking Newark’s riots among the deadliest in American history. Among the casualties were a cop, a fireman, and 21 civilians, all shot by police or guardsmen.

Governor Hughes extolled the outcome. “I felt a thrill of pride in the way our state police and National Guard have conducted themselves,” he told the media. As for the roots of the unrest, authorities dismissed the notion that racism, economic disenfranchisement, and state-sanctioned violence were to blame. Instead, they accused communist agitators, paid protestors, and criminal thugs of stirring unwarranted rage among the city’s poor.

It was a time before cell-phone videos and body cams, and the accounts of white officers met with little resistance, trumping those of black citizens. No one in the state or local government was charged with wrongdoing. Not everyone, however, could accept the whitewashing these events received. Among them was Porambo.

1968

Six months after the riots, Porambo left the Camden paper for a gig at the Daily Journal in the town of Elizabeth, a few miles south of Newark. The paper had long been a stepping-stone for cub reporters who went on to bigger and better things. Carl Bernstein had just departed for The Washington Post. Porambo wanted to follow a similar path.

His first piece was about a candy-store robbery. He transformed the story of a petty crime into something bigger by writing it from the imagined perspective of the thief, describing what it was like to need money so badly that you’d take a gun into a shop catering to children. He followed that with a story about a family of 17 living in four rooms—“the bare edge of civilization,” he called it—whose patriarch was murdered in a dispute over a billiards game. Next came a profile of a black building superintendent who, after saving the lives of 20 residents when the structure he maintained went up in flames, was fired and evicted for demanding that the landlord improve the property’s conditions.

Joe Jennings, the executive editor, loved Porambo’s unorthodox style. “He was one of the best pure writers I’ve ever seen at a newspaper,” he said years later to New Jersey Monthly. Thom Akeman, a fellow reporter, described Porambo’s work as having “a lot of leeway and imagination,” which made it compelling. “I’d never stopped to think about looking at a robbery from the point of view of the guy who has the gun,” he told me.

Porambo and his growing family—he and Carol had two more children together—lived in a house in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, a middle-class, mostly black area. He was happy to be home, but he found the city of his youth irrevocably changed, tattooed with a post-riot identity. Burned-out buildings dotted downtown, citizens projected an air of defeat, and the city’s reputation lay in ruins. The New York Times described Newark as a “nightmare … finally succumbing to America’s catalog of urban ills.”

One day, Porambo covered a meeting of the Newark Human Rights Commission, a community group that advocated for police reform. He watched as witness after witness took to the floor to recount beatings and shootings perpetrated by police during the riots. The stories had been circulating through Newark’s black neighborhoods for months. In his article about the meeting, Porambo noted, “It was the first time these things were said in a public auditorium,” but the black survivors of the riots “heard nothing they didn’t know.”

He was determined to put the stories he heard on the front page. So he got to work on what the Daily Journal dubbed the Post-Riot Notebook, a 15-part series intended to introduce readers to the people living in the areas of Newark most affected by the unrest. Porambo knew that something bigger than the color and detail of individual lives was at stake in his reporting. The governor, the mayor, cops, and public prosecutors had all denied complicity in what had transpired in July of 1967. Now, in the name of justice, Porambo wanted to expose it. In the introduction to the series, he promised that “those within the power structure will not like what they read because it will be too close to the truth.”

To get the story, he did what he’d always done. He became a regular at Newark’s roughest watering holes, sitting on stools and slouching in booths at establishments with names like Dick and Ann’s and the R&R. He frequented pool halls and sweaty go-go joints. He told regulars everywhere he went that he wanted to hear what really happened during the riots—what the people who lived through those harrowing five days witnessed. That Porambo was married to a black woman gave him extra cachet in the establishments where he spent late night after late night.

“Those within the power structure will not like what they read because it will be too close to the truth.”

People talked. Over hot dogs and games of nine-ball, he heard desperate scenes recounted, like the one on Beacon Street on the evening of July 14, when state troopers opened fire for no apparent reason. In the melee, James Snead, 36, was shot in the stomach while repairing his car. Karl Green, 17, was shot in the head. Both survived. Seventy-six people signed an eyewitness petition demanding an investigation into the shootings, but no action was taken. For the series’ fifth installment, Porambo drove with 22-year-old Mack Tucker to the spot where police shot him while he sat in a friend’s car. Tucker bore the scars of slug wounds on the side of his face and neck.

The death of Jimmy Rutledge, a looter discovered with 42 bullet wounds, was perhaps the most damning. In the series’ eighth installment, an anonymous police detective walked Porambo through the shooting. Cops on the scene had claimed that Rutledge brandished a butcher knife before they opened fire. But the detective was incredulous: somehow, Rutledge had found the time to wipe his fingerprints from the handle of the blade before falling to the floor dead. According to witnesses, his last words were “Don’t shoot. I’ll serve my time in jail,” followed by “I will come peacefully.”

The more he heard, the more Porambo’s outrage grew. The Post-Riot Notebook consumed him. At a certain point, he took up residence in the Daily Journal’s office, sleeping at his desk and showering in the bathroom the next morning. His union reps fumed over his unlogged overtime. But his dedication was about to pay off.

The New York publishing house Holt, Rinehart, and Winston got wind of the series and offered Porambo a modest $7,500 advance to expand his investigation into a book. He jumped at the chance. He was eager to leave newspaper work behind for a while. No more battles over word count or whether he had to cover a school-board meeting. No more destabilizing hired-and-fired cadence to his life. Just a chance to make it big. “This was going to be the vehicle for him becoming famous and important and influential,” Fred Bruning, Porambo’s old friend from Albany, told me. “He wanted all those things badly. But I think that his first priority, always, was to give voice to this stuff that he felt so passionate about.”

1970

Nearly every morning, Porambo donned a heavy gray sweatsuit, leashed up Ralph, the mutt he’d rescued in Tennessee and loved so much that he’d contemplated listing him as a dependent on the family’s taxes, and jogged several miles through Newark’s South Ward. On his way home, he always picked up fresh bread, tea, and the first editions of the local papers, which left ink stains on his hands. Porambo ate breakfast with his wife and children, Glenna, Franklin, and Ronda. Then he went into his small, book-lined office and shut the door. He was not to be disturbed while he wrote, connecting the dots of the scrupulous reporting he’d compiled over the previous two years.

Unraveling the facts of the riots wasn’t easy. Many of the surviving victims and the families of those killed moved frequently and rarely filed a change of address. Porambo had worn through shoe leather ringing doorbells all over the city. In the process, he fell more deeply in love with Newark. “Everything’s so personal,” he told a reporter, “because everybody’s crushed together, deprived of human rights, down to life itself.” He was as likely to interview a community activist or business owner as a career criminal or drug addict. He described the array of characters he encountered as the personification of “much of black Newark as it was six months after its riot.… Black men sell women and white men buy them. Black children shoot heroin and white politicians give the city away to the mobsters who supply the narcotics.”

Of course, not every pimp and pusher was interested in talking to a reporter. While pounding the pavement, Porambo was threatened more than once, and he kept a revolver close at hand: sometimes under the seat of his car, other times hidden in the light fixture on the living room ceiling. When muggers demanded his grandfather’s pocket watch, they discovered the ex-boxer still had a nasty left hook.

Early in the summer of 1970, Porambo turned in a 700-page draft to his publishers. It landed on the desk of Warren Sloat, a laid-back, 35-year-old editor. “I was appalled by some of the writing,” Sloat later said. “It was just all over the place.” He spent several weeks poring over the text, crossing out digressive rants about conservatism and Richard Nixon. Beneath the vitriolic fat, though, he found a lean narrative of authenticity and verve. “The voices of the people he spoke with rang true,” Sloat recalled. “And his description of how he found them was terribly interesting.” Porambo described it as “sifting through the ashes.”

The book was a scathing account of police brutality, corruption, and cover-ups spanning several years before and after the riots. Porambo chronicled, for instance, the shooting death of 22-year-old Lester Long Jr. on June 12, 1965. Cops pulled Long over because his car had a noisy muffler. Suspecting that his license might be fake, they put him in the back seat of their cruiser. The stop happened across from the Happy Inn Tavern, and a crowd, including some of Long’s friends, gathered outside to watch. After 45 minutes of being detained, Long made a break for it. He got about 30 feet from the car before a bullet hit him in the back of the head. At first the local papers reported the police’s version of events as fact: Long had tried to cut an officer with a knife, the officer had stumbled out of the car bleeding, and a gun had gone off accidentally. But the crowd that watched the events unfold claimed there was no knife, no blood, no accidental shooting. Bystanders saw an officer square up and gun down a fleeing man.

Corrupt political machinery quickly hijacked the narrative. Police advocates claimed that Newark’s finest would be devastated if one of their own were charged with murder. Long had a criminal record, they pointed out. The accused cop went so far as to sue a citizens group for handing out leaflets that labeled him a killer. “What should have been an issue defined by facts had become an ideological conflict with ‘police morale’ as the main issue,” Porambo wrote. “Any action was permissible if it maintained so-called law and order.” This same thinking, he believed, led to the bloody display in 1967.

“If there are two occupational groups that can be expected to lie with abandon on the witness stand,” Porambo wrote, “they are hardened criminals and experienced police officers.”

“If there are two occupational groups that can be expected to lie with abandon on the witness stand, they are hardened criminals and experienced police officers.”

One chapter in the book was dedicated to the trial of John Smith, the cab driver whose arrest had sparked the riots and who had been charged with assaulting two police officers. He claimed that the officers had brutally beaten him; they countered that Smith was the one doing the beating. That Smith had injuries requiring hospitalization and the officers seemed unharmed didn’t shake the court’s opinion. An all-white jury convicted Smith, who after appeals served just under a year in prison.

Porambo broadened his reporting to examine corruption in law enforcement beyond the riots. A heroin dealer went on record to say that he was occasionally supplied by an officer in the city’s vice squad. Porambo unearthed Mafia campaign contributions that had helped elect Mayor Addonizio. And he didn’t hesitate to name names as he laid out kickback schemes that traveled all the way up the chain of command to police director Dominick Spina.

Warren Sloat knew he had something astonishing on his hands. When his heavy edit made it to Porambo’s desk, however, the writer reacted with typical outrage. He’d never met Sloat. Who was this son of a bitch carving up his book? He jumped in his Oldsmobile and raced the ten miles down Route 22 to Plainfield, New Jersey, where Sloat lived on a tree-lined street in a stucco house with a play set in the backyard. Porambo marched up to the door and rang the bell.

After ushering the livid writer inside, Sloat gathered his revisions and Porambo’s original material. For two hours, they sat at a table comparing the texts line by line. The changes were justified, Sloat explained, if only to distill the most important and convincing aspects of the work. “I’ve never read a book quite like this,” he told Porambo. It was going to be valuable to the people of Newark. It might garner national awards.

For the first time in his career, Porambo bought into the editorial process. He headed back to Newark sure that he was on the verge of fame and fortune. He’d been driving a soft-drink delivery truck to make ends meet since his advance ran out. Now he began dreaming of a Pulitzer Prize.

While Sloat put the finishing touches on the manuscript, Porambo hustled to secure what he believed would bring his reporting into perfect focus: photographs taken by the county coroner’s office of bodies with wounds in their backs, sealed by the courts from public view, showing beyond a doubt that many of the riot’s victims were shot as they fled police. Porambo was willing to do anything to obtain visual proof of police brutality, even pay one of the force’s own. In November 1970, he approached officer John Balogh, a hard-bitten veteran whom he’d interviewed during his reporting, and made an under-the-table offer: ten photos for $10 apiece.

At first, Balogh appeared agreeable to the offer, and he provided half the requested the photos. But it turned out to be a ruse. Balogh recorded their conversations and shared them with public prosecutors. One day at a local restaurant, he passed a second stack of images to Porambo, and the writer chose the ones he wanted. As the final payoff went down, Porambo found himself in handcuffs. Balogh was arresting him for bribing a police officer.

Porambo seemed unfazed. “The worst I can get is six months,” he mused in an interview with Thom Akeman, his ex-colleague from the Daily Journal. “Unless I get one of those judges I wrote about.”

1971

The book was published, without photos, while the bribery case was still pending. It was a masterpiece of urban reporting, as raw as it was authoritative. The first page alone must have caused jaws to drop and eyebrows to jump as readers, particularly white readers, took it in. Porambo began his 398-page investigation with a description of a black dancer:

She was ghetto Newark and her brown arms glistened and drops of sweat covered her bare stomach. They formed trickles that dripped into her navel and on down into what little there was of the bottom half of her dancing costume, down into black Newark, a place where tattered kids play on dirty brick streets; where, at the first light of dawn, working people rise for another day’s labor and junkies look for anything worth stealing to feed the needle; where locked warm thighs in the restless morning start the cycle all over again, bringing screaming infants into a cramped jungle that now must be called post-riot Newark. … Keep moving, brown-skinned girl, you are Newark and you are beautiful and the place you call home has a primitive beauty and allure of its own.

In the next paragraph, he called the deaths caused by police during the riots “homicide,” an unflinching accusation that he later unpacked in the book’s most devastating chapter, entitled “Nailing the Lid on a Coffin.” Porambo outlined each of the killings brought before grand juries after the riots. He described eyewitness accounts in meticulous detail—people who’d watched the violence from apartment windows and fire escapes and street corners—and revisited the police’s own investigatory materials. The picture he painted was at best one of police misconduct, at worst one of a murder spree. Yet in case after case, the authorities had proved immune to prosecution. “Due to insufficient evidence of any criminal misconduct,” courts ruled, “the jury found no cause for indictment.” The phrase became the title of Porambo’s book: No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark.

The city had placed fault for the deaths on the shoulders of the looters and protesters who’d flouted the law in the first place, and on individuals not sufficiently cognizant of the war zone Newark had become during the riots. Porambo declared this nothing short of craven racism. “The inference was clear that the guilty included Eddie Moss’s father, for taking his son out for hamburgers,” Porambo wrote, “Michael Pugh’s mother, for telling her son to carry out the garbage, and Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Spellman, and Mrs. Gainer”—the three women killed in their Hayes Homes apartments—“for being the same color as the rioters.”

When the book hit shelves, Porambo became a household name in Newark overnight. “It was a reference point,” Amiri Baraka, a poet and community activist who featured in the text, later told the Star-Ledger. “One had to be able to say, ‘Yes, I know that book,’ whether you had read it or not.” A review in the Baltimore Sun noted, “Even if Mr. Porambo is wrong ten per cent of the time, and that is unlikely, his is still a very serious indictment of the Newark police.” Kirkus heralded, “Porambo is energetic, angry, and he spares no one.”

“It was a reference point. One had to be able to say, ‘Yes, I know that book,’ whether you had read it or not.”

Frustrating to the writer, most of the major New Jersey papers didn’t review it—perhaps because he’d reserved disdain for his own tribe in the book, dubbing the local press “the whorehouse’s blushing counterfeit virgins.” Porambo believed newspapers had done little to investigate violent incidents, instead parroting police accounts. When evidence proved those accounts wrong, the stories often went uncorrected. In one case, Porambo confronted a reporter who’d written about the shooting of 17-year-old Dexter Johnson after an alleged struggle with police. Witness accounts made it clear that a fence standing six feet high separated Johnson and the cop who’d shot him; a scuffle between the two would have been physically impossible. The reporter was shocked when Porambo told him about the contradictory evidence. In his book, Porambo derided lazy reporting as the reason “why whites, who read once again of a ruthless punk and a valiant police officer, remain so uninformed.”

No one demanded retractions or sued. Still, Porambo was prepared for backlash. “I wrote a book about how people were murdered during the riot,” he told a reporter. “I also wrote about corruption in city government and the police department. It’s only natural that I join the victims.”

Three weeks after his book’s release, in December 1971, Porambo was driving in the thin light of dawn along a desolate street abutting Interstate 78. In his rearview mirror, he saw a car with its headlights switched off surge toward him. It veered left and pulled alongside his window. The driver whipped out a pistol and sent seven bullets into Porambo’s Oldsmobile before speeding away. Porambo lost control of the car and jumped a curb. He stayed crouched in his seat, covered in broken glass and too afraid to move, for a solid ten minutes.

Afterward, Porambo told reporters that he was certain the attack had to do with his book. He even insinuated that the police were trying to shut him up. “Newark is the way it is,” he said. “Nothing should be surprising in Newark. Nothing.” A sluggish investigation turned up no suspects or evidence.

Soon after, Porambo got a job as a correspondent for 51st State, a program that aired nightly on public television in the New York City area. The show offered “news from the bottom up,” told through the perspectives of the people who lived it, and reporters weren’t afraid to be provocative. Porambo fit right in. He spent most of his time in the field but sometimes came to 51st State’s headquarters above Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Producer Gary Gilson remembered him as a “madman genius” and “like a member of an Italian street gang. He was rough, but he was an artist.” It showed in his segments. One of Porambo’s investigations, about the ease of buying illegal guns on the streets of Newark, opened with the camera zoomed in on a man leaning into a car window, seemingly doing business with the person behind the wheel. As the camera pulled back, viewers saw that Porambo was the buyer. He turned to face the lens, lifted the pistol he’d pretended to purchase, and fired several shots. It was unnerving stuff, and it has been lost to history: When the station that aired 51st State moved offices in the 1990s, it recorded over or lost almost all of the show’s archive.

On January 14, 1972, Gilson, who was in charge of Friday programming, answered his desk phone. When he did, it threw his scheduled lineup into disarray. Porambo was on the line. “It’s Ron,” he said. “I can’t come in. I’ve been shot.”

The night before, around 11 p.m., he’d gone to Dick and Ann’s, one of his favorite bars. He’d ordered a drink from waitress Sherry Rivers, who mentioned that a man had been in earlier asking about a “white guy.” The stranger was talking about Porambo, who took the news in stride. Maybe it was someone out to get him, like whoever had shot up his car a few weeks prior, or maybe it was someone who just wanted to talk. After Dick and Ann’s, Porambo went to Tony’s Tavern, where the bartender told him that someone had been asking around for a “white dude shooting pool.”

The cover of the original paperback. 
The cover of the original paperback. 

At 1:30 a.m., Porambo paid his tab and went to his car. The driver-side door was still busted from the shooting, so he climbed through the passenger’s side. As he slid across the bench seat, a heavyset white man pushed through the open door behind him and leveled a pistol at his head. Porambo kicked and fought, but he couldn’t get away. The attacker fired seven times, and bullets penetrated both of Porambo’s legs. Blood began soaking his pants. He had his own gun under the seat, which he managed to grab and discharge at the fleeing assailant. But the man got away, leaving only a brown loafer in his wake.

At the hospital, after doctors bandaged his legs, Porambo held court with journalists who’d gotten wind of the shooting. “I don’t think they’re trying to kill me,” he said. “They just want to terrify me.” Newark cops were stationed at his door, and as visiting hours ended, they tried to escort the interviewers out. Porambo argued that the journalists should be allowed to stay. Neither side would back down, so against the wishes of his doctors, Porambo checked himself out of the hospital. In a fury, he grabbed some crutches and hobbled out the building’s double doors.

Over at 51st State’s offices, Gilson rushed to put together a new opening segment with the title “Our Man in Newark Has Been Shot.” TV crews showed up on the steps of Newark’s police headquarters to demand answers. Suspicious that he might have staged the shootings, officers asked Porambo to take a lie-detector test. He refused. “The cops just want to try to discredit the book,” he told a reporter, also noting that a polygraph would be “very unreliable for someone with my temperament.” One of the bullets in the second incident had narrowly missed an artery. He took chances, Porambo insisted, but he wasn’t stupid.  

Or was he? The night of the second shooting, before Porambo went to Dick and Ann’s, he and a friend whom his kids called Uncle Artie sat in his office sipping scotch and milk. Carol was in the adjacent living room listening to Roberta Flack on the record player, and in between tracks she caught snippets of the two men’s hushed conversation.

“Come on, man. You’ve got to do this for me, man,” Porambo said.

“What if I mess up and do something else?” Artie responded.

“I need you to do this,” Porambo implored.

Eventually, the men left the house together, Porambo telling Carol that they were off to play some pool. Unsure what her husband was planning, Carol brushed off what she’d overheard and turned up the volume on “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” When the phone rang several hours later, and a voice on the other end told her that her husband had been shot, Carol’s first thought was, I can’t believe he convinced Artie to do it. She and Glenna grabbed the three portable TVs in the house and lined them up on the wide kitchen counter, tuning them to ABC, NBC, and CBS. They sat at the kitchen table watching as Porambo talked with newscasters in the hospital.

Quietly, Carol told Glenna what she suspected had happened. But she had no plans to tell the cops. Glenna understood why. In the Porambo household, loyalty was to the bone. If one of the kids snitched on another for breaking a rule, the tattler caught it first with a wooden ruler. So mother and daughter tacitly agreed to keep their lips sealed about what in retrospect may have been a warning sign of Porambo’s deteriorating grasp of right and wrong.

Others soon followed. No Cause for Indictment sold out its initial run of 7,500 copies, and the publisher ordered a second printing. The critical success buoyed Porambo’s belief that he would win a Pulitzer. He already felt that he’d earned it by dedicating years of reporting to his book and even risking his life for it. “He used to talk about it all the time,” Carol told me. In the spring of 1972, however, a jury of his peers decided that another book was more worthy of nonfiction’s highest honor: a history of General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s exploits in the Far East by historian Barbara W. Tuchman. Porambo was heartbroken. “He didn’t have another dream to replace that one,” Glenna told me.

Intensifying his pain and frustration was Porambo’s realization that his book wasn’t having the tangible impact he’d hoped, however naively, it would. Newark had elected its first black mayor while he was writing it, a development that Porambo lauded. During the mayor’s first year in office, however, eight black people were shot dead by police for petty crimes, six as they fled scenes. Soon after, the Evening News and Star-Ledger decided to cut back on crime reporting, because editors worried that stories of violence were becoming repetitive for readers. In his book, Porambo had pilloried Tony Imperiale, a Stetson-wearing, race-baiting rabble-rouser who’d encouraged white citizens to take up arms against rioters in 1967 and once referred to the civil rights movement’s most prominent leader as “Martin Luther Coon.” In 1970, Imperiale was elected to the city council; three years later, he became a member of the state senate.

Porambo had written a seminal text about urban America. He’d used bold tactics. He’d positioned himself on the right side of history. It hadn’t been enough to move Newark’s social needle. Would anything?

When a source gave him documents outlining corruption in city contracts, Porambo saw it as a chance to at least force some discreet change. According to the documents, officials were approving payouts for demolition contracts on buildings that didn’t exist. Porambo trusted his source, a 23-year-old city employee named Aleck Grishkevich. The two men were drinking buddies. Porambo produced segments on 51st State based on the papers and demanded that officials state on the record when indictments would be forthcoming. He confronted representatives of the mayor’s office and the demolition company that had allegedly drawn canceled checks for the work orders.

Then one day, Porambo received a call from Grishkevich’s mother. Her son had been arrested on forgery charges, she said. The documents used in the segments were fakes. When Porambo reached out to the prosecutor’s office, he learned that a warrant had been issued for his arrest, too. He pleaded ignorance about the forgery, and ultimately the charges against him were dropped. But he’d put his colleagues’ credibility in jeopardy by failing to corroborate the details of the materials provided by his source. The show fired him.

Around the same time, the longstanding bribery charges were finally brought to court. Porambo was found guilty and served three months behind bars. He emerged jaded and indignant.

1973

The renowned psychoanalyst Alfred Adler believed that the need to cope with feelings of inferiority drives human behavior. We work hard in personal, professional, and communal spheres to develop self-assurance, and we establish goals that might compensate for our perceived deficiencies. When people can’t overcome or process these flaws, however, they can grow depressed, anxious, and insecure. Some channel their frustrations into manipulating or dominating other people. They become, in a word, bullies.

Porambo fit that mold. The one-two punch of losing the Pulitzer and his job at 51st State proved too much for him to bear, and his psyche cracked. He’d always been argumentative, volatile, and domineering. Now he could be vicious. Even his eyes changed. The brown wells that had always seemed attentive became cold and unfeeling. He looked “like nobody loved him,” Carol told me.

When he got back late and found his kids’ clothes and toys left in piles on the floor, Porambo would wake them, even in the middle of a school night, and demand that they clean their rooms. He would holler at his wife and dump laundry she’d folded down the stairs. He could be physically abusive, too, often reserving his fiercest anger for his son Franklin. “He would slap him in the nose and then look at me and say, ‘See what you made me do?’” Carol recalled. “I would go off to a motel with the children until he calmed down.”

Despite his professional blunders, Porambo still had plenty of admirers. He got a job as a field producer for City-TV in Toronto and moved his family to Canada. His kids gathered around the television at 7 p.m. each night to watch their father, wearing his signature black beret, unleash blistering reports. Carol worked as a photographer at a mall, and the family lived in a roomy two-bedroom condominium with floor-to-ceiling windows. On Sundays, Porambo planted himself in front of the TV to watch football. He always rooted for the underdog. The family seemed to friends and neighbors like the picture of domestic bliss. Privately, though, Porambo was becoming increasingly erratic.

One day, Carol came home to find that he’d painted the exterior of their home a rusty red, because he was sick of it being uniform with the condos around it. The paint job lasted only as long as it took the community board to have it sandblasted off. Porambo made good money, roughly the equivalent of a $150,000 annual salary today, and his parents regularly deposited money into the family’s bank account. But Porambo was reckless with cash and fell into debt. He maxed out two credit cards to buy Carol a $1,500 blue and gold macaw named Harold for her birthday. He taught the bird to sip wine from a glass until it skulked off-balance along the edge of the dining table. He refused to cage it, even outside. Once, during a family barbecue, Harold flew up into some trees, and the fire department had to come retrieve him.

Losing his job didn’t scare him straight. It only pushed him deeper into vice.

Rather than pay off his credit cards, Porambo sent letters to the banks pretending to be an attorney. He claimed “Mr. Porambo” had fallen ill and couldn’t pay his bills on time. Eventually, he wrote that his client had died. At work, Porambo began taking small payoffs from stringers at the TV station in exchange for guaranteeing that their clips were broadcast. When their segments didn’t show as promised, the freelancers alerted executives to the scheme. Soon after, the station discovered that Porambo had been cooking his expense reports. Once again he was fired.

The question of why a reporter who’d built his reputation skewering corrupt systems would lie to banks, to say nothing of swindling fellow journalists for a few bucks, is difficult to answer. Maybe he genuinely believed that his family needed the cash. Or maybe he feared that he was living the cookie-cutter life he’d always dreaded and broke the rules just to prove that he could. Either way, losing his job didn’t scare him straight. It only pushed him deeper into vice.

One day in March 1978, Porambo dyed his hair a garish red—or donned a wig that color, no one can remember for sure—and drove to the parking lot of Toronto International Airport. He carried a toy gun that he’d spray-painted to look real. Porambo approached a parking attendant, demanded money, then ran away with the cash. A few days later, police tracked him down and arrested him. Porambo claimed that he’d robbed the attendant to make a mortgage payment. “I just did the wrong thing,” he told a reporter several years later. “I was real messed up.” Yet the crime was so preposterously amateurish, so cartoonish, that it seemed engineered to fail.

One theory, now shared by Carol and Glenna, is that Porambo intended to get in trouble with the law, or at least flirt with the prospect. The seed of this theory is a book. In 1968, writer Nathan Heard had published Howard Street, a hyperrealistic novel set in Newark. It was about sex workers, pimps, and pushers, and it was hailed for its raw honesty. Boosting the book’s profile was the fact that Heard wrote it while he was finishing an eight-year stint in prison for armed robbery. His vivid prose and personal story wowed readers and the literary world. Howard Street sold a million copies. Porambo kept a copy on his shelf, where it became an object of envy for him. In Toronto, he started working on a novel he titled Walker’s Last Stand. No one ever read the draft—Porambo was protective of his work, and the manuscript was later lost—but his family gathered that the plot centered on a criminal enterprise. Perhaps, Carol and Glenna told me, No Cause for Indictment had made him realize that, despite his reporting chops and ear for gritty, untold stories, he lacked the profile to launch a book about urban life into the commercial stratosphere. In which case, maybe he thought that crossing the line into criminality would give his writing authenticity.

The idea sounds farfetched. Then again, Porambo was notoriously rash. And the theory brings to mind the first story he wrote for the Daily Journal, about the robbery at the candy store. On its face, the article reads like a remarkable feat of empathy with the thief. But could its perspective have been a sly confession about how Porambo got the story? Given the trajectory of the writer’s life, in hindsight it seems plausible.

Following the stick-up at the airport, Porambo was found guilty of armed robbery. Carol packed up the family car and headed back to Newark. She was fed up with her husband’s antics, but she still loved him. She’d be there when he got out.

Porambo kept working, taking inspiration from his circumstances. He was allowed a typewriter in his cell and published a piece in the Toronto Star on the endless boredom of “dead time,” the days that convicts spend before sentencing that may or may not count as time served. After nine months, he was released and deported to America, where he reunited with his family in Newark. It wouldn’t be his last stint behind bars.

1980

Porambo was determined to sell Walker’s Last Stand. The manuscript was finished, and he wanted it to win the accolades that No Cause for Indictment hadn’t. He commuted into Manhattan for long dinners with book publishers at Italian restaurants in the West Village, with Carol by his side. He was so pushy when promoting his work, so sure of his brilliance, that she was sometimes embarrassed for him. “Ron had no shame, so nothing was awkward for him,” she said. When nothing came from a meeting, he would mutter to his wife under his breath, “I hate people.”

Without a book deal or steady work, Porambo began leading a double life. By day he worked on his novel and pitched freelance articles. By night he descended into Newark’s underworld—this time not as a reporter but as a participant. In 1980, the city was posting some of the highest crime rates in the country, and Porambo joined the fray by reviving the stick-up routine he’d tried in Toronto. Glenna, with whom Porambo was close, helped him. She rode with her stepfather to nice neighborhoods and cased potential marks. When Porambo bought wigs and fake mustaches for the disguises he wore when holding people at gunpoint, he paid Glenna $10 to trim them so they’d fit his face. “It was a lot of money back then,” she told me.

Porambo pocketed modest amounts of cash from his robberies, but that didn’t seem to be his main motivation. Like his parents all those years ago, Porambo fumed about “those people,” except he was referring to whites who worked in Newark during the day and returned to their cushy suburban homes at night. He ranted to Carol about how the rich never spent their money where it was needed.

“He thought he was getting back at rich people and society,” Carol confided in Fred Bruning, who’d kept in touch while building a respectable career at papers up and down the East Coast. Or maybe, Carol added, her husband was just unwell.

There was a Robin Hood quality to his logic, but Porambo didn’t spread the wealth he pilfered. He seemed more vindictive than benevolent.

There was a Robin Hood quality to his logic, but Porambo didn’t spread the wealth he pilfered. He seemed more vindictive than benevolent.

Porambo made friends with street criminals willing to team up with him on jobs. One night in June 1980, he and an accomplice, 20-year-old Richard Norman, staked out the parking lot of Snuffy’s, a restaurant in the town of Scotch Plains. It featured faux marble colonnades, lobster buffets, a plate-breaking show with cries of “Opa!” and a “sit down eating clam bar”—the greatest hits of Greek American hospitality. Their stomachs full of surf and turf and two-dollar glasses of wine, a couple named the Kilpatricks were walking to their car when Porambo and Norman approached. One of them pistol-whipped Mr. Kilpatrick, and the attackers made off with $277 in cash. Fifteen minutes later, the police pulled them over in a car matching the description the Kilpatricks had provided. Porambo later admitted to being a little “high on alcohol” during the slapdash heist. Once again the weapon he used was a toy gun.

Porambo was sentenced to seven years for robbery and assault and shipped off to Leesburg State Prison, a medium-security lockup that employed inmates in good standing on a working farm. Porambo did well inside, and he even gave his investigative career another go. He began looking into the prison’s bloated work contracts and compiled a 16-page report on fraud and kickbacks. He tried to mail it to a newspaper, but prison authorities discovered the draft and confiscated it. Despite the provocation, he earned early release to a halfway house in less than two years.

As a parolee, looking for a job was a legal requirement. Asking Newsday to hire him was ballsy. The Long Island daily was cherry-picking writers and editors from bigger, better-known outlets. Murray Kempton, the former editor of The New Republic, came on board as a columnist in 1981 and won a Pulitzer four years later. Breslin jumped ship from the Daily News and worked at Newsday until he retired in 2004. Porambo secured an interview with Tony Marro, one of the top editors, and hoped he could convince the paper’s leadership to help him stage a comeback.

When he visited Newsday’s offices, Porambo’s first stop was at the desk of Fred Bruning, who’d recently joined the staff. Over the years, in phone calls and at dinners when the men found themselves in the same city, Bruning had been a calming influence on his friend. He’d always been jealous of Porambo’s talent. Now, as they sat in the Newsday cafeteria, Bruning realized that the journalist he’d long admired was no longer there. Personal demons had done their worst; the conversation was brutal. “Looking grim and exhausted,” Bruning later wrote, “Porambo told me he was going to give newspapers one more try. But, he warned, if he couldn’t find a job at a prestigious place like Newsday, if the business rejected him again at this late date, he was returning to his avocation—to crime.”

The gig at Newsday didn’t materialize. Over the next few weeks, Porambo appeased his parole officer by picking up work at the Atlantic City Press. Then, in January 1982, he missed his nightly sign-in at the halfway house. He explained that he was late because he’d been at work—the very work that the legal system required him to have. It didn’t matter. He was charged with attempted escape and shipped back to prison. When he got out a few months later, he made good on what he’d told Bruning he would do.

1983

Porambo rubbed spirit gum along the contour above his upper lip and pressed the flimsy mustache into place. He pulled the wig, selected from the Headstart Hair for Men line, over his scalp. He’d bought it a few weeks earlier at a store called Town Wigs in Irvington, New Jersey, where he’d told the salesman his name was Ron Pope. The wig made him look like Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. He glanced in the mirror to make sure he was unrecognizable. Then he grabbed his brown overnight bag and stuffed his supplies inside: silver .32 revolver, duct tape, ski masks, fake police badges, bullets, and makeup.

Carol was crying. She pleaded with him not to go. They had money; they would make rent. And there were consequences to the dangerous game Porambo was playing. “God don’t like ugly,” she told her husband.

Since getting out of Leesburg the second time, Porambo had settled into a new line of crime: taking down drug dealers. It was a high-risk, high-reward business. The upsides were cash and other items—cocaine, marijuana, jewelry—with serious street value. Plus, Porambo’s marks rarely called the police. But there was little room for error in robbing hustlers. One mistake and you could wind up dead.

There was little room for error in robbing hustlers. One mistake and you could wind up dead.

Porambo didn’t work alone. His accomplices were the same sort of people he’d once relied on for news tips. There was Eddie Crawford, who supplied Porambo with information about targets—where they lived, what they were carrying, when their shipments came in. Larry Page and Bob Windsor, two men Porambo had met in prison, helped him do the dirty work: While he held a dealer at gunpoint, they would shake the target down. After making their getaway, the team would divvy up the spoils. Jewelry got fenced through Willie Rabb, the owner of a We Buy Gold outfit in Newark.

Carol disliked her husband’s new friends so much that she quit her job as a nanny to make sure her kids were never alone when Porambo brought the men around. Windsor was from south-central New Jersey and had been in and out of jail for the past decade. He was 38, white, and a little overweight. Porambo sometimes scolded him for being a junkie. Page was black, a few years younger, and imbued with a cruel streak. According to Carol, “He was the devil.”   

There was no better proof than what happened on April 10, 1983. It was a rainy spring day. Water dripped from trees and gutters as Porambo and Page walked toward a five-story redbrick apartment building in Newark. They had to pass the entrance a few times before someone who lived in one of the units came out. Porambo, wearing a blue uniform jacket, smiled and tipped a fire-marshal hat toward the tenant. Then he stuck his foot between the door and the frame; he and Page slipped inside.

Three floors up, Sidney Davis and his girlfriend, Betsy, were naked and doing cocaine on Davis’s big circular bed. A 34-year-old drug dealer, Davis wasn’t the richest or flashiest guy pushing coke in the neighborhood, but he moved a decent amount of it. Just after 2 p.m., there was a knock at the door.

“Did you hear that?” Betsy asked.

Davis stuck his head out from the bedroom. “Who’s that?” he yelled.

“Fireman,” was the answer. Davis hadn’t heard an alarm in the building. Still, he threw on a robe and opened the door.

He instantly knew he’d been set up. These guys were no firemen. Porambo pushed past him and pulled a revolver from his jacket pocket, which he pointed squarely at Davis’s chest. Then Page barged in, and the robbers forced Davis to lie facedown on a couch.

Porambo kept his gun trained on Davis while Page scoured the apartment for money and drugs. In the bedroom, he found a few thousand dollars, diamond-studded watches, and Betsy. She was trying to hide from the intruders. Page started to force her into the living room, then changed his mind. He pushed her back onto the bed and raped her.

When Page finished, he dragged Betsy out to the couch and threw her on top of Davis. Then he shoved a pillow over her head and demanded that Porambo shoot them both. For all the mayhem Porambo had caused in his life, he’d avoided crossing the line that divides threatening deadly violence and committing it. Davis, though, couldn’t have known that. Lying on the couch under the weight of his girlfriend’s battered body, he decided that he wasn’t going down without a fight.

Davis roared up from the couch and lunged at Porambo. Betsy did the same, clawing wildly at the faces of the two surprised robbers. In the ensuing fight, bottles were smashed, furniture was flipped, and skin was torn open. Then a crack of gunfire split the air. A downstairs neighbor heard it and stuck her head into the hallway. She listened as two men raced to the exit on the floor above her, one of them shouting, “Hurry up, I’m hurt!”

As Porambo and Page bolted from the building, Betsy called the police. When they arrived, the officers found Davis laying in the hallway, his bloodstained robe trailing behind him. He had a gushing wound in his chest. Adrenaline and shock had kept him awake long enough to tell the cops that a white man had shot him. He was pronounced dead within the hour.

Inside the apartment, there were blood smears on the floor and coffee table, and a long streak on the wall where a hand had reached for support. In the bedroom was an extensive stash of cocaine and drug paraphernalia. Betsy was hysterical and unable to describe much of the robbery, except to say that she’d been raped. On the floor, detectives found a black wig, a blue fireman’s hat, and a silver .32-caliber revolver with two spent cartridges.

When Porambo returned home later that night, he was bleeding from a gash on his head and wearing different clothes than he’d left in. “Whose sweater is that?” Carol demanded. All Porambo would say was that he’d borrowed the shirt from Page. “What have you done?” Carol asked. Her husband stood in front of a mirror trying to pull off the gluey wads of wig hair matted together with dried blood. Someone had smashed his head with a vase, he replied. She didn’t believe him. “I can’t help you,” Carol said, throwing up her hands. He’d made his choices.

Porambo packed a suitcase and disappeared for a couple of weeks, staying at Windsor’s bungalow in southern New Jersey. A seismic shift had occurred: Porambo was now a killer, and it was likely only a matter of time before Davis’s associates came looking for him. His nerves were raw. He told Carol and his children not to open the door for anyone they didn’t recognize. “You could sense a little change in the way he felt about it. He said he might’ve stepped a little too far,” Glenna told me. Before long, though, he started lining up a slate of new jobs back in Newark. He was like an addict convinced that he wouldn’t overdose a second time. “I went about it the way I did everything else,” Porambo later told Bruning of his criminal exploits. “If there had been eight days in a week, I would have done it eight days.”

One month after Davis’s murder, Porambo and Windsor robbed a major drug dealer named David Williams, a job that involved dressing as cops and tying up Williams’s domestic help in a brazen midday home invasion. The pair made off with a briefcase of cash, jewelry, and drugs. When Porambo delivered the jewelry to Willie Rabb, his longtime fence, Rabb had a choice to make. Porambo had been a reliable partner, but Williams was a fearsome guy. If the drug dealer found out that Rabb had flipped his possessions, it could spell the end for the We Buy Gold proprietor. Rabb picked up the phone, called around until he got Williams on the line, and told the dealer how the job had gone down.

A few days later, on the night of May 19, Porambo was home with his family when the phone rang. He answered it in his office and kept his voice low while he talked. “All right, I’ll see you there,” was all Carol caught of the conversation. After Porambo hung up, he told his wife that he was going out. As usual, she begged him to stay and he brushed her off, telling her that he’d be back soon.

It was the same thing that Eddie Crawford, Porambo’s tip provider, had told his girlfriend a few hours earlier. After taking a phone call, Crawford had left home and gone into Manhattan, where he’d been gunned down by an unknown assailant. By the time Porambo got in his Volkswagen and drove to 186 Ridgewood Ave., Crawford was in a Harlem hospital, brain-dead. Maybe the person who’d called Porambo’s house had warned him that he was in danger, too. Or maybe it was the same individual who lured Crawford out. Nobody knows for sure, because the next time Porambo spoke to anyone, he was under arrest in a hospital bed, with a bullet lodged permanently in his brain and little memory of how it got there.

The cops who responded to Porambo’s shooting searched the Volkswagen where it had happened and found a bag containing wigs, fake badges, and two loaded pistols. The accessories linked Porambo to several unsolved crimes, including the murder of Sydney Davis. A rent receipt led police to an apartment in Belleville, New Jersey, where they found cash, stolen driver’s licenses, maps with homes and addresses circled, passports and birth certificates with random names, and more guns and disguises.

To some people, the scope of Porambo’s crimes seemed implausible. His parole officer told police that he’d had “no inclination that [Porambo] was doing anything wrong.” Local newspapers covered the story, listing the pending charges against him and referencing Porambo’s renown for his “controversial book.”

Carol’s reaction to the scope of her husband’s deceit was stoic. Nothing surprised her anymore. “It was just so hard for me to even cry tears,” she told me. In a final act of spousal loyalty, she dug through Porambo’s office and found a fireman’s uniform he often wore during robberies. She burned it in their apartment building’s incinerator.

1984

While he sat in jail awaiting trial for felony murder, acclimating to life with a chunk of metal in his head, Porambo’s moods were fitful. Sometimes he was chipper, like the day a detective visited him with a nurse to take hair and blood samples. The nurse patted one of Porambo’s muscled forearms in search of a vein, and the inmate bragged that he’d been doing lots of pull-ups lately. At one point, he said to the detective, “It’s really nice to make your acquaintance. I only wish it had been under different circumstances.”  

“You’re the first guy in seven years in your situation that ever said that to me,” the detective replied.

When the nurse turned her attention to his hair, zeroing in on a strand to pluck, Porambo said, “Don’t take the gray hairs! Those are special to me.” When the nurse asked why, he glanced up with a scampish grin, “I got them from all of my unpublished works.”

In other moments, Porambo was matter-of-fact. Page and Windsor had given statements to the police implicating him in multiple crimes, including Davis’s murder, in order to protect themselves. He assumed they did so because they were sure he would die of his gunshot wounds. “How can you hurt a man who’s already dead?” he explained in a letter, one of hundreds he wrote while awaiting trial. The letters piled up on his lawyer’s desk, in the prison warden’s office, and at the newsroom of the Star-Ledger. He wrote so many to Richard Newman, the judge assigned to his case, that Newman was forced to recuse himself after prosecutors complained that the accused’s overwhelming contact might influence the trial.

Some of these letters revealed another side of Porambo—a peculiar, perhaps delusional one. He claimed that Jesus Christ had been whispering in his ear since he woke up in the hospital. He carried a small crucifix to legal meetings and signed correspondence “Sincerely and Faith in Christ.” Before a pretrial hearing, as he was preparing “notes” for the new judge on his case, he suddenly switched to writing that Jesus had told him, “No, no, run. Go to court! Why write the judge when you can tell [him] face to face.”

When the trial finally began, in July 1984, two of Porambo’s letters became focal points for the prosecution. In one, Porambo offered to testify against Page in exchange for a plea bargain; it was a tacit admission of guilt. In the other, he stated that he was “the only person who can or will recount the last moments of Mr. Davis with the dignity with which he deserves.” That sentence placed him at the scene of the murder.

Porambo’s defense was based largely on the precariousness of circumstantial evidence. His blood type was found in Davis’s living room, for instance, and Betsy identified the disguises in his car and at the secret apartment as looking similar to those worn by her attackers. Porambo’s lawyer also contended that the Newark police were framing his client as payback for No Cause for Indictment. The corrupt system Porambo had exposed, the attorney argued, had finally found a way to silence him. There was no proof to support that claim, however.

Porambo’s guns and disguise materials. (Essex County Files)

As the trial dragged on, the damage to Porambo’s neurological system caused spittle to collect at the corners of his mouth and sometimes drip down his chin. He was prone to bursting into tears unexpectedly. When he was called on to don the disguises allegedly used in his crimes, the moisture on his face rendered the glue used to attach them useless. Cheap beards and mustaches drooped pathetically off his visage as he stood before the jury. His lawyer later described it as “almost a sick kind of scene.”

Carol came to the hearings. She knew that their marriage was over, but she wanted to be present for her husband’s reckoning. Nervous that whoever had shot Porambo—a crime the police never solved—might come after her, she kept a low profile by sitting in the back row and avoiding the press. She never spoke to her husband. She can’t remember even making eye contact with him.

On October 2, 1984, a jury of eight women and four men found Porambo guilty. He was sentenced to 30 years to life. Though he never admitted to killing Davis, as the trial came to a close, Porambo made a statement before the court. “I am two people,” he told the judge. “I’m a good person and a bad person. I know that now.”

2006

For the first few years of his sentence, as he passed through bland prison hallways on his way to eat or shower, Porambo bounced awkwardly on the balls of his feet. Brain damage had spoiled his equilibrium. Below his black, thick-framed glasses, his chin jutted out at a strange, painful-seeming angle. He still drooled. Yet he kept in shape by jogging for an hour every day in the recreation yard, stopping to change into dry sweats halfway through. And he loved to shadowbox, doing the footwork that, as a teenager, he’d shunned in the ring. His moves inspired shouts of “Rambo!” among fellow inmates, who liked the smart, funny, and accomplished guy from Newark. Prison officers were less enamored: Porambo once threatened a hunger strike, detailing a “suicide schedule” in a letter, unless they provided him with speech and occupational therapy.

Eventually, Porambo began to wither, emotionally and physically. Outbursts of anger at his brother’s family, who tried to maintain contact with him, drove them to cut off communication. (Family members I contacted either did not reply or declined to comment.) His psyche took a major hit when, in 1989, his daughter Ronda slipped into a coma during routine surgery related to rheumatoid arthritis. Doctors said she was unlikely to survive. Prison authorities told Porambo that he could either visit her in the hospital or go to her funeral. He chose to see her before she died.

Carol heard her husband before he entered Ronda’s hospital room: his shuffling footsteps in the sterile hallway, the clanking shackles on his wrists and ankles. During the 15 minutes he was allotted for the visit, he wept over Ronda’s inert body, gripping it as tightly as he could. Then he trundled out. It was the last time Carol ever saw him. Years later, Porambo would remember Ronda’s death and say simply, “Lost without her.”

The trapped bullet eroded Porambo’s memory and his ability to speak and move. In time he was relocated to a prison unit for people with permanent health problems. When he could no longer jog, he took to walking the yard. When speaking more than a few words at a time became difficult, he scribbled on a pad of paper. Another prisoner helped him do basic tasks like tie his shoes and type.

In the summer of 2006, after Porambo had been behind bars for 23 years, Fred Bruning paid him a visit. They hadn’t seen each other in decades. Bruning found his old friend a shell of his former self, a desperate man who alternated between boisterous fits of laughter and racking sobs when talking about the past. Responding to questions, Porambo mostly grunted, roared, or scratched words onto his pad of paper. His phlegm-rattled breathing made him sound like a predator on a phone call in a horror movie.

Bruning had come to interview Porambo about his life. “Where’s Carol?” Porambo wanted to know. Bruning had no idea. They talked about what Porambo would be doing if he were free. “Work,” he managed to say. Then, putting pen to paper that was wet with his saliva, he continued, “Work is everything.” Bruning mentioned that two of his children, including Porambo’s own goddaughter, taught in minority schools. “God bless her,” Porambo wrote. When Bruning brought up the most painful subject of all—how his friend had wound up disabled and serving time for murder, how a life of such promise had come to this—Porambo let out a series of mournful cries before managing a single word: “Mistake.”

Porambo let out a series of mournful cries before managing a single word: “Mistake.”

Three months after Bruning’s visit, on the morning of October 22, a corrections officer peered through the cutaway glass window of cell 2C. Inside, Porambo was on his knees with his upper body bent over the metal frame of his stiff cot, as if in silent prayer. An hour prior, he’d had his breakfast. The officer knocked on the door. Porambo didn’t move.

The guard called in a “53,” the code for a medical emergency, over his walkie-talkie, and the lock on Porambo’s cell thudded open. Paramedics rushed in and dragged Porambo’s unresponsive body onto his mattress. They began chest compressions. Thirty-three minutes after being discovered in his cell, Porambo was pronounced dead.

At first it wasn’t clear what had killed him. The medical examiner saw no signs of physical injury: cuts, scrapes, bruises, torn fingernails. Porambo’s gray hair was shorn nearly to his scalp, and there was no visible head trauma. It wasn’t until the examiner conducted a full autopsy, cutting open his body, that she found the cause of death. The reporter once hailed as “a truth-seeker above all,” the criminal deemed by Newark prosecutors as “an extreme risk to society,” the erratic father, husband, friend, and colleague who’d been shot six times, had choked on a slice of orange. He was 67.

Finding any next of kin was difficult. No one could figure out where Carol was; she’d long ago ceased interacting with Porambo and anyone who knew him. When I tracked her down for this story, she was living in Kingsport with a second husband, in a cramped, homey apartment across the street from where the Bloody Bucket used to be; the place was filled with pictures of grand- and great-grandchildren, stacks of DVDs, and several pet cats. Carol told me that she and her children finally learned of Porambo’s death months after it happened, when Glenna searched for her stepfather’s name online and came across an obituary. By then, lest Porambo wind up in a pauper’s grave, his brother had claimed his remains.

Cleaning out the dead man’s cell, at least, was easy. Everything he owned fit into two plastic bins: a few books, a black-and-white portable TV, an electric typewriter. And a letter.

It had arrived in June 2006, a second chance in a white envelope. “Dear Mr. Porambo,” it read. “I was very moved by your book, No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark. It’s an important piece of journalism and an enlightening read.” The sender was an editor at Melville House, a small publisher, who’d found a used copy of Porambo’s book on a sale rack at a local library. “I write to ask if you would allow us to bring it back into print,” the editor went on, remarking that the following year would be the 40th anniversary of the Newark riots. “We believe the book deserves a new life.”

With the help of another inmate, Porambo had typed a reply accepting the offer. The paper was taut and stained with tears.

When the book was reissued in 2007, its publisher crowed of the author, “His life … had this one great piece of work. And, by God, if you accomplish one great thing like that in your life, is it really a wasted life?” Warren Sloat, the original editor, penned a new introduction. “There’s nothing to compare with Porambo at the top of his form,” Sloat wrote, describing No Cause for Indictment as “borne aloft by an authentic literary voice.” That voice reverberated through time, with a righteous fury as widely relevant in the 21st century as it was when the book first appeared. Porambo wrote of “two distinct worlds,” one “rented to the city’s poor, a sprawling mass of slums and high-rise prisons,” the other for prosperous white people who “retreat” from facing up to pernicious realities in which they are complicit. Racist public policies cemented the divide, and bigoted law enforcement patrolled it. “Violence perpetrated on ghetto people is condoned by police superiors,” he said, “if not by overt action then at least by silence.”

Sloat pondered the book’s limited success—“maybe [it] was too late to be journalism and too early to be history”—but not Porambo’s existential downfall. That task fell to Bruning, whose prison interview formed the reprint’s poignant epilogue. He cycled through possible psychological explanations, concluding that nobody could say for sure what went wrong in Porambo’s life, not even Porambo himself. Bruning then quoted Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno, who once wrote, “At some point, it is inevitable that you find yourself and it is up to you to determine whether that moment, that encounter will be about gladness or about sorrow.” Bruning wondered. “Did gladness spook Porambo? If so, sorrow awaited.”

When I spoke to Bruning on the phone in the fall of 2017, he told me, “There is a starting point to this somewhere, somehow. Without knowing it, there’s going to be a hole in every story done about Ron.” Perhaps, though, that hole is the point—the counterintuitive thing that makes the narrative of Porambo’s life both universal and complete. We all have cracks, some wider than others, through which devils can creep to fight our better angels. And as Porambo wrote in his book, “There are no such animals as ‘minor corruption’ or ‘little lies’ … since both evolve into predatory monsters.”

Things Fall Apart

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Things Fall Apart

A feat of elegant design wowed elite architects and promised to bring education to poor children in Nigeria. Then it collapsed.

by Allyn Gaestel

The Atavist Magazine, No. 76


Allyn Gaestel is a writer based in Lagos, Nigeria. Her work in print and online has appeared through The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Al Jazeera, among other publications.  

Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Adam Przybyl
Images: Iwan Baan for NLÉ; Allyn Gaestel
Drawings: NLÉ; Allyn Gaestel

Published in February 2018. Design updated in 2021.

Prologue

Kunlé Adeyemi hustled across the ballroom in Venice, Italy, with a wide smile on his face. He wore a tailored tunic and pants—classic Nigerian menswear—cut from glossy brown fabric. The staid crowd that had gathered to witness his coronation applauded politely as he beckoned his team to join him on stage. There Adeyemi embraced each member of the jury that had named him the victor and seized his prize: the Silver Lion, awarded to a “promising young participant” in the International Architecture Exhibition, better known among the global design elite as the Venice Biennale.

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It was May 2016, and the Biennale’s theme was “reporting from the front.” To curator Alejandro Aravena, “the front” encompassed spaces both literal and figurative. Aravena was the most recent recipient of his field’s top honor, the Pritzker Prize, and he designed buildings that prioritized public interest and social impact. He wanted his Biennale to crack open assumptions about architecture by drawing on the talent, knowledge, and imagination of those bearing witness to the world’s most pressing problems. “We are not interested in architecture as the manifestation of a formal style,” Aravena said before the exhibition, “but rather as an instrument of self-government, of humanist civilization, and as a demonstration of the ability of humans to become masters of their own destinies.”

Adeyemi, at whom Aravena beamed with pride during the award ceremony, was one of the Biennale’s darlings. The 40-year-old Nigerian was given his prize for designing a school in Makoko, one of the largest slums in Lagos. Described by the Silver Lion jury as “at once iconic and pragmatic,” the school was meant to serve poor children whose neighborhood the government wanted to demolish. What made it singular was its location: The school floated on the water that envelops much of the coastal megacity. The structure suggested an alternative to tearing down slums to make way for development, a new approach for elevating instead of erasing the poor. Thanks to Adeyemi’s innovative design, the children of Makoko had a space in which to expand their minds and horizons.

In his acceptance speech, Adeyemi compared his project’s setting to the Biennale’s. “It’s said that the early settlers of Venice were fishermen in the marshy lagoons, not very different from the people of Makoko,” he said. “It’s a great honor to be standing here representing the intelligence of the people of Makoko as well as countless waterfront communities all over the world.” The crowd standing before him could see the Makoko Floating School for themselves: A replica, called MFS II, sat between brick arches and white Istrian columns in the Gaggiandre, a 16th-century Venetian dockyard. Built specifically for the Biennale, the structure included a buoyant platform, on top of which blond wood beams crisscrossed into triangles that formed a classic A-frame.

MFS II projected a sharply modern geometry onto the still surface of the ancient canal. To rapt Biennale participants, it also reflected the far-reaching potential of Adeyemi’s design. Built in ten days by four Italian woodworkers, MFS II had been “adapted for easy prefabrication, rapid assembly, and a wide range of uses,” according to the architect and his team. Inside the replica, Adeyemi hung maps of coastlines from around the world. Pushpins designated construction projects in “water cities,” the coastal metropolises likely to bear some of the most drastic impacts of climate change and rising sea levels. With the floating school, Adeyemi wanted to spark a conversation about how cities like Lagos can adapt to their shifting environments and set examples for sustainable design.

It was a beautiful pitch, and Adeyemi is a gifted orator. When he spoke to reporters, he was articulate and self-assured. Before the Biennale, the school in Makoko had made headlines in The New York Times and The Guardian and been featured in segments on CNN and Al Jazeera. After Adeyemi’s victory in Italy, the accolades continued. On social media, the architect shared an image of his Silver Lion nestled in the grass of a Venetian park and another of a barge tugging MFS II into the Gaggiandre. Congratulatory notes littered the comments of both photos.

Then, suddenly, the praise evaporated. Shock and censure took its place. One week after Adeyemi claimed his statuette, the Makoko Floating School collapsed. All that remained of the structure heralded as a bellwether of change for a slum and its inhabitants was a flattened pile of planks adrift in the waters of a polluted lagoon.

What follows is an account of the school’s stunning rise and fall. Though it deals with the question of who is to blame for what happened, it is ultimately a parable of complicity. It is about the myths that people want to believe about the world, noble intentions sullied by ego or derailed by the mundane, the intractability of parochial politics, and the ethics of social experimentation. It is about gossip and spin, the spectrum between honesty and deceit, and the dilemma of who can speak for whom. It is also about the moral of the empty barrel—the emptier it is, the louder the echo—and bad belle, a Nigerian term for jealousy.

Stories that seem simple aren’t always so. Heroes and villains are rarely pure. In the case of the Makoko Floating School, the truth is shambolic, the characters changeable. It is fitting that our story takes place somewhere fluid.

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One

Lagos is shaped by water. Its name comes from the Portuguese word for “lakes,” and the city is situated on the western and southwestern shorelines of a 2,500-square-mile lagoon. The water abuts a swathe of mainland before splitting into serpentine channels that flow between several small islands and empty into the Gulf of Guinea. The islands house Lagos’s business districts and elite neighborhoods, while the mainland is where government offices and the airport are located. It’s also where most of the population lives. No one is sure how many people are in Lagos; official estimates range from 14 million to 21 million. Thousands more arrive each day seeking economic opportunity. Many wind up in the city’s slums.

Kunlé Adeyemi didn’t live in Lagos until he was a young man. He grew up in Kaduna, an industrial city in northern Nigeria. His father was an architect who constantly amended his family’s house. Adeyemi followed in his father’s footsteps, studying architecture at the University of Lagos (Unilag) in the late 1990s. In the design world, it was an era of grandiose projects and personalities, of “starchitects” like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. Structures were celebrated for their hyper-visibility. A loud, iconic statement was as valued as functionality. Buildings weren’t just buildings; they were triumphant displays of vision.

During Adeyemi’s studies, Rem Koolhaas, one of the period’s most famous architects, came to Lagos for a research project. Koolhaas was known for his global media presence, conspicuous constructions, and sweeping philosophical missives on urbanism and space. While scholars and policymakers tended to frame Lagos in apocalyptic terms—too big, too dirty, too frenetic—Koolhaas saw purpose in the city’s chaos. “In terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilized an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency,” he later told The Guardian. From his research, which involved design students at Unilag, Koolhaas produced a documentary that showed Lagosians moving through their rapidly growing city, utilizing its spaces and navigating its economies.

After graduating, Adeyemi got a job at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Koolhaas’s renowned design firm in the Netherlands. For several years, he worked within an organization known for long hours, radical dreamscapes, and savvy publicity. He participated in projects in Doha and Seoul. When he set out on his own, launching the firm NLÉ in 2010, its main office was in Amsterdam. He later opened a second, smaller branch in Lagos.

Adeyemi wanted his firm to shape the future of developing cities, particularly in Africa, through projects that created affordable housing and common-use spaces. This philosophy was captured in his firm’s name: Nlé means “at home” in Yoruba, the dominant language in southwestern Nigeria. “‘Home’ is much more than walls, floors and ceilings,” the company’s Facebook page reads. “It refers to the fundamental building blocks of the city, to everyday life and the uses of public space in the emerging and endlessly complex urbanisms of developing regions.”

In Lagos, one place drew Adeyemi like a magnet. For years he’d seen it from a distance. Like many Lagosians, he glimpsed it to the west every time he crossed the citys’s lofted, curving Third Mainland Bridge. That place was Makoko.

The slum looks now as it did then: distinctive and arresting. Many of its shanties jut out from the mainland, transforming the appearance of the shoreline. Resting on stilts sunk into the lagoon’s muddy bed, they form jagged rows that seem to hang over the water’s surface. This ad hoc characteristic predates colonialism and forms part of Lagos’s architectural heritage. It is also vulnerable to the elements and the pressures of a swelling population: Makoko is home to an estimated 100,000 people and counting.

The structures wooden walls are waxy with wear. Denizens move between them in canoes. So do hawkers; unlike their land-dwelling counterparts, who tote wares in round bins balanced on their heads, the vendors of Makoko array hair accessories, tomatoes, sodas, and fried snacks in their laps as they ply the neighborhood’s channels. In other parts of Lagos, there are honking horns, rumbling exhaust pipes, and roaring engines, but in the slum you hear only the hum of human voices and the occasional quaking of a generator. Water imbues the scene with a preternatural serenity.

The government has long thought of Makoko as a festering eyesore. “It’s shameful, it’s embarrassing, you don’t see this in Europe, in the U.S.,” a state press liaison told me, his voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. But journalists, photographers, and urbanists come to the slum with the zeal of explorers. There is a messy mystique to the place: It is at once inspiring and upsetting, intriguing and shocking. The permanent haze that hovers overhead, a mix of smoke, dust, and fumes, imbues Makoko with a beguiling light. The bright colors of patterned clothing pop in photos, and the visual drama is deepened by the blackness of the lagoon.

When Adeyemi latched onto Makoko as a potential project site, friends in Lagos’s design community suggested that he talk to Isi Etomi. A young architect with an ebullient laugh, Etomi is a native Lagosian who values pragmatism and restraint. While studying architecture at Canterbury University in Great Britain, she wanted her senior project to be “a realistic proposal that someone could take to the government and say, ‘This is how you solve a problem’”—not one of the “fantasy projects, up in the sky, in the clouds” that many young architects prefer. She scoured her memory for a candidate in her home city and recalled Makoko. She’d never visited, but she’d smelled its scent, which wafts up to the Third Mainland Bridge: smoked fish, fresh sap, diesel fumes, and unprocessed sewage. “It’s not particularly off-putting, but it is memorable,” Etomi told me. Her two-volume thesis, which drew on Koolhaas’s research and comparative examples like Brazil’s favelas, proposed a new market and a gradual upgrading of the slum, one row of shanties at a time.

When she moved back to Lagos, Etomi began a year with the National Youth Service Corps—compulsory for university graduates—and requested placement in Makoko. She taught at one of the neighborhood’s only Anglophone schools, called Whanyinna (Love). Adept at navigating their unusual neighborhood, students scurried along beams suspended over the lagoon to get to their classes, which were held in derelict rooms spruced up with red flowers hand-painted on the walls. The school was a charity project of the Lagos Yacht Club, but the funders hadn’t allotted money for teachers’ salaries or even toilets. The building’s foundation was submerged underwater and rested on sand fill. Sometimes when it rained, the interior flooded. Whanyinna was also overcrowded, with a waiting list for admission. “The project failed practically and socially,” Etomi noted in a report she wrote about the school. “Unsupported capital investments simply add management burdens to already under-resourced communities/governments and end up wasting the capital investments.”

In a serendipitous twist, actor Ben Stiller visited Makoko and met with Noah Shemede, the school’s director and a native of the slum. When Shemede mentioned that Makoko’s children needed more classroom space, Stiller offered to fund construction through his philanthropic foundation. Etomi began working on a feasibility study for an extension of Whanyinna’s original structure. At the same time, she drafted and completed a smaller-scale project: a shelter for people awaiting canoe taxis at one of Makoko’s watery intersections. “It’s something that makes life a little easier in a discreet kind of way,” she told me. It took two days to build.  

Whanyinna’s extension was still in an early drafting phase when Etomi and Adeyemi met. They discussed their shared interest in Makoko and brainstormed designs for the school. In Etomi’s mind, this was “charity work, a community project,” and she was “not thinking of anything further than that.” Adeyemi started on the same page. His early ideas were straightforward: a two-story, open-plan structure, with a playground downstairs and a classroom upstairs.

Around the third draft, though, Adeyemi hit on a new idea: What if the school floated in the lagoon? That would make it resistant to flooding, he hypothesized, and speak to the growing threat of climate change. It could be shaped like a triangle, with sloping walls that enabled drainage into the lagoon. It would be a beacon of invention among Makoko’s dilapidated stilt structures and a “reusable modular building prototype.” In an early rendering, Adeyemi labeled the structure with the words “indigenous, ecological, local materials, self sustaining, economical, adaptable, movable, safe.”

In a 2012 budget prepared for the Stiller Foundation, Adeyemi estimated the outlay for his project at about $130,000, including what amounted to $13,000 for him to fly business class between his home in Amsterdam and Lagos. Etomi balked at the price tag, which was roughly seven times the cost of Whanyinna’s original structure, and at the idea that the building would be replicable. “It cannot work, because they cannot afford it,” she told me, referring to the slum’s residents.

Etomi and Adeyemi debated the matter in text messages, which were obtained for this story from a third party. “You can provide a higher standard of building but it need not be so… elaborate,” Etomi wrote in one exchange. “The simplest solutions are often the best.” Adeyemi replied, “I’m surprised u don’t see the simplicity in the new proposal.” Etomi also worried that the structure wouldn’t be able to withstand storms. “I keep thinking about driving rain,” she texted. “Driving rain is a detailing issue,” Adeyemi responded.

In an early rendering, Adeyemi labeled the structure with the words “indigenous, ecological, local materials, self sustaining, economical, adaptable, movable, safe.”

There was also the matter of the project’s visibility, which Adeyemi wanted to maximize. Makoko residents live under constant threat of eviction, which has a long, brutal history in Lagos. Many of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods sit where slums once did. In 1990, a single mass eviction affected some 300,000 people. The area was covered with sand and, later, McMansions. Eko Atlantic, a luxury district built on land “reclaimed” from coastal erosion through dredging and specialized infrastructure, displaced a poor community on the fringes of Bar Beach. Evictions are often violent affairs; bulldozers and armed police plow into communities with little or no prior notice. Etomi feared that a high-profile project intended to help and celebrate Makoko’s residents risked making them targets.

Adeyemi told Etomi that she was behaving like a “side critic” who wasn’t “actually properly engaging with the work.” She decided to back out of the project. “I just didn’t have any confidence in it,” she told me. Stiller’s foundation stepped away as well. (It didn’t reply to a request for comment.)

Adeyemi looked for other funding and secured it from the United Nations Development Program and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which funds environmentally friendly projects worldwide. Noah Shemede, the school’s director, wondered what had happened to the other collaborators, but the project was gaining momentum. “All I needed was a school to put the students in, so I said no wahala,” Shemede recalled, using Nigerian slang for “no problem.”

He showed Adeyemi around the neighborhood and welcomed the architect into his home. The men traveled together to neighboring Benin to observe other water-based architecture. The future looked bright. Then came a searing reminder that, in Makoko, daily life is a precarious balancing act.

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Two

On July 12, 2012, Makoko residents woke to find the slum papered with flyers. Printed on letterhead from the Lagos State Ministry of Waterfront Infrastructure Development, they accused residents of continuing to “occupy and develop shanties and unwholesome structures on the waterfront without authority,” which “constituted environmental nuisance, security risks, impediments to economic and gainful utilization of the waterfront such as navigation, entertainment, recreation, etc.” Residents were given 72 hours to vacate.

A few days later, police raced into Makoko on speedboats. They cut homes down with chainsaws. Shacks were reduced to haphazard piles of broken beams. Displaced residents drifted in canoes with whatever belongings they could salvage, or they crammed into the already crowded homes of sympathetic neighbors. Activists sprung into action, imploring the government to cease demolition and alerting the press. Adeyemi joined in by posting updates on NLÉ’s Facebook page. He shared aerial photos of the slum, delineating the parts that had been destroyed and those that might be next. Bright yellow text overlaying the images read “Save Makoko.” When the police shot and killed a local leader, the outcry from residents and activists forced the government to back down, at least for the time being. The campaign had lasted five days. The next one, locals feared, would be worse.

Adeyemi folded the event into his pitch for the floating school. Suddenly, the project was about more than a place where children could learn. It was a redemptive emblem for a threatened community. That October, NLÉ shared an image on Facebook of Adeyemi sitting at a conference table with the government’s commissioner of the environment, discussing plans for the school. It was one of many events that Adeyemi documented for public consumption. On social media, he posted photos of kids jumping and kicking a soccer ball on a test raft, a platform of wood planks resting on recycled blue barrels lashed together and bobbing in the lagoon. He shared images from a local lumberyard where he procured wood for the school’s frame and from meetings with community members where they reviewed diagrams and designs.

The most important liaison in Makoko was Shemede, whose life story became another thread in the compelling narrative of Adeyemi’s project. The youngest of 22 children, Shemede has soft features and deep-set eyes. His father was one of Makoko’s six traditional leaders, called baales. Shemede was the only child in his family to make it to high school. He hated it, but his mother and siblings forced him to go, sometimes with beatings. When he grew up, his mother said, he should start a school to share what he had learned. As director of Whanyinna, Shemede was deeply proud—of the school and his home. “Makoko is very fine. It just needs improvements,” he told me once. “If you put a fish on dry land, can it survive? That is the way we people here are like. We cannot live on land. Living on water is part of our culture.” The comment reminded me of a quote by Langston Hughes: “Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.”

Local builders were hired to erect the floating school in late 2012. The process took a few months. The final design included three floors: a bottom level of more than 1,000 square feet where children could play and community members could gather, and two upper floors that would house classrooms. There were louvered windows for shade and ventilation, a sleek blue roof, and plans for systems that would harvest rainwater and compost waste. With its A-frame shape, low center of gravity, and base of more than 250 blue barrels, the school was supposed to be resilient against storms and tides.

In an interview with Fast Company in February 2013, as construction was nearing completion, Adeyemi said that the school was “very stable” and that kids in Makoko loved it. “It has been exciting for them since we built the first platform,” he said. “They are always around it.” It was for the benefit of children, Adeyemi noted, that he’d embarked on the project in the first place. “I was inspired, shocked, and motivated by the environment,” he explained. “I asked if there was anything I could do, and they said the school was always flooding, and they needed an extension. So that’s what we did.”

With its A-frame shape, low center of gravity, and base of more than 250 blue barrels, the school was supposed to be resilient against storms and tides.

NLÉ celebrated the school’s opening in March 2013. Residents raced fishing boats along the slum’s central channel, as if parading down Main Street. Courtesy of the design firm, people wore bright yellow headscarves and custom-printed polo shirts with the “A” of Makoko fashioned into an icon of the school. More than 200 people packed the structure: NGO workers and students, community leaders, journalists, even an envoy from the Ministry of Environment, despite the fact that the government still hadn’t given the school its official blessing. “The ‘boat’ remained steady while the event rocked,” NLÉ wrote on its Facebook page.

The firm brought Iwan Baan, one of the world’s foremost architecture photographers, to shoot images of its creation. The results were triumphant, hopeful, and gorgeous. Baan’s images capture children in crisp blue and yellow uniforms riding in a boat near the school, climbing the open-air stairs, and peering out at the lagoon from the classrooms. They show fishermen using the lower platform as a space to mend their nets, while canoes angle off the structure like the limbs of an asterisk. The photos ran in The New York Times and other internationals outlets.

Adeyemi plugged the images into PowerPoint presentations and took his story on the road. At conferences and universities around the globe, he presented his project as a collaboration with the people of Makoko and a case study for a future in which rich countries take cues from poor ones about sustainable ways to cope with inequality, population growth, and climate change. Rather than pity, there would be solidarity. Computer-generated images of the school were clustered onto photos and maps of various locations around the world; Adeyemi suggested that entire neighborhoods might one day float. He described his project as “a seed that actually addresses issues of urbanization. It grows. We’re hoping it can be cultivated to create more.”

Media attention exploded abroad and echoed back to Nigeria. Adeyemi’s school offered a refreshing, accessible counter-narrative to the relentless poverty porn streaming out of Africa. Many Nigerians were glad to read about something other than terrorism and corruption. Adeyemi was portrayed as a visionary—a fluent spokesman for Lagos, for the wider continent, for coastal cities, and for the poor. Features about the school appeared in magazines and design journals from South Africa to the Netherlands, Italy to the United States. The Architectural Review praised the project’s “determination and ingenuity in harnessing the transformational potential of architecture to address an extreme social context.” It also remarked that while the building was to “serve primarily as a school,” its design was “scalable and adaptable for other uses, such as a health center, market, or housing.”

Makoko was suddenly on the map, not as a hotbed of squalor but as a site of innovation. Many Lagosians felt proud of their architectural monument, whose blue roof they could spot from the Third Mainland Bridge. Isi Etomi told me that, although she still had reservations about the project, she “had to eat humble pie” whenever she ran into Adeyemi. Ultimately, she told herself, all that mattered was that the school served its intended purpose. “If it was good, then fine,” she said. “I’ll put my hands up.”

There, however, was the rub. Beneath the projections and pride was an uncomfortable truth: The famous floating school was not a school at all.

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Three

Empty classrooms dot the landscapes of poor countries like the skeletons of do-gooders’ shallow or disingenuous objectives. Infamously, the Central Asia Institute, cofounded by Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson, built schools in Afghanistan but didn’t invest in sustainable operations; the structures were left to languish while Mortenson promoted his book and its sequel. The Makoko Floating School was supposed to be different, less complicated, an extension of an existing school rather than one started from scratch. But what I saw when I visited for the first time in 2014 was alarming. The gap between the gloss presented to the world and the reality on the ground was vast.

At the time, I was reporting on slum demolitions, tromping through soggy neighborhoods listening to people describe their experiences of violence and anxiety, protest and resistance. In Makoko, locals insisted that I visit their prized landmark. By then it was one of the most famous contemporary buildings in Nigeria. When I set foot inside, children were sprawled across the deck playing with a balloon. They were relaxed and enjoying the view of the lagoon, but they weren’t studying. Upstairs, in the classrooms, beams were splitting. The floors were covered in dust. Desks were shoved into a corner. I soon learned that when the school had opened the previous March, toilets and blackboards hadn’t been installed. Since then not a single class had been held.

When the school opened, toilets and blackboards hadn’t been installed. Since then not a single class had been held.

What explained the false impression of success conveyed to people around the world? Noah Shemede told me that, to keep the project’s reputation intact, he sometimes moved desks into the school when Adeyemi warned him that journalists were coming. I also spoke to Andrew Esiebo, a photographer who shot footage of the school for Sweden’s arm of the United Nations Foundation. He recounted how he’d ferried kids to the structure and filmed them running gleefully up the stairs. “We staged it,” he said, to evoke the school’s intended purpose. Esiebo’s video was later published on The Guardian’s website.

Media outlets rarely mentioned that the school wasn’t in use. When they did, it was usually in passing, excused with a wave of blame aimed at the government. In September 2014, a few months after my visit, Al Jazeera premiered an episode of its series Rebel Architecture that profiled Adeyemi. Clad in a white shirt, dark jeans, and designer glasses, the architect rides in a canoe around Makoko. When he arrives at the school with Shemede, he seems surprised to find that the ceiling on the second level is crumbling. “Quite a bit of repair work to do,” Adeyemi says, noting that some overhead lights are detached from their wiring and mounts. “So what I think we need to do is to take out, just replace this—very, very easy,” he continues, hurried and reassuring. The episode then cuts to an interview with Shemede, who explains that the school is “in neglected condition” because it hasn’t received approval for use by students; the government still considers it an “illegal structure.” When I spoke with the office of Lagos’s commissioner of the environment, a representative told me that Adeyemi “did everything in his power to get government buy-in into that school but was not successful.”

Behind the scenes, other factors were eroding the project. Shemede cut a controversial figure in Makoko. If Adeyemi was the project’s international ambassador, the school’s director was its man on the ground.  With his new fame, Shemede fashioned himself into a local oga (boss). On behalf of the Nigerian Field Society, a cultural association for which he’d long run tours of Makoko, he took visitors to the floating school. A guided slum visit cost about 4,000 Naira, or $30. Shemede told me that he used his cut to pay teachers. Given the small amount of money in question and the lack of codified records, it’s impossible to verify this claim. When tourists or other visitors were moved to donate to the school, Shemede told them to pay in cash or make checks out to him; he promised to allocate the funds appropriately.

Shemede’s stature was often as isolating as it was empowering. Although the school project was supposed to be collective, benefiting the entire slum, some leaders in Makoko didn’t see it that way. “They gave it a community name, but it is more or less an individual affair,” said Ayeseminikan Bawo, who runs a private school in Makoko. It didn’t help that Shemede often referred to it as “my school.”

He and Adeyemi had agreed that, over time, the Makoko community would take ownership of the school, including its maintenance. But the baales felt sidelined and weren’t compelled to contribute. For two years, the onus fell on NLÉ to fix problems like rotting planks and leaky roof panels. Shemede was frustrated that, while the school sat empty and deteriorating, Adeyemi was off globetrotting.

Finally, in the summer of 2015, there was some positive news. The government was including the school in a plan to regenerate Makoko. NLÉ framed this acknowledgement as the long-awaited signal of official approval, even though the government still hadn’t explicitly given it. The firm also formally transferred control of the school to Shemede, which it viewed as a clear line in the sand: From there on out, the Makoko community would be in charge of all upkeep and NLÉ would no longer send maintenance workers to the site. That fall, two and a half years after the school opened, Shemede moved two classes, 49 students total, into the building.

In December, there was another gesture of good will from the government. Folorunsho Folarin-Coker, then Lagos’s minister of tourism, was tired of seeing “the same smog-filled, gloomy” view of Makoko each day. So, as part of a holiday celebration called One Lagos Fiesta, Folarin-Coker agreed to provide solar panels and external lights for the floating school. “You know, Christmas lights in Makoko,” he explained to me. He clarified that he saw the donation as “an act of kindness,” not of government recognition. “If there’s anything I can do for those people, I won’t turn my back,” he said.

NLÉ hired a photographer to shoot the installation. In one image captured at night, a child steering a canoe is silhouetted against the glow of the lights reflecting in the rippling lagoon. “#MakokoFloatingSchool lights up the Lagos waterfront with #solar power! Thnx to #Lagos State Govt’s #onelagosfiesta initiative,” read the photo’s caption when the firm posted it on Facebook.

Shemede wasn’t impressed. “Is it solar panels we need?” he asked angrily when recounting the installation. Thieves sometimes stripped wiring and other materials from the building to sell for cash. The panels, which were more valuable, would likely have to be guarded.

For Shemede, keeping an eye on fancy technology was asking too much. He was already dealing with what he considered to be more than enough trouble. Water sometimes breached the school, and wind shook it violently. Students were scared, and parents complained. “If you have children, can you allow them to go to schooling like that?” Shemede asked me later. In March 2016, just over four months since they’d been relocated, Shemede moved the students back to the original school building. There wasn’t any space for them there, so they squeezed into Shemede’s office for their lessons, bumping elbows at shared desks.

Adeyemi’s account of all this was recorded in an email sent to Shemede on March 19. He said that the situation wasn’t his firm’s fault. He also expressed concern that some of the chains anchoring the school were “missing/stolen”:

We cannot continue to carry out repairs on the building, particularly with little or no efforts or contributions of time or resources from you or the community. The structure belongs to you and the community. It is your responsibility and it is up to you to manage it as we have discussed many times extensively.… Please be advised that the current state of the structure is dangerous and at risk of causing major damage to properties and lives.

No repairs were made. A few weeks later, the school detached from its mooring and drifted across the lagoon, colliding with several shacks. Adeyemi sent money for improvements, along with another frustrated email begging for Shemede to invest in maintaining the school. For his part, Shemede felt that he didn’t have the resources, expertise, or support to do so.

Around the same time, a reviewer for the Aga Khan Award visited Lagos to assess the school, which had been shortlisted for the prestigious architectural prize. Tomà Berlanda, director of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, met with Shemede, toured the school, and discussed the project with NLÉ staff and Makoko residents. In his report, Berlanda acknowledged the school’s “state of abandonment.” He noted sympathetically that, “given the very limited resources which are available in the community, it is understandable that repairs have not been kept up to speed.”

“Given the very limited resources which are available in the community, it is understandable that repairs have not been kept up to speed.”

Adeyemi was out of town when Berlanda visited, but the two men had communicated earlier on Skype. In their conversation, Adeyemi repeated the concerns he’d shared with Shemede but stood by the existing structure. He didn’t mention plans for renovations.

All of which made a press release that NLÉ issued a few weeks later very peculiar. Adeyemi was fresh from his triumphant appearance at the Venice Biennale. The release clarified why the building that the architecture world was feting had suddenly ceased to exist: “After 3 years of intensive use, and exceptional service to the community, the first prototype structure Makoko Floating School has come down on June 7, 2016. Following its decommission since March, the structure has been out of use in anticipation of reconstruction.”

The language was a spin on what, by the time the release landed in journalists’ inboxes, was gist (gossip) all over Lagos: The school had collapsed.

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Four

The storm on the morning of June 7 was strong, but it wasn’t the worst of the season. Makoko was accustomed to torrential tropical downpours. Wind whistled through the cracks in the shanties’ walls and whipped at their stilts. Shemede stood outside the original Whanyinna building in the pounding rain.

The floating school stood tall in the distance, a promise just out of reach. Then it began to shake. In a matter of seconds, it came down in a terrific crash of wood, metal, and plastic. Shemede shouted in alarm, and some of his staff ran out of Whanyinna to join him on the edge of the lagoon. They stood gawking at what was now an absence on the horizon.

Word swept outward via WhatsApp and text message. I heard the news from an architect. “Holy shit, I’m going over there now,” I wrote back. I wanted to see the pancaked structure for myself. I met with photojournalist Sulayman Afose Senayon, who lives in Makoko. I followed him through twisting alleyways down to the muddy shore, where we caught a canoe into the lagoon. On the way to the school, we stopped so that Senayon could climb onto the second-story balcony of a shack and speak to Shemede’s older brother, a baale. When Senayon descended once more into the canoe, he repeated what the baale had told him: Adeyemi had called and said to stop journalists from going to the wreckage. Senayon argued that, as a Makoko resident, he could go wherever he wanted. So we continued.

What was left of the school was both tragic and anticlimactic. Here was an internationally lauded feat of design undone by the very forces it was supposed to resist. Here, too, was a neglected, dysfunctional building that had finally fallen down. The lagoon was placid; the rain had passed. Senayon and I were among the very few people who’d paddled to the site to observe what was left of the school. Makoko residents, I realized, had already given up on it. For them there was nothing to ogle.

Here was an internationally lauded feat of design undone by the very forces it was supposed to resist. Here, too, was a neglected, dysfunctional building that had finally fallen down.

That night I met Shemede at a bar. His voice was tired because he’d been talking all day. Distant believers in the floating school had contacted him to express their dismay. He’d fielded phone calls from journalists, donors, and former volunteers at Whanyinna. Sipping a Guinness, he told me that he felt particularly obligated to engage with the press. After all, reporters had been good to him for years. “When the school was progressing, journalists were the ones that made people know about it,” he said. While we sat talking, his cell phone continued to buzz.

“The school collapsed. Nobody did it; the school collapsed by itself,” Shemede said at one point. “Everybody that comes to that school appreciates it, like, ‘Oh wow, it’s a good building,’ but nobody knows the inside, what is going on. We that are living there, we are the ones that know.”

When he talked of Adeyemi, Shemede sighed dejectedly. “Kunlé,” he said. “Kunlé is for Kunlé.”

The NLÉ press release went out the next day, bearing the headline “Makoko Floating School Comes Down for Upgrade.” According to Shemede, that an upgrade was in the works was news to him. So was the release’s mention of the school having been “decommissioned” in March. “I decided to move the students from the school myself,” he insisted. A few days later, Berlanda wrote in The Architectural Review that Adeyemi “had ostensibly been silent about the decommission.” He also described the press release’s headline as “worryingly misleading.” Berlanda said, “The fact is that the prototype’s load-bearing structure fell apart, and with it the hopes of the community.” A Guardian headline expressed similar concern: “Does Makoko Floating School’s collapse threaten the whole slum’s future?”

Other reactions were more pointed. James Inedu, a fellow architect, wrote in a scathing opinion piece, “All the school did was to blow up the designer’s ego and to give him highly coveted international attention.… It was simply bad architecture done iconically.” Privately, Isi Etomi compared the situation to The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Through all this, Adeyemi remained mostly silent, giving only a few interviews in which he reiterated the language of the press release. He sent the document to journalists, colleagues, even his old mentor at Unilag, who had reached out by email to urge his former student not to be discouraged. When I contacted him, Adeyemi agreed to meet for an interview on June 17. The night before, when I called to confirm, he said that he couldn’t make it—he’d be traveling. “I don’t really have anything to say,” he added. I sent a text the following week, which he didn’t answer. I asked friends of his whom I knew to put in a word; that didn’t work either.

Several months later, NLÉ published a 24-page document entitled “Why Did Makoko Floating School Collapse and Other FAQs.” It addressed everything from who was responsible for maintenance (from 2013 to 2015, the design firm; after that, Shemede and other Makoko leaders) to what happened to the school’s materials after the collapse (Shemede’s brother had “led the disassembly and recycling,” collecting equipment for “reuse in future reconstruction”). In the appendix appeared the press release and the emails exchanged between Adeyemi and Shemede regarding upkeep.

Shemede aired feelings of betrayal and sadness to the press. He talked of doubting the structure’s integrity months before the collapse. The FAQ addressed some of Shemede’s criticisms directly. “His comments about the long-term relevance of the structure were mostly personal and understandably, expressed in grievance and defense of his responsibilities. It is unfortunate that his views were reported as a victim or antagonist of a personalized situation,” the document read. “Noah Shemede’s position on the project has been overplayed and misrepresented in the media,” the FAQ continued—a characterization that would seem to contradict NLÉ’s own description of Shemede’s role, provided just a few pages earlier. “He was responsible for the operational, maintenance, financial and management of the structure,” it read.

The FAQ was what Adeyemi directed me to when, a year after the school’s collapse, I began to put this story together. I replied with a list of detailed follow-up questions, to which a manager at NLÉ responded, “Unfortunately, due to numerous inquiries, we are at this time unable to provide individual responses about Makoko Floating School.” The manager then pointed me, circuitously, back to the FAQ.

In September 2017 and February 2018, I reached out to the architect and his firm again. My requests for an interview were declined. At the bottom of the emails sent by NLÉ were links to adulatory press for the firm, including two articles about the floating school. Both were published before the building’s collapse.

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A local man looks at the collapsed school. (Photo: Allyn Gaestel)

It is essential to probe beneath the defensiveness and finger-pointing to take stock of the Makoko Floating School’s dimensions of failure. The project failed as a school, housing classes for only about four months in the three years that it was moored in the lagoon. It failed as a sustainable structure, sliding into disrepair and then falling victim to a late spring thunderstorm. It failed as a collaboration between an artist and members of a community.

From a more abstract perspective, however, it’s arguable that all wasn’t lost when the school fell. As Berlanda wrote in The Architectural Review, the project showed how architecture could be “a vehicle for a message of resilience towards both climate change, and the growing project of inequality that is increasingly marginalizing poor communities.” This was the idea that Adeyemi embraced more than ever in the wake of the collapse. In July 2016, while presenting at a conference, he described the school as “a temporary structure that is designed as a catalyst to stimulate and think about different ways of building, to innovate, to address issues of adaptation, climate change and for education.” Later he responded to critics by saying, “The most important part of this is the structure is really a prototype, a pilot project.”

Residents of Makoko never saw it that way, however. They expected functionality and permanence from the beautiful building that drew so much attention to their home. Which raises the question: For whom is there benefit in trying and failing, particularly in marginalized communities? Reams of scholarship have been dedicated to the terrible global legacy of experimenting on the poor, including in Nigeria. It is one of three countries in the world that hasn’t eradicated polio, partly because of fears and myths surrounding the vaccine that are informed by a history of clinical trials carried out on citizens without their consent.

For whom is there benefit in trying and failing, particularly in marginalized communities?

There is a persistent risk of doing harm, dashing hopes, and eroding trust with trial and error, no matter how virtuous the objectives. It is the duty of the powerful to minimize that risk as much as possible. “It was supposed to be innovation, but now we’re being told it was experimentation,” Papa Omotayo, a Lagos-based architect and friend of Adeyemi’s, said of the floating school a few days after the collapse. “The issue is, can you experiment in a community like [Makoko] knowing things like budget, like social issues, and more importantly knowing that children are involved?”

A final layer of failure pertains to the damage done by storytelling. Makoko is a place where the nearly unfathomable poverty and inequality that underlie our global economic order are glaringly visible. When confronted with these dynamics, outsiders are prone to transmuting it from place to concept—a mental backdrop for dreams, arguments, and theories, a chance to make readers and viewers feel better about the world. Members of the media and design circles slipped all too easily into this trap, stripping Makoko of its specificity and its residents of their humanity, rendering them symbolic, and placing faith in what promised to be shiny and new. They stuck with what was digestible: a narrative of Makoko redeemed.

A lie is an intentionally false statement. It is also, according to Oxford Dictionaries, “used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression.” This last phrase neatly describes the myth of the Makoko Floating School. The project was a chimera composed of flawed and superficial ideas and curated by deflection, obfuscation, and overestimation. The people who wanted the illusion to be real allowed it to spin unchecked—until a precipitous void made it impossible to believe. “Falsehood flies,” Jonathan Swift once wrote, “and truth comes limping after it.”

Epilogue

In March 2017, the replica of the floating school in Venice was disassembled and put in storage. By then, Adeyemi had been named the Aga Khan design critic in architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He’d received grants to continue researching water cities, an outgrowth of the Makoko project, and he was constructing another school, this one on terra firma, in Tanzania.

Today, his NLÉ bio includes a personal quote, part of which reads, “In each project the essential needs of performance, value, and identity—critical for success—are fundamentally the same for me. Although quantitatively different from place to place, the responsibility of achieving these needs at maximum, with minimum means, remains the same.” The bio also describes the Makoko Floating School, in the present tense, as “acclaimed” and “innovative,” even though it fell short of Adeyemi’s own metrics and was never reconstructed.

In the slum, concerned parties have returned to the drawing board. Three days after the floating school buckled into the lagoon, Etomi and a friend set up a GoFundMe page with a goal of about $40,000. “We want to focus on a more basic, grassroots approach than the floating school and enable the community to do what they’ve already taken ownership over rather than building a second ‘fancy’ structure,” the campaign’s explanation read. The organizers’ aim was to improve  Whanyinna’s condition and construct the long-awaited extension with Shemede’s guidance. The campaign raised about one-fifth of its target, but Etomi was pleased. It would be enough to give the children of Whanyinna a durable solution, which she hoped would include a board to oversee the school’s management and curriculum and a trust for its finances.

Shemede, however, disagreed with Etomi’s approach. He thought he should make the decisions about what to do with the school and the donated money. “I am the one that has been controlling it before,” he told me, “and the way their own things are going they would now be the one.” The project stalled while Shemede vied for a seat in the local government. (He wound up with an appointed supervisory role.) Afterward he and Etomi debated some small-scale investments, such as fortifying the school’s foundation to mitigate flooding. As of this writing, they’re still assessing how to proceed.

This ending is unsatisfying, poetic, and true. Change is never linear, humans are ever contradictory, and answers are rarely easy. “The money is literally just sitting there,” Etomi told me. Meanwhile, in Makoko, school years pass; children grow.

The Old and the Restless

The Old and the Restless

An indecent proposal, a crime of passion, and legends of murder in an enclave of bohemian retirees.

By Chris Walker

The Atavist Magazine, No. 75


Chris Walker is a former staff writer at Denver alt-weekly Westword. Prior to living in Colorado, he spent two years bicycling across Eurasia, during which he wrote feature stories for NPR, Forbes, The Atlantic, and Vice. His website is chrisallanwalker.com. 


Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Tekendra Parmar
Illustrator: Bijou Karman

Published in January 2018. Design updated in 2021.

Act I

Ajijic. Such a strange word, Jackie Hodges thought as she rode in a Porsche convertible through a stretch of lush, rolling mountains in central Mexico. The 45-year-old American knew virtually nothing about the small town where she was headed, including how to pronounce its name. “Ah-hee-heek,” locals would patiently repeat again and again after she arrived. In Mexico’s indigenous Nahuatl tongue, the word means “place where the water is born.”

It was the fall of 1969, and Hodges needed a distraction. Her second marriage was coming apart at the seams. Eager to get away from her home in Pasadena, California, she’d seized upon an invitation to visit Lona Mae Isoard, a friend who lived in Ajijic. Hodges had always puzzled over Isoard’s decision to move there. A talented painter who liked to wear her gray hair in a French twist, Isoard was a seasoned traveler who’d lived in Paris and Rome. Why settle down in a Mexican pueblo of barely 5,000 people just south of Guadalajara?

The environs were pretty, at least. Hodges spotted Ajijic as the Porsche, in which Isoard had picked her up at Guadalajara’s airport, crested a mountain pass. She took in the expanse of Lake Chapala, Mexico’s largest freshwater lake. It stretched some 11 miles south and 50 miles east to west. Dotting its northern edge were picturesque fishing communities, one of which was the women’s destination.

They wended their way down the highway until the convertible’s tires met cobblestone. The Porsche rattled into the heart of Ajijic, where blue tin placards proclaimed the narrow streets’ names, children ran around shoeless, and bare-chested men hawked fish pulled from the lake. Hodges spied a pig strung up outside a home, rivulets of blood running from a gash in its neck down its snout to the ground. Nearby a group of caballeros with spurs on their boots rode sidestepping horses. The women drove past the Posada, a lodge and watering hole that had served as the de facto center of Ajijic’s expatriate scene since it opened in 1938. Eventually, they came to a row of brightly painted brick-and-mortar homes, one of which was Isoard’s.

“Rest up,” the painter told Hodges after they’d gotten settled. She would need energy.

The following evening, Isoard threw nothing short of a bacchanal. Some 60 people came, martinis flowed, and conversations slurred. “Have you met Jackie?” Isoard said to guest after guest, nudging the newcomer into the night’s starring role. The air was thick with smoke from Cuban cigars; a group of businessmen had just returned from Havana. At one point, they launched into a spirited argument with a couple of former diplomats over America’s embargo of the island nation. Rolling her eyes, Isoard directed a five-piece band she’d hired for the night to stand close to the men. Then she gathered up several women and displaced the debate with a dance floor.

Before the party was over, Hodges had a good if drunken understanding of Ajijic’s expats. Most of them were retired or nearly being so, but they refused to act like they were aging. Among them were many artists, writers, and actors—both has-beens and still-wannabes—who made the town feel like a Shangri-la for sun-setting bohemians. The wild party scene was fabled among those who’d experienced it, and some impressive names had made cameos. D.H. Lawrence wrote the first draft of his novel The Plumed Serpent while residing in the area in 1923. During the 1950s, Beat writers swallowed a drink or five at the Posada. Then came the hippies, who earned Ajijic a shout-out in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Acid Kool Aid Test as a stopover during a drug-fueled escapade by the LSD evangelists known as the Merry Pranksters.

The discomfiting contrast between their privileged existence and the substantially poorer one of the Mexicans they lived among didn’t seem to bother many expats. Ajijic’s low cost of living was a draw, along with its bucolic setting and temperate weather. To foreigners, whatever the town lacked—paved roads, telephones, TVs—it made up for with characters who embodied a popular saying: Once a private crossed the border into Mexico, he could be a general. People’s pasts became whatever they said they were. Take Zara Alexeyewa, known as La Rusa, who’d lived in Ajijic since the 1920s and claimed to be a ballerina from Russia. Over time local journalists and historians would uncover some 18 aliases she’d used and pinpoint her birthplace as New York. Alexeyewa fancied herself queen of the expats. Her attitude was imperious, and she was never seen walking anywhere. She rode around on a black horse, sitting sidesaddle in a long dress and wide-brimmed hat.

Hodges, a free spirit who’d always lamented that she missed visiting the Paris of Gertrude Stein by a generation, was enamored. After her visit with Isoard, she returned to Ajijic for longer stretches over the next three summers. By 1972, she was looking to buy a casita. By 1976, she was divorced and living in Ajijic year-round. She began dating a housing contractor, got married again, and never looked back.

I know this because she’s my grandmother. Now 93, Hodges has lived in Ajijic all my life. The place has changed since she first arrived. Development has altered the landscape, and Mexico’s drug war has taken a toll. My grandmother, though, is a time capsule. A flamboyant raconteur, she embellishes stories of parties that evolved into orgies and acquaintances who turned out to be CIA spooks with dialogue she couldn’t possibly have been privy to. I take everything she says about Ajijic with a grain or two of salt.

In 2015, she told me a story I couldn’t shake, about a person she couldn’t shake. Around Thanksgiving, we were in her living room discussing the litany of outrageous people and situations she’d encountered. Short and rail thin, with a dyed platinum-blond bob, she gesticulated as she spoke. Suddenly, with dramatic flair, she declared, “I’ve only met one person in my lifetime that I thought was truly evil.” The way she emphasized the last word jolted me. She meant it.

That person was Donna McCready, a charismatic, controversial figure in Ajijic in the 1970s and 1980s. So incredible were the instances of seduction, betrayal, and violence in which McCready is said to have played a part that they are now the crown jewels of local lore. Many of the old-timers who got entangled in McCready’s web are long gone, as is the woman herself, but some are still alive. I sought them out to hear their accounts, which added layers both macabre and poignant to the story my grandmother told me.

It boils down to this: In Ajijic, Donna McCready’s name is synonymous with murder.

Act II

One balmy afternoon in late 1976, Judy Eager was sitting near the entrance of the Posada when she saw two women roar into view astride motorcycles. They were newcomers, sporting black leather jackets and stony expressions that seemed to say fuck you. Expats rolled into Ajijic all the time, usually in less dramatic fashion. Eager and her husband had arrived only two years earlier, on the recommendation of a cab driver in Guadalajara, where they’d been vacationing. Soon after, they moved to town and took over stewardship of the Posada. Slinging drinks at the bar, they got to know everyone.

In the pair of leather-clad women, Eager sensed trouble. They pulled up to the Posada and came in for drinks. Their names were Donna McCready and Lois Schaefer, they were from Sausalito, California, and they were on a road trip through Mexico. They were also dating. Ajijic hosted a sizable gay population, but its members tended to be discreet about their relationships. The women were anything but: At the Posada, they were all over each other. The “dykes on bikes,” as Eager described them, took a liking to Ajijic and decided to stay.

Schaefer was middle-aged and boisterous, while McCready was in her thirties—young for an Ajijic expat—and resembled a school-age tomboy, with a short, shaggy haircut and thick glasses. On first impression she was quiet, but she relished making a scene and telling shocking stories. According to one Ajijic resident, McCready and Schaefer once decided to get a drink at Azteca, a dark cave of a saloon on the town’s main plaza. It catered to blue-collar Mexicans and featured a trough under the bar where patrons could relieve themselves. When an inebriated man insulted Schaefer, McCready came at him swinging. The women were hauled off to jail on assault charges—which McCready later claimed were dropped because she gave the station chief a blow job.

Schaefer and McCready didn’t stay together long. Mundane arguments over things like doing the dishes could turn violent. After they split, Schaefer struck up a new romance with a blonde named Susie Emery. One night during a squabble, Emery pulled out a gun and shot Schaefer through the breast; the bullet entered one side and came out the other. Judy Eager recounted the aftermath in her diary, which she recently showed me. “They both ended up in jail, had to pay a large fine to get out, and were both on probation for three months,” Eager wrote. “They became lovers again. Lois had Susie’s name tattooed above the bullet hole.” In Ajijic, it was a characteristically crazy incident.

McCready, meanwhile, got around romantically, according to Jan Dunlap. The two women bonded over a mutual predilection for mischief. Dunlap had moved to Ajijic with her five kids in 1967, after federal agents raided her home in New Mexico as part of a crackdown on a marijuana-trafficking ring involving her husband. She later opened Big Mama’s, a bar located across the street from the Posada that quickly earned an unholy reputation as a site for drug transactions. (Dunlap swore she wasn’t involved.) In comparison with the Posada, where caballeros only occasionally engaged in pistol shootouts—Eager called them “misunderstandings”—Big Mama’s was a dive. Patrons stumbled between the two establishments every night, until someone drunkenly announced whose house everyone could migrate to for a party.

McCready came by Big Mama’s alone around 11 a.m. most days to have a nip of tequila and chat with Dunlap before checking her mail at the post office. The women traded gossip, and McCready talked about her recent flirtations and sexual conquests. No one was off limits. McCready even propositioned Dunlap one day. “I already tried that once and didn’t like it,” she replied with a hearty laugh.

McCready wasn’t beautiful, in Dunlap’s opinion, but she could switch seamlessly from controlling an interaction with her charm to listening with apparent sympathy. Dunlap suspected that McCready’s savvy was why some people were drawn to her. Others thought it signaled a proclivity for manipulation. “If you studied her closely, her cold gray eyes gave away the secrets of a hard diabolical mind and a mean spirit,” reads the treatment for an unpublished screenplay about McCready, written in the 1990s by a former actor and Ajijic resident named Bob Jones. “The time left to her would be littered with victims.”

Around 1979, McCready began working as a home nurse for Steve and Pat Harrington, an older couple who owned a large estate on a hill above town. The home had a private drive, up which expats climbed to attend lavish parties—the sort that made other locals, who thrived on a culture of one-upmanship when it came to entertaining, green with envy. Steve had developed a serious heart problem that required constant care. McCready landed the job by claiming to have nursing experience. (No one I spoke to could remember whether she really did.)

As the weeks passed, McCready spent increasing amounts of time at the Harringtons’ tending to her sick charge. She also spent a lot of time wooing and then sleeping with Steve’s wife.

When Dunlap heard about the affair, she thought it fitting for McCready and her scorn for social mores. Dunlap would later recount it when crafting her own screenplay about McCready, called With Money Dances the Dogs:

PAT

Kiss me, DONNA. I need your arms around me.

DONNA caresses PAT. She has her hands inside PAT’S clothing, fondling her breast. One hand moves further down. PAT is in ecstasy, forgetting everything. DONNA is being very methodical, she knows what she’s doing.

Steve’s health declined quickly, and before long he died. According to Mexican law, a body must be buried or cremated within 48 hours of death. Unless there’s suspicion of foul play, autopsies are not routine. Steve was interred, and that was that.

McCready and Pat soon went public with their romance. For some residents, especially those who’d been friends with the Harringtons for many years, the affair was terribly gauche. When Judy Eager heard the news, she was angry. How could Pat move on from Steve just like that? Was she lonely or confused? My grandmother visited Pat, whom she considered a friend, and noticed that she’d undergone a makeover intended to take years off her appearance. She wore a pink dress and had curled her hair. “She was flitting about like a little kid,” my grandmother recalled.

Gossip began to swirl, including the conjecture that Steve may have succumbed to a most unnatural death at the hands of his wife’s lover. It was the sort of gross speculation that expats relished, especially while sipping cocktails. “If you live in Ajijic,” Dunlap told me, “you know it thrives on scandal.”

The first time I spoke to Dunlap, she told me that, not long after Steve died, McCready arrived at Big Mama’s for one of her visits. The place was empty. McCready marched over to the bar and announced, apropos of nothing, that she’d killed Steve.

Dunlap stood waiting for the punch line, but it never came. Instead, McCready doubled down on her claim. “She said she smothered him with a pillow,” Dunlap recalled, “and that Pat was watching from inside the coat closet.” Later, McCready told Dunlap that she and Pat had plotted the murder in order to collect Steve’s inheritance, only to discover that he’d changed his will to give some relatives the Ajijic estate and most of his money. Perhaps he’d sensed something nefarious afoot.

In another interview, Dunlap remembered McCready jesting publicly about murdering Steve. “She used to brag about it at cocktail parties,” Dunlap told me. “She’d say jokingly, ‘Sure, I killed him.’ Everyone would just listen to her and laugh.”

Dunlap wasn’t sure what to think, much less say. Why would her friend admit to a crime and risk getting caught? Was she trying to deflect suspicion through morbid humor? On the other hand, if she was lying, it was a bizarre yarn to spin, even for someone with a devilish streak and a fondness for shock value.

In the absence of proof, Dunlap uneasily let the matter lie. Years later, in her fictionalized take on the story, she tweaked the narrative to depict McCready poisoning her elderly employer:

STEVE is in bed, reading a book. DONNA enters the open doorway and knocks.

DONNA

Stevie Poo, I’ve brought you a pot of hot tea, made English style. See, I’ve even added milk, just the way you like it. My mother used to serve it to me like this, she always said it made me relax and sleep better. Here’s hoping it does the same for you.

It would be easy to dismiss this as the stuff of cinematic melodrama, a scenario Dunlap dreamed up for her screenplay. (The script was never produced, but there is periodic chatter around town of Meryl Streep or Sharon Stone being attached to it—wishful thinking in a community of lifelong dreamers.) No one else I spoke to remembered McCready boasting openly of killing her lover’s husband.

Dunlap, however, wasn’t the only Ajijic resident to claim that McCready confessed in confidence to murder. Nor was Steve Harrington the only purported victim.

In 1982, at a New Year’s Eve dinner party at the Posada, a distraught-looking Pat pulled my grandmother aside. “I’m losing her, Jackie,” she whispered miserably. “Donna is in love with someone else.” She was right: McCready broke up with Pat, prompting the spurned widow to leave Ajijic for good. McCready then moved on to occupy one corner of another love triangle.

Dunlap wasn’t the only Ajijic resident to claim that McCready confessed in confidence to murder. Nor was Steve Harrington the only purported victim.

Like the Harringtons, the Taylors were a wealthy retired couple. Albert had been a producer of Broadway shows, and Hildegard was a former model. They maintained an aura of elegance—Albert often wore a monocle—and fawned over one another. When he developed dementia, however, Albert’s personality changed. Pamela Duran, who knew the Taylors well, described how Hildegard would take him to social gatherings, where he sat silently among friends as if in a stupor. In other instances, he grew abusive, yelling at his wife for reasons he couldn’t articulate.

Hildegard sought someone with nursing experience to care for her ailing husband, and McCready got the job. Given how sick he was, no one was surprised when Albert died. But Duran was stunned when, one afternoon, McCready sidled up to her on the Posada’s patio, where she liked to watch the sun set over the lake. McCready sat down at Duran’s table and admitted out of the blue to killing Albert.

According to Duran, McCready leaned forward so that other happy-hour drinkers couldn’t hear her. “I killed Albert by smothering him with a pillow,” she whispered. Duran could only stare at her blankly. “He just didn’t have any quality of life,” McCready continued. “He couldn’t finish a sentence. He peed on himself all the time. And he was mean to Hildegard, so I went in and put a pillow on his face, and I killed the old bastard.”

“You… you did?” Duran finally stammered.

“Yeah, I did.”

Duran told me that she didn’t reveal McCready’s confession to anyone. “I knew that if I did, she’d say, ‘Oh, I was just bragging. I didn’t do that,’” Duran said. “I knew she was telling the truth.” Jan Dunlap also said McCready told her about killing Albert, but by dropping a radio into a tub where he was bathing—and with Hildegard’s knowledge. No one else I spoke to had heard anything about Albert being electrocuted.

The verifiable outcome of his death was that Hildegard and McCready announced their relationship as if it were an engagement. “Everyone, I want to tell you something,” Hildegard said at a dinner party, after clinking her glass with a fork to get the room’s attention. “I am in love with Donna!” Once again, though, McCready’s relationship with a new widow didn’t last long. This time the reason was tragic. Hildegard developed a nasty cough, and when she and McCready traveled to a hospital in Houston to have it checked out, they learned that the cause was terminal throat cancer. Hildegard’s demise was fast and ugly. She had a tracheotomy, and McCready would indulge her requests at parties, which Hildegard still attended, to pour gin down the tube in her throat.

Hildegard died in March 1984. For a brief time, McCready’s spark for trouble seemed to dim. She wasn’t seen at many social gatherings, though she did host a prime-rib dinner in Hildegard’s memory. Some residents felt sorry for her. But when McCready received a sizable inheritance, including at least one property the Taylors had owned in Los Angeles, the cloud of suspicion around her darkened once more. She really is just a gold-digger, people whispered, some with genuine disdain, others with morbid glee.

By all accounts, McCready moved on, setting her romantic sights elsewhere; my grandmother claims that McCready once made a pass at her, right after her third husband died. McCready’s most fateful entanglement, however, was yet to come. It involved a couple with an outwardly idyllic marriage who kept painful secrets, and an indecent proposal gone horribly wrong. No one disputes that the affair ended in a brutal crime.

Act III

When Joe and Barbara Kovach decided to retire in 1980, they had no idea where they’d wind up. They just knew that they wanted to explore the world outside the Chicago suburbs where they’d spent most of their marriage and raised their daughters. Joe, 61, and Barbara, 50, had been movers and shakers in Bolingbrook, a small town Joe had helped to incorporate in 1965.

Joe spent his days behind a typewriter as editor in chief of Beacon, a local newspaper. Barbara ran the paper’s sales department and was active on the board of Bolingbrook’s library and park district. When they decided to leave, the Kovaches wrote a farewell column:

We have lived here for 17 years and have been publishing Beacon for 16 years. Without qualifications, this has been the richest and most rewarding time of our lives, and it has been our friends, associates and readers who have made it so. We will be going to warmer climes and will be facing new challenges and experiences, but leaving will not be easy…. The only way to say good bye is to say it. Good bye. We love you. JJK and BAK.

Then the Kovaches made that classic American move: They bought an RV, which they christened the Pinta, and decided to drive until they felt like staying somewhere. Over several months they headed east, then south, sending their adult daughters postcards from a hit parade of monuments and museums. They crossed the border into Mexico and, like my grandmother more than a decade prior, eventually came upon a panoramic view of Lake Chapala. “Barb, I don’t know about you,” Joe said as they looked at the water, “but I’m never leaving.” It was December 1980. They settled in Ajijic, sold the RV, and rented a house.

The couple came with extra baggage—the emotional kind. Joe wasn’t faithful. He was always flirting with other women and had even made public gestures that landed him in hot water with Barbara. He’d had trouble explaining why, when he’d met a woman in Bolingbrook who owned a cherry tree that wasn’t producing fruit, he’d bought two pounds of cherries and individually tied them to the tree’s branches. Then there was the period when he spent weekends in Indianapolis, supposedly to get better acquainted with a son from a previous marriage whom Barbara had never met. When the son called the Kovaches’ house one day and announced that he was trying to establish contact with his absent father for the first time, it became evident that the tall, slender man with whom Joe had taken pictures in Indianapolis wasn’t really his son. Presumably, the photo was part of a scheme to cover up the fact that he was visiting another woman.

Barbara nearly left Joe a couple of times. Once, she packed her bags and bought a plane ticket to Miami to stay with her sister-in-law. Joe convinced her to let him drive her to the airport and, before they even reached the terminal, to cancel her ticket. It wasn’t wholly surprising; she’d always been susceptible to his persuasions. The Kovaches had met in 1950 in Boston, where Barbara grew up and was studying at the Massachusetts School of Physiotherapy. Joe, born in Hungary, had come to the United States as a child and wound up in Boston after his first marriage ended. He was six foot two, strapping, and a real charmer. When he began courting her, Barbara was dating a doctor, so Joe sent her a case of apples with a note attached: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

When he began courting her, Barbara was dating a doctor, so Joe sent her a case of apples with a note attached: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

Joe’s charisma, however, was a facade that shielded troubling behavior from public view. To his four daughters, Kitt, Karen, Kim, and Kandi, in order of age, he could be a tyrant. He was obsessed with instilling an appreciation for the arts, literature, and history. Most family dinners took place at 6 p.m. sharp and began with a quiz. Joe asked trivia questions, and if one of his daughters gave the wrong answer, he replied with cutting commentary like, “You need to worry about getting married, because you’re clearly not going to make it in school.” As the girls grew up, small infractions of house rules could trigger disproportionate responses. Once, Joe woke Kandi up around midnight and made her hand-wash every dish in the kitchen because she’d put one back in the cupboard with a trace of food on it. Another time, Joe had her spend an entire Sunday walking back and forth across the street in front of the house because he’d caught a glimpse of her forgetting to look both ways.

When tragedy struck, Joe was similarly controlling, and Barbara went along with him. Kitt developed leukemia when she was a young teenager. Her parents decided not to tell her that she was dying; in fact, they told no one except Kim and Karen—their youngest was spared from the news—and a few close friends. They claimed that they didn’t want Kitt to fear dying and acted as if her nosebleeds and waning energy were nothing to worry about. One day in 1968, when she was 15, Kitt went to the hospital for a particularly severe nosebleed. She never came home. After her death, the Kovaches grieved and continued to celebrate her birthday privately, but Joe and Barbara also insisted on keeping a stiff upper lip. “It was as though, if you didn’t talk about it, it didn’t happen,” Karen later told me.

Setting out in the RV a dozen years later was a chance for the Kovaches to put the past behind them. Barbara saw it as an opportunity to move past Joe’s affairs and reset their marriage. But things didn’t exactly work out that way.

Ajijic had always had painful colonial undertones: foreigners staking their claims to various pieces of property and hiring locals as their gardeners, drivers, and maids. The extent to which the two worlds—white and not—meshed depended on what sort of life an extranjero (foreigner) envisioned on the shores of Lake Chapala. Each of the Kovaches had different priorities.

Barbara committed to learning Spanish and hoped to model herself on longtime expat philanthropists like Neill James, who after arriving in the 1940s supported aspiring Mexican painters and donated to the Lake Chapala Society, which provided funds and school supplies to area children. Barbara’s good works took the form of cooking and delivering meals to residents, both foreign and Mexican, when they were sick. To bring in additional income, she worked as a cashier at a clothing boutique that catered to wealthy tourists and Mexican vacationers.

Joe, by contrast, didn’t bother to learn much Spanish. He started running bridge games and organizing luñadas, guided nighttime horseback rides that promised a dude-ranch-like experience with meals cooked over a campfire. The moonlit trips quickly became popular among extranjeros, who put a wild spin on them. One night, after swigging vodka atop their horses, two women charged into the streets of Ajijic like cavalry, announcing themselves as “the rowdy bunch.”

Where the Kovaches had a shared interest was parties. They cultivated a reputation in the town’s Rolodex of social hosts and wrote letters to their daughters back in the States saying that retirement was the most fun they’d ever had. They had so many friends, they held a small “practice party” the night before throwing a big shindig, inviting B-level acquaintances who wouldn’t fit in their house for the main event.

By the mid-1980s, McCready had also jumped into the hosting game. Her signature was a lobster feast. She would travel to Mexico’s Pacific coast and come back with at least a dozen crustaceans, which she then served to impressed dinner guests. Also impressive to inebriated crowds was the pet duck she kept in the swimming pool in her front yard. “Donna was now the hostess with the mostess,” reads Bob Jones’s script treatment. “She developed her own fan club, of which Joe and Barbara were her key members.”

McCready and the Kovaches also got to know each other through the Lakeside Little Theatre. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1965, organized productions of classic English-language plays, as well as scripts written by expats. Joe was an actor, while Barbara worked behind the scenes fundraising to secure the company a permanent venue so that it could stop staging shows at the Posada. McCready was the theater’s treasurer and also directed plays. In December 1985, she helmed Send Me No Flowers, a comedy about a man who thinks he’s dying and tries to find his wife a new husband; the movie version starred Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Joe had a small part in the show as a salesman of burial plots.

At cast parties, according to one Ajijic resident, McCready displayed a “cruising mentality” as she eyed potential love interests. Joe gave her a run for her reputation. Retirement hadn’t cured his wayward eye as Barbara had hoped it would, and he garnered a social profile as an arrogant, irredeemable flirt. At one of Joe’s luñadas, my grandmother recalled, a woman fell off her horse and broke her arm, after which he showed up at her door with flowers and profuse apologies. The woman found the gesture kind, but when he kept coming back day after day, she told him to stop or she’d have to call the police.

Joe and McCready eventually—some might say inevitably—collided in a scenario so bawdy that it seemed yanked from the pages of Shakespeare. In late 1986, after deciding he was attracted to McCready, Joe asked her to have an affair. If she had sex with him, he claimed, she’d never want to sleep with a woman again. Amused and not entirely opposed to the idea, McCready made a counterproposal: First she’d whisk Barbara away on a trip. If she couldn’t seduce Joe’s wife, then she’d sleep with him.

Joe agreed to the wager, and the women went on the trip. What exactly transpired, no one who’s still alive knows. But McCready won the bet—and more. After the women returned to Ajijic, Barbara had news for Joe: She was leaving him, for good this time, to be with McCready.

Joe and McCready eventually—some might say inevitably—collided in a scenario so bawdy that it seemed yanked from the pages of Shakespeare. 

At first the Kovaches didn’t tell their family about the separation. Letters they wrote in late 1986 make no mention of McCready. One such missive was the couple’s Christmas letter:

This month marked our sixth anniversary in Mexico. How time does fly. We have been living in our present home in Ajijic over two years and plan to stay here indefinitely. The place suits us to a T and there is just enough work and gardening to do to make it interesting and not tedious…. Perhaps in the near future you will head down our way. It is still the best bargain vacation spot.… Just give us a little notice to make sure the casita is available. Again, a merry Christmas and a happy new year. As ever, Barbara and Joe Kovach.

Privately, however, losing Barbara drove Joe nuts. He was feeling particularly vulnerable because he’d just learned that he had prostate cancer and would need surgery to remove the tumor. He’d started taking medication to relieve his pain and counter erectile dysfunction—an insult to his bruised sexual ego. In desperation, Joe faked a suicide attempt to get Barbara’s attention. He called her at McCready’s house and begged her hysterically to come home, claiming that he’d taken a bunch of pills. The ploy didn’t work.

Joe, Barbara, and McCready kept their strife under wraps. The wider expat community was unaware of the disintegration of the Kovaches’ marriage and McCready’s role in it. Not even the troupe at the Lakeside Little Theatre knew. Only very close friends were told what was happening. In retrospect, this may have been because Barbara and McCready hoped to slip out of Ajijic without much of anyone knowing.

In early January 1987, they told Joe that they were moving to California to start a life together. McCready would sell property in Los Angeles that she’d inherited from Hildegard and use the money to buy a house in Palm Springs. The women elected not to cut off contact with Joe, operating on the shaky understanding that they could all stay friends. In an undated letter to the two women, which I obtained from the Kovach family, Joe kept a cordial tone as he addressed their pending departure:

It is evident that you will have to stay at Donna’s house for some time to take care of some practical matters which concern all of us, mostly Barb and I. Following are a list of these matters, though I doubt if they are all inclusive.

Notifying our kids and your parents and other relatives. I will offer no objection on how or what you tell them but for the sake of consistency I should get a copy of these letters. Perhaps the same should hold true for mutual friends in the states. You will also be giving explanations to your co-workers and our mutual friends in this area.

I still think it is very important that you and Donna make some arrangement for your benefit if things do not work out for you. You know you can always come back to me but feeling the way you do about me I do not think you would. Rest assured however, that if you want to come back and I am living with someone else at the time, that person will know that you have first priority because it is you that I love.

In any case, I believe we should all get together at our house after work tomorrow, sober and calm, and discuss all this. You will want to pack your bags in any case.

The women agreed to meet with Joe but flipped the invitation, asking him to McCready’s house for dinner on the evening of January 9. Two days later, they planned to drive away for good.

The gathering began smoothly enough. Joe arrived at McCready’s house at 7 p.m. He and Barbara poured aperitifs as McCready readied the meal. The trio made it through at least a couple of drinks and accompanying niceties before the conversation went south.

Joe had come prepared with a Hail Mary appeal, as he had when he’d dissuaded Barbara from leaving him on the way to the airport many years prior. Couldn’t the women delay their departure, at least until he had his prostate surgery in Guadalajara? McCready said no. But how could they just abandon him like this? They’d be kicking a man who was already down. McCready again flatly refused. She and Barbara were leaving, she told Joe, on January 11.

That’s when Joe lost it. He yanked out a hunting knife that he kept tucked inside one of his boots, common knowledge to anyone who’d seen him use it during the luñadas. According to what Barbara later told friends, he lunged toward McCready, who yelped and dived underneath her dining room table.

Barbara threw herself in front of Joe. She could feel McCready’s arms wrap around her legs as she faced down her husband.

“Go ahead and kill me!” she screamed.

“I would never kill you, Barbara!” Joe yelled back.

Barbara kept her gaze locked on her husband and his hunting knife. Then the thought occurred to her, Why isn’t Donna helping me?

She felt her lover’s grip weakening on her legs and heard a gurgling sound. She looked down and saw that McCready’s neck had been sliced open. Joe had managed to do it when he’d first come at her with the knife. McCready was bleeding out on the Turkish rug beneath the table.

She gasped for air a few times through her punctured trachea, then stopped. She was gone.

“You see what you’ve done?” Barbara cried.

“Yes, I’ve killed her!” Joe responded. “And they’re going to hang me for it.”

Joe didn’t chase Barbara as she burst out of McCready’s house and ran a block to the home of her friend Kathy Curtis. “Joe just killed Donna,” she blurted out when Curtis opened the door. Curtis brought Barbara inside and called the police. When they arrived, they took Barbara to the station to be interviewed. Then officers walked with Curtis over to McCready’s house, where a crime-scene investigation was already under way.

By the next morning, the news had spread. As expats ran into each other in Ajijic’s main plaza and tight lanes, there were hushed conversations, and some not so hushed ones. The rumor mill went into overdrive. One version of the story involved Joe beheading McCready. A neighbor claimed to have heard Joe sharpening a knife before he left for the dinner. Could the murder have been premeditated? When my grandmother heard the news, she was shocked by the barbarity of the crime.

Barbara didn’t want to talk to anyone. After leaving the police station, she holed up in McCready’s house, which hadn’t been scrubbed of her lover’s blood. Joe was nowhere to be found. Clothes, cash, and his yellow Volkswagen bug were gone from his house. He’d fled in the middle of the night.

The buzz continued at a long-planned bake sale to benefit the Lakeside Little Theatre. Every gringo in town seemed to be there. Cookies, bread, and pastries exchanged hands as people shared information and opinions about the murder. There was shock, along with speculation that Barbara might have helped Joe escape. They were still married, after all, and he was the father of her children.

The gossip also contained a heavy dose of she had it coming, which calcified as the days and weeks passed. Xill Fessenden, an artist who moved to Ajijic in 1985, remembered people talking about how McCready had stolen three wives and probably killed two old men. “So many people came to the defense of Joe,” she told me. “People kept saying that Donna deserved it.”

“I mean, she may not have been the nicest person in the world,” Fessenden added, “but who deserves to be murdered?”

Act IV

Interest in that question evaporated quickly. After McCready’s death, there were new scandals for expats to fixate on, like the revelation that a couple of their own were CIA operatives associated with the Iran-Contra affair. “The thing that people always said about the stories that came out of Ajijic was that, once all those stories were collected, no one would believe them,” Ron Wallen, a former resident, told me. “Because that’s what Ajijic was: one unbelievable story after another.”  

No one heard from Joe again. Barbara organized McCready’s cremation and remembrance, to which none of the deceased’s family came. Then she found herself marooned. Joe had taken the checkbooks, the Social Security payments they received were in his name, and she didn’t qualify for any of her lover’s estate. A stipulation in McCready’s will assigned her assets to her most recent “live-in” spouse, and when lawyers asked Barbara for mail sent in her name to McCready’s address, she couldn’t provide any.

Some townsfolk who felt sorry for her offered distinctly Ajijician gestures. One artist invited Barbara over to unveil a large painting that depicted the murder. In the work, Joe loomed over McCready’s crumpled body, clutching a bloody knife in one hand. The artist thought that seeing it might be cathartic for Barbara. Instead, she started crying and asked to leave.

By 1989, Barbara had saved up enough money selling textiles and working as a caterer to move away. She headed to Barbados, where she worked at a bed and breakfast, then to Maine to care for her elderly parents. She remained in contact with a few people in Ajijic but never set foot there again.

“That’s what Ajijic was: one unbelievable story after another.”  

Over the years, the absence of key players in the crime, combined with many locals’ aging memories, distaste for McCready, and fervor for juicy lore, allowed falsehoods to become accepted fact. Joe cutting off McCready’s head, for example, hardened into the plot. Paradoxically, the effect of countless retellings was reductive. Characters were essentialized—the wily predator, the long-suffering wife, the jealous husband—to support the tale’s operatic scaffolding. The internet and the ability to scout for information about the event and the people involved didn’t become part of the cultural mainstream until well after 1987, making it easier for the story to remain cocooned.

Separating myth from truth meant diving into a murky quagmire of loose ends that most Ajijic residents had never been concerned with. Why did Barbara enter into a romance with a woman who’d used her as a sexual bargaining chip? How did Joe evade justice? Did the Kovaches ever meet again? And, above all, did anyone know the truth about Donna McCready?

First I traced the Kovaches’ trajectories to find out where they’d wound up. In December 2016, I tracked down their daughters, all of whom live near Phoenix. At Karen’s house, we sat in a ring around the dining room table. The women all possessed the same almond-shaped eyes and easygoing smile, which looked a lot like Barbara’s, based on pictures of her that I’d seen. I explained how I’d first heard about Joe’s crime and produced a copy of Jan Dunlap’s screenplay, which they didn’t know existed. They eagerly paged through it. Kim read some of the dialogue aloud:

BARBARA

I’ll go home and talk to JOE. It may take a while, so don’t get all bent out of shape if I don’t come back until tomorrow.

“Oh, Mom would never say that!” Kim declared with a laugh. Her sisters agreed.

Collectively, the women then shared what they knew about the events that transpired after McCready’s murder. Some of it their parents had told them; other details were divulged in family letters.

After leaving McCready’s body on the dining room floor, Joe decided that he had to get across the U.S. border as quickly as possible. His yellow Volkswagen was a fugitive’s nightmare, but he got behind the wheel anyway and headed for the safest place he could think of: his sister Ann Garey’s house in Berkeley, California, some 1,800 miles north. During a pit stop in Puerto Vallarta, he called Garey. He refused to explain what had happened but said that he would be at her door in a few days. He continued driving north, then ditched his conspicuous coupe before leaving Mexico. He worried that border security might have been told to look out for it. Joe walked into America.

Whether he took a bus or hitchhiked north, no one can remember. By the time he arrived at Garey’s home, he was a wreck: paranoid, haggard, and lacking a plan for what to do next. He told his sister, who’s now deceased, that he’d killed a woman in Ajijic. She was horrified, but Joe swore that he’d acted in a moment of madness. McCready drove him to do it, he said, by mocking him.

In a letter to the Kovach daughters dated February 6, 1987, Garey wrote that Joe was heading to a local hospital for his prostate surgery:

Emotionally, of course, he is still in sad condition, but physically he at least looks much, much better than when he arrived. We all know that this is not the kind of thing Joe would do if he were rational—no matter what she [McCready] said. Something inside him must have snapped and who can say what it was. It’s such a terrible thing to have happened—to everyone concerned. Unfortunately there is no way to undo it—so it seems we all have to go on doing what we are doing—each in their own way—and that is coping and trying to make the situation as bearable as possible.

By then, Kim and Kandi had traveled to Ajijic to be with their mother. They were stunned by everything they learned. They’d known very little about McCready before her murder, and they had no idea Barbara was interested in women. They were told about the bet that had initiated the affair; Barbara had been angry about it, but not enough to ignore her attraction to McCready. As for Joe, he was a philanderer and a cruel father, but he’d never been physically abusive. That he could murder someone seemed unthinkable to his daughters. By his own confession, though, he’d done it.

In Berkeley, Garey found Joe a therapist and a lawyer. Harold Rosenthal was the attorney; he’s retired now. When I spoke with him, he said that he received at least half a dozen calls from the FBI regarding Joe in the winter of 1987. There was no formal charge against his client, but the agency wanted him to “answer some questions.” Rosenthal advised Joe, whom he found to be a “very, very nice man,” not to agree to it. Meanwhile, Rosenthal focused on readying a defense, operating on the assumption that the FBI would eventually obtain a warrant and arrest Joe.

That never happened. Months passed, and the FBI stopped calling. Rosenthal finally decided that there must not have been enough political will or interest to mount a transnational legal case. (Though the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara reportedly cooperated with local authorities immediately after McCready’s death, no one I talked to at the State Department, including representatives of its historical archives, could find any documentation to that effect.) Joe could live his life having gotten away with murder.

Joe’s therapist was named Richard Delman. He’s still in practice near San Rafael, just north of San Francisco. Delman described Joe as “regretful and remorseful about the death of Donna.” He also said that Joe “desperately wanted to be rescued” from the situation he’d dug himself into but refused to pay for intensive psychotherapy. Joe was shocked by the cost of treatment and talked about how everything was cheaper in Mexico, where he’d grown accustomed to the peso. The best Delman could do was recommend that Joe establish regular routines for himself rather than worry about whether he’d find himself in handcuffs on any given day. “He suggests I try to get back into the same kinds of things I’ve been doing: bridge, theater, etc.,” Joe wrote to Kim on February 23, 1987. “This is exactly what I would like to do after getting settled down and getting a job.”

More than anything, Joe wanted Barbara. “That is still the most difficult part for me, not hearing from Barb,” he wrote to Kim. “I’m 67 and feeling old for the first time. I just hope there is enough time left for her to forgive me before it is too late. Thirty-four years and four children is a lot to throw away because of one moment of insanity.”

According to their daughters, Barbara and Joe never saw each other again. When they signed divorce papers in 1989, they did so separately. It was Barbara’s decision. She ignored Joe’s pleas for forgiveness, which he expressed in letters as he moved from California to Arizona, then to Illinois, and finally to Budapest, his birthplace. In a missive dated December 1, Joe wrote:

Dear Barb,

Another year older. Two years ago, I did not think I’d last this long. Even a year ago I had doubts. Strangely enough, I feel quite well, mentally and physically. Have not had a depressed period for over a month or more. Have put on a few pounds. Nightmares are much less frequent and I often sleep through the night. My guilt feelings have not abated, and I suppose they never will, but I am learning to live with them. Why this discourse? Well, Hon, I still entertain the thought that you still retain enough feeling for me to be glad to know that I’m feeling and doing better. Perhaps you do not care at all, which is probably closer to the truth. I find it so very difficult to cling to the hope that you are concerned. I love you so very much.

She didn’t respond, and Joe eventually gave up writing to her. But he frequently asked his daughters how Barbara was doing, including when they hosted him in their homes. He wore out his welcome in every instance, proving the same overbearing presence he’d been in the women’s childhood. “He’d blame my kids for everything,” Kandi told me. Karen wondered where a man who’d murdered someone and destroyed his marriage found the audacity to return letters she wrote to him with grammatical corrections appended.

Kandi and Karen severed contact with their father in the final years of his life, as he lived off $900 a month in Social Security checks and whatever he made occasionally writing for Hungarian newspapers. Only Kim stayed in touch with him until he died in November 2011. She was the one who broke the news to her family, including Barbara. Her mother hardly reacted. “She was emotionally and physically divorced from him,” Kim recalled.

Joe’s body was donated to science. No funeral was held.

By then, Barbara was living in Phoenix to be close to her daughters and grandchildren. She avoided talking about what had happened in Ajijic. Kandi brought up McCready with Barbara just one time.

“Mom, do you think you’re a lesbian?” she asked tentatively. “Do you want help finding a partner?”

“I think I was just lonely,” Barbara responded, then changed the subject. She never spoke of McCready again before dying of pancreatic cancer in December 2013.

For three decades, the woman their mother loved and father killed had been a lingering mystery to the Kovach sisters. They listened with rapt interest as I described my grandmother’s proclamation that McCready was evil. They’d never heard the rumors about her murdering Steve Harrington and Albert Taylor. In fact, they’d talked to very few Ajijic residents who knew McCready or their parents.

It wasn’t entirely a surprise, then, when Kim offered to join me in Ajijic as I looked for evidence of McCready’s life. She wanted to find it, too, and share it with her sisters. We agreed to meet in Mexico in August 2017.

Ajijic no longer feels like a secret. Cheap flights arrive regularly in Guadalajara, and snowbirds—people who travel south to escape the winter in second homes along the lake—are more common than ever. The breathtaking natural views that lured my grandmother and many others have been irreparably altered. Development has been swift and aggressive. There are power lines, radio towers, and rambling McMansions in the foothills above the water. Along the lakeshore are crowded bars, convenience stores, and a Domino’s Pizza. In 2008, Walmart set up shop on the highway leading to Guadalajara.

Juxtapositions define Ajijic. On my first day there, I went on a stroll and passed a parade of horses and a brass band—a funeral procession. Then I turned a corner and saw a Google Street View car, bumping along the cobblestones with its roof-mounted camera.

Longtime expats bemoan this state of affairs. A friend of my grandmother’s blamed NAFTA. “We began to get satellite TVs, telephones, imported items, and all sorts of creature comforts that you wouldn’t have here before,” she told me. “Plus, there were no gated communities. Now people can close the gate, and they’re in Mexico but they’re not really here.”

“There were no gated communities. Now people can close the gate, and they’re in Mexico but they’re not really here.”

Like many foreigners in the community, she was quick to gloss over expats’ complicity in the disparities between the lives of foreigners and natives. It’s true, however, that the days when residents ran into each other on a daily basis in a handful of haunts have all but vanished. Big Mama’s is gone; Jan Dunlap, the onetime proprietor, now lives in California. The Posada moved in the 1990s, and the new version just isn’t the same.

When I pressed locals for their memories of McCready, I found their recollections similarly diminished, save those pertaining to her love affairs and death. People who talked with authority about her as a local legend knew remarkably little about her life, particularly before she came to Ajijic. It was as if she had only ever existed in a paradisiacal version of the town and become fossilized as a social upstart with an untamable libido.

Even residents who kept notes about life in Ajijic had little to share. When I met Judy Eager for coffee at the new Posada, which she now runs with her son, she produced a large bound diary. The only entry Eager could find about McCready from the years leading up to her death described her arrival with Lois Schaefer in 1976. It said that the women had lived together “for eight years” in California before relocating.

Schaefer died in 1988, but her son, Ed, lives in the Bay Area. We spoke on the phone, and he remembered McCready, whom his mother met in 1965 or 1966, shortly after she split with Ed’s dad in an acrimonious divorce. Ed spent summers with the two women at their home in Sausalito, and he said McCready, whose background was a mystery to him, “wanted nothing to do” with a kid. She and Schaefer drank heavily, hosted large parties, and sometimes got into scary arguments. Once, they came home “drunker than skunks,” and when McCready noticed that Ed hadn’t done the dishes, she threatened him with a butcher knife. Ed stayed outside wearing only his underwear until his mother had calmed McCready down enough that it was safe for him to go back into the house. Another time, he came home and noticed three fresh bullet holes in the side of the house.

“To me it was no big deal,” Ed said. “It was like water off a duck’s back, because it was always crazy,” meaning life with his mom. Before we hung up, Ed confirmed the story about Schaefer being shot through the breast by a lover in Ajijic.

One afternoon, I paid a Mexican driver named Chevy, who patiently ferries elderly expat women around town, to take me to McCready’s house. We talked in Spanish, and I told him I was working on a story about un asesinato (a murder). This didn’t faze him. Today there are a number of sensational murders associated with Ajijic. In 2000, an American couple, Norris and Nancy Price, were shot to death in their home. Police suspect that it was a contract killing, ordered over a land dispute. In 2005, authorities arrested Perry March, who was living with his young children and father in Ajijic, for murdering his wife in Tennessee a decade prior. He was convicted the next year. In 2012, hit men from a drug cartel killed, decapitated, and disposed of 18 Mexicans just outside town.

McCready’s home on Avenida las Robles was painted bright blue and orange and surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. The pool where her pet duck once swam was still in the front yard. When we pulled up, Chevy instantly knew whose murder I was interested in. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Señora Donna!”

It turned out that when he was a teenager, McCready had hired him to wash her car every weekend and deliver copies of the local newspaper to her doorstep. Chevy said she was always very nice to him.

My conversation with Chevy led me to Carlos Hernandez Del Toro, a local attorney who also knew McCready. He was wary of talking to a reporter but said that McCready came into his life when she and Pat Harrington organized a drive to collect supplies for his high school. McCready took a liking to Del Toro and eventually supported him through law school in Guadalajara. He went on to represent her interests and said she was like a godmother to him. As with Chevy’s recollections, the generosity Del Toro described was absent from most expats’ depictions of McCready. But anything he knew about her personal life Del Toro wasn’t willing to discuss. As soon as I mentioned Hildegard Taylor and the property she’d left to McCready, he blurted out, “I have no interest to talk to strange people I do not know!”

I then turned to public records in search of McCready. The only news item I could locate was the dramatic 1987 article about her murder in a Mexican newspaper, accompanied by her obituary. It said that McCready was 45 when she died, that she kept “manikins in her home she used for target practice,” and that she was originally from North Carolina, where she attended “the state university.” I called the registrars at both of North Carolina’s main higher-education systems and found no record of her attendance. Through searches of government databases, I found a Donna L. McCready, which seemed promising, given that the newspaper article about her death had said that McCready’s middle name was Leason. But the birth year (1936) and location (Los Angeles) of the person I’d found conflicted with McCready’s obituary. I emailed a surviving brother of Donna L. McCready and one of his sons, who replied, “Donna never lived in Mexico, hope that helps you.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if McCready had used her real name when she was in Ajijic and before, in Sausalito. Maybe she was someone else entirely. Given her affinity for stirring up intrigue, it didn’t seem out of the question.

The most revealing insights about McCready came from a small cluster of people who considered themselves her friends. They don’t run in the same Ajijic circles as my grandmother, and their take on what happened 30 years ago is different from prevailing opinion.

Helen DesJardins and Joan Gamma have lived in Ajijic on and off since 1983. When I met them at their home, a short walk from Lake Chapala, they told me that the rumors about McCready murdering the husbands of her lovers were ludicrous. “Donna wasn’t like a lot of people thought she was. She was very loyal,” Gamma told me. She would know: Gamma was with McCready at the hospital in Houston when Hildegard Taylor succumbed to throat cancer. Gamma described her friend as devastated by the loss.

She also dismissed the idea that McCready tried to seduce women for financial gain. “If she was all out for money, then why did she end up with Barbara?” Gamma asked. “Barbara had no money.” She and DesJardins hadn’t known about the bet with Joe Kovach when it happened, but they were certain that no matter how it was formed, the bond between McCready and Barbara was genuine.

“Donna was a somewhat tragic figure,” Gamma continued. “She had a rough childhood. She had a terrible stepfather, and her mother was dead.” I asked for more details, but that was all she knew.

It wasn’t the only reference I heard to McCready having a traumatic history. Jan Dunlap said that McCready once described an uncle sexually assaulting her when she was just eight or nine. But Dunlap’s knowledge ran no deeper than Gamma’s. McCready, it seemed, hadn’t liked to talk much about her early life, and no one pushed her to reveal more than she wanted to. In Ajijic, after all, a person’s past was whatever they said it was.

Gamma suggested a connection between McCready’s younger years and her liaisons with married couples. “What she wanted was a family, so she would come into a family of people—husband and wife—and she would love them both,” Gamma explained. “She wanted to be accepted by them.” If true, it would mean that Steve Harrington and Albert Taylor dying in succession, with McCready in their employ and sleeping with their wives, was mere coincidence. In which case people’s assumptions about McCready’s ulterior motives might have derived from astonishment that Pat and Hildegard would take a female lover.

“What she wanted was a family, so she would come into a family of people—husband and wife—and she would love them both.”

Toward the end of my trip, Kim Kovach arrived in town. Together we met with Estela Hidalgo, an artist and sculptor who was a friend of Barbara’s. The encounter started out awkwardly, as Hidalgo didn’t mince words about Joe. “I’m sorry,” she said to Kim, “but I didn’t like your father from the first moment I met him.” Hidalgo described Joe as “rude” and said she knew people who wouldn’t invite him to parties because his womanizing made guests uncomfortable. “I know,” Kim replied.

Then Hidalgo pivoted to talking about Barbara and how deeply affecting the events of January 9, 1987 must have been for her. “She loved Joe and Donna, so she lost two people in one second,” Hidalgo said. As for McCready, Hidalgo said, she “looked for trouble. There were dinners when she tried to seduce two or three women in a single evening.” When she fell for Barbara, though, she changed.

“When she was with Barbara,” Hidalgo said, “it was only Barbara.”

What I came to realize was that when McCready was alive, prejudice ran deeper in Ajijic than its carefree expats were willing to admit. It carved lines around crowds and cliques on the basis of class and identity. These borders were largely invisible to the people they divided; everyone mingled at the same parties and bars and dinners, because that was life on the shores of Lake Chapala. Still, social and cultural rifts defined the local appetite for gossip—in particular, what sorts of behavior were considered beyond the pale and who was cast in the recurring role of the town villain. When I regaled my grandmother with Gamma’s and Hidalgo’s theories about McCready, she balked. “I don’t buy it,” she said. Never mind that, as she eventually admitted, Hildegard once wrote her a letter rejecting outright that McCready had killed Albert. (My grandmother said she later lost the letter.)

When Ajijic’s old-timers pass away, the legend of Donna McCready will slip quietly into oblivion. It’s vexing not to have an answer to every question about the enigmatic woman. Yet it also feels fitting for someone who enjoyed inspiring a mix of ire, suspicion, and yearning. Even in death, McCready wreaked havoc.

The morning before we left town, Kim Kovach met with Gamma and DesJardins to pour a vial of Barbara’s ashes, which she’d brought from Phoenix, into the lake. They did it at the end of a pier next to Ajijic’s esplanade. “It was lovely,” Kim later told me. Gamma and DesJardins mentioned to Kim that, over the years, they’d scattered several friends’ ashes on the lake. “You should write a book about all of them,” Kim told the women, “and you should call it Our Friends in the Lake.”

Among those friends was McCready. Her memorial wasn’t lovely, I learned, but it was perfect.

On a January day in 1987, Barbara and a few friends gathered on the same pier where Kim later stood. After a wine toast, the executor of McCready’s will, a retired lawyer from California, inverted a plastic bag containing her ashes in order to dump them in the water. Just then there was a gust of wind. The executor lost his grip on the bag, dropping it into the lake, and a portion of the ashes blew over the small crowd.

“She was all over everybody,” one of the attendees told me. “Donna got the last word and the last laugh.”

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Losing Conner’s Mind

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Losing Conner’s Mind

The race to save a child from a genetic death sentence.

By Amitha Kalaichandran

The Atavist Magazine, No. 74


Amitha Kalaichandran is a resident physician and a health and science writer in Ottawa. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, New York magazine, and Stat News, among other publications.

Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Daniel Moattar
Photographer: Shan Wallace

Published in December 2017. Design updated in 2021.

Chapter One

The lightning hit on a sweltering and stormy June afternoon. It thrashed through the chimney of the Beishes’ two-story home in Denton, Maryland, a rural community, before ripping into the basement. There it arced into the gas line, setting off an explosion that shook the walls of the house.

Jeff Beish, a truck driver, was often away for extended stretches of time. That day in 2016, however, he was in the living room with his three-year-old son watching television. “It was the loudest boom I’d ever heard. Then I saw smoke spring up through the wall,” Jeff said. “I grabbed Conner, booked it, and called 911.” While they stood outside in the yard, the fire surged through the living room floor.

Find hundreds of hours’ worth of longform stories read by audiobook narrators in the Audm app for iPhone.

“Thank God it happened during the day and not while we were asleep,” Hollie, Jeff’s wife, added. She and the Beishes’ other son, seven-year-old Jaxon, had been out running errands. By the time they got home, firefighters had extinguished the flames. The house was salvageable, but electrical wiring needed to be rerouted, and floors and walls required structural repairs. The Beishes spent the next month at a nearby hotel.

Which would have been fine, except that Conner was sick. He had been for months, and the cause was a mystery. He got worse at the hotel. The Beishes hoped that the elusive condition wasn’t serious and they’d find the right treatment soon. Certainly, they reassured themselves, it was nothing catastrophic. After all, the cliché is that lightning never strikes the same place twice.

Born in August 2012, Conner had been a healthy infant. He was prone to colds and had “baby asthma,” but the doctors said that would go away. By the time he turned one, he had a full head of wavy blond hair that Hollie kept long. Sometimes it fell down his forehead, meeting the long brown eyelashes that framed his blue eyes. He had a wide, mischievous smile. He started walking at 13 months and two months later was chasing Jaxon around the house dressed as a lobster for Halloween.

Words came slowly to Conner. By his second birthday, he’d mastered about ten of them; at that age, the number should have been at least 50. “I assumed it was because Jaxon would always speak for him,” Hollie said, something big brothers often do. “Sometimes I thought maybe he was just shy.” The Beishes’ pediatrician said not to worry, that some children gain words in bursts. Family and friends were also reassuring. “They would joke that once he started talking, he wouldn’t stop,” Jeff recalled. Months passed and Conner’s progress was still glacial. The Beishes took him to a speech pathologist.  

Hollie was in her late twenties then, five-foot-three with green eyes and a silver hoop through the inner cartilage of one ear. Jeff was a few years older, was much taller, and liked to wear baseball caps backward. They’d met ten years prior at a Walgreens, where she’d worked as a clerk and he’d made regular drop-offs driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Hollie had decided to be a full-time mom, which suited her “strict and structured” personality, she told me. It also meant that she was the person who adapted the most to Conner’s limited communication.

“Eat! Eat!” he would yell when he was hungry. Hollie would take him to the pantry or fridge and point to various food items. He would nod or gesture at what he wanted. “It was a bit like negotiating,” Hollie explained. If Conner didn’t know a word, he would make a sound instead—imitating the sucking of liquid through a straw if he was thirsty, for instance. Some words he understood but couldn’t quite say: Jaxon was “Bubba,” Jeff was “Da,” and Hollie was “Me.”

Conner started preschool at three. When picture day rolled around, on October 1, 2015, Hollie dressed him in khaki pants and an OshKosh collared shirt with white and beige stripes. She noticed that he seemed tired. At school, Conner sat for his picture against a blue background that matched his eyes, offering the photographer a measured, close-lipped smile.

Then, as he made his way across the classroom to return to his seat, Conner suddenly went limp. He crumpled onto the carpet. His teacher rushed him to the nurse’s office. His forehead felt warm, and soon he began convulsing. Conner’s seizure, his first, lasted six minutes.

When the school called Hollie, she jumped in her dark purple Ford SUV and resisted the urge to speed. “I even put the car on cruise control,” she said. She also forced herself to stop crying, because the tears were blurring her vision. She didn’t want to get into an accident.

At the hospital where Conner had been rushed in an ambulance, doctors ruled out an infection like meningitis. Then they sent him home. “It could happen again, or it might not happen again,” one of them told Hollie. If it did, she shouldn’t worry. About 470,000 children in the United States have epilepsy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but an underlying medical condition isn’t the only cause of seizures. High temperatures can also trigger an episode in a developing brain. The doctor told Hollie that Conner had likely experienced one of these so-called febrile seizures and instructed her to give him Tylenol.

Jeff was “scared to death” when Hollie called to tell him what had happened. He thought back on their families’ medical histories and couldn’t remember anyone who’d experienced seizures. Hollie, though, was comforted by what the doctors had said. When Conner had more seizures—after his nighttime bath, while playing in his room—she imagined that she and Jeff would one day look back on these episodes as they did Conner’s baby asthma: They would remember them as part of a passing phase.

Two months later, the Beishes took Conner to a clinic in Baltimore for an electroencephalogram, which measures brain activity through electrodes attached to the scalp. The results were abnormal: He endured multiple seizures during the procedure, some so small that his body never visibly moved. Conner was prescribed a low dose of an anti-seizure medication, which seemed to work. By the time of his follow-up appointment in February 2016, he’d been seizure-free for three months. He was even able to ride a scooter, a Christmas present from his parents, in the backyard with Jaxon.

The good news didn’t last long, however. During the February appointment, Conner had an MRI. The test revealed that his cerebellum, the part of the brain responsible for balance and coordination, was unusually small. “Some doctors said it could be a normal thing, like some people just are born with a small cerebellum,” Hollie said. “Another doctor said it could mean it had changed and had become smaller as he got older.” They would need to run more tests.

That night, after her family went to sleep, Hollie poured herself a glass of soda, sat down with her iPad, and Googled “small cerebellum.” The conditions that popped up were terrifying. There was Alzheimer’s, which she knew Conner couldn’t have, and fatal childhood brain disorders, which she couldn’t stand to think about. Then Hollie saw cerebral palsy listed. “I always thought that was something that happened at birth,” she said. “But one article I read said it’s hard to tell in some kids until they’re older.” If Conner had cerebral palsy, the Beishes could handle it. They knew a few kids with the condition. Her eyelids heavy, Hollie clicked off her tablet and went to bed feeling hopeful.

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    Beish family pictures. Click right for more. (Photo: Shan Wallace)
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    (Photo: Shan Wallace)
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    (Photo: Courtesy Beish family)
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    (Photo: Courtesy Beish family)

Conner didn’t have cerebral palsy. His doctors were able to figure out that much—but little else. By May 2016, the seizures were back and worse than ever. “He was standing beside his wooden train table and fell and smashed his face on it,” Hollie said of one attack. Then he threw up. His doctors increased his medication. It didn’t work.

By then the costs of Conner’s prescriptions, procedures, and visits to specialists tallied into the tens of thousands of dollars. The Beishes had private insurance that covered most of it; not every American family could say the same. Still, Hollie and Jeff were exhausted and frustrated. Conner’s life, and theirs, had been upended by a medical riddle.

The Beishes didn’t think the seizures had anything to do with Conner’s speech delay, which had remained static for months. He still had his small arsenal of vocabulary, and he could parrot what his parents and speech therapist said. He would answer his mom when she pointed at things, even if the words he used for them weren’t exactly right: “Moo” was cow, for example, and “meow” was cat. He knew his colors, too, especially red, green, and blue.

One day in August, a few weeks after lightning struck the Beishes’ house, Hollie and Conner were working on a puzzle. “What color is this?” Hollie asked, holding up a blue piece. Her son was silent. She asked again, this time more slowly. Conner stared at her and still said nothing. “He was looking at me like, What do you want me to do?” Hollie recalled.

Blue was the first word Conner lost.

Chapter Two

Emily de los Reyes had two career choices. “All the women in my family were teachers or doctors,” she said. De los Reyes was born in 1963 and grew up in Manila. Her family was well off, so they didn’t feel the most acute effects of the Philippines’ widespread corruption and privation, the fallout of President Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship. When de los Reyes went to medical school, however, she witnessed social ills firsthand. On Sunday afternoons, following church, she sometimes assisted health workers caring for children in poor parts of the city. Hundreds of kids would queue up—some with parents, some on their own—and wait to be seen. The experience stayed with de los Reyes as she pursued a career in pediatrics.

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Emily de los Reyes (Photo: Courtesy Nationwide Hospital)

Toward the end of medical school, in the mid-1980s, she joined her classmates in protesting the waning Marcos regime. When I met her at a busy Starbucks in Columbus, Ohio, more than 30 years later, it was hard for me to imagine her as a firebrand. At 54, she was the picture of precision. Her hair had been blow-dried into a neat black bob and showed a few streaks of gray. Nearly everything she had with her was a shade of pink: her laptop cover, her iPhone case, her zip-up sweater. Before I arrived, she’d been carefully finalizing a PowerPoint presentation. “I was so idealistic back then,” she said of her youth, a smile creeping across her face.

After graduating she decided to work in the United States, because its democracy was strong and medical care first-rate. She moved to San Francisco, where there was a large Filipino community, then to Charleston, West Virginia, where there was not. One day, while completing her residency at a local hospital, she rode in a helicopter to pick up a sick infant from a farm. When the mother saw de los Reyes’s dark skin, she hesitated before handing over the baby. Still, the young doctor found a community. Her residency class had several other foreigners—not uncommon in underserved parts of the United States—and she met an American doctor who soon became her husband.

In the early 1990s, West Virginia became a relative hotbed of an infectious brain disease called La Crosse encephalitis. Like Zika, the virus is spread by mosquitoes, and most cases occur in children. Dozens of patients came to the Charleston hospital where de los Reyes worked. Some presented with nothing more than a fever. Others arrived comatose, with terrified parents. “A day or two before, their child was fine,” de los Reyes said, “just running around in the woods.” Then the kid would struggle to wake up, have seizures, and become delirious before passing out. “We would give them anti-seizure medications and make sure they were ventilated,” de los Reyes said. “Most would do fine.” But some would not: They left the hospital with permanent neurological deficits.

De los Reyes decided to specialize in pediatric neurology, a field rife with harrowing conditions that degrade young brains. Many of those ailments are rare diseases, a legal designation that in the United States is generally reserved for illnesses afflicting fewer than 200,000 people. Nearly 7,000 maladies fall into the category. Most are complicated genetic conditions that pharmaceutical companies have never been inclined to gamble on. The industry prefers to focus its resources on widespread ailments with identifiable causes, an approach that requires less research investment and offers a larger stable of patients who will eventually pay for the pills, injections, and devices that companies invent. A U.S. law called the Orphan Drug Act, signed in 1983, offers tax breaks, subsidies, expedited approval, and exclusive manufacturing rights to companies that develop treatments for uncommon conditions. The law led to the creation of hundreds of new drugs in its first three decades on the books. Still, when de los Reyes entered pediatric neurology, 95 percent of rare diseases had no cure. Over the course of her career, that number would hardly budge.

When de los Reyes entered pediatric neurology, 95 percent of rare diseases had no cure. Over the course of her career, that number would hardly budge.

After finishing her residency and a fellowship, de los Reyes was recruited to work as a neurodevelopmental specialist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. It was there, in 2001, that she saw a case unlike anything she’d ever treated. The patient, referred by an ophthalmologist, was a nine-year-old girl who’d been born healthy but was now losing her eyesight. Her family was from Guam. They’d traveled more than 7,000 miles for the appointment at the Little Rock hospital, which through word of mouth they’d learned had excellent eye specialists.

De los Reyes examined the little girl, who had a chubby, tamarind-colored face and short black hair—not so different from her own appearance when she was a child in the Philippines. The parents described a bizarre constellation of symptoms on top of progressive blindness: speech delay, seizures, and difficult walking. Together with the ophthalmologist, de los Reyes began testing for various illnesses. The doctors ruled out macular dystrophy, a genetic condition that destroys cells in the retina, and keratomalacia, a chronic deficiency of vitamin A that causes blindness. Could it be a problem with the little girl’s brain, like a tumor? Imaging came back negative for suspicious masses.

Stumped, de los Reyes called her mentor, Paul Dyken, one of the country’s foremost experts in childhood brain disorders. She spelled out everything she’d learned and asked if he’d ever seen anything like it. “Oh Emily…,” Dyken replied with a heavy sigh before delivering the news.

The little girl had a condition so rare that most pediatricians hadn’t heard of it. But Dyken had. He’d treated several patients with, and coauthored scientific papers about, the disease. He was one of the few doctors in the world who could say “I see this all the time” about the condition, because afflicted families sought him out. If she was lucky, Dyken said, the girl would live to be 20. De los Reyes could help her die a slow, inevitable death as painlessly as possible—nothing more.

Chapter Three

Soon after the Beishes moved back into their home after the lightning strike, Conner was hospitalized twice for tonic-clonic seizures, marked by a loss of consciousness and violent limb contractions. Doctors diagnosed him with Doose syndrome, a form of childhood epilepsy that more often affects boys. “It was comforting to have an answer,” Hollie said. They told their worried families; everyone relaxed.

Conner had just turned four. As he headed into his second year of preschool, he took various combinations of anti-seizure medications as his doctors tried to find a cocktail that worked. Hollie and Jeff had never heard of the prescriptions, which had names like Keppra, Depakote, and Onfi. Sometimes Conner would scream when he couldn’t remember a word for something he’d once been able to name, which seemed to happen more and more often. His legs began trembling when he walked.

That fall, a blood panel came back with surprising results. Conner had two genetic markers indicating that he might be missing an essential enzyme called tripeptidyl-peptidase1 (TPP1). A second blood test would be necessary to confirm the discovery. If it came back positive, that meant Conner had a rare genetic disorder. “The doctor advised me not to look anything up on the internet,” Hollie said, “which of course I did as soon as I hung up.”

What she saw on her iPad was horrifying. Being born without TPP1 was a slow death sentence. There was no cure and no treatment. Hollie saw videos of kindergarten-age children in wheelchairs, unable to speak or control their limbs. She began to sob.

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    The Beishes at home in Denton, Maryland. Click right for more. (Photos: Shan Wallace)
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More blood was sent off to the lab, and for what felt like the millionth time, Hollie and Jeff waited for the results. As fall turned to winter, Conner stopped running around with his brother, and he could barely speak. “It was like he wanted to say things and would open his mouth, but nothing came out,” Hollie recalled. He developed tremors in both hands, like an elderly man with Parkinson’s. He had trouble feeding himself, taking longer to use a fork and struggling to bring the utensil to his mouth. Hollie had to hold his cup when he drank.

Grasping for any shred of comfort, the Beishes kept reading about TPP1 deficiencies and looking for differences between the doomed children who appeared on their computer screens and their own son. They realized that in each case they read about, the afflicted kid was blind. Conner’s vision was fine. It was something to hold on to.

That December was mild in Maryland. On days when snow fell, it melted as soon as it hit the pavement. Conner had to grasp one of his parent’s hands in order to walk. Otherwise he crawled. Hollie emailed the doctors and requested, if the news from the blood test was bad, that they not deliver it before Christmas. She wanted the holidays to be happy. As a gift for Conner, the Beishes adopted a golden Labrador retriever, whom they named Joy. Jeff hid the puppy in the garage until Christmas morning, when Hollie put reindeer antlers on Joy’s head for the big reveal. Conner shrieked with glee when he saw the puppy, then stroked her back as she lay curled up next to him on the floor. His parents imagined a similar scene repeating itself as Conner and Joy got bigger. “It would be his dog that he would grow up with,” Jeff said.  

When the doctors didn’t call after Christmas, Hollie thought they might have forgotten about Conner. Or maybe the news was good, so not a high priority. The Beishes didn’t nag, preferring instead to preserve a semblance of normalcy. “I wanted to know, but at the same time I didn’t want to know,” Hollie admitted.

Then, on January 19, 2017, she called to ask for an update. It turned out there had been an error: Someone had put Conner’s test results in the wrong part of his chart. A doctor would call with answers the next day, the Beishes were told, which happened to be the date of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. Jeff and Hollie had voted for Trump. “I didn’t like either candidate, but I picked the one whose policies lined up with me more,” Hollie explained. She and Jeff hoped that the ceremonies on TV would distract them while they waited for the call.

Hours passed. As the sun was setting, they turned off the inauguration feed. They sat side by side on the staircase in the foyer, Hollie’s iPhone clenched in her hand. Finally it rang.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t call earlier,” the doctor said. “But…” She paused before continuing. “The test results confirm things.” Conner was missing TPP1. “He has Batten disease,” the doctor said.

Hollie was standing on the steps, the phone to her ear. “OK,” she said weakly, the only word she could manage. Jeff was on the other side of the banister, unable to hear the doctor. He held his hands suspended in the air, palms up, in a gesture that seemed to plead, Tell me what’s happening.

Chapter Four

Frederick Eustace Batten, a British physician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was one of the founders of the field of pediatric neurology. A “brisk, lithe figure” with “bubbling humor,” according to one medical historian, Batten was “practical and purposeful,” and “children loved him.” In 1903, he published research on two young siblings suffering from the same undiagnosed condition, in which their brain function and eyesight deteriorated rapidly. The disease was given the name juvenile amaurotic idiocy, which endured in the medical lexicon until the 1970s.

Idiocy is no longer considered appropriate terminology, and Batten disease is now known by the name of the man who identified it. Still, Alfried Kohlschütter, a pediatrics researcher at the University of Hamburg and an authority on the condition, uses another controversial label. “I always say it’s a form of childhood dementia, though people don’t like me using that term,” he told me recently. Dissenters claim that it oversimplifies the condition and suggests a link to adult memory loss, which has different underlying causes. To Kohlschütter, though, the progression of the diseases is strikingly similar. “It’s like these children are melting in front of you,” he said.

Batten disease is a glitch in the body’s nervous system. Whenever the brain completes basic cellular and metabolic processes, its cells produce waste. Batten disease sufferers lack certain enzymes or proteins required to process this waste. As a result, brain cells are forced to store it internally. (See figure below.) Eventually, the cells become clogged and die. One parent of a child with Batten disease compared the condition to “your kitchen filling up with garbage” because no one ever takes it out, to the point that the room is no longer usable. Along the way, patients’ motor, verbal, and emotional capacities diminish.

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In the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health, between two and four of every 100,000 children are born with Batten disease. They can get it if both their parents are genetic carriers. There are 14 subtypes of the disease, each affecting a different gene, involving a different deficiency, and decreeing a different life span. Conner was diagnosed with subtype CLN2, distinguished by the absence of TPP1. Symptoms initially appear around the age of two; a speech delay is often the first noticeable sign of disease. After that come seizures, language regression, motor dysfunction, and blindness. Patients die between the ages of eight and twelve.

The first Batten disease case that de los Reyes saw was the little girl from Guam. Her subtype was CLN3, indicated by a protein missing from cellular membranes. Her family was stoic when de los Reyes delivered the diagnosis. By then she had young children of her own. Explaining a fatal illness to parents who’d come thousands of miles to Little Rock, armed with faith in doctors’ abilities to help their daughter, “was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” de los Reyes recalled.

The family flew home a few days later. De los Reyes communicated with the girl’s local doctors for about two years. But eventually the calls from Guam stopped. “We lost touch,” de los Reyes said. “I have no idea how long the girl lived.”

Like her mentor, de los Reyes fashioned herself into one of the world’s few experts in Batten disease. She diagnosed several more cases in Arkansas before being recruited to Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. As the head of the neurodevelopmental department, she took on the project of turning Nationwide into a hub of Batten disease research and patient care. Families traveled from around the world for appointments with her.

De los Reyes was proud of her work, but the script she was forced to recite to parents was excruciating: There is no cure. Your child will die. People reacted in different ways. Some turned numb and silent, like the parents from Guam, dumbstruck by the futility of feeling or doing anything else. Others put the blame on de los Reyes, because she was the messenger of the devastating news. Or they lashed out at loved ones, their disappointment channeled into anger.

De los Reyes advised parents to spend as much time as they could with their sick kids. She promised to support them while they did, with medication, physical therapy, and walking aids. “I can’t tell you how many funerals I’ve been to,” she said in the Starbucks, her gaze shifting to the floor. She hoped that things would be different one day.

Science is almost never done in a vacuum. Given Big Pharma’s historical indifference to rare-disease research, finding a treatment or cure almost always requires a scrappy army of academic researchers, patient advocates, and bold financiers. Collectively they must be willing to endure years of painstaking, costly investigation and the litany of failures that typically precede even marginal gains. The quest to unravel Batten disease was no exception.

While de los Reyes was delivering tough news in Little Rock and Columbus, Peter Lobel and David Sleat were hard at work in a lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey. During the late 1990s, the scientists isolated TPP1 and demonstrated its role in processing cellular waste, a breakthrough in knowledge of CLN2. Their research led to a new hypothesis: If children with CLN2 are sick because they’re missing TPP1, they should get better when given the enzyme. The proposition was straightforward enough, but testing it wasn’t.

Lobel and Sleat’s first step was replicating CLN2 in mice, so that the animals could be used as experiment subjects. “This part was really, really hard,” Sleat told me in a mildly accented voice, a remnant of his native England, which he left 30 years ago to work in the United States. It took about two years to genetically engineer the TPP1-deficient stem cells needed to produce a mouse that showed signs of Batten disease at around seven weeks old. “You could pick them up and feel them shaking,” Sleat said. “As they got older, the shaking got worse, and they would have difficulty walking, dying at around four months.” (Healthy lab mice live two or three years.)

Given Big Pharma’s historical indifference to rare-disease research, finding a treatment or cure almost always requires a scrappy army of academic researchers, patient advocates, and bold financiers.

The next phase of research involved administering lab-made TPP1 to the mice through the spine. Remarkably, at just a fraction of normal TPP1 levels, young mice didn’t develop signs of Batten disease. Older subjects with severe symptoms experienced only mild gains. Early treatment, the research confirmed, was crucial.

Other labs around the world began using mice that had been genetically altered using Sleat and Lobel’s method. Some researchers experimented with cerebral shunts, which worked at least as well as the spinal route in terms of reducing seizures and cellular waste. But inserting a device into the brain left severe scarring, and the subjects died within a few months.

Meanwhile, at the University of Missouri, ophthalmology professor Martin Katz was studying dogs’ brains for clues to help solve neurodevelopmental problems in humans. In 2005, a man in Pennsylvania had grown worried about his longhaired dachshund, Frodo, who at a few months old had started having seizures, then ceased walking and eating on his own. His owner took him to several vets, none of whom had any idea what was wrong. When Frodo died at just one year old, the owner offered his body to the veterinary lab at the University of Pennsylvania, which packed it in ice and sent it to Katz, widely known for his research.

Katz was intrigued. He extracted tissue samples from Frodo’s brain and examined them under a microscope. He compared the samples to research texts, which led to a surprising match: Cellular waste that had accumulated in Frodo’s brain was essentially identical to that found in autopsies of human subjects who’d died of CLN2. Both had a distinctive curvilinear pattern. “If you imagine a bowl of alphabet soup with all C’s and very little liquid, that’s what it looked like,” Katz told me.

Unlike the Rutgers mice, Frodo was a natural subject for Batten disease research. If there were more dogs like him, they could be used to test treatments. Katz quickly traced him to a breeder, to whom he explained that Frodo’s parents could produce puppies that might help sick children get better. The breeder agreed to let Katz adopt the two adult dachshunds, Captain and Autumn. “Captain and Autumn were very attached to each other,” said Katz, who has a soft voice and a head of thick, wavy chestnut hair, not unlike the coat of some dachshunds. “It was nice to have them around.” Both dogs were perfectly healthy; the genetic mutation that causes CLN2 was recessive in their DNA. They produced several litters in Katz’s lab, each bearing a few puppies with Batten disease.

Here an unusual player in rare-disease research entered the scene. BioMarin is a Northern California pharmaceutical company that develops treatments for uncommon genetic disorders. Founded in 1997, it has a risky business model: Pour money into research for orphan drugs, then profit from large price margins and limited competition. Relying on a handful of willing investors and the provisions of the Orphan Drug Act, the company’s path has been anything but smooth. After posting disappointing revenues, BioMarin laid off a third of its staff in 2005, the same year its second rare-disease drug went to market. That proved to be a turning point: Within a few years, the company’s first two proprietary treatments would reap more than $500 million annually through licensing and medical coverage of just a few thousand patients. By 2017, the company would finally reach the edge of profitability.

Around 2009, building on Lobel and Sleat’s research at Rutgers, BioMarin began producing purified TPP1 in vats. When it heard about Katz’s dachshunds, the company suggested collaborating on trials to determine how enzyme injections affected dogs. Katz agreed, and together they launched a pilot study. Three dogs with CLN2 received injections at the base of the spine, a procedure that lasted a few minutes. After only the second round of treatment, they mounted an allergic response. After the third, they went into anaphylactic shock. Ultimately, they were euthanized.

Rather than declare failure, Katz brainstormed new approaches. “I always tell my students that it wouldn’t be called research if it worked out all the time,” he explained. His team spaced out the injections and tried administering the enzyme to the dogs’ brains through the cranium, even though complications with that approach had previously killed lab mice. Finally, Katz hit on a method that worked. Two puppies named Waylon and Lulu had shunts surgically inserted into their brains. (A pathologist would later find no scarring as a result of the procedure.) Compared with injections, the shunts gave researchers more control over the rate at which TPP1 entered the dogs’ bodies—and slower delivery minimized the risk of allergic reaction.

Waylon and Lulu received infusions every other week for a few hours at a time, then were observed alongside sick subjects that weren’t given treatments. For a couple of months, Waylon and Lulu behaved like healthy dogs. They were attentive and playful with the scientists, they didn’t wobble when they walked, and they didn’t have seizures. When Batten disease symptoms finally appeared, they progressed slowly. Ultimately, Waylon and Lulu lived 50 percent longer than the dogs that didn’t receive TPP1 infusions.

A BioMarin researcher presented the study’s results in the summer of 2012, at a meeting in Charlotte hosted by the Batten Disease Support and Research Association, a network for families affected by the condition. De los Reyes, who by then sat on the BDSRA’s medical advisory board, perched in a chair at a table in the dimly lit room, absorbing Katz’s PowerPoint presentation. Katz ended the slideshow with split-screen video footage. On one side, Waylon and Lulu were running; on the other, two dogs of the same age struggled to walk.

“The whole room gasped,” de los Reyes said. No one had ever seen anything like it. Accustomed to brutal disappointment when it came to Batten disease, de los Reyes initially considered Katz’s findings too good to be true. When her skepticism subsided, however, her thoughts turned to the obvious question: When can we give this to kids?

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Conner resting on the living room floor. (Photo: Shan Wallace) 

Chapter Five

Standing on the stairs, Hollie could barely hear what the doctor on the phone said next about Conner’s diagnosis. Shock had quickly morphed into anger. First it had been febrile seizures, then Doose syndrome, now Batten disease. Why had it taken so long—nearly 16 months since Conner’s first seizure, even more since the onset of his speech delay—to get the right answer?

“We’d like for you to come into the office to discuss it further, and moving forward we’d like…”

“That’s OK,” Hollie interrupted the physician. “I’m not interested. I’d like to find a new doctor.” She demanded that Conner’s medical records be sent to their house. Then she hung up and told Jeff everything. Together they cried at the bottom of the stairs.

The next day, Hollie found herself strangely invigorated. “I felt a weight had lifted. All of our questions and the wondering were just gone,” she said. “Now it became, What can we do to help Conner?” The clock was ticking. The longer it took the Beishes to find their son the right care, the more muted his short life would be. And maybe—just maybe—there was something out there that might save him: a medicine, or a miracle.

The Beishes read about various hospitals and specialists. “It was time to find a doctor who knew what this disease was,” Hollie said, “someone who could give us answers.” She kept careful notes about everything she learned. The Beishes told their families, who began doing research, too. Jeff’s mother read about the BDSRA and called its director. “Please speak with my daughter-in-law,” she begged.

The director phoned Hollie soon after. “You should give Dr. Emily at Nationwide a call,” she said, referring to de los Reyes. “She’s the Batten disease guru.” Not only that, but Nationwide had a clinical trial under way that Conner might be able to enroll in.

Delivering an enzyme directly to a child’s delicate brain had never been done before, and it was a scary prospect. “The knowledge translation is difficult,” de los Reyes said. “We know mice are not men.” Nor are dachshunds. BioMarin tested the infusion method on monkeys, which are genetically more akin to humans, to screen for complications and determine the safest dosage level (300 milligrams every two weeks). Then, in 2013, the company launched human trials of the treatment, cerliponase alfa, which it gave the trade name Brineura.

Twenty-one children were enrolled to receive infusions at one of three participating hospitals in Italy, Germany, and England. BioMarin also wanted a small research cohort in America. Nationwide was a natural fit, and de los Reyes was adamant that the hospital participate. “I’m an impatient person,” she told me with a smile, the same one I’d seen when she talked about her time as a student protester in Manila. The hospital’s ethics board and research coordinators were concerned that the treatment might expose children to infection or cause injury. “Even with rare diseases where children are dying, we don’t want to hasten their death,” de los Reyes explained.

She had a plan: De los Reyes invited the hospital’s decision-makers to her clinic to meet children with Batten disease. Some of the top brass had never seen an afflicted patient; they’d only read about what the illness did to young bodies. By the end of the tour, one of the research directors was crying. “Emily, we want to help,” she said. “Let’s do this.” Need was weighed against risk, and Nationwide’s participation in the trial was approved.

Due to funding limits and the trial’s protocol, which capped the number of participants at 24, only three children could be enrolled at the Ohio site. They came from various locations, referred by physicians in their home states. The plan was for them to fly into Columbus every other week for treatment. “They had no alternative,” de los Reyes said. “The alternative for them was death.” One by one, starting in December 2014, the participants had catheters and ports inserted into their skulls by neurosurgeons at Nationwide. No infections or injuries occurred. After that, de los Reyes used the surgical implants to administer the enzyme infusions. (See figure below.)

Weeks passed, then months. None of the three children got sicker. They maintained their motor skills or even made gains. Some saw their speech improve. “They didn’t go from single words to sentences, but they were acquiring new words, which is so important,” de los Reyes said. “They could tell their family what they wanted.” Juice, snacks, a hug.

The first trial results weren’t released until March 2016. By then de los Reyes was bursting with excitement over what she knew: On average, participants’ clinical decline was 80 percent slower than expected during the first 48 weeks of treatment. In nearly two-thirds of cases, the disease stabilized. The most common side effects—hypersensitivity, fever, vomiting—were generally tolerated. Batten disease effectively had been halted in its tracks. That the stalling had happened so quickly was all the more remarkable.

News of the clinical trial’s early results spread quickly through the tightly knit community of families coping with Batten disease. It reached the Beishes, through the BDSRA director, in late January 2017. Hollie immediately called de los Reyes and left a message. Her request was simple: She wanted Conner in the trial.

When de los Reyes called Hollie back, she offered to evaluate Conner as soon as the Beishes could get him from Maryland to Ohio. While she could talk to them about Brineura, however, the trial was limited to its original participants. De los Reyes hoped the treatment might be available to more children soon.

Hollie looked at her son. He seemed both too young and too old, his mind and body slipping away before they could really develop. How could anyone deny him help? “I thought maybe if the doctor met us and Conner, she might get us into the trial faster,” Hollie told me—an idea similar to the one that de los Reyes had acted on to convince Nationwide to study Brineura.

Hollie made an appointment for March 13. That day friends and family in Denton wore T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Fighting for Conner.” Jaxon had one, too; he wore it to school while Hollie, Jeff, and Conner piled into the family’s SUV. It was an eight-hour drive through snow and slush to Columbus.

The Beishes had never explained Conner’s condition to him. He was too young to understand. All he knew as his parents led him into the huge glass building that is Nationwide Hospital was that he was going to see another doctor. In the exam room, he sat on a narrow green table, a sippy cup in one hand. When de los Reyes came in, Hollie was struck by how tiny she was—scarcely five feet tall.

“Hi, Conner,” de los Reyes said. “You’re holding that cup very well!”

She was soon joined by several specialists: an occupational therapist, two physiotherapists, and a speech pathologist. They examined Conner, watching him take a few assisted steps and listening to his strained speech. They peppered Hollie with questions about his medical history. The entire process took more than four hours, much longer than the Beishes had expected.

When the examination ended, de los Reyes repeated what she’d said on the phone: The trial was closed. Hollie’s heart sank. De los Reyes explained that the Beishes would have to wait for the treatment to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Then Brineura would be available commercially. The doctor was hopeful that that would happen soon, but there were no guarantees.

Normally, drug approval moves at a sluggish bureaucratic pace. But in 2016, BioMarin had filed for a rapid assessment of Brineura. On one hand, the enzyme-replacement study had a small number of participants and a limited time frame. No one had any idea how TPP1 infusions would affect a child two or five or ten years into treatment. The FDA was tasked with avoiding a nightmare scenario in which a drug is approved too early and adverse side effects appear down the road, requiring a recall and possibly leading to lawsuits. On the other hand, the FDA might agree to fast-track Brineura, given that it targeted a fatal disease and had positive early results. The BDSRA was pushing hard for that to happen, providing the agency with families’ testimonials. Some of them had children who would never benefit from Brineura—kids who’d already died or were nearing the age when they would. Still, their parents felt compelled to speak up.

The FDA would weigh all these factors in its ruling, de los Reyes told the Beishes. “It’s a horrible feeling having to ask a family to wait,” she told me. “They know their child is dying, and I’m sitting there saying, ‘I don’t have access to the medicine.’” In the meantime, she prescribed Conner leg braces, a gait trainer, and adjustments to his seizure medications. The Beishes went home to wait and hope for good news—yet again.

“It’s a horrible feeling having to ask a family to wait. They know their child is dying, and I’m sitting there saying, ‘I don’t have access to the medicine.’”

Hollie kept de los Reyes updated on Conner’s condition. She shot videos on her phone, including one recorded in April at a party themed around the Star Wars movies, some of Conner’s favorites, thrown by the Make-A-Wish Foundation at his school, where he’d been able to return since the appointment in Columbus. Flanked by volunteers dressed as stormtroopers and Darth Vader, Conner stood in the frame of his customized walker, equipped with a saddle that held him upright. He was able to move haltingly, with a plastic red light saber in one hand. Jeff wore a black shirt that read, “I am your father.”  

But happy moments were sporadic. Conner struggled to react emotionally to external stimuli like smiles and friends saying his name. Before long he would lose one of the last words his brain had managed to hold on to. “We had this routine where, when I picked him up from school, he would say, ‘Me! Me! Me!’” Hollie explained. As his disease worsened, he had stopped repeating his word for her so many times. Then he got to the point where he would chirp it only once. Finally, in the spring of 2017, he stopped entirely.

“I picked him up, and he smiled. But he didn’t say ‘Me.’ He was just silent,” Hollie recalled. “He never said it again.”

Chapter Six

On the morning of April 27, Hollie was in her car, getting ready to pull out of the parking lot of a deli in Denton, when her phone rang. It was de los Reyes. “I have some really good news,” the doctor said. “Brineura was just granted approval.”

It was the first time the FDA had given its blessing to any sort of Batten disease care. The rapid decision was based largely on trial data showing improved ambulation—that is, kids with CLN2 who received Brineura were able to walk better. The agency said that it couldn’t make a call on how the treatment affected children’s emotional or verbal development. But the motor-skills gains, coupled with minimal side effects, was enough. If the Beishes wanted, de los Reyes said, she could treat Conner in Columbus, following the same protocol as her earlier trial participants: surgery, then infusions every two weeks. He would be part of an expanded research cohort, monitored for long-term safety implications.

“Tell us when we need to be there and we’ll be there,” Hollie replied.  

Then she called Jeff, who was driving a tractor-trailer and didn’t immediately pick up. When he noticed several urgent notifications on his screen, he pulled over and called his wife back. “I cried my eyes out,” Jeff recalled. “You have no hope. Then you get the call.”

That night, sitting at their kitchen island, the Beishes plotted a plan of action. Money wouldn’t be an issue, they hoped. As part of the trial, Conner would be eligible for 90 days of Brineura infusions, after which Jeff’s insurance would be responsible for coverage. (According to BioMarin, the wholesale cost of a single Brineura infusion comes to $27,000.) Then there were the logistics: driving to Ohio every other week, for instance, because flying was too expensive. But what if they got in a car accident? “My mind went into overdrive,” Hollie said. “Anything could happen.” After airing out every worry they could think of, they contacted de los Reyes and scheduled Conner’s surgery for May 22.

In Columbus, the Beishes stayed at the Ronald McDonald House, a fixture at most children’s hospitals that offers families of sick kids free or low-cost lodging. The morning of the procedure, Hollie reassured Conner, who seemed scared of going into a big, cold room without his parents, even though he couldn’t say so. “You’re going to go to sleep, and when you wake up, you’ll see us,” Hollie said, giving her son a kiss. “Everything will be OK.”

A surgeon used a blue permanent marker to make a cross on the right side of Conner’s forehead, just above the hairline. Conner didn’t feel the marker; he was already under anesthesia. Around the cross, the surgeon clipped away the little boy’s soft, caramel-colored hair, then used a scalpel to make a shallow, crescent-shaped slice through the first layer of skin. Next came antiseptic, followed by a local anesthetic, and the surgeon made a second, deeper cut—this one through muscle. There was a lot of blood. The scalp is incredibly vascular; arteries, veins, and arterioles crisscross it like spiderwebs. The surgeon called for suction.

Once the blood was cleared away, the surgeon saw bone. He drilled through it, then penetrated the dura, the thin gray layer of tissue that envelops the brain. An errant cut could prove fatal. The surgeon double-checked anatomical landmarks, making sure he was in the right place. Then he picked up the device he would insert into Conner’s brain.

It was shorter than a No. 2 pencil and looked like a spindly mushroom, with a small ivory-colored dome made of plastic attached to a thin tube containing a catheter. The surgeon guided the tube into Conner’s brain, threading it like a needle until it neared his third ventricle, the midline cavity that sits between the brain’s hemispheres. At that point, the plastic dome was flush with Conner’s skull. This was the port where TPP1 would be injected every other week. From there the enzyme would flow through the catheter and soak Conner’s brain.

When the procedure was done, a doctor stitched Conner’s scalp back together. Slowly, the little boy was brought out of anesthesia. Hollie and Jeff were allowed to see him. “Hi, buddy,” Jeff said softly at his bedside. Then the Beishes climbed up on either side of their son, where they stayed while he slept. Jeff stroked Conner’s head carefully, so as not to disturb the incision. In the coming weeks, hair would grow back over the surgical site.

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Conner at an infusion appointment. (Photo: Courtesy Beish family)

Conner was discharged three days later and went home to Denton. After less than two weeks of rest, during which a fever sparked fears of infection—it turned out to be a stomach bug—Hollie bundled him back into the car to ferry him to Columbus for his first infusion. Her father, Bruce, went with them. Jeff stayed behind to throw Jaxon his eighth birthday party. As ever, the Beishes tried to keep their lives normal.

The infusion was supposed to take three and a half hours, followed by a 45-minute saline flush to minimize risk of infection. When the medical staff attempted to access the reservoir in Conner’s scalp with a needle, there was still swelling from the surgery. The little boy began to cry. Finally, they got a needle into the port, then wrapped his head in gauze to hold everything in place. TPP1 began to flow through an IV drip. Conner settled down, intermittently napping and watching movies. First it was Frozen, then Moana. His legs were covered with his favorite Star Wars blanket. Occasionally, he sipped a vanilla-flavored nutrition drink.

Two weeks later he did it again. And again two weeks after that. Conner tolerated the long trips and infusions well, but nothing about his health seemed to improve: His mobility, his speech, and his emotional intelligence stayed the same. “It was frustrating and hard,” Hollie said. “I had to tell myself to keep going.” De los Reyes explained that the enzyme could take a while to have an effect. If it were the garbage truck pulling up to the metaphorical kitchen overflowing with trash, it would need to haul out a couple of loads before the space became usable again. Or it might not work at all. Failure was always a possibility.

It became part of Conner’s routine at every infusion to watch The Lorax, the movie based on the beloved Dr. Seuss story of the same name. The plot is a fable about the dangers of environmental destruction and humans’ responsibility to prevent it. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,” the main character says at one point, “nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” In de los Reyes’s clinic, it was a familiar mantra.

Around his fifth birthday, in August 2017, Conner was in a Maryland doctor’s office with Hollie and Jaxon. He’d been through about half a dozen infusions by then. The doctor he was seeing would be adjusting the prosthetics in his shoes, which helped him maneuver better with his walker.

The doctor was running behind schedule, so Hollie pulled out a book and began reading Conner a story. She pointed at various objects on the pages, naming them slowly. The method was supposed to help Conner gain words, but that hadn’t happened in almost two years. Hollie did it anyway.

On one page was a star, a word Conner had once been able to say but had lost. Hollie placed her finger on the yellow symbol and named it. She was about to move on when Conner raised his right hand and placed his own index finger on the page. There was a long pause. Then Conner spoke.

“Star,” he repeated.

Chapter Seven

The Beishes’ home is located in a quiet residential neighborhood in Denton. When I visited in October 2017, two pumpkins sat on the stoop, waiting to be carved, and the windows on either side of the front door were adorned with ghost and haunted-house decals. A wreath made of orange and red leaves hung on the door. “We’re all set for Halloween,” Hollie acknowledged with a smile when she greeted me.

She wore a sweater and sweatpants, with her hair pulled into a bun. We’d met once before, at an infusion appointment in Columbus, right after Conner started saying words again. Since then he’d made more progress. Hollie was eager to show me what he could do.

We settled onto a sofa in the living room. Nearby, above the doorway to the kitchen, I noticed a decorative sign that read, “Family… where life begins and love never ends.” Joy, the now huge golden Lab, lay across my lap. Conner was on the floor playing. At one point, he crawled across the room and hoisted himself up to stroke Joy, making eye contact with me before tumbling back down. He was more responsive, more interactive, and more deliberate than I remembered. At one point, after finishing a smoothie, he gestured to the flatscreen TV mounted on the wall. He wanted to watch cartoons.

In the coming weeks, Conner would learn to feed himself—yogurt was his first solo snack—and say “Bee,” his name for his grandmother. He would regain “choo-choo,” his word for train, when Hollie showed him a treasured family Christmas ornament in the shape of a locomotive. Then came “Da,” for Jeff. And the Beishes would soon stop traveling to Columbus every other week. A hospital in Washington, D.C., began offering Brineura treatments, so Conner could get his infusions there. Hollie said she would miss seeing de los Reyes, but staying close to home would be a relief.

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    The Beishes shopping at a mall in December 2017. Click right for more. (Photos: Shan Wallace)

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The Beishes had found themselves on a lifeboat, along with the handful of other U.S. families with kids who’d started Brineura infusions. They didn’t know how long they could bob in the ocean—maybe forever, more likely not. No one had ever survived Batten disease. The Beishes would need to be cautiously optimistic. They shared stories with other families in their position and tried to think like scientists: incrementally, with judicious notions of progress. “I’ve heard of kids who can now walk 30 steps and kids that couldn’t sit up who can now sit up,” Hollie told me.

In our conversations, de los Reyes had described Brineura as “a treatment until we find a cure.” She told me that she was starting an extension study of the trial to examine the long-term safety and effectiveness of Brineura in children under three. The goal was to determine whether toddlers could be treated before they ever showed symptoms of CLN2. At Rush University in Chicago, researchers have been investigating therapies that could treat TPP1 deficiencies with pills already approved for addressing other medical conditions. For its part, BioMarin is hedging bets by scaling up production of Brineura. It’s also considering the treatment as a model for other direct-to-brain care, which could lead to breakthroughs for patients suffering from other rare neurological diseases.

There may be political hurdles. Congressional Republicans recently slashed the orphan-drug tax credit in half as part of the tax-reform package supported by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, legislators failed to renew the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which expands and supplements Medicaid for some nine million kids whose families otherwise don’t qualify. After short-term funding—a bandage, basically—for the program expires in March 2018, Batten disease experts worry that the CHIP lapse could hurt some families that need Brineura.

When I was in Denton, Hollie told me that her views on health care had changed drastically since her son’s diagnosis. “I used to think Obamacare should just be repealed, but there are things that come from Obamacare, like no lifetime maximum for insurance companies, that make a difference,” she said. “I wish [legislators] could see children like Conner and the impact these policies could have.” (As it happened, Conner would visit the White House in December 2017, as part of a holiday event for sick local children. Trump was in Florida playing golf at the time.)

Hollie said that she’d been using her trusty iPad less lately, resisting the urge to read about new data and prognoses for kids like Conner. She knew that uncertainty about his future was more terrifying than his current reality. She wanted to stay in the now. But sitting on the couch, she grabbed the device to show me some old home videos. There was Conner at age two running around the backyard, at three eating a cupcake and giggling as Jeff teased him. There he was at four hugging Jaxon. Then Hollie showed me a video from June 2016, when Conner was having seizures almost every day. When it was shot, he seemed to be doing well and was playing outside. “This was just before the lightning hit,” Hollie said.

I noticed just how much of the living room was new: the walls, the curtains, the TV on which cartoons were playing. Hollie, smiling with nostalgia, was already moving on to another video of Conner in a diaper. Then she looked up for a moment. “You know, sometimes, when the air-conditioning is on,” she told me, “it will blow, and for a few minutes the room will smell like a campfire.”

The Obsidian Serpent

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The Obsidian Serpent

A homeless father, a Marine’s death, and the making of a serial killer.

By León Krauze

The Atavist Magazine, No. 73


León Krauze is an author and journalist based in Los Angeles. He has written for The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair for Journalism at the University of Southern California. He is also a news anchor for Univision.

Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Tekendra Parmar
Images: Associated Press

Acknowledgements: This story was produced with support from the Ford Foundation as part of a project on migrants and migration policy run by the journalism program and international-studies division at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City. Project coordination was provided by Carlos Bravo Regidor, research assistance by Lauren Eades and Irving Huerta.

Published in November 2017. Design updated in 2021.

1.

Around 9 p.m. on the chilly night of December 20, 2011, outside a strip mall in Placentia, California, James McGillivray lay down to go to sleep. Fifty-three years old, with a furrowed face, a graying beard, and disheveled, thinning hair, McGillivray was a familiar presence in the homeless community that lived along the Santa Ana River south of Los Angeles. That evening he’d been seen wandering around a liquor store. Now he settled onto a blanket spread out on a patch of sidewalk behind one of the mall’s exterior pillars, beneath the glimmer of fluorescent lamps. It was the last light McGillivray would ever see.

A wiry figure dressed in a dark hooded sweatshirt and gloves stood in the shadows of a nearby alleyway, watching and waiting. When McGillivray dozed off, the figure pounced. He pinned the homeless man down with a knee to the chest and unleashed a shocking barrage of violence. In the span of two minutes, he stabbed McGillivray 52 times in the upper torso and head. The assailant started out using one hand, then expertly passed the blade, a heavy-gauge Ka-Bar knife capable of piercing bone, to the other. Finally, he grasped the weapon with both hands and pounded away at his victim. After desperately flailing his arms and legs, McGillivray died within the first 40 seconds of the attack. The brutal murder was captured on grainy video by one of the shopping center’s surveillance cameras.

A week later it happened again, this time underneath an overpass in Anaheim, about five miles southwest of Placentia. The victim was Lloyd Middaugh, 42, a registered sex offender. Unable to find a job or a home, he lived in local shelters. On the evening of December 27, he called his mother, upset, she would later say, that he couldn’t secure a bed anywhere for the night. Then Middaugh, who was six-foot-four and weighed more than 300 pounds, roosted under the 91 freeway and read a book until he fell asleep.

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When the killer approached, he paced around Middaugh, assessing the man’s enormous size. At the sound of footsteps, Middaugh awoke and stood up. The killer attacked from behind, stabbing his victim’s neck as Middaugh frantically tried to protect himself and pleaded for his life. When the confrontation ended, a full five minutes later, Middaugh was dead. He’d been stabbed 60 times, several of his ribs were broken, his neck and head were battered, and he had a gash on his right hand. An autopsy would show that the killer’s blade had sliced Middaugh’s thyroid gland and fractured his right temporal bone before penetrating his brain.

In hindsight it became obvious that the murders were linked. At the time, though, the idea was a hard sell among law-enforcement officials. Homeless people were frequent targets of random violence. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, between 1999 and 2010 there had been nearly 1,200 attacks nationwide, with California seeing the largest share (225) of any state. Still, Anaheim detective Daron Wyatt, a serious man with a thick mustache who spoke in a confident staccato, had a hunch that the back-to-back killings weren’t coincidental. The same kind of knife had been used in both murders, which were uncommonly vicious. What if McGillivray and Middaugh had died at the hands of one man at the start of a spree?

Wyatt approached his department’s top brass and laid out the case for why he thought the deaths were calculated—and why there might be more. His boss “kind of laughed at me,” Wyatt recalled, “because we hadn’t had a serial killer in Orange County in over 25 years.”

2.

A few miles from the crime scenes, in the city of Fullerton, Refugio Ocampo lived in the cab of a broken-down truck with smashed headlights. A tall, slender man with the dignified air of the history teacher he’d once been, Refugio was homeless but refused to look unkempt. He wore clean white shirts that peeked out from beneath a blue all-weather jacket and kept his gaunt face impeccably shaved beneath a bowl of dark hair. He heard about the murders through the transient community’s grapevine: a network of people who sought shelter in the same nooks, under the same overhangs, in the same makeshift encampments. Refugio assumed that the over-the-top story of a madman with a knife had been made up, or at least exaggerated. It wasn’t until his eldest son showed him press clippings about the murders that he believed the sensational rumors.

Refugio was no stranger to violence. Where he came from, he often said, it didn’t take much for people to kill each other. He was born on July 4, 1962, in Zacapoxtepec, a town of a few hundred people in the state of Guerrero, historically one of Mexico’s most violent regions. Refugio’s first childhood memory was of a funeral procession. When he was six, his mother brought him to a window of their home to watch men walking in the street bearing a large box. Refugio asked what it all meant. A whole family had been murdered, she told him, and a grandfather and his young grandson were inside the box, about to be buried together.

Refugio wanted a better life, and a safer one. In 1987, he married a woman named Lilia. They lived in greater Mexico City, where he taught history in a public school. “I had eight brothers, so my mother raised me as if I were a boy,” Lilia said in a recent conversation. “Refugio showed me how to cook, how to clean. He taught me everything.” In March 1988, the couple welcomed their first child, Itzcoatl. Refugio chose the name, an homage to the Aztec war hero and tlatoani (“great ruler”) who launched an imperial expansion by allying with two other indigenous nations in the early 15th century. Four months after Itzcoatl’s birth, Refugio immigrated illegally to California, seeking what so many people do in coming to America: opportunity and stability. He caught up with a cousin who was already in Orange County and found work as a dishwasher. He never resented his dramatic occupational shift. On the contrary, he felt liberated. He wanted to earn his pay through labor.

Lilia joined him two months later. She crossed the border with a group of men in the early hours of a cold, dark morning. Lilia carried Itzcoatl in her arms, handing him off to another traveler when she had to jump a fence to reach the United States. “That’s the only moment I let them take my boy away from me,” she remembered.

Refugio found a new job in a plastics factory. He practiced English and read up on American history in his free time. Lilia faced a steeper learning curve. She relied on friends and family to care for Itzcoatl while she studied English, but she never mastered it. Six years later, Lilia gave birth to a second son, Mixcoatl, named after the Aztec god of the hunt. Half a decade on, a daughter named Citlaly (“star” in Nahuatl, one of Mexico’s indigenous languages) completed the family. On her right shoulder, Lilia got a tattoo of a triangle with her children’s names sketched in cursive, one on each side.

The Ocampos encouraged cultural assimilation. Itzcoatl was known as Izzy to his friends, Mixcoatl as Mix. (Citlaly had to settle for the less colloquial Citla.) Refugio purchased a letter attesting that he had worked in the fields of Southern California, which afforded him permanent residency under a federal stipulation offering certain types of workers a path to legalization. He bought a small house and, after earning a job promotion, upgraded to a larger one. Itzcoatl, a funny, independent boy, eventually became a citizen.

The Ocampos’ lives coasted along until the recession in the late aughts, when Refugio was fired and couldn’t get back on his feet. According to family members he fell prey to drugs, developing an addiction to methamphetamines that made him volatile and untrustworthy. “He stopped taking adequate care of himself and his kids,” Lilia said. Refugio couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage on his family’s house and was evicted. While he lived on the streets, his wife, Mixcoatl, and Citlaly moved in with Lilia’s brothers, one of whom wanted nothing to do with Refugio. Still, Lilia stood by her struggling husband, bringing him food and clothes at homeless camps and, later, at the abandoned rig.

Itzcoatl was in Iraq when his family began to splinter. He’d joined the Marines straight out of high school in 2006, one of 4,889 Hispanics who enlisted that year. By the winter of 2011, he was back living with his mother. He worried about Refugio and visited him often at the rig, where they talked about life before war, addiction, and other hardships. When Itzcoatl showed Refugio articles about the recent murders of homeless men, he implored his father to keep his guard up.

Itzcoatl was shy and bespectacled. Adjusting to civilian life had proved difficult. He passed the time drinking with old friends. Among them was Eder Herrera, who would later wind up behind bars, accused of killing his own mother and brother in a fit of domestic violence. Itzcoatl struggled to hold down a job. Yet with the holiday season in full swing, he donated what cash, toys, and food he could to the needy. Sometimes he drove as far as Van Nuys or Santa Monica, about 45 miles north, to drop off supplies with organizations.

Refugio thought his son generous. But he also noticed that the 23-year-old had a drinking problem—the sort of thing that if he wasn’t careful could land him on the streets, vulnerable like his father, the people for whom he collected donations, and the two men who’d been knifed to death.

3.

Quick to laugh, with a gap-toothed smile, long wavy hair, and an overgrown goatee, Paulus Cornelius Smit had battled drug addiction and drifted in and out of homelessness for several years. Through much of 2011, the 57-year-old shared a dilapidated home with his girlfriend, but when authorities red-tagged the house, indicating that it was uninhabitable, Smit suddenly had no place to live. There were brief reprieves: He spent Christmas, for instance, with Julia Smit-Lozano, the eldest of three daughters from a previous relationship, who had recently escaped homelessness herself.

Smit traveled on a bicycle, perhaps his most prized possession, and he often passed his days at Yorba Linda’s quiet public library, a faded pink building at a busy intersection off Orange County’s Imperial Highway. On the afternoon of December 30, while at the library, he realized that his bike had been stolen. Instead of venturing away on foot, Smit phoned his youngest daughter to ask for a ride. “She was unable to pick him up,” Julia Smit-Lozano recalled, “and by the time I was off work and ready to pick him up, it was too late.” The missing bicycle was a ploy. Someone had taken it to prevent Smit from going anywhere—someone who’d been watching him for hours, maybe days, and seeking the perfect moment to strike.

Smit walked out of the library, went around back, and sat down in an obscured spot near the bottom of a stairwell to wait for his daughter. That’s where the killer attacked, armed with the thick Ka-Bar. He stabbed Smit 56 times in the back, head, and neck, fracturing his ribcage, slashing his heart, and severing his jugular vein. The man whom his daughters called “Papa” died before 5 p.m., while the library was open. If Smit screamed, no one heard him.

After the third murder, detective Wyatt’s hunch was verifiable fact: Orange County had a serial killer, targeting a population that was difficult to protect from harm under even the best of circumstances. And the criminal was growing more brazen.

After the third murder, detective Wyatt’s hunch was verifiable fact: Orange County had a serial killer targeting a population that was difficult to protect from harm under even the best of circumstances. 

By the beginning of 2012, three municipal police departments—in Anaheim, Placentia, and Brea—along with the Orange County sheriff’s office and the FBI, had organized the 15-member Homeless Homicide Investigative Task Force. Wyatt took the lead. The group set up checkpoints on county roads, stopping hundreds of cars each night to question drivers about any suspicious individuals or circumstances they’d come across. Authorities and volunteers distributed whistles and flashlights to the homeless and advised them to remain in groups if they couldn’t find beds in shelters, which reported a 40 percent surge in demand. The story of the serial killer leaped from the pages of the Orange County Register to national outlets. “People are very, very anxious about the situation,” Jim Palmer, president of the Orange County Rescue Mission, told The New York Times. “This is just so evil that somebody would go after the least, the last, and the lost of our community.”

Itzcoatl Ocampo visited his father again not long after the third murder. This time, instead of press clippings, he carried an FBI flier emblazoned with photographs of the victims. Leaning against the light blue door of Refugio’s truck, Itzcoatl showed the flier to his father and pleaded once more for him to stay clean and be vigilant. Refugio tried to reassure him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m a survivor. Nothing will happen to me.”

4.

Not everyone heeded the authorities’ warnings. Among them was John Berry, a Vietnam veteran who sported a bushy white beard. An amateur astronomer and bird watcher, Berry loved being outside, where he could look at the sky day or night. On the morning of January 5, 2012, he was in a public rest area overlooking the Santa Ana River when Anaheim Police sergeant Mike Lynch approached him. Los Angeles Times photographer Allen Schaben, who had tagged along to cover law enforcement’s outreach effort in the homeless community, captured the moment. It was an eloquent image: Berry sitting comfortably on a tarp with his legs outstretched and a rumpled khaki fishing hat perched on his head. A yellow bicycle was parked such that it afforded him some shade from the winter sun while he listened to Lynch explain the threat. Berry said that he would be just fine as he was, even with a serial killer on the prowl. “We couldn’t force him to get off the streets,” Wyatt later told me.

Schaben’s picture of Berry looking carefree and defiant was printed in an article about the slayings. The killer must have seen it, because Berry, 64, quickly sensed that something was wrong. In the following days, he called the police to say that he felt like he was being watched as he moved among his favorite haunts in Anaheim and Yorba Linda. Police again advised Berry to seek shelter, and again he did not.

For a week, Orange County held its breath. No homeless men were murdered. Then, around 8:15 p.m. on Friday, January 13, Berry was pushing his bike toward a trash enclosure behind a Carl’s Jr. fast-food joint, located in the middle of a shopping center’s parking lot, when a hooded figure rushed toward him on foot. The assailant knocked Berry to the ground, pulled out a knife, and stabbed him to death, continuing his frenzy for a few harrowing minutes after the victim’s heart had stopped beating.

This time, though, the attacker was sloppy in choosing where to kill. Customers milled around the complex, and one of them witnessed the murder in progress. The man ran into a nearby pharmacy yelling, “The bum killer is outside!”

Donny Hopkins, a forklift driver who was shopping in the pharmacy, darted out to the parking lot and saw the assailant on top of Berry. He screamed at the attacker, who immediately stood up and ran toward a mobile-home park adjacent to the shopping center. Unarmed, Hopkins gave chase, running at full tilt. As he went, he misdialed 911 twice on his cell phone before managing to get through and share his location with the dispatcher. He provided a quick description of the suspect, who had shed his dark sweatshirt to reveal a red short-sleeved T-shirt. Based on Hopkins’s information, police surrounded the area and found the killer as he walked nonchalantly down a street—hoping, perhaps, that without his hood and by seeming composed he would avoid suspicion.

Youthfully handsome, with a long, angular face, deep-set dark eyes, and brown hair buzzed down to the scalp, the suspect had blood on his arms and hands.

He didn’t put up a fight when the cops grabbed him. In fact he was docile, “very collected and cooperative,” Wyatt told me. Youthfully handsome, with a long, angular face, deep-set dark eyes, and brown hair buzzed down to the scalp, the suspect had blood on his arms and hands. Nearby, police found a backpack, gloves, and a belt with a sheath that contained the Ka-Bar knife. The killer had tossed them as he fled.

The suspect was taken to the Anaheim police department, where Wyatt began his interrogation, hoping to develop a profile of a man capable of astonishing rage. It wasn’t hard. Dressed in light blue detention garb, the Orange County serial killer spoke for five hours straight, well into the morning of January 14, after waiving his right to remain silent. He wore old-fashioned, oversize prescription glasses and addressed Wyatt as “sir.” One by one, he candidly walked the detective through the killings.

Toward the end of the interview, Wyatt asked the suspect if he knew right from wrong.

“Yes, sir,” the man replied, nodding vehemently.

“Do you think what you’ve done is right or wrong?” Wyatt asked.

The killer took a beat to think, then looked at the detective. “Wrong,” he answered, “but it had to be done.”

“Why? To satisfy your needs?”

“No,” he said quickly. “They were making the place look bad.”

“Really, what you were doing, you were helping clean up the county?”

“In a way, sir, yes.”

In the more than 12 hours he would spend with the suspect in the coming days, Wyatt’s opinion of him solidified. “He knew exactly what he was doing,” the detective told me. This was a cold-blooded killer in full control of his emotions and mental capacity. He chose victims who “were available and vulnerable,” Wyatt explained. It was as simple as that.

As for understanding his desire to purify Orange Country by way of murder, that would require digging into the man’s past. To do that, Wyatt needed a name. The suspect willingly gave it in their first meeting: Itzcoatl Ocampo.

“Itzcoatl,” Refugio would later whisper to me, recalling his son’s arrest. “It means ‘obsidian serpent.’”

5.

Driving home late that Friday evening, Raúl González, Lilia Ocampo’s brother, heard the unmistakable buzz of news helicopters hovering near Imperial Highway. González steered clear of the commotion and any police roadblocks that might accompany it. When he finally arrived at his house, he saw several white cars parked around the property. Police approached him and demanded that he let them inside.

Citlaly and Mixcoatl were home. González asked his niece where Lilia was. “She’s with my father,” Citlaly, barely a teenager, replied. Annoyed, González called his sister’s cell phone. “Did you know police are here while you’re over there with that asshole?” he asked her. Lilia came home quickly. When she arrived and saw two of her children sitting on the couch, terrified, she thought of the one that wasn’t there. Itzcoatl had gone out walking alone a few hours before. He did that a lot lately. Lilia thought some tragedy had befallen him.

Then, as the police began asking her questions, someone turned on the television. An evening news report sputtered to life and showed Itzcoatl sitting on a curb, surrounded by cops. He was the suspect in the string of murders that had spurred a countywide manhunt.

Lilia was stunned. She’d been sharing a bedroom with all three of her children; Itzcoatl slept on the floor without complaint. She had seen a Ka-Bar in his possession, but he’d told her that it was just combat equipment. Lilia knew that her son had been troubled since returning from the military, but she’d never thought him violent. Surely, as his mother, she would have known if he was capable of murder. For Refugio, who soon learned of his son’s arrest, the thought that Itzcoatl could kill innocent people was inconceivable. “I always knew who my children were,” he told me. Besides, why would Itzcoatl warn his father about the killer if he was the killer?

Lilia knew that her son had been troubled since returning from the military, but she’d never thought him violent. Surely, as his mother, she would have known if he was capable of murder.

According to Wyatt, a search of the house turned up boots with DNA from two of the murder victims, a knife sharpener for the Ka-Bar—on which forensic experts would later find genetic material from all but one of the deceased—and documents about notorious killers from whom it seemed Itzcoatl had sought inspiration. In grand jury testimony the following month, Wyatt would describe how Itzcoatl had intended to emulate Charles Whitman, a former Marine sharpshooter, known as the Texas Tower Sniper, who in 1966 had killed 13 people at the University of Texas. When Wyatt asked Itzcoatl why he’d used a knife, he made a reference to the Joker, as played by actor Heath Ledger in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. “‘A knife is more personal.’ He actually said that in his interview,” Wyatt told me. “He quoted The Dark Knight.” (The exact line from the film is “Do you want to know why I use a knife? Guns are too quick. You can’t savor all the little emotions. In, you see, in their last moments, people show you who they really are.”)

After Itzcoatl’s arrest, the media hounded the Ocampos. Refugio in particular became a recurring tragic figure on local newscasts: the homeless father of the serial killer who targeted homeless men. On the morning of January 16, Orange County Register videographer Eugene Garcia found Refugio standing outside his rig in Fullerton. He explained that Itzcoatl was “a role model” for his family.

“Do you believe he’s innocent?” Garcia inquired.

“I don’t know,” Refugio answered. “He was worried for me.”

The only possible explanation for his son’s behavior, he continued, lay with the Marines. Something must have happened to his son in the service, because he committed the murders after he was discharged. “They killed the person he was,” Refugio declared.

When Wyatt appeared before the grand jury, he would say that the “primary reason” for the carnage was that Itzcoatl had a taste for blood that his time in Iraq didn’t sate, so he’d fashioned himself into the assassin he’d always wanted to be. He even researched “human anatomy on the computer,” Wyatt added, so that he would know “where the heart was” in his victims. The detective pointed to an exchange from Itzcoatl’s confession: “What made you want to kill somebody? Was it the fact that you’re a Marine?” Wyatt asked, to which Itzcoatl replied, “Probably, sir. Yes, sir. I didn’t get to kill when I was in… I look at other Marines and want to be like them.”

The truth of the matter, though, wasn’t so pat. The effort to untangle Itzcoatl’s hostility, grief, trauma, fear, and dejection would require looking further back than to his stint in the Marines—it would mean returning to his youth, particularly to his relationship with his best friend.

6.

As a child, Itzcoatl had a close-knit circle of friends whose center of gravity was Claudio Patiño IV. Born to a family with a history of armed service, Claudio grew up yearning to enlist. His father, a Mexican immigrant, had been a cadet at a military academy; he kept the gala uniform he wore as a teenager in immaculate shape, along with a stack of sepia photographs of himself performing acrobatic feats during military parades in Guadalajara. Claudio came up with elaborate warlike scenarios that he and his friends acted out in his family’s dusty backyard in Yorba Linda. He also started a clandestine brawling club, organizing bare-knuckle rounds among neighborhood boys. At age 12, Claudio refused orthodontic treatment to fix severely crooked teeth because he was afraid that the procedure might go wrong and leave him deformed or unable to use his jaw properly, disqualifying him from enlisting in the Marines one day.

Itzcoatl idolized Claudio. González, Itzcoatl’s uncle, described the pair as “inseparable” in childhood. “They got along like brothers. It was an enviable friendship,” he told me. Evelyn Patiño, Claudio’s mother, remembered Itzcoatl as a “respectful and quiet” child who often slept over, playing video games late into the night. In middle school, one of Claudio’s sisters invited Itzcoatl to her quinceañera, a traditional 15th-birthday and coming-of-age party for Latin American girls. He went with Refugio, who delivered an impromptu speech in celebration of the families’ bond.

Claudio and Itzcoatl shared a keen sense of bicultural belonging. Itzcoatl kept in touch with family in Mexico, whom he visited in the summers. Along with posters of U.S. helicopters and Marines, Claudio decorated his bedroom with pictures of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and a ceramic carving of a clash between a Spanish conquistador and an Aztec warrior. Next to his bed, he placed an ornate replica of a sacrificial knife that he’d bought on a family trip to the ancient city of Teotihuacan. Later in his youth, Claudio would get an American eagle tattooed on one of his arms and a Mexican eagle on the other.

Yet the boys were an odd couple. Built like an athlete, lean and muscular, with a square jaw and handsome face despite his warped teeth, Claudio cut an appealing figure. Itzcoatl, by contrast, was slight and soft-spoken. Brian Doyle, a school friend, would later describe him to the Associated Press as a “tall, geeky kid, really fun-loving.” Itzcoatl dreamed of going to college, even if it meant parting ways with Claudio.

Although Itzcoatl was barely 13 at the time, the scene of the World Trade Center towers falling “really shook him,” Lilia said. Like many young Americans, he interpreted the attack as a call to arms.

That changed after 9/11. Although Itzcoatl was barely 13 at the time, the scene of the World Trade Center towers falling “really shook him,” Lilia told me. Like many young Americans, Itzcoatl interpreted the attack as a call to arms. Lilia and Refugio disapproved. “I never saw him as a soldier,” his mother said. “He was calm and noble.” But Itzcoatl ignored his parents. At 18, he enlisted in the Marines alongside Claudio.

The friends dreamed of a brotherly, patriotic adventure. After completing their training, however, their paths diverged. Claudio quickly won acclaim and respect. He became a scout sniper, adept at reconnaissance and marksmanship. Nate Coffey, who met Claudio before they deployed to Afghanistan and who later became his team leader, described him as a natural soldier. “He was a fighter before he was a Marine,” Coffey wrote in an email. “Joining the military and becoming a Scout Sniper merely lent him additional tools with which to fight. He was one of our best shooters (and that’s saying something in a sniper platoon), and he was the one I picked to coach the team in hand-to-hand training. In short, he was good at killing, whether it was up close or far away.” Coffey added, “He was more aggressive than a wolverine drinking a Red Bull.”

Itzcoatl’s experience was diametrically different. He deployed to Iraq in March 2008 as part of the First Medical Battalion, serving as a motor-vehicle operator—that is, a driver. He didn’t take well to the unpredictability and hypermasculinity of military life. Although he hid it from his family, he was unhappy that he and Claudio weren’t serving side by side and that he was limited to transporting supplies and personnel. González told me of a conversation he had with his nephew in which “he said it was deeply depressing.” Itzcoatl “used to say that they had to dig holes in the ground to build shelters in the desert, and they slept inside to avoid sandstorms. They were suddenly awakened by bombing. He seemed scared.”

Barely a month after deploying, Itzcoatl learned that his father had lost his job. On a phone call, he listened to his mother’s unsettling account of the situation: Refugio had fallen into financial trouble, and he was still doing drugs. (Before leaving for Iraq, Itzcoatl had found a crack pipe in his father’s car.) He wasn’t always sleeping at home. Lilia told me that Itzcoatl took the news of his father’s unraveling with characteristic stoicism. He kept any deeper feelings to himself. But not for long.

Two months later, at Camp Al Taqqadum, an abandoned Iraqi base 70 miles west of Baghdad repurposed by U.S. forces for logistical support, Itzcoatl loaded and then pointed an M16 rifle at another Marine. He claimed he was just clowning around. His superiors didn’t care. What he’d done was a punishable offense. Itzcoatl’s misconduct earned him a loss of rank—from lance corporal to private first class, with a pay reduction—in late May 2008 through nonjudicial punishment, an administrative disciplinary procedure. He took responsibility for his actions in a signed confession and connected the incident to his family’s troubles:

I know that this was very unprofessional, dangerous, irresponsible, and idiotic of me.… I went to Condition 1 [loading the rifle] because I took a joke way too serious. I was angry because in the back of my mind I was just thinking of my problems back home; for example, my father lost his job and my family is having financial problems. I did not know my fellow Marines could help me out with my problems, but they can and have. I am taking anger management, stress management and other classes to help me manage and cope with these issues. This way something like this will never happen again.

He concluded, “It is not me or in my nature to behave like this.”

Itzcoatl didn’t tell his family about the situation. That June, he recorded a Father’s Day video for Refugio. “Thank you for everything you have done, Dad,” he said in hesitant Spanish, sitting in a poorly lit room in front of an American flag. “I love you very much. I’m doing well here, I’m OK. Just three months left and then I’ll be back.” He then read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham for his sister, who was almost nine at the time. “Don’t worry about me,” he repeated several times, like a mantra. “I’m OK.”

7.

At the end of his six-month tour, Itzcoatl returned to California, where he remained enlisted at Camp Pendleton, south of where his family lived. Corporal Bonnie Tisdale, who supervised him on the base, said she watched him decline emotionally. “His demeanor just kind of changed,” Tisdale told me. At first he was a disciplined, quiet young man who could also be funny and who would “offer you the shirt off his back or his last dollar.” Then, according to Tisdale, he grew bitter and depressed. He got in trouble for odd, minor infractions, like lying about where he’d parked his car when it was due for inspection.

When he was released from active duty in July 2010, right on schedule, the military designated him fully qualified to reenlist, should he choose to. There were no red flags on his record. Still, Tisdale worried about his transition to civilian life, which is difficult for any soldier. “If you don’t have a degree, you’re struggling to find a job. Your friends that you knew before the Marines, they don’t really understand you, so it’s hard. You feel alone,” she told me. “Ocampo was an awkward guy to begin with. I can’t imagine what it was like for him to get out.”

There was another reason to worry: A month prior to Itzcoatl’s discharge, Claudio had been killed in action. On the morning of June 22, he was with his platoon near Musah Qala, a village in Helmand Province, feeling restless. “If the team was sitting around not shooting bad guys, he would take half of them and find a new place to attack,” Coffey, his team leader, told me. Around noon, Claudio set his sights on a nearby hill crest and led three members of the group to scope it out. “I remember him getting to that hilltop and collapsing, and I heard the automatic gunfire a half-second later,” Coffey recalled. It was a Taliban ambush. According to the military news outlet Stars and Stripes, “a bullet first grazed Patiño’s arm, but the second ripped a path through his upper torso.” Lance corporal Nat Small, who was with Claudio at the time, told the publication, “He basically fatally exposed himself before the rest of us could. He definitely laid down his life for the team.” In September 2010, Claudio was posthumously honored with a Bronze Star.

When Itzcoatl learned of his friend’s death, he was devastated. “He called me and said, ‘Mom, you won’t believe this, but they killed Claudio,’” Lilia remembered. “He was crying, and so was I. He kept asking why it had been Claudio and not him.” Refugio told me that Claudio’s death was the beginning of the end for his son. “That’s what lit the wick,” he said.

Itzcoatl began telling his parents he felt useless and unworthy. Money ran out quickly. “I had to drag him to the unemployment office and Veterans Affairs,” Refugio said. “I had to help him fill out applications, and he kept telling me, ‘Dad, they’re not going to give me a job.’” Rather than looking for work, he often spent afternoons in Yorba Linda’s public library—outside which he’d later murder Smit, his third victim—reading with his little sister. According to Mixcoatl, his brother was withdrawn and drinking too much, but he “never saw any evil in him, anything bad.”

“His greatest sorrow came from the fact that he hadn’t been there for Claudio when he died. He wanted to be there to help him get back on his feet, help him stand up.”

Some days, Itzcoatl took Lilia to her job at a hardware company and then drove the 35 miles from Yorba Linda to Riverside National Cemetery, where Claudio was buried. He would stand at his friend’s grave alone, thinking. He also went to see Claudio’s parents. Evelyn Patiño recalled how during one visit, Itzcoatl told her that “his greatest sorrow came from the fact that he hadn’t been there for Claudio when he died. He wanted to be there to help him get back on his feet, help him stand up. It pained him so much.”

At home his family began to notice bizarre behavior, signals that he was traumatized, depressed, or both. “He had horrible nightmares, truly ugly dreams. He never told me what they were exactly, but he did say they were horrible: bloody people all over,” Lilia recalled. Itzcoatl said he had splitting headaches and kept pointing to a recurring twitch above his right eye. “One day,” Lilia remembered, “he called me to say that he was looking for bombs in the house.” During the day, he sometimes talked to himself. But he never hinted at a desire to hurt anyone.  

If only his family had been able to read his journal, a brief but harrowing private account of what was running through Itzcoatl’s mind leading up to the murders. He turned to it often, putting down in jittery handwriting his muddled delusions and feelings of resentment and self-loathing. He also wrote about his urge to kill.

8.

I first met Refugio and Lilia on a Saturday morning last winter, behind a car-repair shop in Placentia where Refugio had been living for the better part of a year. The owner was a friend who’d offered him a place to stay, an old RV, in exchange for guarding the lot. Refugio acknowledged that there wasn’t much to guard. Littered with rusted fenders and gas pumps, the place looked like a scrapyard.

For my visit, he’d arranged a couple of chairs, a stool, and a wooden table covered with a tan piece of plastic that flapped in the wind. It was cold, so he’d lit a fire inside a makeshift pit: two logs thrown into a circular metal planter. Refugio wore a gray pinstriped suit coat over black pants, both a couple of sizes too big, with an untucked white shirt and a pair of worn brown loafers, their dry leather tassels curled up. Lilia, who was living in a nearby apartment, wore heavy makeup and sat with her arms hugging her body. In her hands was an envelope holding crumpled pages of writing: the journal. It was the first time the Ocampos had shown it to a reporter since Lilia found it in the wake of her son’s arrest, wedged behind a seat in her truck, and given it to his legal team.

“We didn’t know he had written any of this,” Refugio said. Lilia nodded. “He shares everything he went through,” she explained, handing me the envelope. “It’s also a sort of confession,” Refugio acknowledged as I began to read. The first entry began, “Based on a true story.” The pages weren’t dated, but Lilia said that she assumed Itzcoatl had written them in late 2011.

Itzcoatl identified as a “POG,” or “people other than grunts,” a derogatory term used in the Marines to describe support personnel who rarely engage in combat. “Joined to be a fucking killer…but then ended up somewhere where I would be saving lives rather than taking ‘em,” he lamented. “Ended up ass-fucking POG. Dealing with motherfuckers who speak poor English yet somehow managed to be high-ups.” When he wrote about losing rank after the nonjudicial punishment process, he displayed an acute sense of injustice that morphed into an elaborate paranoid conspiracy. “I was all alone with the enemy who turned out to be my own co-workers, my own roommate and my own friends,” he wrote. “It took me a while to figure out that my whole life was a set up.”

Later, Itzcoatl reflected, “I came out [of the military] all fucked-up, normal before and now just fucked-up.” He described his state of mind as “most of the time, depressed.” Sometimes he speculated about why he felt so terrible: “Possibly a tumor in my head because I have headaches almost every damn day,” and “Is there some device inside me that gives my location, takes my pulse or gives me funny feelings?” He also worried that he would wind up like his father. “Now the next in line to be a bum,” he wrote.

“Could you imagine how the world would be if you were still here and not me? Utopia. Every day I think about you and blame myself.”

Often he talked about Claudio and survivor’s guilt. “Even before the Corps you were or still is a fucking hero,” he wrote, addressing his dead friend directly. “Look at the cheers you got at your graduation. Either way it wasn’t your time to go. I just happened to fuck things up.” Why he felt responsible for Claudio’s death wasn’t clear. In a particularly melancholy entry, Itzcoatl said he wished he were dead instead. “Every time I see your house I tell myself how much bullshit it is that I’m here and your [gone]. How fucked up it is that they picked you and not me. Could you imagine how the world would be if you were still here and not me? Utopia. Every day I think about you and blame myself,” he wrote. “I’ll only get over you and all of this shit is when I’m gone.”

In other entries, Itzcoatl showed latent jealousy that Claudio was a native-born American. “Since you were born here I’m guessing you didn’t have to deal w/ the fucking racism,” he wrote before speculating about his own fate. “I’m either going back to Mexico walking or by bus where from there I’ll die of either starvation or someone will just shoot me or stab me. I really am pathetic.”

The last pages of the journal revealed an impulse to do something that would address his anger and pain. “I always ask myself why you guys never shot me when you had the chance,” Itzcoatl wrote, as if addressing his fellow Marines. “If you’re me, it’s better off that you’re dead,” he continued. “There is only 3 ways of dying: by police, some random person or by yourself. Death won’t come so I might as well give it a call. Why? My head is fucked up.”

But while those words seemed to indicate that he was planning to kill or harm himself, he hadn’t followed through. Instead he’d turned his rage outward, perhaps hoping to stifle it by committing violence against the very people he feared becoming: homeless men, rootless and forgotten. Near the end of the journal, he seemed to obliquely describe his plans for a murder spree by way of a popular ad slogan. “I hate to say it’s time to make this town a scary place,” he wrote. “Gots to kill a few Pepsis, so hopefully it’ll refresh my world.” (“Pepsi” is street slang for a drug addict.)

By then, however, Itzcoatl had likely already killed for the first time. During the lengthy interrogations after his arrest, he surprised law enforcement by confessing to two gruesome murders that predated his attack on Jim McGillivray. The victims weren’t homeless men. They were his friends.

9.

It turned out that Itzcoatl, fresh out of Camp Pendleton, had worked briefly with his friend Eder Herrera and often visited the house that Herrera shared with his elder brother Juan and their mother, Raquel. “They realized Ocampo was just getting paranoid and weird,” John Burton, Herrera’s lawyer, told me. Itzcoatl would point at cars parked across the street and claim he was being watched. So Herrera, Juan, and Raquel decided to ask him not to come around. According to a detective who worked the case, Itzcoatl felt “disrespected” but acquiesced. A few months passed, during which he wasn’t in contact with the family.

Then, on the night of October 25, 2011, Itzcoatl went to Herrera’s home in Yorba Linda. He was planning to kill his former friends, he later told police, because they “seemed to have an attitude.” Herrera wasn’t home, so Itzcoatl waited outside. Then he grew impatient. “He went in and killed the other two,” Burton told me. “Ocampo started stabbing the mom, and then the brother came in and he started stabbing him.” When Juan tried to escape, Itzcoatl chased him and pulled him back inside. Autopsies would later find close to 100 stab wounds between the two victims.

Itzcoatl was planning to kill his former friends, he later told police, because they “seemed to have an attitude.”

Herrera was quickly arrested for the murders of his mother and brother and locked away. A 911 caller who said he was a neighbor, but who used a pay phone about a mile away, had reported loud noises coming from the residence. (According to Burton, the caller was Itzcoatl, who the lawyer also believes planted a kitchen knife at the scene to make the cops think they already had the murder weapon.) An eyewitness across the street claimed to have seen Herrera dragging something large—Juan’s body—into the house, accompanied by cries of “help.” When police picked him up, Herrera said that he’d spent the night at a friend’s place. But he raised suspicions when he admitted that he’d tried to go home some time after midnight. When he saw cop cars everywhere, he feared that he would be arrested because he was undocumented. Herrera said he drove away from the scene rather than figure out what had happened in his home.

Herrera swore that he had nothing to do with the killings. He didn’t know who the perpetrator might be. While he sat in jail, the idea that Itzcoatl could have murdered his family never crossed Herrera’s mind. “Eder didn’t want to hang out with Ocampo anymore and thought he was weird,” Burton told me, but his client considered “nothing even remotely approaching the fact that Ocampo could do something like that.”

Had it not been for the witness who saw John Berry die behind the Carl’s Jr., Itzcoatl might have gotten away with the double murder. Herrera might have rotted in prison. Instead, after Itzcoatl confessed, police found DNA from Herrera’s mother and brother on the Ka-Bar. Herrera went on to win a public settlement of $700,000 for unjust imprisonment, though the authorities never admitted any negligence in the case. “They were so sure from the outset they had the right guy, they didn’t entertain the evidence that led away from him,” Burton told the press. “If they’d gotten the right guy, [Ocampo] wouldn’t have killed four other people.”

10.

In January 2012, Itzcoatl was charged with murder, special allegations in multiple murders, lying in wait, and personal use of a deadly weapon. The Orange County district attorney decided to seek the death penalty. According to Wyatt, it was what Itzcoatl wanted. The young man had told his interrogator that he “deserved the death penalty” by “lethal injection, or whatever is quickest.”

In court, however, Itzcoatl pleaded not guilty. His lawyer told reporters that he was considering mounting an insanity defense. It’s possible that Itzcoatl was experiencing the onset of mental illness at the time of the murders. He was 23, and conditions like schizophrenia usually don’t manifest until late adolescence or early adulthood. But family and friends saw another culprit: post-traumatic stress disorder.

People close to him claimed that Itzcoatl had shown no signs of mental illness before he joined the Marines. His official medical examination upon enlistment revealed no personality deviation. In fact, the only notes from the physical were that he wore glasses and admitted to smoking marijuana. Like many veterans, though, he came home different. In a recent study, the Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families at the University of Southern California screened the mental health of Orange County veterans, more than one-third of whom were Hispanic. Forty-five percent suffered from PTSD, the same portion from depression. Nearly one-fifth had considered suicide. During his arrest booking, Itzcoatl told a nurse that he’d tried to suffocate himself to death in 2010.

When I asked Wyatt about the possibility that Itzcoatl had PTSD, the detective dismissed it. He said the prosecution carefully considered the suspect’s experience in Iraq and found no incident that could explain his violent turn. Itzcoatl “was not involved in transporting dead bodies, either soldiers or other people. He did not work in a morgue. He basically drove a water truck,” Wyatt argued. “He wasn’t involved in the types of combat situations that normally you would expect to see with PTSD.”

“Many of our service members, when they leave the military, they are like immigrants in their own country, because nobody really knows them.”

Not everyone shared Wyatt’s opinion, though. Carl Castro, a professor of social work and a retired Army colonel, leads the USC center that commissioned the recent study of Orange County veterans. (I also teach at USC, where I am the chair of journalism at the Annenberg School.) When I met him at his office in downtown Los Angeles, he spoke at length about a pervasive sense of alienation among veterans. “Many of our service members, when they leave the military, they are like immigrants in their own country, because nobody really knows them,” Castro explained. He cautioned that while many former service members are “very, very angry,” not all of them have PTSD. But when he reviewed the details of Itzcoatl’s case, he immediately recognized signs of the affliction.

There were the recurring, disturbing nightmares, for one, “the crying-out-in-your-sleep kind,” he said. Castro also saw symptoms in Itzcoatl’s tendency to be hypervigilant (“We call it ‘startle reflex’ in PTSD jargon”) and in the fantasy Lilia remembered her son having about a bomb being hidden in their home. “A lot of people think of nightmares as rightfully happening at night, but you can also have them while you’re sitting here,” Castro told me. “Combat affects your thinking, it affects your behavior, it lowers your tolerance to people who are aggressive towards you. It disrupts the ability to calm down.”

Itzcoatl never saw combat, I pointed out. “We have some really good data showing that truck drivers are one of the most stressed groups, because they’re really a very passive target,” Castro countered. “In some sense, the way they described it was, ‘I’m a sitting duck here!’” It would be wrong to dismiss a motor-vehicle operator’s potential distress, he added, because “everyone was at risk in Iraq and Afghanistan.” According to Itzcoatl’s military file, he was “properly notified of his requirement to be screened for PTSD/TBI,” or traumatic brain injury. He never scheduled any appointments.

Castro said that a crucial aspect of veterans’ reintegration into civilian life is the ability to seek and maintain meaningful relationships. When I asked about the effect Claudio Patiño’s death might have had on Itzcoatl, Castro said that for a man in an already fragile state of mind, the consequences of such a loss could be “catastrophic” and “the last nail in the coffin.” Particularly if it was the deepest friendship Itzcoatl ever had.

Castro understood why law enforcement might have seen an insanity defense as a cop-out. “But it’s not about getting off,” he said. “It’s trying to understand the contributions that these very traumatic, life-changing experiences can have on someone.” Similarly, Bonnie Tisdale, Itzcoatl’s supervisor at Camp Pendleton, recalled the shock she felt when she saw the young Marine’s mug shot on the news. “It wasn’t the Ocampo I remembered. He looked dead inside,” she told me. “I’m not saying what he did was right. It was absolutely wrong. But I think he just needed help. I really do.”

11.

In the end, Itzcoatl didn’t get help. He wasn’t convicted either. While awaiting trial, he spent nearly two years in jail. He was prescribed Paxil and Zoloft, which he sometimes refused to take. He once banged his head so hard against a wall that he was put on suicide watch, and he shared morbid thoughts about killing himself with other inmates. Lilia and Refugio saw their son as often as possible, but they never spoke about the murders. Itzcoatl remained discreet with his parents. Lilia worried that he was getting thin.

In 2013, the Marines permanently removed Itzcoatl from the Corps, serving him with an “other than honorable” discharge. A review board held a hearing, which Itzcoatl didn’t attend, to examine the facts of the case. It found him liable for “a serious offense, to wit: murder.” Under the terms of the Marine Corps Separation and Retirement Manual, neither a military nor a civilian conviction was required for the board’s decision, which Itzcoatl was informed of that fall.

Itzcoatl began hoarding small amounts of a powder similar to Ajax, which inmates were allowed to use to clean their cells. He stored it in small milk cartons under his bed.

Soon after, he began hoarding small amounts of a powder similar to Ajax, which inmates were allowed to use to clean their cells. He stored it in small milk cartons under his bed. On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 27, he swallowed it all with water. At around 6:15 p.m., authorities found him vomiting and shaking in his cell, with a towel inexplicably tied around his head as a blindfold. He declined assistance. Within a half-hour, he was foaming at the mouth and unresponsive. An emergency medical team was summoned.

The next day was Thanksgiving. Itzcoatl had told Lilia that he was looking forward to getting more and better food on the holiday. Early that morning she got a phone call. Itzcoatl had been transported to Western Medical Center Santa Ana, she learned, and his condition was dire. When she and Refugio arrived at the hospital, they were told that their son was brain dead. Around 7:15 that evening, they decided to pull the plug on his ventilator.

His parents initially received conflicting reports about what had killed Itzcoatl. “They told us he drank too much water,” Lilia recalled through tears. But to hydrate oneself to death is incredibly difficult. When she was told that he’d poisoned himself, Lilia didn’t believe that either. She’d planned a family visit with Itzcoatl for the day after Thanksgiving. Why would he agree to meet with her if he knew he’d be dead?

Itzcoatl’s attorney, Michael Molfetta, faulted prison authorities for negligence with regard to a mentally ill patient. “This was a guy who should have garnered the highest level of scrutiny,” Molfetta told journalists at the time, “and it wasn’t done.” But an inquiry into Itzcoatl’s death concluded otherwise. A final report published more than a year after his death cleared law enforcement of any “criminal culpability” in his suicide.

Itzcoatl was buried in Santa Ana. A handful of family members and friends attended, including Claudio Patiño’s parents. “They were our friends, and we had seen the boy grow up,” Claudio’s father told me of his decision to go. His own son had been lain to rest with full honors after a touching procession through local streets lined with people waving American flags. The only evidence of Itzcoatl’s ties to the military was on his tombstone. The Ocampos chose to engrave it with the Marines Corps motto, Semper Fidelis, above a quote that Itzcoatl had listed as his favorite in his high school yearbook: “Walk the streets I walked alone, then sit and judge me.”

12.

Judging the murders that Itzcoatl committed as unequivocal moral wrongs is easy. Determining what drove him to violent ends is much harder. His story is about many things: the immigrant experience, the desire to assimilate, military service, psychological distress, family and friendship, extraordinary violence. It begs for an organizing principle, a way to seamlessly fit its themes together in order to reveal a kernel of truth about what makes a person good and what can turn him bad. But that principle doesn’t exist—at least a satisfying one doesn’t. The story’s defining rule is the ultimate unknowability of Itzcoatl’s mind, an enigma that weighs heavily on the family he left behind.    

A few days after I met Itzcoatl’s parents last winter, Lilia traveled to Germany. It was the first long flight of her life; 17-year-old Citlaly, who declined to be interviewed for this story, went with her. Lilia told me that she was nervous to go, but also eager. She would be spending a few weeks with her first grandchild, Mixcoatl’s infant son, Ezra. “He’s always smiling. He seems very attentive,” Lilia said, cheerful for the first time in our interactions.

Mixcoatl was living in Germany with a woman named Sandra, Ezra’s mother. They were both in the Army, serving at a base in the Bavarian town of Vilseck. Mixcoatl had enlisted after Itzcoatl’s arrest. His parents told me that he’d always planned to join the armed services. Mixcoatl, who looks strikingly like his brother—same build, same buzz cut, same sharply angled face—told me he had another motivation. “I felt like everyone knew me,” he said of life in Orange County after the murders.

Itzcoatl’s dark notoriety was hard on his brother. People gossiped, and Mixcoatl was tired of the whispers about how he was related to a serial killer. The Army afforded him “a weird escape from reality,” he told me. He was in Afghanistan when he learned that his brother had killed himself. A friend sent him a message after seeing the news. “Your brother’s dead, man,” it read. Mixcoatl asked that his family wait to bury Itzcoatl until his deployment was over, a few months later, and they obliged. “My brother would have wanted me to complete my mission,” Mixcoatl told me. He also wanted to see Itzcoatl’s body one last time.

Initially, Mixcoatl hoped to be a paratrooper, but he has since changed his mind. “I like my body,” he said. “I don’t want to injure it.” Besides, he and Sandra are already expecting their second child, a daughter. Mixcoatl thinks they might move to Texas one day. It would be cheaper to live there than in Orange County, and fewer people would know about his brother.

While Lilia and Citlaly were away, I reached out to Refugio. He was still living behind the repair shop, clad in the too big jacket I’d seen him wear before. He’d recently started cleaning backyard pools for money, but he hadn’t made much. With his immediate family either dead or half a world away, he seemed glad for my company.

“I don’t regret coming to the United States in any way. It was the right decision. If we had stayed in Mexico, things would have been much worse.”

It was early January, almost five years to the day since Itzcoatl had been arrested. It would soon be 30 years since Refugio had left Mexico. So much had happened since then, and he seemed puzzled by it all: how he’d wound up penniless, chronically underemployed, with a son who confessed to murder before dying his own grisly death. I asked if he wished that he’d made a different decision when he was younger and stayed in his home country. “I don’t regret coming to the United States in any way,” Refugio said. “It was the right decision. If we had stayed in Mexico, things would have been much worse.”

Then he turned the conversation to the country he’d chosen and made wholeheartedly his own. He still believed in U.S. institutions, he said, even as he wrestled with questions about his son’s crimes and bitter end—questions for which he might never find answers. “He was a kind and honorable man,” Refugio said of Itzcoatl. “That is why I know my son didn’t do what they say he did. Or if he did do it, it wasn’t my son anymore. It was not Itzcoatl anymore.”

Promethea Unbound

Promethea Unbound

A child genius raised in poverty, she wanted to change the world. A horrific act of violence nearly destroyed her.

By Mike Mariani

The Atavist Magazine, No. 72


Mike Mariani is a writer and journalist based in Lake Tahoe, California. His features and essays have appeared in Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, The Guardian, Slate, Newsweek, and TheAtlantic.com. You can see more of his work at mikemariani.contently.com


Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Tekendra Parmar
Photographer: Lynn Donaldsonr
Cover Image: Courtesy of Promethea Pythaitha

Published in October 2017. Design updated in 2021.

One

For Georgia Smith, home was a beat-up red Plymouth Voyager minivan with a bad engine block. A Greek immigrant in her early forties, she had been evicted from her San Francisco apartment in the fall of 1996. Georgia didn’t want anyone to alert social services that she and her daughter Jasmine were destitute, so for several months they’d been living as nomads. She shuttled the five-year-old around the city by day before finding a parking lot where they could spend the night. They never stayed in one place for very long.

To Jasmine, a little girl with olive skin and dark eyes prone to faraway expressions, it felt like camping. She wasn’t enrolled in school, so her mother took her to the zoo, the botanical gardens, and the beach. They had a favorite park overlooking the bay where they would take long walks, watch people fishing on the pier, and wash their hair—they both had long, thick black tresses—in a public fountain.

One night in the summer of 1997, Georgia decided to surprise Jasmine with the next day’s activity. While driving around, she pretended they were lost. After Jasmine fell asleep, Georgia headed to the campus of Stanford University, 35 miles south of San Francisco, where she parked the Voyager in a dormitory lot. Throughout the night, whenever someone drove past, she grabbed a flashlight and map to look like she’d pulled over for directions.

Her plan was to take her daughter on a morning tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, one of the world’s premier scientific laboratories.  SLAC had produced three Nobel Prizes in physics and hosted the first website in North America. Jasmine had been dying to visit the accelerator since she had first read about it in a book. “You know how some kids want to go to Disneyland, because that’s where all the magic happens?” she would later explain. For her that was SLAC. Jasmine wasn’t an ordinary five-year-old.

When she woke up in the van, it was to the oak trees and manicured lawns of Stanford’s sun-dappled campus. “You have a gift coming your way,” Georgia said. The little girl’s eyes lit up with excitement. They joined the first tour of the day, which was otherwise filled with college students and older science enthusiasts. A guide led them through halls lined with framed photographs, plaques, and awards. Jasmine, wearing a drooping T-shirt, blue jeans, a white headband, and Velcro sneakers, was rapt by talk of electrons, X-rays, and lasers.

Find hundreds of hours’ worth of longform stories read by audiobook narrators in the Audm app for iPhone.

The tour ended with a question and answer session in an auditorium. Because Jasmine was so short, she and Georgia sat in the front row to make sure she could see the speaker, a physicist. At one point, Jasmine whispered to her mother, “Is it OK to ask a question?” When Georgia approved, the little girl raised her hand, and the physicist called on her.

“How do you prevent the accelerator from melting down because of all the heat created by the particle collisions?” Jasmine asked.

A hush fell over the audience. The physicist took a long pause, his eyes fixed on the little girl. Then he described SLAC’s sophisticated cooling system, satisfying Jasmine’s curiosity, before moving on to other questions.

When the session ended and visitors began filing out, the physicist walked briskly over to Georgia. “I think you should go see Dr. Yearian,” he said, referring to Mason Yearian, a professor who led one of the Stanford physics department’s labs. With the speaker’s help, Georgia scheduled a meeting for that day.

Yearian was tall and thin, with gray and white hair carefully combed to one side of his forehead. When Georgia and Jasmine arrived at his office, he asked to see the young girl alone. He wanted to make sure that what had happened in the auditorium wasn’t orchestrated by her mother. Yearian led Jasmine into a spacious room lined with textbooks and file boxes, then picked her up and set her in a chair opposite his desk. She swung her legs up and down, her feet nowhere close to touching the floor, before settling with her knees pulled up to her chest. As Yearian talked, Jasmine kept looking at a pink slinky perched on a shelf.

Why, he asked, had she inquired about the accelerator melting down? Jasmine answered matter-of-factly: Particles moving nearly at the speed of light create an enormous amount of thermal energy that must be contained. The professor followed up by asking her about the physics principles behind a pendulum. Jasmine described oscillation, conservation of energy, and frictional damping. This is the real deal, Yearian thought.

He called Georgia into the office. “You have an extremely bright child,” he said. “How did she learn so much?” Everything Jasmine knew, Georgia explained, she had taught herself.

Back then, Georgia didn’t consider her daughter a prodigy so much as a miracle. Georgia had been 36 and pursuing a literature degree at Montana State University, in the city of Bozeman, when she became pregnant with her third child; she already had a son, Apollo, and a daughter, Vanessa, from a short-lived marriage in her twenties. Georgia was poor and single, and due to a preexisting medical condition, a doctor warned her that carrying to term would come at great risk for her (hemorrhage) and the baby (death). But Georgia said, “If God has put it in, then I’ll let God take it out.”

On March 13, 1991, she went into labor in her one-floor clapboard house. Her midwife, who was dating a veterinarian, came straight from helping her partner deliver a calf. As predicted, Georgia lost a lot of blood. When Jasmine Li Lysistrata was delivered, according to her mother, the midwife clamped the umbilical cord with an instrument used to birth the calf. “It’s perfectly safe,” she assured Georgia. In the following days, Jasmine developed an infection, and her mother suspected that the device hadn’t been sterilized properly. Gradually, though, the pair recovered from their first shared brush with death.  

It didn’t take long for Georgia to recognize that Jasmine was unusual. At six months she started speaking; at around nine she was reading. As a full-time student and single parent, Georgia didn’t have time to homeschool Jasmine, so she checked out piles of books, including illustrated novels and science texts, from the MSU library. By the time Jasmine was two, she could write. Even the way she carried herself—head up and back arched, like an adult with good posture—was uncanny.

Georgia, whose maiden name was Kotsaki, had grown up in Greece hearing cultural myths steeped in prophecy: futures handed down from the gods, people tormented by fates only they could see. She’d often wondered about her own fortunes. Most of her youth had been spent in an all-female orphanage, or paedopoli, Greek for “child town.” It was housed in converted military barracks surrounded by stone walls and barbed wire, situated near the sandy cliffs and sapphire lagoons of the Ionian Sea. Each orphan was identified by a number inscribed on her bed frame; Georgia’s was 788. The girls ate slices of bread with tea for breakfast and watery soup with rice for dinner, after which they prayed next to their bunks dressed in matching white nightgowns. Sometimes they would sneak into the garden and steal vegetables, and they weren’t the only scavengers. Hulking mastiffs, local sheepherding dogs, ransacked the orphanage’s garbage for food. The girls were terrified of the slobbering beasts, preferring the frogs and turtles they caught and kept as pets in shoe-polish cans they poked with holes.

At 16, Georgia moved to New Jersey to live with an aunt. A few years later, she married and had Vanessa. When her marriage turned abusive, she left her husband and moved across the country while pregnant with Apollo, winding up in Bozeman. It hadn’t been easy raising two kids alone, being a foreigner in a remote place, or returning to school in her thirties, but Georgia felt liberated. Montana was her third act in life, and the one most firmly in her control.

Now, as her third child began to flourish, her speculations turned to Jasmine’s future. She wondered if she had something truly rare on her hands and felt guilty for not being able to give her daughter more. She was also worried. Apollo had shown similar acumen in his first year, picking up English and Greek at marvelous speed. Then he went dark, becoming nonverbal and irretrievably drawn into himself because of a developmental disability. When Jasmine’s intelligence continued accelerating past the point where Apollo’s had faltered, Georgia was still scared. She agonized over the notion that her daughter might be singled out or persecuted for her uniqueness, or that she might “attract attention that wasn’t healthy.” With time that dread would morph into a harrowing question: Was Jasmine’s remarkable mind a blessing or a curse?

Georgia Smith with Jasmine as a toddler. (Photo: Lynn Donaldson)

Two

In Far from the Tree, a book about parents with exceptional children, writer Andrew Solomon punctures the beguiling myth that raising a prodigy is like winning the lottery or finding a golden ticket in a candy wrapper. While the odds might be comparable, the lived reality is more complicated. Solomon refers to the “mainstreaming dilemma,” the question of whether to enroll brilliant children in age-level classes or to find ones that suit their intellectual abilities. “You can damage prodigies by nurturing their talent at the expense of personal growth,” Solomon writes, “or by cultivating general development at the expense of the special skill that might have given them the deepest fulfillment.”

Monumental decisions like these come fast and furious for parents of geniuses, a taxing amplification of the stress all mothers and fathers feel about the potential long-term consequences of the choices they make for their kids. Pressure on time and finances can also be unyielding. There are musical instruments, private lessons, and gifted programs to pay for, and parents often relinquish careers to support a child’s abilities and aspirations. Families discover that a genius’s talents are prodigious in more than one sense of the word, as there seems to be little room for much else.

Solomon posits that “being gifted and being disabled are surprisingly similar: isolating, mystifying, petrifying.” The Americans with Disabilities Act doesn’t cover prodigies, and the rationale seems obvious: These children are overequipped for normal achievement. Yet their unique requirements for learning and the extraordinary burdens placed on their families make prodigies resplendent doppelgängers to developmentally challenged children. They can be just as ill-suited to systems meticulously constructed for normalcy, misfits forced to invent their own vermiculate paths to accommodate the demands of brilliance.

Jasmine proved no exception, and Georgia’s circumstances only magnified the challenges of raising her. In 1993, Montana’s Department of Child and Family Services wanted to take Apollo away because it didn’t think Georgia, a single mom on welfare, could provide the attention and resources he required. Rather than be forced to give him up, Georgia rented a U-Haul, packed her belongings, and left for California, just five credits shy of her degree. Vanessa, 18 and recently married, stayed behind.

Georgia, Jasmine, and Apollo settled in San Francisco, in a cramped basement apartment with a warped ceiling. The only entrance was through the landlord’s garage. Georgia and Jasmine slept in one room, while Apollo stayed in another, tucked inside a sleeping bag on the floor. The apartment was dingy, with mice and a septic tank that overflowed, causing brown wastewater to gush from a drain in the floor.   

Georgia got a job working 12-hour graveyard shifts at a post office for seven dollars an hour, seven days a week. She’d leave in the late afternoon and return around 6 a.m. Unable to afford child care, she left Jasmine and Apollo, 16 and still unable to communicate fully, home alone. Jasmine, a toddler, had trouble sleeping with her mother away, so she often stayed up reading books. On Georgia’s lunch break, around midnight, she would call to find out what her daughter was studying.

Jasmine’s mind was voracious, but she particularly loved math. Georgia had introduced her to the subject by way of a set of counting beads picked up at a Montessori school. Sitting in their living room one day, she demonstrated subtraction by removing a few beads from the set. “Simple,” two-year-old Jasmine replied. Georgia asked her to subtract four-, five-, and six-digit numbers from others just as big, and Jasmine solved each problem easily. Before long she shed her training wheels and started solving large problems using a pen and paper. By the time she turned three, she had mastered fractions, decimals, and multiplication.

Next came geography, history, and literature, including Greek epic poems and plays such as Antigone and Orestes, the works of Romantic poets, and Charles Dickens’s novels, whose waifs led hard-luck lives not so different from Jasmine’s. She devoured them all before she was old enough to enter kindergarten. She also showed exceptional ability on the piano. Her blossoming aptitude for math, though, is what kept inspiring nerve-jangling awe in her mother. By age four, Jasmine was doing algebra.

When Jasmine turned five, in March 1996, Georgia scrambled to fit her into the public education system. Elementary, middle, and even high schools told Georgia that they couldn’t accommodate her daughter. Then she heard about the Nueva School, a private academy for gifted children. The tuition was beyond her means, but she hoped that, by demonstrating Jasmine’s intelligence, she could secure her daughter a scholarship.

Georgia paid around $200 for Jasmine to take an IQ test. The building where it was administered was buzzing with activity; a construction project was under way, and workers shuffled in and out constantly. Georgia feared that the clamor might distract Jasmine. Nervous, she waited outside the testing room. The exam took less than an hour.

When the results arrived in the mail, Georgia was stunned: Jasmine had scored in the 99.9th percentile. Although IQ tests are now seen as flawed, measuring only certain variables of a person’s intelligence, Jasmine’s score left little doubt that the girl living in a fleabag apartment was a prodigy.

Plans to jump-start Jasmine’s academic career halted, however, when tragedy struck that summer. Back in Bozeman, Vanessa was on her way to Big Timber Waterslide Park with her husband, two-year-old daughter, and brother-in-law when their car overturned on a highway. Her husband suffered a heavy blow to the head and was pronounced brain-dead by the time he reached the hospital; he was pulled off life support soon after. Vanessa was paralyzed from the chest down, leaving her to face the prospect of single motherhood—her daughter and brother-in-law had emerged relatively unscathed—as a disabled widow. Georgia explained the situation to her landlord and, with Jasmine and Apollo in tow, drove to Montana.

They stayed at the Lutheran Center in Billings, a residence for the families of medical patients. Georgia did laundry, cooked, and cleaned for Vanessa and helped her acclimate to her wheelchair. Jasmine played with her little niece, Cassy, and planted acorns in Dixie cups to watch seedlings sprout. When Vanessa was assigned a health aide by the state, Georgia took Jasmine and Apollo back to San Francisco. She expected to find her apartment and job waiting for her. But her landlord, who had told her not worry about rent in the midst of family tragedy, had evicted them. The post office wouldn’t let her work because she didn’t have a permanent address, and other potential employers made the same stipulation. In a vicious cycle, Georgia’s lack of employment kept her from finding a new place to rent.

So the era of living in the Voyager began. Given his circumstances, Apollo was sent back to Montana to stay with Vanessa, and then on to New Jersey to be cared for by extended family members. For Jasmine, who didn’t have much social interaction with other kids, her brother’s departure was hard. Georgia, the minivan, and books became her whole world.   

When I first heard the story of the SLAC tour, I assumed that Georgia’s plan was to get Jasmine discovered, so to speak. If Stanford faculty saw her kindergarten-age child grasping the nuances of particle physics, they might be willing to support her beleaguered quest to find Jasmine a suitable education. Her goal, however, was much simpler than that: Georgia wanted to make Jasmine happy, to see the gleeful look on her face when she laid eyes on the linear accelerator.

Jasmine was discovered on the tour, though. Professor Yearian’s conversation with her impressed him enough that he suggested Georgia enroll her in Stanford’s Education Program for Gifted Youth, a series of distance-learning classes developed for children with exceptional academic ability. Around the same time, Georgia won a settlement from her old landlord—not only was the 1996 eviction deemed unlawful, but the court also found the sewage-plagued basement to be uninhabitable. With the money, she and Jasmine finally had options. Georgia asked her daughter where she wanted to live, and Jasmine said, “I want to go where I was born.” The pair relocated permanently to Montana, where Jasmine began taking EPGY classes on a clunky desktop computer in their Bozeman apartment.

In successive three-month semesters, Jasmine completed courses in algebra and calculus, all before her eighth birthday. Even in a program for brilliant kids, her performance raised eyebrows. “When Jasmine Lysistrata first came to the attention of the experts on gifted children at Stanford University, they wondered if she might be a hoax,” read an article published at the time in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “Never had the calculus course on the Internet been taken by a child as young.” EPGY officials were so skeptical that they had Jasmine’s math teacher, Janet Glosup, travel to Montana to confirm that the little girl was doing her own coursework. Glosup and Jasmine already had an online rapport about various subjects; in one email exchange about GMOs, Glosup had signed off, “Yuck, Janet.” In Bozeman, Glosup gave Jasmine math problems to solve and took her to Hyalite Canyon, a popular hiking destination. She later told a reporter that the girl was “at least ten times brighter than the brightest student I’ve had.”

In 1998, the CBS documentary series 48 Hours was looking for subjects for an episode entitled “Whiz Kids!” The producers heard about Jasmine through the Stanford faculty and sent a crew to Montana in the late fall. To capture a day in the life, the team, led by a young auburn-haired reporter named Maggie Cooper, arrived at Georgia and Jasmine’s apartment, the bottom level of a fourplex, at 6:30 a.m. They filmed mother and daughter as they ate hard-boiled eggs and cereal and reviewed a calculus lesson plan. Cooper then joined Jasmine in her study, a small room where a long desk and white bookcases sat atop maroon carpeting. A fake Christmas tree adorned with lights blinked in the corner. After Jasmine solved a calculus problem on a whiteboard, Cooper suggested, “You look like you’re having a good time.” Leaning against the desk, Jasmine replied shyly, “Yes, that’s very true.”

Jasmine’s segment on “Whiz Kids!” (Recording: Courtesy Promethea Pythaitha) 

While still photographs from that time show a serious child, her thick eyebrows slightly furrowed at the center of a face defined by wide, flat planes, Jasmine was effervescent on camera. Her full cheeks were red, her inflection lively. She delivered a hammy reading of Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Later in the day, the show’s producers started a snowball fight while filming Jasmine and Georgia walking home from a pond near their apartment. Slipping and sliding in slushy snow, Jasmine squealed wildly. The walk was the happiest Georgia had ever seen her daughter, “laughing her little heart out.”

Not everything that 48 Hours captured was so rosy. The crew sat in on a calculus course Jasmine was auditing at MSU, part of a trial period before the school would allow her to enroll as an official student. In an awkward scenario no doubt staged for the show, she volunteered to solve a problem in front of the class. As she filled multiple blackboards, the other students, all much older than she was, looked on with a mixture of languor and annoyance. When the class let out, Jasmine waved goodbye to one student, who quickly acknowledged her before rushing out. The chasm between Jasmine and her classmates was wide.    

Before the taping ended, Cooper sat down with Georgia in her living room, decorated with white lace, small Greek busts, and framed pictures. A portrait of Jasmine wearing a yellow dress, which Georgia had painted, hung on the wall. Georgia sat atop a stack of books in sneakers and sweatpants. Still living off the San Francisco settlement, she’d dedicated herself full-time to helping Jasmine study.

“She should graduate with her bachelor’s at about the age of 11,” Georgia told the reporter.

“She could have her master’s degree and then Ph.D. by, what, 15?” Cooper asked.

“Sixteen at the latest,” Georgia said.

After the “Whiz Kids!” episode aired in December 1998, people stopped Georgia in public to say that they recognized her from the show, including during a trip to New Jersey to visit family. There was also media coverage from Montana outlets that previously had no idea a child genius sat under their noses. MSU president Mike Malone decided to let Jasmine take courses for credit. At age eight, she became a college student.

When she was allowed to declare a major, she chose math. Because Jasmine was a minor, Georgia went to class with her every day. “It was the greatest time of our lives,” Georgia would say later. “All she cared about was learning. And as long as she learned, she was a thriving child.”

Circumstances outside the classroom continued to bedevil mother and daughter, though. A wealthy Bozeman family had offered to cover Jasmine’s tuition, but the cost of textbooks, supplies, and transportation strained Georgia’s limited finances. Going to school with her daughter made steady employment impossible. She eked out a living as best she could by cleaning faculty houses and student dormitories, sometimes in exchange for used textbooks. When the Voyager broke down, Georgia couldn’t afford to replace it, so she and Jasmine walked the 16 blocks to MSU each day.

Jasmine struggled socially. Local kids ganged up on her in the Bozeman trailer park where Vanessa lived with her daughter. One day, Jasmine made the mistake of trying to explain a math problem to one of them. From then on when she visited her sister, kids would chase her and try to bait her into answering questions so that they could ridicule the way she talked—with big words and sober mannerisms. “They would start pretty viciously mocking me,” she recalled. “It was profoundly unrewarding, every single time.”

Students at MSU could also be malicious. One told her to go home and play with Barbie dolls. Others complained about having to partner with “a baby” in labs. In the brief moments when she and her mother were separated—a bathroom break, a dash to retrieve a misplaced textbook—Jasmine was sometimes pushed around in the halls. She took to using her arms as a shield, keeping them crossed loosely in front of her chest with her elbows sticking out.

Despite having to knuckle through social crucibles, in December 2004, at age 13, Jasmine completed the coursework for her degree. She graduated the following May, becoming the youngest person in MSU history ever to do so. Her GPA was 3.81. “It isn’t perfect,” she admitted to a local reporter.

Wearing a black graduation gown and a cap with a gold tassel, the symbol of highest honors, Jasmine told the journalist that she wanted to get another four or five bachelor’s degrees. A doctorate could wait. In her mind, there was a lucid pathway between academic fields, a way to connect solutions to disease, pollution, and other global problems, so she wanted to study as many subjects as she could. “I can’t feel well accomplished, because I have so much to learn,” Jasmine said.

Except she was no longer Jasmine, legally speaking. In anticipation of her graduation, she had decided to change her name. She spent a lot of time thinking about the one she wanted, how it could offer a window into her bracing idealism and ethical vision. She settled on a four-part Greek moniker: Promethea Olympia Kyrene Pythaitha.

Promethea is a feminization of Prometheus, the Greek titan who gave fire to humankind. It also comes from the Greek word for forethought. Olympia is the region on the Peloponnesian peninsula where the Olympic games originated. (“One of the ancient Greeks’ big contributions to the world,” in the teenager’s opinion, was “the idea of putting aside people’s petty conflicts to compete for betterment, peacefully, without it being about politics and gaining power.”) Kyrene was a daughter of the god Hermes and a feminist prototype, participating in men’s sporting competitions and founding her own colony.

Finally, the inspiration behind Pythaitha was twofold: It was the name of the mother of Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, and it sounded a lot like Pythia, the name of the high priestess at Delphi who foretold the future. The girl who was now Promethea believed her life, and its work, would have meaning.

Psychologist Martha J. Morelock, who has studied prodigies for much of her career, has observed what she calls their “rage to learn.” Promethea had it. At 15, she returned to MSU for her next bachelor’s degree, this one in physics. Ever since watching Carl Sagan’s documentaries as a little girl in San Francisco, she’d been spellbound by the field. She loved how consequential physics was, how its laws governed everything in the universe. To a mind hardwired to see the intricate ways one subject might unlock the secrets of another, physics was a skeleton key.

In a jarring sequence of events, Georgia’s sister passed away and left her some money that, under the terms of the estate, had to be spent on a home within 30 days of receipt. Georgia quickly bought a shabby house on 20 acres of land near Livingston, a rural, mountainous town about 24 miles from MSU. She got a car, too, so that she could drive Promethea to classes. “The worst decision we ever made,” Georgia said later, “was to move out of Bozeman.”

The ranch was located in the Wineglass, an area whose name comes from the shape of a path carved by the timber industry in the 1890s to haul timber down from higher elevations. The area was made up of rambling homesteads scattered over a network of hills and valleys, connected by unpaved roads covered in loose rocks and prairie bunchgrass as high as a car’s hood. As soon as they moved there, Georgia and Promethea felt isolated. They butted heads with their neighbors, whom they found to be cold and surly. Georgia became embroiled in several legal disputes regarding property boundaries and other land matters. Already eccentric outsiders by nature, mother and daughter suddenly found themselves deeper than ever in the social margins.

Promethea’s schedule didn’t help. On a typical weekday, she would get up around 5 a.m. to have breakfast and prepare for the one-hour commute to MSU. Georgia still accompanied her everywhere and passed the time reading newspapers and how-to manuals for home repairs. After her classes finished in the afternoon, Promethea went to a lounge in the engineering and physical sciences building to review her notes, which she considered “chicken scratch.” She rewrote them more legibly and with generous annotations, often flashes of insight she’d had connecting one discipline to another. If she was riveted by the way a professor had described a sophisticated concept, she jotted it down. Only when she finished transcribing did she start on her homework. It wasn’t uncommon for her to go from astrophysics to circuit design to code writing in one sitting. Her meticulous approach could keep her on campus past midnight, after which Georgia drove her home and the pair slept two or three hours before waking up and starting all over again.

The days were long at MSU for another reason. Their home in Livingston had plumbing and heating problems, and Georgia struggled to pay contractors to fix them. She and Promethea shivered through frigid winter nights, when temperatures could plummet to minus 30 degrees. To bathe they boiled water. If she had to do homework, Promethea sat at her desk bundled in a heavy jacket and gloves. On campus, at least, there was heat and working bathrooms.

In the physics department, Promethea grew close with two professors, Carla Riedel and Bennett Link, who were married. Riedel taught her in five classes. “She was just a ferocious intellect,” the professor recently told me. “She devoured and sucked the information out of everything that she encountered.” Riedel compared teaching Promethea to trying to throw luggage onto a freight train passing by at full speed. “She was by far the smartest person I’ve ever known in my life,” Riedel said, and also “the most generous, sweetest, most respectful.” Promethea would bring Riedel fresh eggs from chickens she raised on the ranch.

Link, who taught Promethea in graduate-level classes on quantum mechanics and general relativity between 2009 and 2010, was similarly awed. “In terms of raw mental horsepower, she was by far the best I’ve ever seen in 25 years of teaching,” Link said. “Her ability to quickly grasp something and understand it completely was just off-scale.” Promethea would turn in 30 or 40 pages for homework assignments, “tomes” in which she solved a sophisticated physics problem—the transition rates of hydrogen atoms, say—three different ways. “That’s what the absolute best people do to check their work,” Link said, “the finest scientists I know of, especially in theoretical fields.” Promethea emblazoned each solution with a smiley face.

As Link spent more time with Promethea, though, he grew concerned about her future. He felt that one of her most impressive attributes—her appetite for a range of fields—was becoming a hindrance. During one meeting in his office, Link brought up specialization. “It’s great that you’re so inquisitive,” he said, “but at some point you need to decide what you want to do. You need to focus if you want to make an impact.” He asked Promethea what sort of career she wanted, and she couldn’t articulate an answer beyond “research-level science.” When Link encouraged her to apply to graduate programs, Promethea told him that she didn’t want to go anywhere but MSU. “She was worried about finances. She clearly didn’t want to leave the area,” Link recalled. “And she didn’t know what to do with her mother if she went to a big graduate school.”

The professors found Georgia “outrageously protective,” as Riedel put it. Even after Promethea turned 18, her mother insisted on shadowing her everywhere. Instead of diminishing over time, their fears of bullying and physical danger had hardened, and the way mother and daughter operated as a unit had become ritualistic. They were always scanning for threats and vulnerabilities, planning ahead to avoid worst-case scenarios. “There was a real secrecy over their movements around campus,” Riedel said. “Promethea would tell me she wanted to meet with me at a specific time, and then tell me why it had to be at that time, so that she could manage her environment.”

To observers, Promethea and Georgia appeared to be battening the hatches for a storm that existed only in their imaginations. “They struck me as colossally paranoid about the world,” Riedel said. “They went on and on about the awful things that might happen.

“And then,” she added, “the awful things started really happening here in Bozeman.”

Three

Unbeknownst to Riedel, Link, or anyone else at MSU, Promethea and Georgia’s lives had grown increasingly fraught, and not with delusion. It all started at a seemingly benign event. The donor family that had supported Promethea had agreed to cover tuition only for her math degree. For her physics education, she had to look elsewhere for funding. In 2006, she entered and won an essay contest sponsored by the PanHellenic Scholarship Foundation, a nonprofit that helps pay for Greek-American students’ college educations. She was awarded $10,000 and later invited to speak at the Festival of the Three Hierarchs, a banquet held every January in Chicago to commemorate the founders of the Greek Orthodox Church.

In researching the subject of her speech—the relationship between education and the church—Promethea was shocked to learn that the hierarchs, three bishops who lived in the fourth century A.D., were complicit in the vicious tyranny of early Christianity. Or in her own words, “There’s really no way to describe the history of the early Orthodox Church other than religious fascism.” The hierarchs supported leaders who persecuted philosophers, astronomers, and poets; at least one of them participated directly in this oppression. People who spread knowledge that didn’t have to do with the church were charged with heresy or witchcraft, then tortured and killed. The hierarchs also helped expunge any trace of pre-Christian religion and history, burning books and razing temples, libraries, and other landmarks that harked back to ancient Greece. Infuriated by what she’d learned, Promethea wrote a 150-page speech rebuking the church’s history. Delivering it would take several hours, but she didn’t care.

In January 2007, she and Georgia flew to Chicago, all expenses paid, to attend the festival. A car was waiting for them at the airport, along with a representative from the Greek church who was eager to meet the child prodigy her colleagues had been raving about. The woman peppered them with questions on the ride to the hotel. “How could you tell Promethea was so smart?” she asked Georgia. “When did you first discover she was gifted?” When they arrived, the representative showed them around. “We got a very nice room for you,” she said. “Look at the wonderful view.” Peering out the window, Georgia saw only a concrete plaza, which paled in comparison to Montana’s striking vistas.

For her speech, Promethea chose to wear an authentic Greek outfit: a heavily embroidered cotton dress with an ornate flap that hung down like an apron and a black vest with gold stitching. She wanted to celebrate her sartorial heritage, but the handler from the church tried to dissuade her. “You don’t want to dress like that,” the woman said. “You want to dress like a regular kid your age.” She suggested a more contemporary top with a black skirt—what Georgia described as a “bimbo” look. “No, thank you,” Promethea replied.

The festival was held in a large banquet hall. The chair of the event delivered a lofty speech introducing the brilliant teenager, and on her way up to the podium, Promethea received a standing ovation. Flanked by two men in black cassocks, both powerful priests, she began to speak in Greek.

YouTube video
The Chicago speech, with disruptions at minute 30. 

The more she talked, the tenser the room got. Georgia realized that “no one expected to hear the truths that were coming out of her mouth.” About 20 minutes into the speech, a man working the event’s film equipment began yelling, accusing Promethea of blasphemy. When she paused, a cacophony of voices rose from the hall’s tables. Some sounded livid, but not all. “Let her finish!” a burly man roared.

The priests seated on either side of Promethea wore inscrutable expressions. At one point, she was handed a card that read, “You’re finished.” She continued delivering the speech, making her voice louder and louder so as not to be drowned out. When the din finally became too much, she walked off the stage. She’d gotten through only a fraction of what she’d written.

The people running the event were irate, but several guests gathered at Promethea’s table to congratulate her on her display of courage. Women approached her in the bathroom asking for her contact information and sharing theirs. The video of the speech was posted online, where it garnered more notoriety and admiration throughout the Greek diaspora. Promethea received death threats in the mail, but also fan letters.

A few months later, Promethea and Georgia were in a car accident on a mountain pass in Montana. Georgia was rushed to the emergency room, where she pleaded with the triage nurse, “You can’t admit me, I’ve got to take my kid to school tomorrow.” Promethea insisted otherwise, and Georgia was diagnosed with broken ribs and facial bones, and a broken sternum. When news of the accident spread through the Greek community, supporters helped cover Georgia’s medical expenses and chipped in to buy her a new car. One man, 77-year-old Thomas Kyros, who claimed to be a retired physicist, made a peculiar gesture: He offered to pay for the mother and daughter, whose speech had greatly impressed him, to take a vacation to Italy once Georgia was better. They accepted, but decided to go to Greece instead.

When they returned from the vacation, their relationship with Kyros, who lived in New Port Richey, Florida, and whom they’d never met in person, quickly soured. Over email, he asked that Promethea check in with him regularly. He made it clear that he couldn’t stand her being at MSU, which he considered a middling public university in an off-the-radar state compared with the likes of Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, or Columbia, where he said he’d once worked. As Promethea put it, “I had to go to an Ivy League college so that I could became famous and well-known, so that I could in part reflect that fame on him.” If finances were an issue, she could live with him, Kyros said—never mind that his home was nowhere near any of the universities he found worthy of her. He referred to himself as pappoulis, “little grandfather” in Greek, and Promethea as eggonoula, which means “granddaughter.”

From 2007 to 2009, Kyros sent Promethea thousands of dollars intended for her education. Troubled by his overtures, she and Georgia refused them. Promethea also rejected packages he sent in the mail bearing books and other gifts, and she eventually stopped responding to his emails. This only seemed to make Kyros more obsessed, and he grew convinced that Georgia was responsible for the teenager’s disavowal of him. “He kept writing, writing, harassing,” Promethea later told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “He said, ‘You’re brainwashed, your mother’s this, your mother’s that.’”

Kyros called and wrote to officials at MSU to voice conspiracy theories: There was something scandalous, maybe depraved, going on in the dilapidated brown ranch house in the Wineglass. He also contacted the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “Promethea is a slave,” he told the newspaper in a 2009 interview, published a few years after. “She’s in bondage.” He provided what he claimed was evidence, including canceled checks that he’d tried to send to Promethea and a copy of the “Whiz Kids!” segment. He’d watched the episode over and over, parsing it for clues that Promethea was afraid of Georgia, a cruel, domineering mother who bent her daughter to her will. “He had created for himself a version of events that he liked, where he could be the hero and my mother could be the villain,” Promethea recalled, “which would give him an excuse to step in and take over my life.”

When neither MSU nor the Bozeman Daily Chronicle found his claims credible—the newspaper looked into the accusations but turned up nothing—Kyros hired a private investigator. He asked her to look into Georgia’s finances, the 2007 car accident, and the mother and daughter’s living situation in Livingston. One day in 2009, the investigator visited the ranch disguised as a special courier carrying a package from Kyros. He wanted to know who, exactly, was rejecting his mail. If Georgia sent the package back on her daughter’s behalf, Kyros would have a slender but precious shard of proof to feed his theories. It was Promethea, however, who met the incognito investigator at the ranch’s gate and turned her away.

For a while, there was radio silence from Kyros. Then, in January 2011, he called the Bozeman Daily Chronicle for the first time in a year. He left a message saying that Promethea and Georgia would be in a Livingston court in the coming days to testify as witnesses in a civil trial pertaining to road use near their home. He’d found out about the case through the private investigator, and he thought the newspaper should cover it. As usual, no one took him seriously.  

What the paper didn’t know was that Kyros was no longer in Florida. He was in Bozeman, and he’d been there for months.

At the end of October 2010, Kyros had left the house where he lived alone on Putnam Circle in New Port Richey, a suburb of Tampa. He’d given his neighbor a key and money for lawn care and newspaper delivery. He told her that he was going to visit friends in Montana, which was also where his favorite grandchild, a brilliant young woman, had attended college. “He thought she was the cat’s meow,” the neighbor, Rosalie Maxey, told a reporter at the time. Then Kyros had flown to Bozeman, where he checked in to a Days Inn.

Kyros, by then 81, was pint-size, walked in a slow shuffle, and wore plaid dress shirts and khakis. Some of the hotel’s employees grew fond of him. Marsha Wardrop, who worked at the front desk, told me that he had a made-to-order breakfast every day because of dietary restrictions. He didn’t hide his reason for being in Bozeman. “He talked about her all the time,” Wardrop recalled. Kyros told the staff that Promethea was in danger. He was certain her mother was exploiting her, and he’d come to save the young prodigy.

Room 238, where Kyros lived, often reeked of vinegar, which he used to clean his urinary catheter. According to court documents, his possessions revealed someone who had whittled his life down to a single purpose. Under his mattress was a zipped-up bag containing his passport, a checkbook, credit cards, and checks made out to his son, Kostas. Attached to the bag was a note with instructions for sending it to his son’s New Jersey address, without further explanation. (I contacted Kostas Kyros several times for an interview, but he didn’t reply.) Next to the bed were records from the Sunshine Travel Agency showing information for a one-way plane ticket to Montana, dated October 28, 2010. Several sets of directions to 50 Outlaw Hill, the address of the ranch, were scattered around the room. The nightstand held a box for a Kel-Tec P-32 semi-automatic pistol, with a sales receipt and a business card from a gun shop in Hudson, Florida.

In a suitcase were copies of the paperwork for an education trust that Kyros had set up for Promethea. The document stipulated, “In no event shall the trustee [a lawyer] provide for any educational costs relating to Promethea’s attending any university, college, program, or other schooling in the state of Montana while her mother, Georgia A. Smith, is living.” A stack of documents contained a copy of a fax written to Kyros’s Florida attorney in shaky scrawl: “This fax is to notify you that Promethea’s address, mailing, as 50 Outlaw Hill must be considered null and void for all purposes. The USPS PO Box No. 388, as well as all telephone numbers, email etc. for as long as Georgia is alive must also [be] considered null and void. For as long as Georgia is alive all communications are blocked.” (The attorney, David Gilmore, declined an interview.) Taped to the bedroom mirror was a scrap of paper with one word written on it: pappoulis.

The fax addressed to Kyros’s attorney. 
The fax addressed to Kyros’s attorney. 
The January 12, 2011 stalking notice.
The January 12, 2011 stalking notice.

On January 12, 2011, Kyros finally made his presence known to Promethea. By then the 19-year-old had finished her second degree and was planning to start a third bachelor’s in computer science while also pursuing a PhD in physics, both at MSU. At the Livingston courthouse, she was perched on a bench in a hallway waiting to testify in the road-use trial when an old man took a seat next to her.

“I’ve got the flu,” she fibbed, hoping to get him to go away. “You probably want to keep your distance.” Instead, he slid closer.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

He handed her a small card that, like the paper stuck on his hotel mirror, read pappoulis. Although she had never seen Kyros in person, the shock of recognition at the Greek word twisted Promethea’s stomach into a knot. “I don’t want to see you ever again,” she said before getting up and hurrying away.

Unnerved, she went straight to the Park County Sheriff’s Office, which had a dispatch window in the courthouse. Kyros followed her. Promethea told Park County sergeant Clay Herbst that she was being harassed. She pointed to Kyros, and Herbst asked him to leave. Kyros refused, arguing that it was a public building and he was entitled to stay.

“You’re upsetting Promethea, giving her unwanted contact, and you need to leave,” Herbst said.

“She’s keeping Promethea in a concentration camp,” Kyros replied, referring to Georgia, who was elsewhere in the courthouse at the time. Promethea asked for a no-stalking order, which Herbst and his supervisor, Tom Totland, issued and had Kyros sign before escorting him from the building.

Over the next few days, Promethea was jumpy. If he hadn’t gone back to Florida, Kyros was likely just a short drive away. It was hard to get to the ranch, at least, to navigate the Wineglass’s steep, winding roads, particularly if someone wasn’t familiar with the area. Between that and the no-stalking order, Promethea hoped she’d be safe.

The following Monday, January 17, was Martin Luther King Day. Daytime temperatures can get down to single digits during a Montana winter, but that day was in the high forties. Promethea and her mother slept in, had their morning coffee, and talked at the kitchen table. Just before noon, Georgia decided to go for a walk. She’d slept fitfully, with terrible nightmares, and she wanted to meditate with a view of the soaring mountains that wreathed the Wineglass like grassy parapets.

No sooner had she left the house than Georgia heard a loud clattering near the front of the property. She went to investigate and saw that someone was ramming the front of a pickup truck into the tall, locked green gate at the head of the driveway. She ran back inside to tell Promethea. “Get the camera,” Georgia yelled, planning to snap photos of the intruder. Instead, feeling a queasy dread rising in her body, Promethea went outside to see who it was.

Behind the wheel of a black Dodge Ram sat Kyros.

“If you don’t leave immediately,” Promethea yelled, “I’m calling the police.” From the driver’s-side window, Kyros told her that if she was so afraid to talk to him, there must be something wrong with her. She went back inside to get the phone and camera.

When Georgia learned who the driver was, she wondered if she could put an end to the whole ordeal by meeting face-to-face with the man who’d viciously disparaged her. She and Kyros were both Greek, with ties to the old country. If they talked, she reasoned, and he saw that she wasn’t evil, perhaps it would be enough to hang a truce on.

Georgia stepped out of the house and walked toward Kyros, who had emerged from the truck and was standing on the far side of the gate. When she was within a few feet of him, she realized he had something in his hand. It was the Kel-Tec. At the sight of it, she screamed and reeled back. Kyros raised the pistol and fired, hitting Georgia in the neck.

When Promethea, who was still inside the house, heard the shot, she dialed 911. Once she was on the phone with the dispatcher, she dashed into the yard. Georgia had collapsed and was curled up on her side in the reedy grass. Kyros had shot her another time, and another, and he was still firing. Promethea sprinted toward the gate and threw herself on top of her mother. Maybe—probably—he wants me alive, she thought.

“Stop!” Promethea screamed. “Stop, you bastard!”

“Why are you weeping?” Kyros asked. “You should be happy she’s going to die.”

Sprawled over her mother, Promethea remained on the phone with 911. She tried to keep an eye on Kyros, who was pacing back and forth on the far side of the gate, looking for another clean shot. Then he stopped. Perhaps he decided that he’d already done what he came to do, and now he had only to wait for Georgia’s heart to stop beating.

Kyros reached into his truck and pulled out a blue bag, which he tossed on the ground near the two women. It contained $720 in cash and a copy of the education trust. Then he got behind the wheel of the Dodge Ram, turned the ignition, and reversed for a few yards before swinging around and backing the truck’s bed up to the green gate. Through the windshield he now faced the gravel driveway, about 100 yards long, leading away from the house. It was the only way in and the only way out. To save Georgia, law enforcement would have to get past him.

“Keep fighting,” Promethea told her mother between heaving sobs. Georgia was slipping into unconsciousness, and her lips were turning blue.

Herbst and Totland, the same officers who’d encountered Kyros at the courthouse, were notified that there’d been shots fired on Outlaw Hill. A victim had been hit, Promethea was on the line, and the suspect was still armed. The officers knew who the shooter had to be.

It took them ten minutes to arrive at the ranch, with an ambulance close behind. When they caught sight of Kyros, they used a squad car’s PA system to order him out of the truck with his hands up. He didn’t respond. The officers couldn’t see Promethea and Georgia, because Kyros had blocked their view of where the women lay crumpled on the ground. Herbst radioed headquarters for a victim status update. Emergency dispatch, still on the phone with Promethea, said that Georgia was losing a lot of blood.

The officers debated their options. They decided that Totland would drive slowly toward Kyros while Herbst approached on foot along the passenger’s side of the vehicle, using it as a shield. It had begun to drizzle. Herbst put on a coat and loaded his rifle. Totland started rolling his car toward the Dodge Ram.

When they got close enough, they could see that Kyros was in the driver’s seat with his right arm resting on the center console. The gun was in that hand, its barrel pointing toward the front of the truck. His finger was on the trigger.

“Drop your gun, sir!” Herbst shouted.

“You put your guns down!” Kyros replied.

Herbst sensed that Kyros was trying to keep the ambulance at bay for as long as possible. “I saw Georgia lying on the ground. I didn’t see Georgia moving, I saw blood on Promethea’s hands,” Herbst said later in an official interview with the Montana Department of Criminal Investigation. “At that point I didn’t know if he had maybe shot Promethea as well.”

Kyros told the officers they would have to shoot him. But however unhinged he was, Kyros hadn’t tried to attack them. In fact, he didn’t budge as they got within a few feet of his truck. Herbst saw the old man fiddling with the buttons on his door, the ones controlling the truck’s windows and locks. The officer decided to make a move.

With the butt of his rifle, Herbst attempted to shatter the driver’s-side window, which was halfway down. The glass only cracked. That was when Kyros finally reacted, swinging his gun up and pointing it directly at Herbst. Both officers opened fire. Each got off nine shots. Kyros was dead in a matter of seconds.

Promethea picked herself up from her mother’s body and unlocked the gate, hands trembling. Herbst radioed the ambulance to drive in. When he got to Georgia, her eyes were open, but she was nonresponsive. Kyros had shot her five times. As paramedics rushed in, Promethea seemed stricken by the scene, at a loss after the furious adrenaline rush of protecting Georgia. “She wasn’t sure what to do,” Herbst recalled. “I told her to get in the ambulance with her mom and go.” He gave her a hug before she went.

YouTube video
The inquest into Thomas Kyros’s death.

Georgia’s wounds ranged from her neck to her torso to her legs. One shot had been devastating, severing her brachial plexus and puncturing a lung before the bullet became embedded near her spine. Another bullet had struck her small intestine, and a third had fractured her hip before putting a hole in her bladder. At Livingston Memorial Hospital, Georgia underwent emergency surgery to remove the slugs. She was then put on life support and airlifted by helicopter to the Billings Clinic, Montana’s largest hospital. She went directly to the ICU, where doctors performed an endoscopy and later removed a portion of her small intestine. She dipped in and out of consciousness as medical staff inserted chest tubes to drain blood collecting in her lungs, checked her wounds, and monitored her internal organs for signs of failure.

Promethea stayed with her mother. She couldn’t sleep, but she wasn’t distraught, exactly—her nerves were so frayed that she could only feel numb. She’d done all she could to save Georgia, but what if it wasn’t enough? Promethea didn’t know her extended family well. There were no aunts, uncles, cousins, or grandparents visiting the hospital, no one offering her support. Her older siblings’ needs far surpassed her own and created emotional distance; Vanessa remained paralyzed, and Apollo, back in Montana and living in Section 8 housing, couldn’t hold a job. She didn’t have close friends. Math and physics were her passions, but they weren’t flesh and blood.

Without Georgia, Promethea would be utterly alone.

Four

I set out to find Promethea six years after the shooting. She hadn’t given a media interview since the immediate aftermath, and she was no longer enrolled at MSU. As far as I knew, she was still on the ranch in Livingston. I could find neither an email address nor a working phone number for her, and she had zero social-media presence. I reached out to a Bozeman Daily Chronicle reporter named Gail Schontzler who’d written several stories about the prodigy. She told me she hadn’t heard from Promethea in years. “I’m not sure Promethea wants national exposure,” Schontzler cautioned me in an email. “That’s what got her mom shot.”

Eventually, I made contact with Promethea’s lawyer, Jason Armstrong, who said that he’d forward my request to his client. When I asked to email her directly, he declined to share her address, citing Promethea’s past experience with unwanted attention. After a month of back and forth with Armstrong, I finally got the message I’d been hoping for. “Dear Mr. Mariani,” it read. “Good evening, and thank you for your correspondence and the interest you have shown in our story. This is Promethea.”

She said she was open to having a conversation. What was she like at 26? I wondered. How did her mind work? And how would she talk about her turbulent life, as riddled with tragedy as it had been rich with gifts?

It took another month of email exchanges to get her to agree to speak with me on the phone. After that, our dialogue toggled between calls and email. We discussed her unconventional education and her upbringing  by her mother. “I got a lot more sleep, and a lot more food, and a lot more everything than she did because she had to provide for us both, and all I had to do was worry about studying,” Promethea said. When we talked science, her mind was kaleidoscopic, shifting fluidly from one subject to another and making seemingly disparate ideas fit together. In one email, she elaborated on why she found interdisciplinary study so vital. She compared quantum entanglement—the spookiest of physics phenomena, according to Einstein, in which manipulating one object affects another one’s state, even from a great distance—to coding and biology:

Quantum Entanglement is one of those things predicted by the math, and verified experimentally. It’s also a bizarre paradox that’s too weird for words, and yet there’s nothing strange about it from an Information theory/Computing perspective. Same goes for Biochemistry and genetics. Whether we’re looking at enzyme design or gene transcription, within the field it is a baffling triumph of nature in building chemical machines, and yet to a programmer it is a triumph of coding design…. Amino acids are literally like program objects (or functions depending on the coder’s specialty). Inserted in a sequence their effect is predictable, but only at the most base level. What makes the field hard is that it’s far too frequently approached from effects down instead of the approach a programmer would take, working through coding from the bottom up to determine the function for each larger structure, then what structures and processes are built on those and so on up and up.

After two months of correspondence, Promethea agreed to let me visit her in Montana. We could talk more about physics. I could see the driveway where a disturbed man on a violent mission had derailed her life. And I could meet her mother.

Georgia had survived. After nearly a month of surgeries and other procedures, in February 2011, she’d been released and had returned to Livingston under Promethea’s care. She was left with a litany of physical issues, including partial paralysis of her left arm, nerve damage to her neck and shoulder, and extensive abdominal problems. She’d been almost entirely housebound ever since. As Georgia once did for her, Promethea put her life on hold to help her mother recover. She was recuperating, too: A clinical psychologist had diagnosed Promethea with severe post-traumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder as a direct result of Kyros’s attack.

Promethea and Georgia at the ranch on Outlaw Hill. (Photo: Lynn Donaldson)

I flew to Montana in July 2017, rented a car, and drove toward the Wineglass. Past Bozeman’s downtown of warehouse-size coffee shops, independent bookstores, and Yellowstone-themed restaurants were pawn shops, hardware stores, and strip malls. Highways were choked with mammoth pickup trucks—Sierras and Rams and F-150’s—driven by men wearing scruffy beards and weathered overalls. Dirt roads that stretched into the mountains were covered with rocks and thick dust, carving through otherwise uninterrupted miles of sage and bluebunch.

When I’d started researching this story, I hadn’t been able to wrap my head around how Promethea and Georgia fit into the wider picture of the place they called home, but where they’d also been treated as oddities and outcasts. When people who aren’t from there think of Montana, they conjure images of wide-open spaces and taciturn cowboys, or maybe celebrities like Ted Turner and Jeff Bridges living on sprawling, thousand-acre ranches. Like so many representations of seldom-visited places, however, these portrayals are both partially true and wildly misleading—simulacra that throw you off the scent of the real thing.

Montana is the fourth-largest state in America, but it has a population of just over one million. There are around seven people for every square mile; only Wyoming and Alaska have lower population density. The state’s entire northern border runs along Canada at the 49th parallel, a desolate stretch of prairie and badlands. Its southern reaches, including Bozeman, are enveloped by vast mountain ranges. The sweeping, untrammeled terrain cultivates a lifestyle of roughshod, harum-scarum virility and a cultural ethos etched in a very different language—one of grit and self-reliance—than Promethea’s beloved calculus, physics, and computer code. Some people move to Montana looking for anonymity. Infamously, it’s where the Unabomber lived off the grid in a one-room cabin for almost two decades before the FBI caught him. Other people go there for quiet inspiration. Prolific authors like Jim Harrison, who wrote Legends of the Fall, and Thomas McGuane have ensconced themselves in Montana’s lonely hills and valleys, and set their novels among them, too.  

Montana is also a place of guns, construction projects, and belligerent bumper stickers, of skipping work when the fishing is good and patrolling one’s land with righteous territorialism. Its don’t-tread-on-me self-rule is fiercely protected. Even MSU, an intellectual bastion, betrays a cryptic antagonism. Near its entrance is a marble plaque with an inscription from the politician William Jennings Bryan: “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

I found Montana to be like a deep canyon you can’t see until you’re just a few feet in front of it. If you’re not careful, it can swallow you up.

Georgia’s property had a breathtaking but desolate view, with beauty of the cold, unforgiving kind. Ragged prairie, its hue faded gold, ran to the lush green peaks of the Bridger Mountains. The closest neighbors were so far away that their homes looked like dollhouses. Georgia’s house, one of the highest in the area, was situated like a windblown bird’s nest on Outlaw Hill.

Promethea greeted me at the green gate. It was secured with multiple locks. On either side were tattered American flags mounted on wooden posts, blowing hectically in the mountain wind like air dancers at a car dealership. Promethea’s black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore a loose long-sleeve shirt, jeans, and a pair of Merrell sneakers. “It’s great to finally meet you,” she said, opening the gate. Some of her features were recognizable from ­photos of her younger self—the rounded cheekbones, the Mediterranean complexion—but her large hands and boxy figure had a working-class cast I hadn’t expected.

Promethea no longer lived at the ranch. She had a small place in Bozeman, thanks to a work-for-rent arrangement with a local business where she repaired and upgraded computers. She also tutored students for the GRE. She didn’t have a car, so she got up to Livingston by relying on public transportation. I offered to give her rides during my visit.

Initially, when we were one-on-one, Promethea’s disposition disarmed me. Her mood was cheerful but her affect flat, as though something had been stripped from it. I struggled to find my footing in conversation, because the usual notches and grooves weren’t there. At one point she quoted Star Trek’s Spock, and I wondered if she drew inspiration from a character who balanced near perfect intellect with extreme stoicism. I also thought about how socially isolated she’d been all her life: homeless and homeschooled as a young child, taking college classes by age seven, earning two bachelor’s degrees with her mother by her side every day.

Carla Riedel had told me that Promethea “never knew how to end conversations or begin conversations or ratchet herself back.” I experienced this while ferrying her through the Montana landscape. After small talk, which came in fits and starts, Promethea would shift into a high gear I wasn’t ready for. She would talk about her family, then Greek austerity politics, then science, with nary a breath in between. There was no conversational ebb and flow. I didn’t so much participate as try to steer her thoughts now and then with questions.

But while it was clear that I was in the presence of the smartest person I’d ever met, Promethea’s intellect wasn’t the most striking thing about her. She didn’t have the sarcasm, cynicism, or irony many young people use to construct their personalities and establish repartee. She wasn’t quotable in the droll or pithy way that makes a journalist’s job easy; she was earnest and expansive. Our conversations were airless because Promethea had no airs—no hint of attitude, vanity, or ego. Perhaps in missing out on opportunities to develop her social self, she’d eluded artifice altogether.

One day we made plans to drive to Yellowstone National Park. I hoped to use it as an opportunity to broach some of the more sensitive topics in her life. After a week of thunderstorms swooping in and out of Bozeman, the skies were clear and the temperatures were in the low eighties. Promethea wore her hair in a bun under an old green beret and carried an earth-toned knapsack over one shoulder. On the hourlong ride from Livingston through flatlands streaked with yellow and mauve wildflowers, I asked Promethea about her father. She told me that Georgia had loved him, but that his family, which was also Greek, had selected someone else for him to marry. Promethea had never met him—even after she was featured on 48 Hours and profiled in Montana newspapers, and even after the shooting. “It’s kind of hard to be mad at someone you never knew,” she said.

We went hiking in the Lamar Valley, a stretch of wilderness often called the Serengeti of North America because of its dazzling array of big mammals: wolves, grizzlies, and elk, to name a few. Over several hours, picking our way through hilly backcountry past herds of pronghorn and mud-bathing bison, we eased into an idiosyncratic rapport. Promethea spoke less haltingly, but still with bottomless erudition. I began firing whatever questions came to mind, no matter how ludicrous they sounded. Promethea, what genus of flower is this? Promethea, how does the process of decomposition work? Promethea, how did wolves become dogs? It took no time for her to locate an answer in her encyclopedic brain. A few miles in, we stumbled onto a sulfur deposit, an ashy yellow swatch hidden behind a cluster of fir trees. “It must be thousands of years old,” I mused. “Probably much older,” Promethea corrected me. She explained that the sulfur’s likely provenance was volcanic ash spewed half a million years ago.

Joanne Ruthsatz, an expert on virtuosic children, has said that prodigies are exceedingly rare, perhaps only one in five million people. When most of us imagine such an individual, we visualize a gifted specialist who crawls up to a piano as a toddler and plays Beethoven or who outsmarts chess grandmasters while still in junior high school. Promethea, by contrast, seemed like an astounding generalist. She never once struck a false note.

The hardest question of all, lodged inside me like a Zen koan, was one that I wasn’t sure Promethea could answer, at least not easily. Beyond facts and figures, it would require accessing the depths of her emotional intelligence: How had a genius slipped through society’s cracks, and could she ever find her way back aboveground?

One night, Promethea invited me over for dinner at the ranch. We walked up the driveway, past several streetlights installed on the property, and onto a plywood platform leading into the one-story brown house. Georgia was in the living room, waiting to greet me for the first time. “You look just like you do in your picture!” she said, embracing me. She was small, with fierce hazel eyes and silver hair shaved close to her skull. On her face, scars intermingled with smile lines.

Inside, Georgia’s home was like a treasure chest from a bygone era. Miniature Christmas houses crowded wooden shelves, their Victorian roofs flecked with sugary fake snow. Orchids, cactus, and pothos vines spilled from the corners of the living room. Porcelain angels peered out of various nooks and crannies, each one engaged in an act of ethereal grace: holding an infant child, feeding a swan, pirouetting with a silk ribbon in hand. Georgia said that she’d bought the angels to commemorate accomplishments in Promethea’s academic career. Underneath each one was a handwritten congratulatory note to her daughter. One read, “My beloved daughter Jasmine, for acing Linear Algebra 333 at MSU, Bozeman, MT. I love you, Mommy Georgia.”

I sat in the living room talking to Georgia while Promethea flitted to and from the kitchen, where she was preparing dinner. When Georgia told a story Promethea had probably heard a hundred times, she flashed a wry smile. When her mother made a bawdy joke, which she did more than once, Promethea let out a half-stifled laugh. Alongside Georgia, pieces of her personality emerged. Yet she was deferential, happy to let her mother have the spotlight.

Listening to Georgia talk about life in Greece and the star-crossed arc of her time in America, I thought about how, in the mountains of Montana, she had managed to re-create her youth at the orphanage: an existence devoid of comforts but surrounded by natural beauty. Her excruciating history had sharpened Georgia’s edges; her opinions were forward, her tone defiant. When I mentioned that Promethea getting a steady computer-programming job might give them both some financial stability, Georgia gave me a long stare, her head tipped forward and eyebrows raised. “C’mon,” she said. “Life isn’t about having food on the table. It’s about fulfilling your destiny.”

Later, the three of us sat in the kitchen drinking strong, bitter Greek coffee. Animated by the caffeine spike, Promethea began waxing poetic about quantum entanglement. She described the theory as being like “twin souls, bound across time.” She stood and paced around the table, gesturing elaborately with her hands. She looked like a rigorous, romantic professor.

I asked if the transition from intellectual life at MSU, where she had teachers to spar with, to the isolated one she led now had been difficult. She and Bennett Link had discussed the possibility of her attending graduate school in 2011, and again in 2012. But she never applied anywhere, and the two eventually lost touch.

“You need money to go to school,” she told me.

For all her misfortune, indigence had been the most consistent affliction in Promethea’s life, and in many ways her story lays bare the inexorability of class distinctions. In a morbid twist, Kyros had left her two-thirds of his estate. After lawyer fees, a payoff to Kyros’s son (who might otherwise have fought for the inheritance in court), and Georgia’s extensive medical expenses, very little was left. Promethea spent the remainder on an in-home art studio for Georgia, who loves to paint and still sometimes uses her daughter as a subject. Promethea hopes that Georgia might one day show her work in galleries.

I pointed out that graduate programs have fellowships, stipends, and other sources of support, and that many schools would jump at the chance to welcome someone of her caliber. “If you’re doing that, and you’re trying to also, say, pursue computers or the premed program at the same time, you can’t,” she said. In other words, the demands of being a student in one discipline wouldn’t allow her enough time for other pursuits. It was the same impediment Link had observed when she was his student.  

Exasperated, Georgia rolled her eyes. “You’ve been six years on a detour,” she said to her daughter. “When the best is being held back, sure, they will get somewhere, but not where the world needs them to be.”

There was another reason Promethea was on a detour. It became clear when she talked about the shooting, the pain of the memory heavy in her voice. Trauma is always complex, but in her case it is especially insidious. Because Kyros was obsessed with her intelligence, his violence tainted Promethea’s passions and ambitions, sullying the things she wanted most in the world with her own mother’s blood.

“In all the years I went to MSU and all the times I was faced with misogyny and age bias, no matter how bad things were and how isolated sometimes I felt because of the way other students treated me, especially when I was younger, I never regretted being born with the abilities I had,” she told me in the winding way she often speaks. “And then, when I was sitting there in the hospital, with my mother in the ICU, and afterwards knowing that her life would never be normal again, and that she’d be suffering what he caused for the rest of her life, I didn’t wish for anything more than that I had been born perfectly normal.”

The Romantic poets, whom Promethea read as a child, described the sublime as learning to exchange easier for more difficult pleasures. The stunning aberration of prodigies is that they are born with a taste for the latter. Promethea’s fascination with complex mathematics, astrophysics, waves, stars, cells, and the invisible strings that might loop them all together is, and always has been, her natural state. It is also what set her on an unimaginably lonely trajectory, shaped by poverty and pockmarked by violence.

As Gail Schontzler pointed out, Promethea has a rightful claim to a quiet, low-key existence. But those who know her crave more for her future. “She could enter graduate school anywhere, right now, and be top of the class,” Link said. Georgia, who convinced Promethea to participate in this story by suggesting that talented young girls facing difficult odds need to see more positive role models, confided in me that she also hoped the exposure would remind people of her daughter’s dazzling intellect. “I want her to move forward,” Georgia said, “but she needs help.”

After spending several months learning about Promethea’s life and speaking with her dozens of times, I too felt compelled to nudge her toward reclaiming her innate promise and once titanic drive. In the end, though, other people’s wishes and entreaties didn’t matter. They still don’t. The only question is this: What sort of life does the young woman who fell in love with Stanford’s particle accelerator at an age when most children are enamored with The Cat in the Hat imagine for herself? When asked, Promethea will answer ambiguously, as if afraid to name her aspirations lest they be dashed once again. Yet in her rapturous ruminations on esoteric subjects and her cautious agreement to let a reporter into her private domain, perhaps there are glimmers of clarity.

When she got her first bachelor’s degree, Promethea told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, “I kind of think I’ve got something important to do, like fulfilling an oracle.” If such an oracle had existed, like Pythia presiding at Delphi, its prophecy for the young prodigy would have been one of unfathomable brilliance and torment. But there was no high priestess at work in Promethea’s life, only powerful forces of chance and circumstance. They have quieted now, leaving Promethea’s words hanging in the air. She hasn’t finished speaking.

Some Mother’s Boy

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Some Mother’s Boy

In 1921, a teenager died alone in Kentucky and was buried without a name. A century later, a team of sleuths set out to find his identity.

By Alina Simone

The Atavist Magazine, No. 71


Alina Simone is the author of two essay collections and a novel. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian’s Long Read, and the Village Voice, among others.


Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Jake Scobey-Thal
Illustrator: Lauren Tamaki

Published in September 2017. Design updated in 2021.

The Case

He was in a hurry when he was killed.

Late at night on April 1, 1921, a teenager dashed across the tracks of a northbound train just steaming into the depot in Georgetown, Kentucky. He was hoping to catch another train—the Royal Palm headed to Jacksonville, Florida—pulling away on the opposite switch. But his timing was off, or maybe he stumbled. The corner of the massive metal engine he’d raced in front of struck him in the head, fracturing his skull and knocking him unconscious.

The station agent was the first to get to the boy, who wasn’t carrying identification. No horrified onlooker claimed him as a son, brother, lover, or friend. At Ford Memorial Hospital, he was admitted as a John Doe. In a matter of hours he died as one, too. “An unidentified youth brought in the hospital here late Friday night,” the Lexington Leader reported, “died this morning without regaining consciousness. He was about 17 years of age.”

At a local funeral home, it fell to Ernest Ashurst, the Scott County coroner, to find the boy’s family. Georgetown, known for its Baptist college and premium tobacco, had only 3,900 residents. The town’s depot, however, sat on the so-called Whiskey Route connecting Kentucky’s eastern distilleries to the state capital and to rail lines serving cities as far away as Buffalo and Miami. Lexington was 13 miles south, Cincinnati 70 miles north. The dead boy could have come from anywhere.

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Ashurst released a physical description—five feet six inches tall, 110 pounds, eyes blue-gray, hair light brown, complexion fair—along with a catalog of the young man’s possessions. “The youth’s clothes, which were of good quality, bore the clothier’s mark ‘H.M. Lindenthal, Chicago,’ and on his shirt was the laundry mark, ‘Jones,’” the Lexington Leader noted. Ashurst also found a tag bearing the code “E IC6” on the boy’s shirt, and a pocket watch engraved with the letters “W.A.” on the outside of its case, “L.H.D.” on the inside. The coroner canvassed nearby towns with telegrams and advertisements, and he took callers at the funeral home—bereft relatives in search of their own lost boys.

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Meanwhile, county attorney H. Church Ford, a witness to the accident, claimed that the victim hadn’t been traveling alone. “The boy, with another young man, was hidden under a box car on the east side of the station,” the Lexington Herald quoted Ford saying. The pair had attempted to cross the tracks together, but only “one succeeded in getting over.” The account made it seem like the travelers might have been hobos, but Ashurst was convinced otherwise. “The dead boy evidently is well-bred and belongs to an excellent family,” he told the Georgetown Times.

The companion was nowhere in sight by the time the station agent reached the scene. According to bystanders, the boy had bought a ticket—a sign that Ashurst was right about the pair not being hobos—on a train bound for Somerset, Kentucky, some 90 miles south. A warrant was issued for his arrest. When the young man was apprehended, he insisted that he didn’t so much as know the dead boy’s name. They’d met in Cincinnati and ridden south together, nothing more. It seemed odd that they’d never exchanged names, odder still that the survivor had blithely bought a ticket while his acquaintance bled from a fatal head wound. The traveler maintained his ignorance, though, and was released from custody. Newspapers didn’t report his name.

Two weeks after the accident, Georgetown’s authorities couldn’t keep the body aboveground any longer. By then the tragedy had aroused the small town’s sympathy. Residents raised money to pay for a casket and funeral. The burial was held at Georgetown’s cemetery on the afternoon of Thursday, April 14. Several townspeople attended. Others sent flowers. Ashurst pledged to not stop looking for the family.

A simple headstone was unveiled, engraved with the date of the boy’s death, that of his burial, and the note “Contributed by Friends.” The stone didn’t bear a name. At least, not a real one.

The first thing I learned about unidentified bodies is that they need nicknames. A moniker can derive from the place where a body is found, like Cheerleader in the Trunk, discovered in Frederick, Maryland, in 1982. It can refer to when a corpse turns up, like Valentine Sally, found on a February 14 in Williams, Arizona. Or it can memorialize a physical characteristic, like Tok, Alaska’s One-Eyed Jack, who was wearing a leather eye patch when he was located in 1979. Nicknames serve as convenient shorthand for cops tracking cases. They can also generate intrigue, empathy, and investigative leads. The best nicknames tell stories that captivate.

That’s the second thing I learned about unidentified bodies: Story is everything. Of the 4,400 unclaimed, unnamed bodies discovered in the United States annually, law enforcement identifies 75 percent within a year. After that the chances of putting a name to a body plunge dramatically. Drumming up public interest with a compelling narrative is often the only way to keep cases from being forgotten.  

The man who taught me the lessons of the anonymous dead is Todd Matthews. By the time cases make it to him, they’ve been deemed all but unsolvable—“hard boiled,” as he puts it. Matthews co-directs the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a little known government operation housed in the Department of Justice. NamUs manages an online database of records pertaining to unidentified bodies, cross-referenced with a catalog of missing persons. The assumption is that there’s overlap—parents searching for a lost child, say, whose body detectives are trying to identify several states away. Anyone can register case information with NamUs: physical descriptions, date LKA (last known alive), dental records, and so on. About 14,500 cases of unidentified remains—and many more cases of missing persons—have been logged since NamUs was developed in 2007.

Matthews is 47, with a boyish face and shaggy brown hair that he often tops with a battered khaki baseball cap. He isn’t a career bureaucrat, cop, or forensic scientist. He doesn’t even have a college degree. His quixotic hunt for the names of unidentified bodies began 30 years ago in rural Tennessee, where he was born and raised, and where he found his calling as a DIY sleuth. When I reached out to him in early 2017, I was looking for a cold case of my own to pursue. The crime fiction of Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, and Boris Akunin filled my family’s bookcases when I was growing up. As an adult, I prefer the Nordic variant of the genre, penned by writers like Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson. I was eager to report a story with a hero and a villain, a wrong in need of righting, a noble quest.

Over the years, science and technology have made Matthews’s work easier. Labs can now identify human remains from little more than DNA-enriched soil and perform digital facial reconstruction for bodies found without heads. Genetic research is routinely practiced at home, with millions of people uploading their profiles into public databases in hopes of finding a Viking ancestor or Native American cousin thrice removed. Some aspects of the job, though, haven’t changed: the obsessive, painstaking ones. It’s not unusual for Matthews to pursue a case for years, sometimes decades. He believes it’s never too late for anyone—even me, even you—to search for a missing person or identify an anonymous body.

Not everyone agrees. Many lingering John and Jane Does were sex workers, homeless people, or criminals before they died, a potential public relations problem for detectives who find themselves in the distasteful position of justifying the hunt for the identities of people whom society cast out. There’s also the matter of money. With tens of thousands of unsolved murders and rapes committed across the United States each year, the amount of government funding available for DNA testing already falls well short of law enforcement’s needs. Why waste scant resources on the antique dead?

NamUs entry #16182, the case of the young man killed by a train in Georgetown, Kentucky, personified both sides of this debate. At 96 years, it was one of the oldest cases in the NamUs database; there was little hope of finding anyone who knew the deceased when he was alive, and the odds of pulling useable DNA from his remains were low. Because his death was an accident, there was no crime to solve. Yet his nickname pulled off the difficult trick of illuminating what makes some people care so much about the unnamed dead, and what made me choose case #16182 as my project.

The nickname came readymade, inscribed on the donated headstone and obscured over the decades by creeping moss: Some Mother’s Boy.

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The Detective

From the moment he was born, Todd Matthews was dogged by death. His father, a Vietnam veteran, was exposed to Agent Orange, which led to birth abnormalities that claimed the lives of an infant brother and sister. His own survival was no sure thing: He was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect that required surgery by the time he was eight. “This kid won’t make it past his teens,” a doctor muttered at his bedside.

His mother wouldn’t let him so much as plug in an appliance by himself, much less play football or baseball like other boys his age. In the sports-obsessed culture of Livingston, Tennessee, a small town near the Kentucky border, Matthews needed to carve out a different identity for himself. He became a raconteur and a cut-up with a flair for the macabre, the guy at school who smuggled a Ouija board into band practice. It was his way of spinning the darkness that wreathed his early life into something positive.

In the fall of 1987, his senior year of high school, Matthews spotted a new girl—a willowy brunette named Lori Riddle who was a transplant from Kentucky. One day near Halloween, when the school was decked with orange and black streamers, Matthews held a group of kids in study hall captive with a scary story. He was surprised when Riddle took a seat next to him, more surprised still when she spoke. “I have a sort of ghost story,” she said.

In the spring of 1968, her father, Wilbur Riddle, was walking near a ridge covered with thick scrub in Scott County, Kentucky, when he tripped on a dirty green tarp bound by a tight cord and encasing something bulky. He cut the cord and was horrified to discover the naked body of a young woman wrapped in a canvas tent. Police would later determine that she’d been hit in the head and suffocated to death, but they weren’t able to identify her. Tent Girl was buried in a grave marked “No. 90.”

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Matthews was struck, by Riddle and the story. The pair started dating, and when Riddle took Matthews home to meet her family, her father pulled out an old issue of Master Detective magazine that featured a write-up about Tent Girl. “Kentucky police ask your assistance in the most baffling case in the state’s criminal history,” the cover blared. “Who is the ‘Tent Girl’ and who killed her?” For Matthews, it was an eerie moment of clarity, “almost like you’re remembering the future,” he told me. He made two promises to himself: that he would marry Riddle and solve the Tent Girl case.

Within a year, Matthews and Riddle were hitched. He would spend the next ten years making good on promise number two.

After graduating from high school, Matthews went to work on the assembly line at Hutchinson, a materials manufacturer in Livingston. In his spare time, he took to cold-calling police stations and combing newspaper archives in search of any woman reported missing in 1968 who matched Tent Girl’s description: white, between 16 and 19 years old, five feet one inch tall, 110 to 115 pounds, short reddish-brown hair, no identifying marks or scars. He struggled to explain the allure of the case, to others and to himself. All he could say was that it felt like a portal to a place familiar enough to recognize but different enough to enthrall. Matthews had rarely left the county where he was from—“long-distance travel for us was the Smoky Mountains”—and Tent Girl allowed him to pursue something difficult and tragic that stretched his life’s tether.

Sometimes he drove the 170 miles north to the site where her body was found and to her grave, located in a cemetery in Georgetown, Kentucky. Matthews would always pause at the grave marked Some Mother’s Boy. It had earned a mention, peppered with inaccuracies, at the end of the Master Detective magazine article:

“Near ‘No. 90’ is the grave where another unidentified body rests. In it, about 30 years earlier, was buried the body of a young man found dead outside Georgetown. Townspeople joined to buy a grave marker which reads, ‘Someone’s boy. About 19.’”

Everyone knows about Tent Girl, Matthews would think, but nobody knows about Some Mother’s Boy. The grave lodged itself in the recesses of his mind.

Matthews came to know the Tent Girl case so well that he could rattle off descriptions of her fingernails (well manicured) and the rocks (construction debris) that had concealed her body from view on U.S. 25. He developed a theory that she wasn’t a girl at all, but a woman. Police had assumed she was a teenager because she was short; according to Wilbur Riddle, though, her breasts were unusually large. Later, police determined that a small white towel found with the body was a cloth diaper. Matthews suspected that she had delivered a baby not long before she was killed.

A turning point in Matthews’s search came with the advent of the internet. In 1997, he created a website that included Tent Girl’s physical description, a police sketch, and his name and phone number for tipsters to use. Given the primitive state of search engines, “I might as well have hung a poster in the woods,” Matthews said. A Kentucky newspaper ran a story about the site, but it wasn’t so much Tent Girl that interested the reporter as it was Matthews: the son-in-law of the man who’d discovered the body, trying to solve the decades-old mystery.

It was hard to be the sole champion of a dead person. Matthews put financial strain on his family, spending money on long-distance phone calls, travel, motel stays, and other expenses. At one point even his wife, his original muse, grew exasperated. She moved out for six months, taking their infant son with her, and consulted a divorce lawyer. “It’s not like I’m selling dope. I’m not doing anything bad. What’s wrong with this?” Matthews asked her. Deep down, though, he knew the answer: His obsession “was taking away, in her mind, from other things I should be doing,” Matthews told me. After they reconciled, he would wait for her to go to bed before scouring the internet for leads.

One night in January 1998, Matthews was trawling a website called Crain and Hibb, “kinda like a Craigslist of the day,” he recalled. “People were looking for lost dogs, cars for sale. I searched for missing mother, sister, daughter.” He came across a listing that read, “Sister, last seen in Lexington, KY, Dec 1967.” Matthews froze. Tent Girl had been found just north of Lexington. He’d always suspected she was from there but could never find a missing-person report with a matching description. He ran into the bedroom, jumped on the bed, and yelled to his wife, who was asleep, “I found her! I found her!”

“People were looking for lost dogs, cars for sale. I searched for missing mother, sister, daughter.”

When Matthews contacted the woman who’d posted the listing, everything fit: her sister’s height, hair, and weight, even her well-manicured nails. The missing woman’s name was Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor, and she’d been in her twenties with an eight-month-old child at the time of her death. It was her teeth that convinced Emily Craig, Kentucky’s state forensic anthropologist, to authorize an exhumation of Tent Girl for DNA testing. “A lot of these stories can be discounted pretty quickly, but Todd and the Tent Girl just couldn’t,” Craig told me. “He had pictures of Barbara Hackmann Taylor, and I had pictures from the autopsy that showed her teeth.” Both sets of images revealed a top row with a distinctive gap. “It was a visual thing, a gestalt that I put together in my head,” Craig explained. Six weeks after the exhumation, a DNA test proved that Taylor was Tent Girl. Relatives were able to put a name on her grave, which remained in Georgetown.

How did police fail to identify Tent Girl as a resident of Lexington, so close to where she was found? “Nobody at that time really looked at both sides of the equation,” Craig explained. “There were people that were passionate about the deceased. And there were people passionate about the missing. But without an internet-based system or a person as a go-between, they never came together.”

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Like many anonymous dead, Taylor led a troubled life. She grew up in Illinois but left home to follow her future husband, a trucker named Earl, and had three children with him by the time she was 24. Her family tracked Earl down after she disappeared, but he claimed that she’d run off with another man. The family also contacted police, but thinking Taylor was still alive they asked the wrong question: Had a 24-year-old mother of three been reported missing? After Matthews solved the case, Taylor’s family suspected that Earl had murdered her. He was an occasional carnival worker, and the tent used to wrap up the body was similar to those used in traveling fairs. By then, however, Earl had died of cancer.

As the first civilian in America to identify a body using the internet, Matthews was turbo-spun through the media cycle, even appearing on 48 Hours. Profiles in People and Wired followed. The Tent Girl case prompted Kentucky to create a database of unclaimed remains, among the first of its kind nationwide. More broadly, Craig told me, Matthews’s breakthrough “basically launched the internet phenomenon of web sleuthing for the missing and unidentified.” Matthews helped create the Doe Network, a volunteer-run predecessor to NamUs, and Project EDAN (Everyone Deserves a Name), a group of forensic artists who provide pro bono portraits of bodies. He started a blog called Sleuth the Truth and a Yahoo Group entitled Cold Case Comparative Analysis, as well as other online forums that welcomed amateur detectives. By 2006, he’d launched a podcast, Missing Pieces, which would record more than 100 episodes.

Elsewhere in the digital sphere, chat rooms, message boards, and discussion groups united would-be Inspector Poirots working in home offices or at kitchen tables. “It was like a startup that went nuts,” Matthews recalled. Websites with names like Websleuths dissected cases and posted about breaks, some of them achieved by citizen detectives who cited Matthews as an inspiration. Others turned to him as a resource and sounding board.

Among them was a young woman named Ahlashia Thomas from Berea, Kentucky. In 1993, when Thomas was in high school, hikers found a dead man at a local campground. He wore a backpack but had no identification. Pulled over his head was a plastic bag from a Madison, Wisconsin, grocery store, secured around his neck with a belt. His hands were missing. The local media dubbed him Madison Man because of the plastic bag and because Berea was located in Madison County. Thomas couldn’t get the story out of her mind. “I just imagined this poor man lying there with stumps and—oh, it just bothered me!” Thomas told me.

When the investigation cooled and police determined that Madison Man’s death was not a homicide, her unease turned to indignation. She began to suspect a law-enforcement cover-up. “They want to make it look like this is a perfect place to live,” she said. Deemed the “folk arts and crafts capital of Kentucky” by the state legislature, Berea is also home to the first integrated college in the South. Thomas decided to do some research, starting with “one of those little microfiche things” at Berea College’s library. She pinpointed the site of Madison Man’s death, visited it to take pictures, and started a case file. She scoured the internet for missing persons who matched the John Doe’s description.

Matthews’s name kept coming up in Thomas’s online searches. One day, after Madison Man had been dead for ten years, she “took a leap of faith” and emailed him. Matthews helped her commission a forensic drawing of the body, make a website for the case, and post on missing-person message boards and genealogy forums. He also contacted a reporter in Wisconsin, urging him to write about the case. The reporter agreed, but still no one claimed the body.

Matthews and Thomas decided that if they couldn’t give Madison Man a name, at least they could give him a funeral. Matthews had an unused gravestone in his family’s barn; it had been intended for a great uncle, a casualty of World War II, for whom the military ended up providing a different stone. Matthews had the slab inscribed with the words “Madison Man” and drove it up to replace the original aluminum marker left on the John Doe’s grave. He improvised a prayer. Thomas left flowers. It was June 2004.

Three weeks later, a local news outlet did a story about the appearance of the tombstone. Lexington’s NBC affiliate, WLEX, also ran a story. From there the news item cartwheeled across the country, eventually catching the eye of a woman in Wisconsin who was searching for her brother-in-law, Doug Prouty, missing since 1993. As far as his family knew, Prouty, a janitor, had never been to Kentucky. A DNA test on a tissue sample retained from Madison Man confirmed Prouty’s identity, and his remains were returned home. The circumstances of his death remained murky, but Thomas was satisfied. “I feel he’s at peace,” she told me.

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Like Thomas, the federal government took notice of Matthews’s successes and came calling. In 2007, the Department of Justice asked him to help develop NamUs. After almost 20 years at Hutchinson, Matthews quit his job and started gathering data to enter into the new system. He called detectives and medical examiners to identify potential entries. He traced missing evidence and fact-checked conflicting information.

The grind paid off. Once the system was live, users began cross-referencing cases, trying to match the missing and the dead. Anguished families could see evidence previously siloed in particular counties or states. Web sleuths made NamUs their new mecca, contacting police with theoretical matches between cases. Matthews was always seeking to improve the available data: Is there a picture of that tattoo? Is there a better picture? Are there any X-rays of that broken arm? Do I spy evidence of a car crash?

In 2011, the director of the Laboratory of Forensic Anthropology at the University of North Texas, which provided free genetic testing for unidentified remains, proposed a merger with NamUs. Law enforcement would now have to register cases with NamUs in order to access testing, a move that brought the database’s staff into closer contact with police across the country. Matthews was given a promotion from system administrator to co-director of NamUs, alongside a former police intelligence analyst based at UNT.

But he didn’t move to Fort Worth, where the UNT lab is located. Matthews chose to stay in Livingston. He thought he could make a bigger difference in the South, because he already knew coroners across Tennessee and Kentucky—including Emily Craig, who became NamUs’s critical incident coordinator—and where unidentified remains were buried. He also didn’t want to leave his hometown, where his family had been for more than a century. At the Overton County Heritage Museum, portraits of his ancestors—William Jasper Matthews, who was in the Tennessee senate in the late 1800s, and James Oliver Matthews, who served as a sheriff in the early 20th century—hang near an exhibit of Matthews’s father’s Army uniform from Vietnam. Matthews and his wife still live on the street where he grew up, in sight of the high school where they met, in a house they built next to the homes of his parents and brother. He recently bought a house on an adjacent lot for his grown son’s family. Matthews has nicknamed the block-long compound Hotel California, because, in his words, “You can check out, but you’ll never leave.”

He also holds the deed to his family’s cemetery, where his baby brother and sister are buried. He visits it frequently and knows he’ll be interred there one day. “There is nothing like being there,” he said on a podcast. “That sense of closeness and closure because you have a place to go. I think that is just human nature.”

Matthews once sent me an unprompted email with the subject line “My own funeral—a work in progress.” It contained a letter addressed to his sons that he’d not yet sent them because its contents were “too hard to discuss.” (I could only guess why he shared it with me; obsessing about death forges a strange bond.) “Don’t let them talk you into having a vault for me,” the letter began. “I want as simple a wooden casket as possible. I want to truly return to the earth.” Then came a list of songs Matthews considered appropriate for his funeral service and a specific request to avoid “Go Rest High on That Mountain,” by country singer Vince Gill: “I hate that song. lol.”

To date, 2,970 cases of unidentified remains entered into NamUs have been resolved—a success rate of about 20 percent. Matthews wants to do more. There is no federal law requiring law enforcement to report anonymous bodies to NamUs, a problem Matthews has decided to tackle on a state-by-state basis. In Tennessee, he helped draft the Help Find the Missing Act, which passed while I was reporting this story. To get similar laws enacted across the country, he’s marshaling fellow sleuths to the lobbying cause, mostly via Facebook.

In late 2016, however, NamUs faced a setback: The federal government announced that it was withdrawing funding for UNT’s testing of unidentified remains. The money, a mere $1 million but vital to NamUs’s work, was being redirected to the national backlog of untested rape kits, estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

There are other ways a body can be identified—dental records, fingerprints, X-rays, autopsy photos—but for families of the long-term lost, often “it’s DNA or nothing,” Matthews explained. The more time a body is in the ground, the more degraded its genetic material becomes. Mitochondrial DNA, the most durable form, passed down only through maternal bloodlines, is difficult and costly to analyze. If all that remains of a corpse is a bone fragment, the testing process is much more complicated than your typical drugstore paternity kit or 23andMe swab. According to Forensic magazine, only seven states have laboratories that can match UNT’s testing capacity, and private labs charge thousands of dollars to handle a single sample. If cash-strapped police departments were forced to shelve DNA they couldn’t afford to have analyzed, it would erode the quality of data in the NamUs database.

There are other ways a body can be identified—dental records, fingerprints, X-rays, autopsy photos—but for families of the long-term lost, often “it’s DNA or nothing.”

At the start of 2017, Matthews estimated that there was enough money left from an existing federal grant for the DNA services to last about six months. He formulated a plan: Working closely with law enforcement in Kentucky, the state whose cold cases he knew best, he would pick two unidentified bodies and use the last drip of money to solve them. The ensuing media attention, Matthews hoped, would help bump NamUs back up the government’s list of funding priorities.

The first case Matthews picked was NamUs entry #86, an unsolved homicide from 1989. The man had been found shot through the head, with his hands severed at the wrists, among fragrant tobacco leaves in a barn in the town of Dry Ridge. The missing hands inspired the victim’s nickname, Nubs, and recalled Madison Man.

The second case was Some Mother’s Boy, to whom Matthews felt a lingering sense of responsibility. He’d never forgotten even the smallest details of his career’s genesis, including the anonymous grave that sat near Tent Girl’s. Some Mother’s Boy was now the oldest known cold case in Kentucky. “It might be a historical case, and we don’t have any leads. It’s not a homicide,” Matthews admitted. “But can we give it a shot?”

The Boys

The week after Some Mother’s Boy’s burial in April 1921, Ashurst, the coroner, told a local newspaper, “The body will be preserved for twenty years in a state that will permit identification.” Matthews took this comment to mean that Ashurst was confident enough in the quality of his embalming—far from an exact science a century ago—to believe that the boy would be recognizable should a family request an exhumation in the two decades immediately following his death. However skilled an embalmer Ashurst might have been, by 2017 there was no hope of recognizing Some Mother’s Boy. The real question was whether anything remained of him at all.

Under normal circumstances, an unidentified body is exhumed if a family comes forward with compelling evidence, circumstantial or forensic, that the deceased may be a relative, as was the case with Tent Girl. Police can petition for an exhumation if they have reason to believe technological advances would yield new clues in a homicide investigation. Some Mother’s Boy met neither criterion. But given the pathos and lore surrounding the case—a local paper dubbed it “the biggest mystery in Scott County”—John Goble, the current county coroner, took it on as a personal mission. “Think about this: Up till the day that mama died, she didn’t know where her 17-year-old boy was,” Goble told me.

“Think about this: Up till the day that mama died, she didn’t know where her 17-year-old boy was.”

Before requesting an exhumation, which his office empowered him to do, Goble wanted to double-check some facts. What if a family had claimed the boy after the burial and the headstone had been left behind as a historical curiosity? In that scenario, Ashurst should have filed a death certificate, which was easy enough to check at Kentucky’s Office of Vital Statistics by looking up Some Mother’s Boy’s date of death. Emily Craig volunteered to do the research. (Not only was she working at NamUs, but she was also Goble’s wife.) In early 2017, she confirmed that no death in Georgetown matching the description of Some Mother’s Boy’s demise had been recorded on April 1, 1921.

At Georgetown’s library, she dug up every article she could find about the boy’s death and Ashurst’s frustrated search for kin. Craig also did some sleuthing on H.M. Lindenthal, the company that manufactured the coat the boy was wearing. She discovered advertisements in old newspapers depicting natty gentlemen in suits with names like the Princeton, holding gold-knobbed canes or well-groomed miniature dogs in the crooks of their arms. Lindenthal sold clothing “geared toward the up-and-coming young man,” Craig told me. Based on these findings and Ashurst’s descriptions of Some Mother’s Boy as well-off, Craig developed a theory. “Back then, because people didn’t have telephones, when somebody went missing, they put it in the newspaper, like in the want ads,” she told me. A hobo probably wouldn’t have warranted such attention, but a wealthy young man might have.

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Craig punched some terms into Google: “missing heir,” “1921,” and “W.A.,” the letters engraved on the outside of Some Mother’s Boy’s pocket watch. She found a young man whose family lived three hours north of Georgetown in 1921. An article entitled “Seek Missing Heir to Fortune in L.A.” was placed by a distant relative of one W.A. Shafer, from Parker City, Indiana, in the Los Angeles Herald on March 22, 1921. It stated that Shafer had last been seen in Chicago the previous August, “when he signified his intention of coming to Los Angeles” for reasons the article didn’t describe.

Here was a young man of means with a motive to travel to Georgetown—where he could’ve caught a westbound train—and whose initials matched those on the watch. There were some worrying dimensions to the story. Shafer, for instance, disappeared seven months before Some Mother’s Boy died. But it was a promising lead. Craig called Parker City’s historical society to learn whether the young man had ever reappeared. A representative told Craig that there were a lot of Shafers still living in town and promised to do some research.

All of this was good enough for Goble, who authorized the exhumation. It was set to take place on March 10.

Matthews was thrilled by the decision. In late February, however, he learned that the funding for DNA testing had run out earlier than expected, thanks to a higher-than-average volume of samples requiring analysis in the first two months of the year. The only other entity that might test old DNA for free was the FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia, a much more selective operation than UNT’s. On average it receives more than 200 analysis requests each month.

Craig asked for the lab’s assistance in both the Nubs and Some Mother’s Boy cases. It readily agreed to participate in the former, since it was an open homicide investigation. It was skeptical about Some Mother’s Boy, given the age of the case and its noncriminal nature. Still, the request was approved. “We would prefer femur bones if possible,” a forensic examiner wrote to Craig.

On the morning of Some Mother’s Boy’s exhumation, Matthews, who’d driven three hours from Livingston the night before, met Craig for an early breakfast at a Cracker Barrel. They were the first to arrive at the gravesite. By 8 a.m., Goble was there with a handful of his deputies, coroners from nearby counties, the mayor of Georgetown, and a local funeral director who’d donated a baby-size casket for the dead and coffee for the living. Local media came, too, crews from WTVQ in Lexington, WBIR in Knoxville, and WKRC in Cincinnati, as well as newspaper reporters. It was a cool, windy day, the sky a dull gray. Across U.S. 25, which borders the cemetery, neon signs at the Indian Acres Shopping Center were just starting to blink “Open.”

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Goble led the group in a short prayer, then announced, “We’re going to go down three inches at a time, just peeling back the layers of soil.” A cemetery worker climbed into a backhoe and began to dig. At about three feet deep, the soil became a shade darker, a sign of decomposition, and the worker cut the backhoe’s engine.

From there the dig shifted to a more archaeological approach. Using hand trowels and brushes, one of the coroners probed the dirt, handing up small items that he found. By early afternoon it was done: All that remained of Some Mother’s Boy were a handful of teeth, the hinges, cornices, and handles of his casket, a long shard of bone, and one antique button. The items went into the new casket, which was loaded into the SUV of one of Goble’s deputies.

Mayor Tom Prather addressed the media. “I hope that there’s some comfort in this somewhere,” he said, “for both our community and for any family this young man may have.” By evening, news of the exhumation had traveled well beyond Kentucky. The Associated Press, U.S. News and World Report, and even the Daily Mail picked it up. Matthews was satisfied; everything was going according to script.

Not everyone shared his enthusiasm, though. Some public reactions tended toward disbelief, even anger. “Maybe spend that money clearing the backlog of rape kits for people who can still get justice?” read one Facebook comment on WKRC’s article about the dig, the author likely unaware of the reason for NamUs’s funding crisis. “That’s awful. Let him rest in peace,” read another. “At this point 96 years later grandparents, parents, siblings are all gone. I’d roll over in my grave if some one did this to my son.”

Matthews shrugged off the criticism. “We are testing the boundary of forensic science. We’re looking at phenotyping, ancestry DNA,” he told me. “We need to set a bar to show that nearly a hundred years later, it’s not too late.” What he didn’t say was that a dose of controversy never hurts when trying to gin up media interest in a cold case.

That interest generated a lead two days after Some Mother’s Boy was exhumed, when Gaye Holman, a 73-year-old retired sociology professor living in Beechwood Village, a sleepy residential outpost in the Louisville suburbs, opened her Sunday newspaper. Holman had recently caught the genealogy bug, and as she made her way through an article about the exhumation, her heart began to pound.

Some Mother’s Boy could be her mother’s boy, a beloved cousin who’d vanished. According to family rumor, he’d been murdered.

Holman’s mother, Nancy Duncan, was born in 1909 in Pattons Creek, a Kentucky community of farms and orchards that lay northeast of Louisville and a few miles from the eastern bank of the Ohio River. Owen Bennett Wheeler Jr. was Duncan’s cousin. He’d been orphaned as a young boy; his father died of an illness before he was born, and his mother and brother died four years later of the flu. He was passed among relatives and eventually came to live with his grandfather next door to Duncan’s family.

The cousins grew close. Even as a farm boy, Owen had the makings of a gentleman. “When we walked to school together, on bitter cold days,” Duncan recalled in her unpublished memoirs many years later, “Owen walked back to the wind in front of me to protect me from its force.” Duncan would beg Owen’s grandfather to let him quit work in the fields early so they might play together. One such “glorious day,” Nancy wrote, was spent “in the woods, with Owen cutting limbs for concocting a playhouse.”

As he grew older and stronger, other relatives realized that Owen could be an economic asset. When he was around 13, his uncle Jesse Hancock sued for custody and won. Hancock was known as a cruel, violent man. After he took Owen, word spread that he was using the boy for what amounted to slave labor. Hancock rented his farm from a relative who one day stopped by to find his tenant beating Owen bloody. The man jumped off his horse and put a stop to the abuse, then ordered Hancock to get off his land. It was soon after this incident that Owen disappeared—Holman estimates it was around 1920—and Hancock relocated to Louisville.

At first everyone thought Owen had run away with another local boy who’d vanished from the same county around that time. But that boy soon returned home and said he’d never been with Owen. The family began to suspect that Owen had died at Hancock’s hands, perhaps because the boy’s uncle blamed him for the loss of his farm. A rumor circulated that the young man’s body had been dumped in a sinkhole on the property before Hancock vacated it.

When Duncan heard the story, she cried but held out hope that it might not be true—that “he might have gotten away and might some day return,” she later wrote. Owen was never heard from again. In Pattons Creek, local children avoided the sinkhole, said to be haunted by his ghost. Eventually, the land passed out of family hands and was transformed into a nature preserve.

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By the 1980s, Duncan decided to write her memoirs—“to pull the curtain of my mind to spaces that have shrunk, buildings that are decayed, homes that are no more [and] people that are dead.” Genealogy had never held much interest for Holman, but that changed as she learned about her mother’s life, especially the tragic fate of the cousin whom Duncan had “adored like a brother.” Owen had appeared in the 1920 census, but not the one in 1930. Holman could find neither a death certificate nor a gravestone bearing his name. She traced every leg and juncture of his life, starting with his father’s obituary, and interviewed relatives who confirmed the rumors of abuse by his uncle. Holman grew increasingly convinced that his bones lay in the sinkhole.

The news of Some Mother’s Boy’s exhumation turned all her careful research on its head. What if her mother’s girlish notion, that Owen had somehow escaped his uncle, was true after all? Even if his flight earned him little more than a violent end on a train track, he would have died free, master of his own fate. It was a romantic twist that Holman was determined to verify.

The Monday morning after she read about the exhumation of Some Mother’s Boy, she called Goble, who immediately shared the news with Matthews. Owen’s story of poverty and violence didn’t jibe with some of the case’s most tantalizing clues, namely the fancy coat and watch. But the ages were close enough: Holman believed that Owen was around 15 when he died, just two years younger than Ashurst had estimated Some Mother’s Boy to be. Matthews was especially intrigued by the fact that Owen was initially thought to have run off with another local boy. Might he have been the mysterious traveling companion questioned by police in Somerset, covering the shame of leaving the scene of an accident with denial?

Looking at a map of Kentucky, Owen’s peregrinations didn’t seem to make sense. Pattons Creek is about 65 miles west of Georgetown. Why would he have gone north to Cincinnati, where Some Mother’s Boy boarded a southbound train, only to wind up back in a town nearer to the one he’d left? Holman’s theory: He was trying to avoid discovery. Cincinnati was a big city, a great place for a runaway to catch a train to anywhere. It may also have been a matter of convenience. “He could have jumped a boat,” Holman said. Steamers cruised the Ohio River all day long back then. One could have carried Owen from Pattons Creek to Cincinnati in a matter of hours. Holman offered to have her DNA tested, and Goble agreed.  

Then a comment posted to an article about the exhumation, published online by CBS, surfaced yet another name. “The kid has already been identified,” wrote JimWill1963. “They published his name on August 23rd, 1921.”

The comment included a link to Some Mother’s Boy’s page on FindAGrave.com, a database frequented by genealogy, cemetery, and obituary enthusiasts. It’s brimming with crowdsourced information about graves and the people inside them, and it’s a frequent stop on the web-sleuth circuit. Matthews knew it well—so well, in fact, that he’d created Some Mother’s Boy’s page in 2007. He was supposed to receive a notification whenever anyone uploaded information or posted a comment. Prior to the exhumation, the entry had received no hits.

But when he’d made the page, he’d erroneously titled it “Some Mother’s Son.” Matthews had posted a photo of the gravestone, which was so mossed over at the time—he and Goble had since cleaned it—that the last word was hard to make out. In the intervening years, someone else had created a different page for the grave using the correct name. Matthews went to it and discovered an article posted by a user almost nine months prior to the exhumation. It had been published in the Richmond, Kentucky, Daily Register in August 1921: “An unknown young man killed in Georgetown last April at the Southern Depot, has been identified as Frank Haynes, of Bronston, KY.”

Matthews sent an email to Craig—still trying, with no luck, to follow up on W.A. Shafer with the Parker City historical society—containing the relevant comments and links. Her response was beyond words: “*!#^~!!!*” It hadn’t occurred to Craig to search newspaper archives from August 1921, more than four months after Some Mother’s Boy’s death, especially since she’d found no death certificate on file. Now she returned to the Scott County Public Library, where a new lead unspooled on microfiche.

Among the seekers of the lost who visited Coroner Ashurst at the funeral home before Some Mother’s Boy was buried, it turned out, was a man named Frank Haynes, a poor laborer from Bronston, Kentucky, an unincorporated community about 100 miles south of Georgetown. Haynes claimed to recognize the boy as his 19-year-old son, also named Frank, who had disappeared from home on March 30, 1921. But the father left without the body, a peculiar thing for a grieving parent to do.

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Ashurst must not have been convinced by the claim. After all, he put the boy in the ground, unnamed, because he “despaired of his being identified,” according to the Georgetown Times. Craig reasoned that it was possible the elder Frank Haynes had expressed a glimmer of doubt—the boy had been struck in the head, which may have made his face difficult to recognize—that the coroner couldn’t shake.

Yet Ashurst didn’t let the matter go either. He sent Mignona Haynes, the visitor’s wife, a photograph of the body, together with the clothes and watch the boy had been wearing. That August she sent a letter in reply, saying that she recognized the photo and the clothes but had never seen the watch. “It was the first time he had ever been away from home,” she explained. “He was led away by another boy. He was honest, obedient and had never been in any trouble. He was born March 2, 1902 and had always lived here until he left a few days before he was killed.” She said her husband hadn’t brought their son’s body home on account of a “dangerous illness” she’d been suffering from at the time. (She didn’t specify what risk or problem the corpse would have posed alongside her sickness.) Her family couldn’t afford to repay the people of Georgetown for the burial, Mrs. Haynes wrote, but they hoped to do so one day. “As soon as we are able we want to have our boy’s name and age put on the monument at his grave,” the letter concluded.

For Matthews the revelation was vexing. If Scott County had dug up a young man whose identity had been established nearly a century prior, the situation would be “a little embarrassing,” he admitted. But there were troubling inconsistencies in the notion that Some Mother’s Boy was Frank Haynes. Why hadn’t Ashurst ever filed a death certificate? Why hadn’t the Hayneses or their descendants ever put a name on the grave? The laundry mark “Jones” on the boy’s shirt could have been the wearer’s last name or the signature of the laundry where it was cleaned. Yet Jones wasn’t Frank’s surname—nor Owen Wheeler’s or W.A. Shafer’s, for that matter—and Bronston wouldn’t have had a professional laundry at the time. And why would the son of a destitute laborer own a fancy suit or pay for laundering anyway?

Then there was the question of geography. The Hayneses claimed that their son left home on March 30. Some Mother’s Boy died the night of April 1. Within a day and a half, the young man would have left Bronston and traveled north to Cincinnati, only to head right back into Kentucky and disembark in Georgetown—a loop of about 230 miles. Maybe he decided to ride the rails alongside the companion Mrs. Haynes mentioned in her letter as the ne’er-do-well who led her son astray, and maybe that was the traveler questioned in Somerset (which, it should be noted, was the closest train stop to Bronston). But if they weren’t hobos, as Ashurst insisted, why pay good money to yo-yo to Ohio and back?

“There’s just something—I hate to use the term ‘fishy’—unresolved about that identification,” Craig told me. “Both sides of the equation didn’t quite equal zero. If they had, that tombstone would have had a name, and they would have filed a death certificate.”

With all the claims and evidence on the table, Matthews, Goble, and Craig decided that the question of Some Mother’s Boy’s identity was still open. He might be Owen Bennett Wheeler Jr., Frank Haynes, W.A. Shafer, or someone else entirely. DNA would provide the answer.

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The Obsession

In truth, the story that first drew me to Kentucky wasn’t Some Mother’s Boy. It was the other case Matthews hoped to resolve simultaneously—the murder of Nubs. I was hooked by the dual mystery of an unsolved murder of an unidentified man. Plus, the case carried an echo of the current opioid crisis. Nubs was found in a barn near an exit off Interstate 75, along a stretch of the road known today as “heroin highway.” When he died nearly 30 years ago, it was used to run marijuana, Kentucky’s top-earning cash crop throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Remote regions in the state served as high-traffic corridors for powerful cartels with names like the Cornbread Mafia.

When I first spoke to Matthews by phone, in March 2017, he told me that the working theory on Nubs was that the victim had somehow been involved in the drug trade. If enough evidence tied the case to the marijuana black market, I imagined that I could draw a line to Kentucky’s long legacy of illicit industry—to scenes of Appalachian backwoods littered with bootlegging operations, pot plots, and heroin caches.

But every time I talked with Matthews, I could tell that he was more enthusiastic about Some Mother’s Boy. I didn’t get it. Nubs’s killer could still be at large. His family might still be searching for their loved one. Some Mother’s Boy had been dead for nearly a century. “No one’s looking for him,” I told Matthews on the phone. “You don’t know that,” he shot back.

Some Mother’s Boy had been dead for nearly a century. “No one’s looking for him,” I told Matthews on the phone. “You don’t know that,” he shot back.

Matthews offered me a twofer: visit Georgetown for Nubs’s exhumation and also tag along as authorities tracked down the Haynes family’s descendants and collected their DNA. I agreed, still hoping that Nubs would be my story.

Goble was in charge of finding the present-day Hayneses. But as the coroner of Scott County, his more immediate duty was to any recently declared dead in a 285-square-mile area. Every other day, I would call or email to see how the search for descendants was going, only to learn that it hadn’t even begun. One Friday night in early April, about three weeks before Nubs’s exhumation, I grew impatient. If there was no DNA collection to witness, I might have to cut my reporting trip short. I typed Mignona Haynes’s name into FindAGrave.com, which I discovered bills itself as “a free resource for finding the final resting places of famous folks, friends and family.” An entry popped up for Mignona Mayme Pratt Haynes in Bronston’s Newell Cemetery, along with links to the graves of her husband and children. Frank was not listed among them. A couple of Google searches and one obituary later, I had contact information for people who appeared to be the living children of the Hayneses’ youngest son. If Frank really was Some Mother’s Boy, he had a number of nieces and nephews still living near Bronston.

My reporter’s instinct told me to call them immediately. But this was Goble’s investigation, with Matthews serving as an expert guide. I didn’t want to step on any toes. So I waited until first thing Monday morning to phone Matthews and share my findings. By then I was fully adrenalized by the possibility that I might have unearthed an honest-to-God forensic lead.

“Goble still hasn’t found them,” Matthews said preemptively.

“That’s OK. I did,” I said, quickly adding, “or I think I did.”

Within a day, using state databases, Goble verified that the people I’d found were indeed the Hayneses’ blood relatives. When Matthews called to tell me, a psychic switch flipped. Nubs, Madison Man, moonshiners, and heroin traders all faded from my mind. I was suddenly, completely taken by Some Mother’s Boy. I struggled to understand why. Maybe his status as a nobody made him an everyman—a proxy for me, you, and everyone we know. Maybe I was driven by the same morbid curiosity that leads me to Google a deceased celebrity’s name for a half-hour, hoping to discern an unrevealed cause of death. Maybe it was something more primal, a basic urge to seize a dangling opportunity to solve something.   

Matthews said I’d found a new vocation: I’d become what he calls a technicriminologist. “This is a new age where the ordinary man can step up and make a difference,” he once wrote on his blog. A “volunteer spending hours on a computer in their back room, may be the only chance of keeping a case alive.”

Some Mother’s Boy was this volunteer’s first case.

On the afternoon of April 27, 2017, Margaret Haynes Bell’s phone rang. The 60-year-old grandmother’s stomach plunged when Goble introduced himself—it isn’t the coroner who calls when you win the Kentucky Cash Ball. But once he explained that the dead relative in question had been deceased for 96 years, Bell’s dread turned into excitement. Of course she knew about Frank, her father’s brother who’d run off as a teenager only to get himself killed by a train. What she didn’t know, and what Goble told her, was that he might have just been exhumed from a grave 100 miles north of Bronston. Somehow the fact that his parents believed Frank was buried in Scott County hadn’t been enshrined in family lore.

Bell promised Goble that she would gather as many siblings and cousins as she could for a DNA test and agreed to get swabbed herself. They arranged to meet in the parking lot of a Walmart at 1 p.m. on May 2, the day after Nubs was to be dug up.

In the meantime, I reached out to Gaye Holman by phone. She was vexed that she had competition for Some Mother’s Boy. “I think what I’ve got is a really good story,” she told me. “That’s why I was so excited, because I have so much invested emotionally in looking all this up and spending so much time with it.” Goble had told her not to give up hope, pointing out that Mignona Haynes hadn’t recognized the watch found with Some Mother’s Boy. If he “had to guess,” he told Holman, there “was a 50-50 chance it was one or the other”—meaning either Frank or Owen Jr.

Holman admitted that she’d been mulling the evidence and hadn’t been able to come up with an explanation for the watch. “That and the laundry mark have me concerned,” she wrote in an email. The “Jones” mark had me concerned, too, as did the tag reading “E 1C6” found on Some Mother’s Boy’s shirt. No one had thoroughly researched either piece of evidence. Perhaps the young man’s identity could be cracked if I figured out how to connect the two.

The night before traveling to Kentucky, I stayed up late reading “Modern Methods of Identification by Laundry and Cleaners’ Marks,” a 1946 article from the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology by Adam Yulch, acting captain of the Laundry Mark Identification Squad—a real law-enforcement entity—in Nassau County, New York. Yulch argued that laundry marks were sometimes better tools than fingerprints when police were working a case. “Not everyone has a fingerprint record on file,” Yulch wrote. “But it is my experience that nearly everyone, knowingly or not, has traceable clues in his or her clothing.” He went on to describe how a brutal murder of a jewelry salesman was solved when “bloodstained towels tied together with [a] sash cord provided the clue.” In the corner of each towel was a distinctive mark, which led police to a laundry less than a half-hour from where the victim was found, and ultimately to a suspect, who was later convicted. The mark was “W-K33,” a four-character alphanumeric sequence just like the one found on Some Mother’s Boy. Until at least the mid-1970s, these codes were like license plates for clothes, tracing back to specific laundry establishments and customers. The “E” on Some Mother’s Boy’s tag could have referred to the last name of the shirt’s owner or to the specific location of a laundry with multiple branches: E as in east. Meanwhile, “1C6” could have referenced a customer or a store number designated by a larger laundry distributor.

Sometime after midnight, I gave up trying to decipher the code and stuffed the articles into a folder—along with copies of vintage Lindenthal advertisements, a history of the Royal Palm from an obscure train-enthusiast website, printouts of all the 1921 articles about Some Mother’s Boy, and a map comparing Owen Jr. and Frank’s probable travel routes. The following day, when I arrived at the airport, I discovered that I didn’t have a ticket. Or rather, I had the wrong one: In my state of utter distraction, I had bought a seat on a flight for the following week. The expressionless woman at the Spirit Airlines counter informed me that the ticket I had was nonrefundable.

In almost ten years as a journalist, I had never made such a daft and expensive mistake. But the thought of delaying or canceling the trip was unthinkable. I had to be there to see Some Mother’s Boy’s grave, to watch the Haynes relatives get swabbed.

I laid my credit card on the counter. Three hours later I was in Kentucky.

Before Nubs’s exhumation on the morning of May 1, I met up with Matthews at a McDonald’s in Dry Ridge, the town where the handless man was found in 1989. Matthews was wearing a black T-shirt, shorts, and his khaki baseball cap, which would not leave his head for the remainder of the week. When I complimented his soul patch he admitted to dying it using his own custom blend: two different shades of Just for Men brown.

The previous day he’d participated in another exhumation, this one relating to a case dating back to 1961. George Hawkins, the constable of Campbell County, Kentucky, had disappeared, and his car had been found abandoned near the Ohio River. In 1980, a skull with a suspicious head wound turned up some 60 miles downstream. There was speculation that it might belong to Hawkins, but to confirm the identity police needed a DNA sample from someone in his matrilineal bloodline. No such living relatives could be found. Decades later, Hawkins’s two daughters had made the decision to exhume their grandmother, Estella, dead since 1949, and use her genetic material.

“I told the ladies, ‘Now, you can’t unsee this once you see it. Are you sure you want to be here?’” Matthews said over an Egg McMuffin. Not only did they insist on being present when their grandmother was dug up, but they also asked if they could take one of her teeth home as a memento. It was a request that in nearly two decades of bringing up bodies Matthews had never encountered, and one he wouldn’t grant. (As it happened, when the coffin was opened, there were no teeth left to distribute.) But he didn’t scorn the impulse. “If one of your uncles fell off the face of the earth and was buried in a pauper’s grave, wouldn’t it matter to you?” he asked me. “I think it would.”

“If one of your uncles fell off the face of the earth and was buried in a pauper’s grave, wouldn’t it matter to you? I think it would.”

I don’t have any uncles, at least not that I know of, but I understood what he was saying about attachment. Half of my closet at home is a shrine to my beloved late grandmother: her old Soviet college diploma, her tomato-shaped pincushion, her silver shoehorn. My grandfather died before her and was buried in a Jewish cemetery in a remote Massachusetts town. Jewish tradition decrees that only rocks may be left atop a headstone, but my grandmother, baptized a Russian Orthodox Christian, would defiantly bring flowers to his grave. When she died, my parents buried her there. The thought of reinterring her in a flower-forgiving graveyard or filling a locket with her ashes had crossed my mind.

It was a cold morning in Dry Ridge. A hard, slanting rain had been pounding the ground since the previous night, and for a couple of hours it looked as though the exhumation might not take place. But by the time county workers at the Hillcrest Cemetery pulled on their rain boots, the sun had cracked the sky. As the lid of the casket containing Nubs was pried open, a hush descended over everyone assembled that could only be described as holy. Even among people who’ve made a career of death, relics retain their power. From the cemetery, a body bag holding Nubs’s remains (soft tissues and soupy bones, or as Matthews put it, “Think of an ice cream on a stick that melted and started to ooze from the wrapper”) went to the medical examiner’s office. They would be dried and cleaned before they were sent to the FBI lab.

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I got in my rental car and drove to Georgetown, a half-hour south, where I stopped at Some Mother’s Boy’s grave to pay my respects. The recently disturbed ground was quilted with a bed of yellow mulch. From there I headed off to meet with Goble, whose office may be the most cheerful looking of its kind in America: a small brick-fronted building just off the town’s main drag, with big letters screaming “CORONER” mounted below the roof. It looked plucked from a Playmobil set. Nearby, on East Main Street, sat businesses with names like Birdsong Quilting Embroidery Crafts and Not Alone Pregnancy Center.

Goble was out on a call when I arrived, so like any good technicriminologist, I spent the wait obsessing over a detail of my case: the watch. The “W.A.” inscribed on the outside, everyone involved in the investigation seemed to agree, were likely initials. But what about the letters “L.H.D.” inside the case? An avid collector and repairer of vintage timepieces had told Matthews that the inscription meant one of two things: Either a jeweler had engraved his own initials when he did a repair, or the letters stood for “left-hand drive”—a reference to the crown’s location on the watch’s left side, which would make it easier for southpaws to wind.

Might there be a third option? I took out my phone and Googled “L.H.D.” and “Latin inscriptions.” Something caught my eye: “litterarum humanarum doctor,” or “doctor of humane letters,” an honorary degree. Could the inscription trace the watch back to, say, a father or grandfather who was an academic or other distinguished professional? It was a stretch, but not impossible.

If only I could see the watch or at least know its brand. Ashurst had sent it to Mignona Haynes in 1921, along with Some Mother’s Boy’s other belongings. I wondered if the descendants still had it. Goble, I was sure, would know the answer.

Back from his call, the coroner sat enthroned in the flickering penumbra of his low-ceilinged office, lit only by a television permanently switched to a channel playing old black-and-white movies. He proved to be a mountain of a man—six feet three inches, towering even when seated—with blue eyes that bore into me like diamond drills. His bookcases were lined with replicas of human skulls and other ephemera. Across from his desk, on a low table, sat a ceramic model of a Victorian house with electric lights twinkling inside. The sign on its tiny door read “mortuary.”

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He was supposed to send the DNA samples from the Haynes family and Gaye Holman to the lab that week, along with Some Mother’s Boy’s teeth. But I pointed out that Holman wasn’t related to Owen Jr. on his mother’s side, a fact the coroner had overlooked. Now Goble had to call her and explain that she needed to seek out other living relatives.

To Goble this was more of a procedural hurdle than anything else. In the weeks since he’d told Holman there was a good chance the body was her mother’s long-lost cousin, he’d grown increasingly sure that Some Mother’s Boy was instead Frank Haynes. “Just too much of the evidence tends to that family,” Goble told me, though what he described was less hard proof than gut feeling. “We talked for, God, 45 minutes,” he said of his call with Margaret Haynes Bell. “She’s convinced it’s him. I’m convinced it’s him.”

“He deserves to go home,” Goble added. “He needs to be buried around his mother and father and sisters and brothers.”

“What if it’s not him?” I ventured.

Goble shot me a pitying look, then began firing off justifications for why the Hayneses didn’t claim the body in 1921: Travel was arduous back then. If the father didn’t have money to bury his son, he might not have been able to buy a train ticket. That would have meant journeying back to Bronston by wagon or stagecoach, a slog along potholed roads with a body in tow. “And you’ve got a wife that’s fatally sick,” Goble said, plus a dozen other children. Only he was juicing up the story: The Haynses eventually had 12 kids, but only six when Frank died—and Mignona Haynes lived another 16 years after her illness.

“What about the nice clothes?” I asked. Unlike Ashurst, Goble seemed to think that Some Mother’s Boy was a hobo, and train hoppers back then “killed each other for shoes,” he said.

“Someone could have took his clothes, and he might have gotten somebody else’s clothes,” came a voice to my right. It was Goble’s deputy, Mark Sutton, who’d been silently occupying a chair in the corner. The Royal Palm, he explained, was “kinda like the Titanic. If you were well dressed, the conductor would say, ‘You belong on the train.’ If you looked like somebody with rag clothes, they’d throw you off.”

The watch was probably stolen, Goble added. “What’s a 17-year-old kid need with a watch?” he muttered, shaking his head. “What does he care about time?”

I jerked upright in my seat. “Does the Haynes family still have the watch?”

“No,” Goble replied. Then he picked up the phone to call Holman and tell her the bad news about her DNA. I slumped back, my hope of sleuthing a case-breaking clue that coroners and cops had failed to see in “L.H.D.” snuffed out.

“Do you want to see him?” I looked up to see Sutton standing over me, beckoning.

In an adjoining room, spread out on a wood-laminate table next to an artificial ficus tree, was all that remained of Some Mother’s Boy. Each tooth had been carefully laid out on a grid of yellow Post-its, numbered one through 25. A small box held the casket hardware, handles, and hinges. Nested among them was a chunk of a metal plate on which the words “At Rest” could still be made out in elegant cursive.

Sutton pointed at the teeth. “One of them has a cavity,” he said. Then, more quietly, “Emily [Craig] thinks that the boy was actually younger, like 12 to 15.” I threw him a sharp look. Frank would have been 19 in 1921, Owen Jr. four years younger. From the other room we could hear Goble talking. “I know I’ve wrecked your day,” he was telling Holman. “See what you can do and let me know.”

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The Test

The Walmart parking lot in Pulaski County, Kentucky, is the same as every one of the superstore’s concrete expanses tessellating across America—an un-landscape that almost defies description. The morning after my encounter with Goble, Matthews and I paced the lot’s periphery in a state of high excitement. We had been told that the Hayneses’ descendants would arrive in a red car. Seeing a woman’s leg emerging from a crimson Fiat, I hurried over.

“Are you Margie Haynes?” I gushed.

“Who?” she snapped, shrinking back into her pleather cave. I shook my head at Matthews.

Five minutes later we spotted them—two older women and a man. Soon we were shaking hands with Margaret Haynes Bell and two cousins, Mamie Hahn and Rick Haynes. They were all well into middle age and dressed casually. Like sugar-addled children, Matthews and I began plying them with questions. Did they still have the Lindenthal coat? I asked. Any idea who the traveling companion might have been? Matthews inquired. The answer to every question was an apologetic “no” or “we don’t know.”

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By 1 p.m., Goble was there with his DNA-harvesting gear, as was a television crew from LEX 18 News led by a woman with a 1980s bouffant. Mamie Hahn said that she’d brought a photo of the Haynes family, which included the only surviving image of young Frank. She dipped into the back seat of her car and emerged with a black-and-white family portrait in a large gold frame. I was taken aback: Even considering that a portrait session was a special occasion in 1904, when the photo was taken, the family was handsomely dressed. Frank, then two years old, was propped on his father’s knee, alongside his mother and three siblings. He wore a collared, polka-dotted children’s gown and what appeared to be real leather shoes. Mignona Haynes, in her high-collared dress with puffed sleeves, and Frank Sr., a 1900s Don Draper in a smart suit, wouldn’t have looked out of place in Vogue. They were hardly the Steinbeckian vision of rural suffering depicted in Mrs. Haynes’s letter to Ashurst. I wondered if I had misjudged their means—or the importance they placed on maintaining a fine appearance in spite of their poverty.

Goble had set up shop on the hood of the LEX 18 crew’s car. Long cotton-tipped swabs fanned out from his blue-gloved fingers, making him look like a Perspex scissorhands. He offered one to each of the Haynes relatives, then stood by awkwardly as the cousins poked around their mouths. Walmart shoppers returning to their cars might’ve mistaken them for a family probing their teeth for poppy seeds or slivers of popcorn. After they handed the swabs over, Goble sealed each sample in a ziplock bag.

“It was in my dad’s Bible. See, right here,” Hahn said, producing a piece of yellow-lined paper titled “deathes” that she’d found tucked in the back of the holy book. It was a list written by her mother, Mary, detailing each sibling’s name and date of death, heartbreaking in its concision. (Mary lived to be 92, the last of the Haynes children to die.) There was Oscar, who fell off a river barge and drowned in July 1935. Eva Mae, who was shot to death by her estranged husband. Otto, who lived only five months, and Fanny, who died at 11. Among them, in looping cursive, were the words “Frank Albert Haynes died April 19, 1921 at Georgetown by train.”

“But why did he run away?” I pressed. Bell and Hahn exchanged a fraught look.

“Apparently he had taken something—” Hahn began.

“—and his dad got upset,” Bell said.

“—and ran him off.”

“—apparently.”

The women seemed troubled by the specter of family scandal, even one a century old. They didn’t claim any sentimental attachment to Frank; they were there for the sake of their beloved parents and grandparents. Bell’s father, Fred, was five years younger than Frank, and the disappearance hit him particularly hard. He kept an old flattop hat of his brother’s for his entire life. “My dad would have been very pleased this is happening,” Bell said.

“But why did he go north from Somerset to Cincinnati if his goal was to go south to Florida?” I asked, referencing the fact that in 1921 authorities believed the dead boy was trying to catch the Royal Palm down to the Sunshine State.

“I think my dad told my brother that he meant to get off in Lexington but went too far,” Bell said. In other words, Cincinnati was an accident, the result of a missed stop. For a boy who’d never traveled far from home, it was a plausible scenario. Yet there was no irrefutable proof here. The Haynes descendants were simply echoing their grandparents’ belief that Some Mother’s Boy was Frank.

“And what if the DNA test comes back negative?” I asked.

Until then, Hahn had addressed me in a soft drawl, maintaining a gracious resolve as a stranger peppered her with personal questions. Now she regarded me with suspicion. “My grandparents recognized the clothing,” she said. A wave of shame coursed through me like a vodka shot.

Bell shook her head. “I just knew it was Georgetown where he got killed,” she murmured. “That’s all I knew.”

Matthews, who had remained mostly quiet, regarded both women and tugged at the bill of his baseball cap. “Well, now we’ve got to prove it,” he said.

Before I left Kentucky to wait out the DNA testing period in what I could only assume would be a state of excruciating suspense, I made one final stop: Gaye Holman’s house, a tidy, one-story affair outside Louisville. Holman is petite, almost swallow-like, with lively blue eyes and white hair she wears in a pixie cut. She waved away my offer to take off my shoes so as not to dirty her wall-to-wall white carpeting.

Holman said she had the distinct feeling that she was being sidelined. “I guess they would like it to be theirs, too,” Holman sighed, referring to the Haynes family. She handed me a short story entitled “Voice from the Sinkhole” that she’d written. It was told from the first-person perspective of Owen Jr.’s dead body. “It is quiet now in the woods,” one passage read. “Small white wildflowers push their heads up through the undergrowth. They are my cemetery’s decorations; the downed trees my grave stone.” I showed her some archival articles I’d brought, and as she scanned one detailing Georgetown residents’ response to Some Mother’s Boy’s death, her eyes filled with tears. “Well, at least they sent flowers,” she said, her voice cracking. “So sad.”

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Together we thumbed through her mother’s old journals. The handwriting was impeccable; Duncan, Holman explained, had been a schoolteacher. On one page, I noticed a capsule description of Owen Jr.: “Owen was near my age. Curly blonde hair, blue eyes.”

“Blond hair?” I asked, looking at Holman. According to all the 1921 accounts, Some Mother’s Boy had brown hair. “Light brown, blond, I don’t know. Some people—” then she broke off her sentence, flustered. “To me that isn’t a nonstarter.”

Holman said that she’d tracked down a maternal relative of Owen Jr.’s at a local nursing home. Two years before, according to the woman’s daughter, her recall had still been strong enough to share family stories. But she’d since slid into senility. Still, the daughter said she’d allow for her mother’s DNA to be tested. Holman told me she’d already sent word to Matthews.

The next time I spoke to Matthews on the phone was a week later. Had Goble started the process of gathering DNA from Owen Jr.’s aged relative? I asked. There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “The story she gave me was very weak,” Matthews said of Holman, choosing his words carefully. “If I hadn’t seen those hand-written notes stuffed in that Bible…” He exhaled loudly. Meeting the possible nieces and nephews of Some Mother’s Boy at Walmart seemed to have had a powerful effect. I gathered that neither Matthews nor Goble was in a hurry to get DNA from the woman at the nursing home.

Still, Matthews hadn’t stopped trying to make the Tetris pieces of Owen Jr.’s story fall within those of Some Mother’s Boy. What if he and Frank had been traveling together? What if Owen Jr. was the mysterious companion arrested in Somerset? And what if, after he was released, he took on a new identity to escape his past once and for all?

“Are you serious?” I asked incredulously when he suggested the outlandish idea. “It was an awesome opportunity to just fade out,” Matthews replied, unfazed. “Sometimes the journey is just as important as the destination.”

I didn’t agree with the cliché. In my mind, the destination of any saga was vital. With regard to Some Mother’s Boy, that could only be a DNA match, a definitively solved case.

These were the thoughts running through my head as, back home in New York, I waited for news about the testing. One day I decided to take a walk to get some fresh air. A block away from my apartment, I realized I had neither my wallet nor my cell phone. I paused at an intersection and wondered, jarringly, What would happen if I stepped into the street, got hit by a car, and died?

My husband was away on business. My six-year-old daughter was at school. I’m a freelance journalist without a carousel of colleagues and editors I see each day. I have friends, of course, but I had no standing plans with anyone. Matthews once told me that the key to an unidentified person’s fate is the question: “Does somebody miss you?” When he said it, he pulled out his iPhone and flashed his email account, showing 162,972 unread messages. “You think I will be missed?” he asked with a chuckle. I knew my family would soon note my absence if I died in that intersection, but it might take them hours or days to locate me, dead in a morgue: Jane Doe, five feet two inches, 115 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, wearing jeans, a blue sweater, and gray sneakers.

The light changed, and I had the right of way to walk. Instead I turned and went back home.

The incident reminded me of something Matthews said on Missing Pieces, his podcast, about the impact his work had on his life. “I think it’s helped me to enjoy my children more,” he said. “I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night before and went into their bedroom and maybe kissed the boys on the forehead and just been so happy they’re there.”

I realized, standing on the sidewalk in Manhattan, that tackling the case of Some Mother’s Boy wasn’t just about correcting an injustice, bringing a family closure, or basking in the glow of success. I still wanted all those things. But the simple, perhaps selfish truth was that the case also made me feel alive—invigorated by a mystery and keenly aware of my own mortality.

Goble had promised the press and the Haynes family DNA results in 30 days. But the Dry Ridge police officer handling the Nubs case was told not to expect them for four to six months—and that was a homicide investigation. (As of this writing, the Nubs results haven’t come in.) Goble implied that his position would help speed up testing for Some Mother’s Boy. As the days, then weeks, ticked by, it became clear that wasn’t the case.

On May 11, Matthews received a terse message from Davey McCann, a forensic specialist at the Kentucky State Police Central Lab, which often helps local law enforcement package and deliver remains to the FBI. “I would estimate 9 to 12 months. Not to mention the potential NO PROFILE [inconclusive] results,” McCann wrote. “Teeth are difficult.” He warned that the FBI would not prioritize testing the remains of a random 96-year-old accident victim over just about anyone or anything else, particularly “recent/active cases that pose potential risk to public health.”

Goble and Matthews suddenly found themselves in an awkward position. “I thought this would show the power of DNA,” Matthews told me, not that NamUs was wasting resources. “Every yin has a yang, I suppose.”

He contacted the Smithsonian Institution to see if it might perform stable-isotope analysis, which provides information about the environment in which a dead person lived based on minerals in their bones, on Some Mother’s Boy’s teeth. The results wouldn’t confirm his ancestry, but they might provide dietary information that could help pinpoint where he was raised. The Smithsonian told Matthews that East Coast diets 100 years ago were too homogeneous to distinguish among neighboring states, much less the 135 miles between where Owen Jr. and Frank grew up. Unless Some Mother’s Boy turned out to be from, say, California or China, the test likely wouldn’t help.

At that point, Goble agreed to pay up to $2,000 for private DNA testing. I began scouring the web for labs, sending contact information for half a dozen that might have the capacity to test human remains as aged and diminished as those of Some Mother’s Boy. Matthews, though, had begun to worry about the repercussions testing might have on a case that had already gone sideways. “People watch CSI and think you can drop some blood in a world-class machine and a driver’s license shoots out the other end. That’s just not what happens,” he said. What if the DNA in the teeth was too degraded to identify, leaving the case permanently in limbo? Worse, Matthews asked, “What if it comes back and says neither one of you are related to this guy? Oh wow.” He sighed, thinking about Holman and the Hayneses. “They’re totally convinced that’s him. How can we tell them it’s potentially wrong?”

That wasn’t how I saw it. Matthews could instead be a courier of good news. If Frank wasn’t Some Mother’s Boy, that meant he might have survived his teens and started a new life elsewhere. If the Haynes family went looking, they might be delighted to learn they had an unknown branch of cousins. Holman, meanwhile, might create a new NamUs entry for Owen Jr., submit his maternal relative’s DNA as data, and cross-check it with thousands of other cases. And if Some Mother’s Boy was someone else—W.A. Shafer, for instance—what about his relatives? Wouldn’t they be thrilled to bring their lost boy home? What about “pushing the boundaries of forensic science”? I asked Matthews, echoing his own words.

“I want to do that,” he said quietly. He promised he’d call the labs I’d found.

A few weeks later, a new funeral for Some Mother’s Boy was held. This time he had a name.

The Reveal

One evening, several months after Matthews had solved the Tent Girl case back in 1998, there was a knock at his front door. He was surprised to find a local patrol officer, Ryan Allred, with whom he’d gone to high school. Allred had seen Matthews on 48 Hours and wanted to know if he would help investigate the death of his half-sister, Vickie Bertram. In 1976, the 16-year-old’s body had been found at the bottom of an abandoned quarry in Livingston called Rock Crusher. The cause of death was declared a fall, which locals took to mean she killed herself. Allred had always believed she was murdered.

Matthews agreed to take the case. For months the two men pored over files at Matthews’s kitchen table. They followed every lead, interviewing physical-trauma specialists and Bertram’s friends and neighbors. Matthews even measured the height of the quarry walls to prove that it would have been impossible for her to have plunged into a limestone basin without sustaining any broken bones, as stated in the autopsy report. Allred and Matthews’s theory was that someone had killed her and moved her body to make it seem like she fell. “I actually threw a pumpkin over that cliff,” Matthews told me. “The thing exploded like it had a stick of dynamite in it.”

Bertram’s family had her body disinterred, hoping to at least lift the stigma of suicide. “They were a Christian family, and that’s pretty damning in the South,” Matthews pointed out. The results of a new autopsy were inconclusive, although they did reveal a broken tailbone. Matthews issued a statement to the press saying that no one could be sure what happened at the quarry back in 1976, but that the assumption of suicide was unwarranted.

“That was enough for the family,” Matthews told me. It wasn’t the paperwork that mattered—it was peace of mind and public opinion.

The Bertram case offered an important lesson of the anonymous dead: Resolution isn’t always arrived at so much as coaxed from a chaotic jumble of facts and conjecture, a sea of maybes. Sometimes it’s a matter of negotiating between living with uncertainty and simply letting go.

Resolution isn’t always arrived at so much as coaxed from a chaotic jumble of facts and conjecture, a sea of maybes. Sometimes it’s a matter of negotiating between living with uncertainty and simply letting go.

One by one the labs Matthews contacted declined to test Some Mother’s Boy’s remains. Either they didn’t have the capacity to pull DNA from 96-year-old teeth, or they argued that nieces and nephews weren’t close enough relatives to provide adequate genetic reference samples, or they said the cost of the whole thing was simply too high. Meanwhile, pressure on Goble and Matthews kept building. Three months had passed since Some Mother’s Boy’s exhumation, more than one since the Haynes family’s DNA had been collected. The media interest that the two men had so deliberately courted was now something to dodge. “We’d stalled long enough. We needed the conclusion,” Matthews said. “It’s not exactly what we hoped for, but we had to tell them something.”

Matthews proposed an unconventional idea: to call the case based on circumstantial evidence. He didn’t come to the decision lightly, having never been involved in an investigation resolved that way. Then again, he’d never plugged into a case as old as Some Mother’s Boy.

Goble told the local media to expect an announcement on the afternoon of June 15, 2017. Before the press conference, he called a meeting. Matthews was there, along with two of Goble’s deputies and representatives of the Scott County sheriff’s office. They went out for lunch. The fate of Kentucky’s oldest anonymous body would be decided over egg rolls and fried rice at Georgetown’s only Chinese restaurant.

Their plates piled high, Goble asked Matthews, who’d brought along printouts of all the archival articles about Some Mother’s Boy, to present the evidence. There was a shared discomfort with the idea that a boy’s remains were now aboveground and in limbo. There was a competing concern about calling the case—any case, really—without DNA testing. “It was like I was on trial,” Matthews recalled. He told the whole story, from the circumstances of the boy’s death, to Ashurst’s thwarted search, to the revelation of Mignona Haynes’s letter. He described meeting the Haynes family and discussed Holman’s claim. “I can’t tell you what to do,” Matthews said, looking around the table, “but I believe this to be Frank Haynes.”

By the time dessert was served—Jell-O, because this was still the South—everyone had agreed. That afternoon the Scott County Coroner’s Office issued a statement: “After 96 years, the search for the identity of ‘Some Mother’s Boy’ has come to an end. Based on circumstances and consistency of associated evidence, there is no reason to refute the supposition that these are remains of Frank Haynes of Bronston.”

In mid-June, Matthews drove a small casket with Some Mother’s Boy’s remains from Georgetown to Southern Oaks Funeral Home in Somerset, where the manager had offered to provide a graveside service for the family at no cost. A relative commissioned a headstone—a piece of flat orange rock—and drafted a simple inscription that included the date of the funeral:

Frank Albert Haynes

March 2, 1902

April 1, 1921

Returned Home

June 26, 2017

There were only a handful of people gathered at Bronston’s Newell Cemetery for the burial, including the Haynes cousins and Matthews. No one said a word as the casket containing the boy legally, if not scientifically, determined to be Frank Haynes was lowered into the ground at an idyllic spot high on a hill overlooking a pasture and a pond. Despite all the ways the case had gone wrong, Matthews still considered Some Mother’s Boy a success. Frank had been declared Mignona Haynes’s boy, and now he was being laid to rest by her side.

After the burial, Matthews approached Mamie Hahn. He’d worn a T-shirt and jeans that day, so as to help dig the tiny grave. “I’m sorry if I intruded in your lives,” he said. “I won’t bother you anymore.” Hahn gave him a hug. “You never bothered me in the first place,” she said.

Before heading home, Matthews sent Goble two words via text: “It’s done.”

“Does New York have what she needs for her story?” Goble replied.

“He calls you New York now,” Matthews explained. “He’s forgot your name.”

Matthews had recently received good news: NamUs’s DNA funding would be restored on September 1. No reason was given for the sudden reinstatement, but it was preceded by an article in Forensic quoting angry police detectives who said the withdrawal of testing was “slowing investigations to a standstill.” That Some Mother’s Boy hadn’t proved the catalyst Matthews hoped it would be didn’t seem to matter. He’d used the funding crisis to make an “urgent and final appeal” about a case he couldn’t shake. “It was like the last call: If we don’t do it now, it may never happen,” he told me.

I felt cheated, especially having come so close to the moment when science would solve a century-old mystery. DNA results have famously roiled investigations that authorities long considered closed. What if my case was no different, but now I’d never know? At the same time, I kept thinking about the concept of Occam’s razor, according to which the simplest explanation is probably true. I knew that Frank being Some Mother’s Boy was the most likely answer to the whole mess. Somewhere in between the two notions, I would have to find balance.

When I called Emily Craig to ask how she felt about the verdict, her official response was “no comment.” Holman told me the outcome was disappointing. But she said that Frank had more living relatives, more people to glean some bit of solace from the decision. To her that meant something. “Nobody but me cared about my poor little guy,” she sighed. I was reminded of the final passage of “Voice from the Sinkhole,” her short story told from Owen Jr.’s perspective: “It is good, though, that someone thinks of me and searches still. I rest, knowing that my name on her papers is the benediction I never received.”

I didn’t want to fan Holman’s hopes, but Matthews had told me that he was holding on to two of Some Mother’s Boy’s teeth, a fact that Rick Haynes, the family’s unofficial press liaison, was fine with. “We know it’s Frank,” Haynes said. “If someone wants to contest it, go ahead.” Matthews had made arrangements with the state medical examiner to store the teeth in her evidence vault, “just in case someone has a valid argument,” Matthews explained. “I’m not gonna lock the lid shut.” The original headstone and plot in Georgetown would also remain. “It’s historic,” Matthews said.

In the meantime, he’d moved on to the next mystery: a woman who was found dead in the Smoky Mountains in 1974. Matthews had decided to take the Smithsonian up on its offer of stable-isotope analysis. Great Smoky Mountains National Park has long been among the most visited parks in the United States; if the Smithsonian’s process could help determine even which half of the country the woman was from, it could be a major breakthrough in the case.

The woman’s body was discovered near a chalet at the Cove Mountain Resort, a coat and sweater folded neatly beside her. Her working nickname is the Guest That Never Left.

YouTube video

The bluegrass classic “Wandering Boy” includes the lyrics, Out in the cold world and far away from home / Some mother’s boy is wandering all alone.

Theater of War

Theater of War

He traveled to some of the world’s most dangerous places to disarm militias, negotiate with gangs, and defy terrorists. But Bill Brookman was just a clown.

By Jessica Hatcher-Moore

The Atavist Magazine, No. 70


Jessica Hatcher-Moore is an award-winning journalist based in North Wales. Her work has appeared in The Guardian Long Read, Telegraph Magazine, Elle, The New Statesman, National Geographic, Time, and Newsweek. Prior to Wales, she lived in Nairobi. 

Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Daniel Moattar
Photographs: Phil Hatcher-Moore (Mogadishu); courtesy of Bill Brookman (other locations)

Published in August 2017. Design updated in 2021.

Mogadishu, Somalia, 2013

Sequined head scarves and dangling earrings shimmered as young people twisted and stomped to a hip-hop beat. The euphoric crowd’s dance floor was a decrepit basketball court ringed by painted concrete walls, their once bright tones muted by the relentless equatorial sun. One woman carried a large Somali flag—a sky blue background stamped with a single white star—that she waved in time to music emanating from the stage, or what passed for one: a corrugated metal canopy held up by wooden poles.

Rappers and singers performed sets, some in Somali, others in English. One musician taking his turn on the microphone gestured to a man controlling the venue’s hastily rigged sound system. Turn up the volume, was the mimed directive.

The sound guy demurred; he knew better. This was Mogadishu’s first public music show in 25 years, a milestone event that many people thought might never happen. The concert was already flirting with a blackout because of the Somali capital’s crumbling infrastructure, a consequence of civil war. Cranking the volume would risk overloading the system, which might grant the show’s enemies the cover of darkness.

Until a year and a half prior, Mogadishu had been largely controlled by the Islamist extremist group al-Shabaab, which made playing music punishable by flogging or even death. Al-Shabaab’s retreat had paved the way for the concert now taking place, an eclectic showcase of international and local artists who’d gathered to celebrate peace. But the extremists maintained a network of supporters who carried out suicide bombings and other targeted attacks. Concert organizers had received a barrage of death threats. For protection, they’d publicized the event like a flash mob, announcing the location only hours before the artists were scheduled to take the stage.

Find hundreds of hours’ worth of longform stories like this, read by audiobook narrators, in the Audm app for iPhone.

One of these organizers stood out from the rest—the “old man,” as the fatigues-clad Somali security guards patrolling the venue called him. His name was Bill Brookman, and while reporting on the historic concert, I found myself following him closely because he was a curious, quixotic figure. He wasn’t an aid worker or a diplomat, and he certainly wasn’t a hip-hop artist. Brookman was a professional clown.

He was 57 and white, with a pink face drenched in sweat that plastered locks of curly gray hair to his forehead. Despite how the guards referred to him, he had a childlike demeanor, jocular and spontaneous. When he harangued one Somali guard for watching the concert and not the basketball court’s perimeter, he spoke English in a refined British accent, with the clipped diction and sonorous quality associated with boarding schools, fox hunting, and the Royal Ascot.

Brookman’s attire, however, was anything but proper. He wore black and white striped pants, bright red boots, an orange T-shirt with tasseled sleeves, and a green cravat embellished with silver charms. Black eyeliner had seeped into the creases beneath his eyes. In his hands were a plastic bottle of kerosene, a box of matches, and three Kevlar sticks, which he’d snuck through customs at Mogadishu’s airport—all the materials he would need to breathe fire.

In his hands were a plastic bottle of kerosene, a box of matches, and three Kevlar sticks—all the materials he would need to breathe fire.

But where? He looked up at the concrete walls. They stood about ten feet high. If he climbed them, he’d be a sitting duck for a shooter. The show had been airing live on local television for two hours already; any half-decent jihadi, Brookman decided, would have identified the location and be on his way over, if not already lying in wait outside the venue. Brookman couldn’t very well breathe fire from the court, though. It wouldn’t have the same wondrous effect as if he were towering above the crowd. Drawing comfort from the weight of the flak jacket and helmet he wore over his kooky getup, Brookman prepared to climb.

“Bill!” a voice shouted from behind him. It was a local fixer who’d helped coordinate the concert. “No, Bill, you can’t go up in a helmet and jacket.”

“Why?” Brookman asked.

“It looks rude. It shows you don’t trust us.”

Reluctantly, Brookman took off the gear and handed it to the fixer. He took a draught of kerosene and held it in his mouth as he clambered atop the wall.

Mogadishu stretched out before him, its shattered buildings and curling coastline engulfed by the heavy night sky. Brookman lit his fire sticks, then filled his lungs to capacity and raised one of the torches toward the stars. The expulsion of kerosene and air that came from his mouth created a flaming tongue worthy of a dragon. For an instant all eyes were on Brookman, his exposed position illuminated by the fantastic burst of light.

Once upon a time, Brookman shared his talents—which along with breathing fire included pantomiming, accordion playing, juggling, and acrobatics—at local carnivals, weddings, and children’s birthday parties across England. What led him to Mogadishu more than three decades into his career was an idea so far-fetched that it just might be true: There are some things only clowns can do.

Clowning dates back to classical antiquity, when fools and similar characters were mainstays in theatrical comedies. The practice evolved through Italy’s commedia dell’arte, Shakespeare’s plays, the British harlequinade, and the modern circus. Humanitarian clowning, as Brookman’s business is known, puts the timeless, playful art to use in underserved or divided communities. The most famous practitioner is Patch Adams, who since 1971 has run the Gesundheit Institute, which sends volunteer performers to hospitals, schools, and slums around the world.

It would be easy to distill humanitarian clowns’ ethos down to a hackneyed idiom: Laughter is the best medicine. But their mission goes beyond that. They seek to build community bonds and convey civic messages. Often, to achieve those goals, they encourage audience participation.

If it sounds like bunk, there’s evidence that performance does work as a tool of social justice and conflict resolution. Allan Owens, a professor of drama education at the University of Chester, located near the border between England and Wales, told me that art and performance help people “make sense of things in difficult times and the passages that we go through.” Outside forces, including entertainment, also provide relief in tense environments. “Where relations get locked, it’s only by that third dynamic coming in that there can actually be some loosening,” Owens said.

In post-genocide Rwanda, theater became an important mode of commemorating the tragedy and aiding interethnic dialogue. One production staged by a public university presented different views on the genocide and invited audiences to intervene when they disagreed. Similar programs have been tested in fractured countries like Israel, El Salvador, and Bosnia.

Brookman once told me that “cultural baggage accrues around a lot of the art that is already” in a place, depending on who created it, who controls it, and who can access it. By contrast, clowning and its ancillary arts are neutral. “Circus skills are activities that are not tainted by anything—by class, creed, religion, politics, or history,” he said. “They’re completely fresh and open.”

Loughborough, England, 1978

“Do you, by any chance, play the one-man band?”

Brookman had recently graduated from university with a degree in fine arts, and he was interviewing at a theater company in Loughborough, a town in the British Midlands close to where he’d grown up—the son of a homemaker mother and engineer father. The company’s director had posed the question. In England, the tradition of the one-man band conforms roughly to Dick Van Dyke’s character Bert in Mary Poppins: an affable bloke weighed down by an array of brass instruments, a squeezebox, and a drum. Brookman could do many things, but playing the one-man band wasn’t among them.

“I do,” he answered anyway, trying to project confidence from beneath his thick mop of strawberry blond curls.

The director offered him the job. Brookman had two weeks to assemble a one-man band and learn to play it if he wanted to get away with the lie when he reported for work.

He approached an acquaintance, a loss adjuster for an insurance company who liked to make gadgets in his free time, and asked for help. The man spring-loaded a pair of hi-hat cymbals and rigged them to a colander that would serve as a hat. A string quoit worn around one arm attached to a bungee cord that, when pulled, caused the top cymbal to drop onto the lower one. A popular children’s television show at the time required participants to smash custard pies between cymbals, so Brookman made sure that his new headpiece was able to accommodate a pie, should the need to destroy one arise. The ensemble also had a cornet, an accordion, a banjo, a honker, and a wood-framed drum worn like a rucksack.

Once it was ready, Brookman set about learning to play the whole kit. “There’s a deflation of pomposity,” he recalled. “It honks, wheezes, buzzes.” He was good at it, though—so good that his homemade contraption took him well beyond the Loughborough theater company. It became his first ticket around the globe.

Brookman’s early career coincided with a wave of British entertainers who, fed up with the stuffy status quo of established galleries and theaters, turned to public spaces to stage their work. They embraced second-wave feminism, attended Ban the Bomb marches, and listened to the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. They performed cabarets and scrawled intricate graffiti on city walls. Brookman’s one-man band may have seemed quaint in comparison, associated more with working-class, postindustrial Great Britain than the punk scene. But he found a niche among the new artistic renegades—and audiences loved it. In the 1980s, he played gigs across his home country and as far away as Thailand, Russia, and the United States.

In 1988, Brookman was invited to perform at a festival in Asia. His departure coincided with the first-ever Red Nose Day, a biennial celebration in the United Kingdom when people are encouraged to wear a plastic clown nose and raise money, often by taking part in daft stunts, for an anti-poverty charity called Comic Relief. Brookman decided to break the world record for the longest distance anyone had ever worn a red nose. (In fact, there was no official record for the feat.) A photograph appeared in the Loughborough Echo, Brookman’s local newspaper, announcing his plan. “Plucky Bill intends to travel all the way to the sub-continent with his Comic Relief red nose on,” one article said. He was quoted as saying, “I give my word as a gentleman that I will not take the nose off during the trip.”

The BBC picked up the story, and a news crew followed Brookman as he clanked and honked in his one-man band onto his plane, a bulbous nose adorning his face. Its edges cut painfully into his nostrils, but he wore it for the duration of his journey to Delhi, where he disembarked for a long layover. Rather than sightsee, he put on an impromptu music show for children at a school for the blind.

When Brookman returned to Loughborough, he found an envelope waiting at the home he shared with his wife, an opera singer with whom he’d started a small theater company, and his two young sons. It was addressed in old-fashioned cursive. Inside was a letter and a check made out in his name from a woman he didn’t know. She’d apparently seen news coverage of his Red Nose Day stunt.

“I’ve heard about what you do. I think it’s wonderful. Have ten pounds,” the letter said.

Brookman opened a bank account and deposited the check. With the meager sum, the charitable Bill Brookman Foundation was born, with the mission to use the arts for social good.

His marriage ended not long after. Brookman’s travels kept him away from home, and his wife suspected infidelity—a charge he denied. On the day they separated, he walked out of the house carrying only a French horn and a plastic bag with jars of pasta sauce inside. The sauce was his wife’s suggestion; Brookman was a terrible cook, and she didn’t want him to starve before he got settled on his own.

Forlorn, Brookman tried to keep working. But when a job playing the one-man band and eating fire at a festival in Germany fell through, he faltered. “I couldn’t take the life of a freelancer,” he recalled. It was too grueling, too uncertain. He stopped performing and trained to become a teacher.

Before taking a permanent job, however, he decided to join a clowning tour to Russia organized by Patch Adams. Many volunteers on Adams’s trips were amateur performers, good-natured types willing to don costumes and makeup for humanitarian causes, so Brookman’s professional skills stood out. One day the group visited a Moscow hospital ward populated by young Chernobyl victims. Dressed like the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist—top hat, red waistcoat and tails, black trousers, and heavy boots—Brookman entered playing discordant notes on an accordion. He pretended to be as surprised by the sounds as the children were, with exaggerated facial expressions and abrupt body movements. Some of the youngsters giggled.

Brookman playing the one-man band. 
Brookman playing the one-man band. 

He approached a shy girl wary of the scene before her. Brookman took a notepad and pencil out of his pocket and, with a flourish, drew a circle on one of the pages. Then he passed the pad and pencil to the girl. With three careful movements, she added two dots and an arc inside the circle—eyes and a smiling mouth. Her own face broke into a grin.

Wonder and surprise of the sort written across the girl’s visage were what Brookman loved about clowning. Predictability, by contrast, was anathema to him. The more he thought about teaching, the more he knew that he wouldn’t be happy doing the same thing year in and year out. He threw himself into performing once more.

Brookman rarely said no to an opportunity for his company, which made money, or his foundation, which put on shows for free. In the 1990s, he taught circus skills to schoolchildren in New York State and clowned in hospitals in France. At home he ran juggling and maypole-dancing clubs and worked as a jack-of-all-trades: actor, puppeteer, musician. In 2002, his foundation took circus performers to Gujarat, India, where a devastating earthquake had killed some 20,000 people the previous year. Brookman packed his accordion and the accoutrements necessary to raise a maypole, which locals in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, would dance around and adorn with luminously colored fabrics.

Brookman didn’t take up humanitarian clowning for purely altruistic reasons. There were more complicated ones, rooted in family history and shaded with equal parts insecurity and hubris. His main inspiration was his maternal grandfather, Alfred Lancelot Wykes, a man he never met. During World War I, Wykes, whose family called him Lance, joined the Royal Flying Corps and flew a Sopwith Camel, a single-seat biplane that proved the most potent fighter craft in the Allies’ arsenal. After the war, Wykes set up a small factory in Thurmaston, Leicestershire, a village just over 100 miles northwest of London, where he produced planes for private use. When World War II began, the British needed a new surveillance aircraft, and Wykes’s model fit the bill. By 1945, his company had produced more than 1,600 planes, known as Austers.

Wykes didn’t live to see the end of the war, however. In 1944, as part of a military show, he flew an aircraft over a Leicestershire park in an aerobatic display. He executed a perfect loop-the-loop, until the point where he was meant to pull up. His wife and son watched as his plane came down like a javelin and burst into flames. His 14-year-old daughter, Brookman’s mother, who was away at boarding school, learned of her father’s death in a newspaper the next day.

Brookman didn’t take up humanitarian clowning for purely altruistic reasons. There were more complicated ones, rooted in family history and shaded with equal parts insecurity and hubris.

Wykes became the stuff of legend. His portrait hung above the staircase in Brookman’s grandmother’s large Victorian house: a short, stocky man with graying hair and kind features, dressed in a three-piece suit and clutching a pipe in one hand. Brookman, who was born in 1955, would climb into the dusty attic to play with Wykes’s medals and uniforms and the propeller of a Sopwith Camel, its wood blades smooth to the touch. In the dining room, a model of the same plane hung inside an inglenook fireplace. His grandmother would take Brookman into her arms and encourage him to blow so that the propeller would turn. The ritual was akin to praying at an altar. “It was symbolic of Lancelot, this man of untouchable honor,” Brookman told me. “That infiltrated my psyche. He was an utter hero to me.”

As a young man, alongside his artistic talents, Brookman nurtured a deep interest in war—one might even say he romanticized it. He devoured military-history books and films in his free time. A line from Lawrence of Arabia stuck with him: He remembered Prince Faisal, based on the real-life king of Greater Syria and Iraq, saying, “Young men make wars.… Then old men make the peace.” The generations of British men immediately preceding Brookman’s had fought in two world wars. He expected to be recruited if a third broke out. But that never happened. His youth passed with no supreme ordeal in which a man, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, could test his mettle and mortality.

So Brookman went looking for one, courting life-and-death scenarios other people were desperate to escape. By the time he started hopping from one international hot zone to another—Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Haiti—he was middle-aged. Making peace, not war, was his mission, and entertainment his favored weapon. All the while, the question of whether he was living up to the legend of Alfred Lancelot Wykes burned in the back of his mind.

Skenderaj, Kosovo, 2003

In 1998 and 1999, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo fought a brutal war against Slobodan Milosevic’s government. Kosovo freed itself from Belgrade’s political grip, but it also emerged from the conflict in a shambles. Much of its population was displaced or mired in poverty, ethnic tensions still roiled, and the government was in disarray. In 2003, Brookman booked a flight to Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. He wanted to help, though he didn’t know exactly how.

It was a rash, perhaps egocentric move to show up sight unseen with no real post-conflict experience and expect to do some good. He risked everything from stepping on one of the land mines littering Kosovo to burdening already-taxed aid workers. Brookman, though, didn’t ignore impulses; if he had one, he acted on it, for better or for worse.

Brookman devised a loose idea of what he wanted to achieve, gleaned from a military history of World War II. In his recollection, the book described how the Soviet army marked the war’s end in Leningrad with a dramatic display of unused signal flares. The soldiers were celebrating victory but also honoring the unfathomable loss of some two million civilians and soldiers in the city. Brookman wanted to create something similar in Kosovo—a public spectacle that inspired collective awe and wonder. It has to be big, he thought, to make you look upward, to make you sigh.

He hoped that small-town connections would help him more than 1,200 miles away from home. The UN had a mission in Kosovo, and a man named Robert Charmbury who’d once worked in Nottinghamshire, not far from Loughborough, was the top representative for the international organization in Skenderaj, a poor municipality. Brookman had never spoken to Charmbury; if he sent a note in advance of his arrival—neither man could recall—it was only to say, I’m coming.

Skenderaj had served as a base for prominent members of the Kosovo Liberation Army and sustained enormous damage in the war. Afterward, a senior KLA commander, Sami Lushtaku, became mayor, a position he held even as he came under investigation for war crimes. (He was convicted and sentenced to prison, but later acquitted.) Skenderaj was gray and rainy when Brookman arrived, and he found Charmbury’s office in a shabby municipal building. A UN flag sat on the desk, which Charmbury would sometimes desert to play Ping-Pong with colleagues.

Brookman wanted to create a public spectacle that inspired collective awe and wonder. It has to be big, he thought, to make you look upward, to make you sigh.

Brookman got lucky; Charmbury didn’t find him rude or presumptuous. The UN official perched on his desk and listened to his guest’s idea: a multiethnic, weekend-long music and theater festival celebrating peace. Charmbury’s work brokering with local leaders to tackle grim privation was slowgoing and not always rewarding. Attempts at more lively initiatives hadn’t panned out. A two-day Mr. and Miss Skenderaj competition, for instance, had been canceled on the first night because of a power outage and on the second because of a bomb scare. “Bill offered a chance to do something special and memorable to cheer the local people,” Charmbury recently wrote in an email. Whether inspired, desperate, or some combination of the two, he agreed to the festival.

“I’m going to need a stage,” Brookman replied. Charmbury said the UN could help with that.

“There’s one other thing,” Brookman continued. “I would love to do something with aerialists.” Like in Leningrad, he wanted people gazing skyward. He’d researched the possibility of getting an aerial rig shipped over from Great Britain, but the cost and logistics weren’t looking good. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas?” Brookman asked. Charmbury said that he could probably sanction the use of a UN crane.

Brookman returned home and began putting together a show. He placed an ad in The Guardian calling for volunteers to join a circus trip to Kosovo. A trapeze artist signed on, as did a member of a Loughborough juggling club and one of Brookman’s sons. Back in Kosovo, a NATO-led peacekeeping force provided floodlights, and native Albanian bands agreed to perform.

The festival was scheduled for July 2003. With the appointed weekend days away, performers arrived in Skenderaj from London. They cobbled together stilts from any material they could find, erected a stage, and practiced the aerial show, which the trapeze artist would perform suspended from the UN crane. Brookman promoted the event in radio and newspaper interviews and walking tours through villages and towns. He carried placards and occasionally stopped to eat fire from Kevlar sticks in front of astonished onlookers.

On the first day of the festival, a few hundred curious locals showed up in Skenderaj’s main square. The first performers took the stage before a huge banner emblazoned with the word “United.” As bands, dancers, and other artists cycled through their performances, the audience grew. Brookman queued up and directed the performers, sometimes running on stage to execute a stunt or pantomime. By evening, when the aerial show was scheduled, more than 1,000 people packed the square. Suspended from the crane by a cord attached to his feet, the trapeze artist swung high into the dusky sky. Then he dropped down and scooped up a young boy from where he stood in the square clutching a candle. The move had been rehearsed at length, though the audience didn’t know it. Holding the boy close, the aerialist soared back up, eliciting screams and applause.

The morning after the festival ended, Brookman walked alone past the dismantled stage, then drifted around town. He noticed a house with walls pockmarked by bullet holes. It was the site of a massacre, a passerby said. Brookman fingered the scarred plaster. Then he ordered coffee at a café that offered a view of a field leading to the Klina River. As he looked out at the expanse, a pack of dogs stormed past, as if on a hunt. “Like headless horsemen,” Brookman recalled. Pets abandoned in the war coursed through the city in search of food.

Freetown, Sierra Leone, 2005

Two years after Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war ended, Brookman was sitting at home with his teenage sons watching the news when a segment about the country’s amputees aired. Hacking off appendages, the reporter said, was the signature atrocity of the 11-year conflict, fought between a corrupt, unpopular regime and unscrupulous, foreign-backed rebels. Some 20,000 civilians, many of them children, were missing arms, legs, lips, ears, or other body parts. Harrowing images of mutilated infants and teenagers filled the screen.

Like any normal person, Brookman was shocked. But a much odder notion popped into his brain, too: Surely a kid with no hands could still learn circus skills. Helping young amputees develop physical talents could rebuild the self-confidence lost along with their limbs. Brookman decided to test the idea on his sons and other children whom he coached in performance at a local community center.

All he needed was a diabolo—a free-running yo-yo shaped like an egg timer that can be spun, hurled into the air, and caught again on a string—a stick on which to balance a spinning plate, a pair of stilts, and some rope. With the rope, Brookman bound one boy’s bent arms so they ended at the elbows. To each truncated limb he tied the diabolo’s string. To another boy’s right arm, which was also tied up, he fastened the stick for the spinning plate. Brookman then challenged them to do tricks. After some trial and error, the boys were using the gear with ease.

Next, Brookman asked them to sit on the floor and bend their legs at the knees. He attached stilts to the joints and told them to try walking. They wobbled at first but gradually found their balance. This is going to work, Brookman thought.

Rather than just showing up in Sierra Leone, as he had in Kosovo, Brookman got in touch with the Single Leg Amputee Sports Association in Freetown, the capital. The organization sponsored soccer matches and other sporting events for people disabled in the conflict, and it agreed to meet with Brookman. In January 2005, carrying suitcases full of juggling balls, plates, and diabolos, he flew to Freetown.

Before leaving, Brookman wrote down the hymns he wanted sung at his funeral and gave the list to his assistant, Sally Renshaw, for safekeeping. Sierra Leone was more dangerous than Kosovo had been—armed gangs operated with impunity—and Brookman was preparing for the worst. He chose “When a Knight Won His Spurs” and “To Be a Pilgrim,” classic British songs about gallantry and faith. The latter has been used as a battle hymn by Great Britain’s special forces.

 He who would valiant be           
‘Gainst all disaster,           
Let him in constancy           
Follow the Master.           
There’s no discouragement           
Shall make him once relent           
His first avowed intent           
To be a pilgrim.

At a glance, it might have seemed that Brookman was seizing the tedious mantle of the prototypical white savior headed to Africa to make a difference and, if necessary, become a martyr. But melodrama in the service of others was Brookman’s business—his life’s work. He was prone to hyperbole whenever he spoke and often prefaced statements in our conversations with, “Now, this will sound awful, but.…” He recognized his penchant for self-aggrandizement, even as he barreled right into it. The choice of hymns was no different.

In Sierra Leone, Brookman visited schools and explained his idea of teaching circus skills to children. He was surprised to see only a handful of amputees. He asked if there were others. Without proper medical care, he learned, most had already died. Ultimately, Brookman would teach a young man missing one leg to hold a flaming torch in his hands as an aerial rig hoisted him up. Another man with no lower arms learned to balance a spinning plate on a long stick tied to one of his biceps. To have a bigger impact, Brookman was going to need a different project—and a team of locals to pull it off.

Pantomime of a gun misfiring.

One day he was having lunch at an outdoor café when he noticed that another customer, also a foreigner, was sitting alone. The man’s jeep was parked nearby, branded with a UN logo and the words “Arms for Development.” In typically forward fashion, Brookman approached the customer, a dark-haired French Canadian in his mid-thirties, and took a seat in a plastic chair at his table. Later, Brookman would describe the moment as if it were fated.

The man’s name was Daniel Ladouceur, and he was working on a new disarmament strategy for the United Nations Development Programme. Despite a government campaign to collect everything from anti-aircraft battery to AK-47’s to rocket-propelled grenades, there was still a lot of weaponry floating around Sierra Leone, particularly small arms and ammunition. Ladouceur’s job was to persuade communities to hand over guns in exchange for UN-funded development projects worth up to $20,000 apiece. So far it wasn’t going well. Ladouceur could see that distributing leaflets and posting placards wouldn’t advance the campaign. He was looking for a more creative, radical approach.

“What are you doing?” he asked Brookman.

“I’m doing circus skills,” Brookman replied, explaining his work.

“Have you got any ideas that could help us?” Ladouceur asked. “Anything you could do to get people interested in handing in their arms?”

Brookman took the question seriously. He scanned the ground until he spotted a few stones. He picked up three. “Let’s say I’m juggling hand grenades,” he said, giving Ladouceur a running commentary of the pantomime. “It goes wrong”—he let one stone land on his head—“and ow!” Brookman shrieked. “But let’s say I have a UN helmet on, and the stone lands in the hat. Then it’s safe.” He pretended to take off a helmet, flip it over, and use it to catch the stone. “People must give the grenades to the UN, else they’ll get burned,” Brookman continued.

Then Brookman pulled a honker from his canvas bag. It was an old-fashioned brass car horn with a large rubber bulb attached to one end. “You could go like this,” he said, drawing the horn up to his shoulder as if it were a rifle, arranging his face into a grimace, and squeezing the bulb—honk—as he mimed taking a shot. “And then this,” he said, aiming the honker but squeezing the bulb such that no sound came out. With a puzzled expression, Brookman flipped the honker around and peered into the imaginary barrel. As he did, he produced another honk, imitating a gun misfiring into his face. “Or how about you fashion a gun out of a balloon,” Brookman said, pretending to eye a target from behind a chair, “but you have a pin hidden in your lapel, so that when you take aim, the balloon blows up in your face.” He reeled his body back in mock pain.

“I suppose something like that could work,” he said more quietly, his muscles relaxing as the adrenaline drained away.

Ladouceur was intrigued. He knew of one-off, didactic plays staged to encourage disarmament, but Brookman’s sketches were simple, engaging, and replicable. “I had a feeling that this was a crazy idea,” Ladouceur told me, “but then the crazier the better, I felt.” He asked Brookman if he’d consider working for the UN, and Brookman said yes. It was exactly the sort of opportunity he’d been hoping to find.

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In Sierra Leone with a cache of weapons.

To deploy the pantomimes, which Brookman refined and scripted, the two men envisaged a traveling troupe of performers. Brookman’s job was to recruit a local person to lead it. He short-listed six candidates who responded to a newspaper ad, then selected Albert Massaquoi, an actor who spoke three local languages as well as English. After Massaquoi learned to juggle, twist gun-shaped balloons, and lead discussions on disarmament, he and Brookman drove to remote villages to test his new skills.

Brookman documented the trip, during which Massaquoi performed in town squares and forest clearings, in a report that was nothing like the usual UN fare, full of Orwellian doublespeak and impenetrable syntax. Brookman’s account was candid, colorful, and written in the third person to mildly comic effect. “Bill is concerned that some drivers drive insensitively up-country,” he wrote, describing the UN employees who ferried him and Massaquoi. “Pedestrians are covered in dust or splashed and raced past in villages. Some of this is unavoidable. But to see a considerate driver in action shows it can be done.”

After the successful trial, Massaquoi recruited other performers. They took off like a traveling circus, turning up in more than 300 locations nationwide in an old bright yellow Land Cruiser. They collected any weapons communities were willing to give up. According to Ladouceur, they gathered more than 1,000 arms, including semi-automatics, hunting rifles, and chakabulas, crude, locally made guns. Finally, Brookman’s clowning was proving effective in the way he’d always hoped it would.

When Ladouceur was reassigned to Haiti, where the UN was struggling to contain urban guerrilla warfare, he asked Brookman to come. The clown was game.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 200

Brookman’s flight to Haiti was a bubble of serenity that burst as soon as he disembarked in Port-au-Prince, with its thick dust and exhaust fumes, blaring music and car horns. From the window of a taxi, Brookman spotted a dead body. At the Hotel Oloffson, a gingerbread-style Gothic mansion and an inspiration for Graham Greene’s 1966 novel The Comedians, foreign aid workers spilled onto shaded terraces overlooking lush, tropical gardens. Theirs was a rarefied club. When the guests went to bed, singing from nearby streets continued through the night, haunting four-part harmonies that drifted through Brookman’s open shutters. Occasional bursts of gunfire broke the melodic reverie.

The sounds represented what Brookman had come to do in Port-au-Prince’s bidonvilles, or slums: alleviate violence through music and art. Of particular concern was Cité Soleil, a shantytown of almost 300,000 people. Numerous gangs vied for control of the streets, killing their enemies and terrorizing civilians. Neither Haiti’s government, in chaos after a coup d’état, nor the police were up to the task of flushing them out. A UN peacekeeping force had arrived in 2004, but it wasn’t able to penetrate the compact neighborhood of flimsy buildings leaning together and overlapping like rooms in a house of cards. Whenever soldiers went in, gunfire from the gangs drove them back out. Several peacekeepers had been killed.

Desmond Molloy, an Irishman and former military officer working for the UN, was tasked with figuring out how to disarm the gangs—composed largely of young men, including many children—and help members transition into civilian society. It felt like an “impossible” job, Molloy told me, and it nearly broke him. The gangs had tens of thousands of weapons in their possession. They used women and children as human shields. On average, Molloy noted at the time, five kidnappings were reported in Cité Soleil every day. His team once met with more than 30 children who belonged to gangs, to discuss alternative ways of life. Within three weeks, Molloy heard that gang bosses had executed at least five for conspiring with the UN.

The gangs had tens of thousands of weapons in their possession. They used women and children as human shields.

Distressed, Molloy contacted Ladouceur, whom he’d worked with in Sierra Leone, and begged him to come to Haiti. The two men drafted a plan to adapt traditional disarmament strategies to a place verging on anarchy. But during a presentation of their ideas, flicking through PowerPoint slides, Molloy abruptly told the room full of UN officials, “I have to stop.” Haiti was in conflict, even if a proper war wasn’t raging. There was no peace agreement signaling any side’s willingness to disarm. Conventional UN solutions wouldn’t work.

Certain that he would be sacked from his job, Molloy was surprised when his boss allowed him and Ladouceur to come up with a new strategy—if they could do it in two days. Molloy and Ladouceur devised what they called community violence reduction, which they were soon allowed to implement. The plan prioritized the well-being of populations affected by gangs by helping people exit the organizations and supporting nonviolent culture in places like Cité Soleil. With no clear way of convincing gang leaders to gather at a negotiating table, Molloy and Ladouceur decided to approach them individually, using Haiti’s vibrant arts scene as a channel. Music was a language the gangsters understood; rap kreyòl, as Haitian hip-hop is known, was born of social discontent.

The UN, though, had a legitimacy problem. Nervous peacekeeping soldiers who were supposed to be protecting civilians rarely got out of their tanks. In January 2006, gangs had shot two of them dead—the third fatal incident affecting UN personnel in under a month. For community violence reduction to work, Ladouceur and Molloy needed outside help.

Brookman was the man for the job. Ladouceur asked him to set up an ostensibly independent organization—it was fully funded by the UN—through which local performers would tour parts of bidonvilles that peacekeepers couldn’t reach. Some Haitian officials were skeptical. “What are you doing bringing in foreigners to run carnival for us?” one asked when he heard the news. “You think you need to teach Haitians how to do carnival?” (The country’s weeks-long celebration leading up to Mardi Gras is legendary.)

Heeding the lessons of Sierra Leone, however, Brookman planned to draft Haitian entertainers and collaborate with them. After his first night at the Hotel Oloffson, Brookman got to work. Through newspaper ads and word of mouth, he found young, street-savvy performers who seemed capable of navigating both chords and conflict. Jerôme Jacques, a stocky, gregarious Haitian with an easy laugh and a beautiful singing voice, was chosen as the troupe’s front man. He and the other performers made bright orange T-shirts emblazoned with the initiative’s name, Caravane de la Paix (Caravan of Peace). They removed the telltale blue logos from the UN vehicles they’d be using and painted the sides with murals inspired by voodoo art. Brookman taught them circus skills, including how to toss a diabolo that had been set on fire.

The caravan set their sights on Cité Soleil, which the UN was eager to access by any means possible. Each gang controlled a parcel of the slum; to secure a location for a show, the caravan would need approval from the relevant gang boss. Jacques decided to drive in to request a meeting with Amaral Duclona, a powerful leader who held sway over an area of the slum known as Bélécou. Among the most feared men in Port-au-Prince, Duclona was suspected of being connected to the murders of several foreigners. Yet Jacques had heard that he was surprisingly approachable and interested in development that might benefit Cité Soleil.

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Haitian performers pose with caravan vehicles. 

On the road into Bélécou, Jacques and three other caravan members who’d agreed to join him were stopped and questioned several times. Once they arrived, about 30 young men blocked their path. Jacques asked where Duclona was. A cluster went looking for their boss while the rest stayed behind to watch the uninvited guests. Fifteen minutes later, a polished blue Honda convertible arrived and produced Duclona, a tall, heavyset man with a buzz cut and a silver chain around his thick neck. He and several armed men disappeared into a nearby building. Duclona found a room with a desk, where he sat with his guards flanking him, like a lord holding court. Only then was Jacques allowed an audience.

“We are working to promote the culture of peace,” Jacques told Duclona. “The whole community honors you as their leader, a great leader, a leader who exudes extraordinary sensitivity toward the people of the Cité.” But those people, Jacques continued, weren’t happy with the status quo of poverty and violence. He asked Duclona’s permission to bring the caravan into Bélécou to engage residents in music and performance.

The gang leader responded by comparing life in Cité Soleil to being in a prison. “The population lives in fear,” Jacques remembered him saying. Duclona also complained about the unearned reputation that slum residents had throughout Port-au-Prince. “People living in this area cannot move with ease around other parts of the capital,” he said. “Men and women, all are considered killers.”

He agreed to let the caravan come, with one stipulation: Jacques also had to get permission from Duclona’s brother-in-law, Évens Jeune—known as Ti Kouto (Little Knife)—a gang leader who controlled a neighboring area known as Boston. The two bosses had made a pact to prohibit public leisure activities as a method of controlling their communities, so Duclona couldn’t agree to the caravan’s request on his own.

Jacques drove with two of Duclona’s men to Ti Kouto’s house, all brick and glass with modern plumbing, air-conditioning, and a driveway in which new cars and motorbikes were parked. When he heard the pitch, Ti Kouto gave his agreement. Jacques left the slum and reported back to Brookman, anxiously awaiting news of the reconnaissance trip, that the caravan’s work was a go.

Two days later, the team loaded into its vehicles and set off for Place Immaculé, a square in Boston. Brookman trusted and admired his Haitian colleagues. He also felt responsible for them; he knew that they were risking their lives because he’d asked them to. But if something went wrong in the slum, there would be little he could do to protect them or himself.

The ride was rough. Gangs had dug trenches on either side of the road; known as “tank traps,” they made it nearly impossible for armored vehicles to pass. When the troupe finally arrived at Place Immaculé, the members cautiously spilled out wearing their orange shirts. Armed men loyal to Ti Kouto emerged from narrow alleyways. They’d been sent to provide protection.

The caravan split into two groups. One managed the curious crowd that had begun to gather. The other, led by Brookman, set up for the show. Every half-hour, Brookman sent a text message to a UN contact so that the official could monitor the caravan’s progress. He was walking a fine line; if Ti Kouto found out the troupe wasn’t a wholly neutral party, as it had been presented to him when Jacques first visited Boston, the caravan could be run out of the slum, even attacked.

Brookman kicked the show off with his accordion, pulsing the instrument’s keys and pushing and stretching its bellows. Several gunshots rang out close by, presumably a warning to the caravan from gangs hostile to Duclona and Ti Kouto’s. The band looked to Brookman for guidance and saw him play on. So they did, too. Later they learned that Brookman hadn’t heard the shots: The accordion is a strident instrument, and he already had hearing loss from years spent cocking his head toward it, the rasping notes blaring into his ear canal.

Jacques and another vocalist took up two microphones. Their first song, a catchy rock tune, beseeched the crowd to lay down their weapons, which the lyrics called “a great burden.” Women clustered near the troupe, with green and yellow buckets bearing laundry, food, and water balanced on their heads. They laughed and swayed to the music. Eventually men joined in, and as the crowd started to cheer, the band’s confidence grew.

Then the audience parted, making way for a lean, muscular man with tattoos and silver hoop earrings. Brookman’s heart fluttered; he wondered if the man was going to shut the show down—or worse. Instead, the man took one of the microphones and began to rap. When he finished, another man, this one skinny, wearing bleached dreadlocks and a leopard-print shirt, jumped in to replace him. The caravan, Brookman realized, was engaged in an unprecedented musical dialogue with some of the most wanted men in Haiti.

The caravan, Brookman realized, was engaged in an unprecedented musical dialogue with some of the most wanted men in Haiti.

At one point, he set down his accordion, picked up a small camera he’d brought with him, and gingerly took a photograph. Rather than get angry, the man in the leopard-print shirt exaggerated his performance gestures. Over the course of the afternoon, keen to document the caravan’s first success, Brookman took more photos of gang members, most of whom had elaborately tattooed arms.

When the troupe finished performing, members distributed T-shirts to the crowd, Brookman said a few words—translated by a local priest—about music being a common language, and the caravan packed up and left. That evening, Ladouceur asked how the show had gone. Brookman played down the fact that, in a matter of hours, the caravan had been able to get into a place the UN had been trying to access for months. “I met the gangs. I performed with them. Oh, and I got pictures of them all,” Brookman said matter-of-factly. “We were not expecting him to go that strong,” Ladouceur later admitted with a chuckle.

After that, Brookman moved in and out of Port-au-Prince’s most violent areas. Embracing the local rara street-festival tradition, he bought a number of bamboo trumpets, known as vaksen, that the caravan incorporated into its repertoire. Jacques continued to meet with gang leaders, explaining that the troupe could be trusted and asking for their blessing on the performances. Ever conscious of the abduction risk, Brookman and his team sketched a map on a translucent piece of paper that, when aligned with a satellite image of Cité Soleil, detailed the locations of gangsters’ houses and hideouts, the tank traps, and the safest roads. The caravan didn’t take it into the slum. The plan was to use the map as a bargaining chip: If a gang kidnapped one of the troupe members, the rest would threaten to give the map to UN soldiers unless their colleague was freed.

The idea was typical Brookman—madcap, but with a certain degree of logic. It also revealed that he was wrestling with his loyalties. He was dedicated to the UN, which he saw as a force for good in the world. To what extent should he be concerned with fidelity to his target audience, including hardened criminals? In Sierra Leone, the two sides had aligned more naturally, thanks to the civil war being over. In Haiti, they were foes.

With UN troops.

Complicating the dilemma was an August 2006 ultimatum issued to the gangs by then president René Préval: Surrender or die. This put UN negotiators like Molloy and Ladouceur in the difficult position of managing a peaceful disarmament process as the specter of a joint UN-Haiti military action loomed. Their team operated alongside peacekeepers with the common goal of overtaking the slums, but the groups had different mandates and often employed clashing methods. If an offensive were to start, as Molloy put it, “Our game is up.” At best the disarmament team’s work could forestall that moment, but privately its leaders held out little hope that would happen.

Still, they asked Brookman to do more—“because he was able to reach places and talk to people that nobody else was able to,” Ladouceur explained. The caravan began to encourage gang leaders to release its rank-and-file members for demobilization, a formal process wherein the young men would leave the slums and, in a UN facility, receive support and education in order to return to civilian life. Jacques again took the lead in negotiations. It was painstaking work, with little progress. Once, after a three-hour meeting, the leaders of a gang known as Base Egaré (Lost Base) told Jacques that they had no reason to trust that demobilization wasn’t a trick. Over the course of the fall, gang leaders agreed to hand over about 100 men to the UN. At the demobilization facility, Brookman helped them record music in which they articulated their grievances and expressed their desire for a new life.

In a matter of months, however, many of them would be dead.

One Friday in February 2007, Brookman received a phone call from Molloy. “Why don’t you come along and spend the weekend up at my place?” the UN official asked. He lived in a cool, leafy home atop a winding escarpment road some ten miles outside Port-au-Prince. Brookman agreed. “Where is the rest of the group—Cité Soleil?” Molloy asked casually. Brookman said his team was in a different city for a few days. (They had started performing regularly outside the capital.) “Fine,” Molloy replied. “Come and stay. Let’s meet for lunch tomorrow, then we’ll drive up to my place.”

During lunch, while Brookman ate pizza and drank a glass of wine, Molloy’s cell phone rang. Brookman listened to his boss’s side of the call, gleaning from the snippets of conversation that a complex military operation was under way somewhere in Port-au-Prince. Calls kept coming in that afternoon as the pair drove to Molloy’s home and after they’d arrived.

Curiosity morphed into disbelief as Brookman learned where the offensive was happening. “Got an op going down in Cité Soleil. They’re taking them,” Molloy said, referring to the gangs. Some 700 UN troops were going after the groups with which the caravan had spent months building relationships. In fact, the primary target was Ti Kouto, whom the head of the UN mission described to The Washington Post in its coverage of the operation as a “psychopath.” (Ti Kouto would manage to escape and flee south of the capital.) Molloy had known about the incursion in advance; it’s why he’d invited Brookman to his home, to ensure his safety. But the decision to move against the gangs hadn’t been his, he explained.

Some 700 UN troops were going after the groups with which the caravan had spent months building relationships.

Brookman understood. He’d been a UN contractor long enough to grasp the nuances of the unwieldy organization’s component parts, and he didn’t begrudge his boss’s position. Still, he was worried. He wondered if he would be taken for a spy, or if the rest of the caravan would. He was relieved that no hostage situation had ever prompted him to use his map. But he knew that if a gang leader wanted revenge on his enemies, even perceived ones, he would take it. When Brookman learned that more than 20 of the young men he’d worked with at the demobilization facility had died after returning to Cité Soleil, some specifically to fight the UN troops, he felt helpless.

He spent the weekend at Molloy’s, anxious and drinking heavily. When he left to rejoin the caravan, Brookman knew that the troupe would have to start from scratch to rebuild trust in the slum. More than ever, it would need to be careful to hide its UN affiliation.

But Brookman never went to Cité Soleil again. The Haitian government had asked to take over the caravan’s operations, so he spent his last few weeks in Port-au-Prince coordinating the transition. He grew increasingly neurotic, telling drivers to turn off the road if his car came close to a UN vehicle, lest a disgruntled gang member associate him with the men who’d invaded Cité Soleil.

When he boarded a flight out of Haiti, police escorted a handcuffed man onto the plane. Brookman craned his neck to see if he recognized the tattoos on his arms. Unable to make them out, he shrank into his seat. He could never get comfortable.

Loughborough, England, 2007

Brookman’s friends were worried about him. After he returned from Haiti, one of his foundation’s board members saw him hurl a piece of circus equipment in what seemed to be a moment of anger. Renshaw, his assistant, thought he looked drained. Brookman admitted that he sometimes thought he heard gunshots that weren’t actually there. When people suggested that he see a therapist because he might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Brookman acquiesced, though he was skeptical. What do you do apart from talk? he thought.

Then again, he had things he wanted to talk about—Haiti, and much more. 

His therapist, a woman in her fifties, worked in a sparsely furnished room in a converted farmhouse. Sitting across from her, Brookman confessed that he had an obsession with death, particularly the untimely demises of great men. Did she know that the composer Henry Purcell had died at 26? Alexander the Great at 36? There was also his grandfather who’d died in front of a crowd. After first mentioning him, Brookman kept talking about Lancelot Wykes. His grandfather’s ghost was always there, almost on his shoulder, Brookman said.

Performing at a festival in Britain.

The therapist told him that he was pursuing an impossible goal. Brookman felt he had to live up to his grandfather’s legacy in order to prove himself to his family, particularly his mother and grandmother. “You’ll never, as a human being alive now, equal a mythical character who’s dead,” the therapist said. As for his unusual knowledge of the age at which men died, she suggested that Brookman was desperate to achieve as much as he could as quickly as possible, in case his own life suddenly ended.

For all the light therapy shed, it did little to temper Brookman’s appetite for risk. “If somebody gives me a project, I just get excited. I get a rush of blood,” he told me. And Renshaw had been Brookman’s assistant long enough—on and off for 11 years—to know that when Ladouceur got in touch, “something international was afoot.”

When Ladouceur phoned one day in 2009, it was about East Africa. He wanted Brookman to visit Somalia, which was languishing without a functioning government. An African Union peacekeeping force was there, but al-Shabaab was on the rise, particularly in the south. In areas the extremists controlled, which would eventually include swaths of Mogadishu, they banned music, cigarettes, sports, gold teeth, bras, movies, the internet, and dancing. Women were forced to wear heavy black robes and were forbidden from working in public. People suspected of spying on behalf of the UN or any other enemy of al-Shabaab were executed, often in public.

Ladouceur wanted Brookman to go to the north, where two autonomous regions—Somaliland and Puntland—were relatively stable, despite rampant piracy and kidnapping. The UN was eager to stem the tide of extremism from rolling in. This wouldn’t be like Haiti; Brookman would be working with people who weren’t armed, encouraging them not to become so, rather than ingratiating himself with fighters against whom the UN might later decide to take a different tack.

He packed his bags.

Over the next four years, Brookman took several trips to Somaliland and Puntland. He rolled around in a tangerine-colored bus with local performers, staging shows that targeted young people, encouraging them to disavow violence. The threat of religious zealots loomed, and there were near misses: bomb attacks on roads the bus took, an accidental detour ten miles into an active minefield before anyone realized and the group had to anxiously backtrack. Many seasoned aid professionals and conflict journalists tone down their tales of closely averted disaster. Getting into trouble often means you’ve messed up and put other people in danger; drawing attention to fiascos as derring-do can be viewed as a mark of inexperience. Brookman, however, never self-censored. He told me stories in full color, with unabashed enthusiasm and, at times, vanity peppered with embellishment. He was first and foremost a performer who saw life and the retelling of it as the ultimate theatrical production.

Brookman was first and foremost a performer who saw life and the retelling of it as the ultimate theatrical production.

When Brookman got home from what was supposed to be his last trip, in late 2012, he sat with Renshaw in the garden of his home. He was spent. “I need to stop now,” he told his assistant. “I need a break.”

Not long after, Ladouceur called. He had another mission to Somalia in mind, this one to Mogadishu, where battles with international forces had cost al-Shabaab key positions; the militants had shifted to a strategy that prioritized car bombs, grenade attacks, and suicide vests over territorial control in the capital. Mogadishu wasn’t safe, but the worst was over. What better way to show it than a public concert to signal that al-Shabaab no longer held sway over the city, its culture, and its inhabitants?

Bloody hell, Brookman thought, I’m going to do another one.

He got off the phone and found Renshaw’s eyebrows furrowed in concern.

“Are you going to say yes?”

Brookman looked apologetic. “I have done so already,” he answered.

Mogadishu, Somalia, 2013

The Reconciliation Music Festival, as the planned event was called, had two enemies. First were the militants, and second was the national government that had formed in the wake of al-Shabaab’s retreat. While they weren’t members of the extremist group, many politicians were still hard-line conservative Muslims. A show featuring singing, dancing, unveiled female artists, and other religiously forbidden activities was frowned upon. “It is not possible to do music in Mogadishu,” an official told Brookman and two other festival organizers when they paid an exploratory visit to the city in January 2013.

On the same trip, the visitors went to Afgoye, a town reclaimed from al-Shabaab less than a year before. The terrorists were making their continued, if fractured, presence felt with regular attacks. As Brookman and his co-organizers were looking around the town, their security guards abruptly bundled them into waiting vehicles and ushered them back to Mogadishu as fast as the bumpy roads would allow. They were told that forces in Afgoye had arrested two or three armed al-Shabaab sympathizers suspected of planning an attack on the visitors.

The concert clearly needed local security support. That’s where the contacts and experience of Shiine Akhyaar Ali came in.

A trailblazing Somali rapper known to his fans only by his first name, Shiine was the festival’s mastermind. In the early nineties, when he was a child, extremists had killed two of his brothers and driven the rest of his family out of Somalia on foot. They traveled across semi-arid desert and eventually settled 700 miles away in Nairobi. Shiine learned to read and write, and he began to compose and perform poetry as a teenager. In 2004, when he was in his early twenties, he and several other Somali exiles formed a creative collective called Waayaha Cusub (New Era). The group recorded hip-hop albums that it performed live across Kenya and in other parts of East Africa; many of the songs promoted nonviolence and tolerance, and some called out the enemy by name. “Who is behind this trail of destruction? Al-Shabaab,” one notable track asserts.

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Playing with fire.

By 2006, Waayaha Cusub had caught the Islamists’ attention. When one of the members, Zakaraia Ciro, traveled to Somalia to visit his dying mother, he was kidnapped and murdered. His dead body surfaced in a river, after which three of his bandmates quit in fear. Even in Nairobi the group wasn’t safe; men loyal to al-Shabaab lived among the Kenyan capital’s large Somali population. A street attack left a female member with a gash down the center of her face. In 2007, armed men broke into Shiine’s apartment one night. He managed to grab and break the light fixture on the ceiling of his bedroom, plunging the space into darkness. The men pinned him down and fired several rounds, only two of which hit home. The attackers left him for dead, blood pumping from an exit wound and a bullet lodged in his stomach. Shiine survived—and kept performing.

Brookman and Shiine met for the first time in 2009, when Brookman was traveling to northern Somalia by way of Nairobi. Shiine, who was garnering a reputation among admirers as a cross between Kanye West and Gandhi, wanted to bring live music back to Somalia and use it to promote peace. He and Brookman talked over coffee at a hotel, where they took an instant liking to each other. Brookman found Shiine, then just 26 and soft-spoken, with a square, boyish face and curly hair, to be confident and mature. Shiine liked Brookman’s humanitarian-cum-artistic work and came to see him as “a friend of the Somali people,” the rapper told me.

Four years later, the idea they’d discussed was finally happening. The UN had signed on as a funder Waayaha Cusub would headline, with an array of global musicians performing sets, including Afghan-American folk singer Ariana Delawari, Filipino reggae artist Jahm-Eye, Kenyan soul band Afro Simba, and Sudanese singer Alsarah with her band the Nubatones. There would be a series of six shows over the course of a week, leading up to one large concert that would be broadcast live on local television. Brookman’s job was to manage UN financing, but he also wanted to stage one of his aerial acrobatic shows and breathe fire during the performances.

To counter government opposition, Shiine went looking for allies. He knew there were no security measures, however large or costly, that could guarantee the event’s safety. “Mogadishu life is knowing that one day you’ll get bombed and you’ll die,” he told me at the time. “People are dying everywhere. The people around them are sitting drinking coffee. That’s the normal.” Yet he placed faith in the hands of two liberals inside Somalia’s intelligence apparatus: Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, the national chief, and Khalif Ahmed Ilig, district chief for Mogadishu. Both men promised to do everything in their power to protect the musicians.

In early March 2013, Brookman landed for the second time that year at Mogadishu’s airport, where the model and caliber of weapons one was traveling with were standard fields on immigration forms. Along with his fire sticks, Brookman smuggled in money, concealed about his person, to pay festival contractors. “I came over with $30,000 stuffed down my knickers. Not all large denominations—wads and wads of it!” he told me. Six armed guards picked him up in a truck, which then transported him at breakneck speed, guns sticking out at odd angles like the quills of an unkempt porcupine, through the streets of Mogadishu. At the City Palace Hotel, a low-lying compound with a quadrangle where guests on plastic chairs drank milky coffee or thick mango juice, Brookman underwent a rigorous security check: body scan, bag scan, extensive pat down. He was introduced to the local police commander in charge of his security detail. A tubby, goofy-looking man with a mouthful of gold teeth, the officer didn’t inspire confidence.

But Brookman had other things to worry about. The stage that the producer had arranged to be shipped in for the concert was missing, probably on a boat somewhere between Mombasa, Kenya, and Mogadishu’s port. The sound and lighting gear they’d ordered were also missing in action, as was a satellite dish rumored to be en route from Dubai. It would’ve been cheaper to import some items over land from Kenya, but it also would’ve required paying bribes to al-Shabaab.

“I came over with $30,000 stuffed down my knickers. Not all large denominations—wads and wads of it!”

Brookman’s idea for an aerial performance, meanwhile, raised eyebrows. “For us that’s very strange. We’ve never seen a lady dancing in the air,” Nur Hassan, a Somali journalist working as a fixer, told me. The security brass saw it as less strange than risky—a person flying through the open air was asking to be a target of terror. They insisted that Brookman not orchestrate the stunt, even though he’d already been training a local aid worker to dangle from a climbing rope and harness, practicing on the veranda of her Mogadishu home.

A few days into the event’s preparation, Brookman and other festival participants decided to check out the concert venue and visit Mogadishu’s fish market. Armed guards went wherever the performers did. Everyone needed a spot in a vehicle. With so many people to organize, departure from the hotel was delayed.

Just as the team was preparing to leave, news came over the radio: A car bomb had exploded less than a mile away, near Mogadishu’s presidential palace. The performers wanted to see the scene, so they drove over. Police and onlookers surrounded the smoldering shell of a public minibus and the charred wreckage of the bomber’s car. The minibus, with civilian passengers aboard, wasn’t hit intentionally, police said. It had been in the way of a car carrying Khalif Ahmed Ilig, one of the festival’s local guarantors. He escaped with minor injuries, as did some 20 other people. At least ten more, however, had died.

Brookman snapped pictures. He felt compelled to bear witness, but he also recognized that he was rubbernecking a disaster. He marveled at the force of the bomb: Only one wheel was still attached to the stunted chassis of the bomber’s car, and the bodywork was blown to bits. Cracks of gunfire—police shooting in the air to disperse the crowd that had gathered—reverberated amid Mogadishu’s crumbling brick and plaster walls. Brookman nervously scanned the street, worried the sounds might be hostile fire.

As the festival drew closer, threats multiplied. Shiine, who arrived from Kenya a few days after the car bombing, and the rest of Waayaha Cusub received menacing calls and text messages. Most promised that death was imminent. One day, Shiine said he received a small amount of prepaid mobile-phone credit shortly before a text that read, “Use this credit to say goodbye to your family.” He worried about the guards hired to protect him. They were undoubtedly poor locals, and al-Shabaab might try to buy them off, giving them more to harm Shiine or festivalgoers than the event’s backers were paying to keep everyone safe. In one incident, Shiine’s guards exchanged fire outside the hotel with men in a moving car. Intelligence officers later determined that it was an attempt to ambush the rapper.

Consulting with Somali policemen ahead of the peace concert.

The day of the event was chaotic. Much of the gear had still not arrived, so the festival team would have to make do with what could be sourced locally. Around the time that organizers announced the concert’s location via phone calls and text messages, I shared a car to the venue with Brookman. He already had on his performing outfit and eyeliner, not yet smudged. He was jittery, speaking as much to himself as to me.

“A three-hour live broadcast!” he screeched. “Who made that call? It might be me.” At another point, he turned in the passenger seat to face me where I sat in the back. “Do you realize what we’re doing?” he asked almost frantically, his eyes blazing with excitement and fear. “It’s going to be a grenade thrown over the wall,” he continued, imagining a simple yet deadly attack al-Shabaab could wage. “It’s not going to be a man with a gun, it’s not going to be a man with a bomb strapped to him.” Then Brookman stopped, struck by an idea. “I hadn’t thought of that—a VBIED!” The possibility that someone might rig up a vehicle-born improvised explosive device and leave it in an inconspicuous car next to the basketball court sent him down a rabbit hole of new fears.

When we arrived at the venue, women in head scarves were sweeping rubbish and dirt from the crude stage. Brookman channeled his energy into telling security personnel what to do. That he had no formal military training didn’t stop him from trying to seem like an expert. There were roughly ten guards standing outside the court’s walls. “If the enemy watches TV, they may bring a VBIED and park it,” Brookman told the men in fatigues, who listened—without comprehension, as they didn’t speak English—to his carefully enunciated words. “They may already have brought one.” (He forgot to order someone to check.) As he walked the court’s perimeter looking for security gaps, Brookman muttered to no one in particular, “I’ve got to show leadership.”

He spotted a young guard with angular shoulders slumped in a plastic chair, his phone clamped to his ear so that he could listen to the radio. Brookman yanked the chair from beneath him and wagged a finger, as if to say, Don’t be caught off guard. Another man standing on a soggy berm was playing a game on his phone. Brookman crept up behind him, snatched the device, and shoved it into a pocket of the man’s fatigues. Brookman mimed a quick lesson on staying alert, stamping one foot next to the other, as if in salute, and holding an imaginary weapon across his body in a ready position. The next guard had been paying attention; he was standing tall with a semi-automatic in his hands when Brookman approached.

The concert was set to start at 3 p.m. and last three hours—I had been told that it was too dangerous for it to continue into the night. By 4 p.m., though, a large screen and the sound system were still being set up. Attendees, mostly young people, sat around the court looking mildly interested. If you’ve waited your whole life to see a concert, what’s a few more hours? I reasoned. By the time the mismatched equipment, multiple cameras, and satellite feed had been set up, and the musicians played their first notes, it was a quarter past six. Clouds the color of pink cotton candy swirled across the sky.

If you’ve waited your whole life to see a concert, what’s a few more hours? I reasoned.

Jahm-Eye, the reggae artist, kicked things off with a song accompanied by acoustic guitar. The crowd swelled as wide-eyed arrivals came seeking the music they’d seen on TV or heard drifting through Mogadishu’s streets. When Waayaha Cusub came on, the crowd went wild. “I’ve never seen this before,” Abdullahi, an out-of-breath 13-year-old, told me. “I never liked music, but when I hear it I like it, because it makes me want to dance.” A woman in a white patterned tunic and fuchsia scarf took me by the hand and we danced.

When I saw Brookman next, he was still fretting—and furiously misquoting ancient Greeks. “Aristotle talked of kings and philosophers,” he said, meaning to refer to Plato and indicating that he didn’t have time to talk about how he felt because he needed to act. Next came an attempt at a line from Shakespeare’s Henry V: “When the blast of war blows in our ears, then is the time to imitate the action of the tiger.” It was as if he was using his literary heroes to steel his nerve. He concluded with some words of his own—“Al-Shabaab are angels of death with an incredible degree of commitment”—before hurrying off to check on the guards once again.

In the midst of the jubilation, Shiine began receiving a flurry of messages and calls from one of his intelligence contacts. They’d learned that al-Shabaab members were trying to cut the power lines to the venue. Their plan, inevitably, was to use the darkness to cause as much panic and devastation as they could. With only one exit—a flimsy metal gate opening out onto a mess of mud puddles left by a recent storm—the court wouldn’t empty quickly. Even one man with a gun would be able to kill a substantial number of people. Shiine encouraged the artists who’d already played to exit the court and go back to the hotel. Meanwhile, he kept getting updates from the intelligence officers.

Unaware of the unfolding security threat, Brookman stood looking at the concrete walls. Fire-breathing on top of them was without a doubt the craziest thing he would ever attempt to do. I’m going to stand up there as a taunt to al-Shabaab, he thought.

And up he went.

In the literary version of this story, here is where the hero would get cut down, sacrificed on the altar of his noble cause. When I saw Brookman on the wall, that scenario flitted through my head. For his part, Shiine thought it bold for Brookman to make himself a target at the venue’s highest point. By then, however, intelligence officials were assuring the rapper that the security threat was under control; police had arrested two would-be attackers.

Later, Brookman would describe feeling as though he was in a play, an actor inhabiting a character who courts disaster. When he sent flames into the sky, some piece of him even felt a fatalistic desire for al-Shabaab to shoot at him—if not hit him. It would be the most dramatic ending imaginable. But he quickly chastised himself for thinking so and leaned instead into the intense feeling that performing always brought, heightened by the scene before him, the crowd shrieking with delight.

The night was the kind that could melt even the most hardened cynicism. The concert was an unqualified success. As for Brookman, people in the crowd told me that for 25 years the fire of guns and bombs had vanquished Mogadishu’s spirit—and now this strange, reckless man had made fire into a triumph. I scribbled in my notepad, “Artists are brave, they dare to dream.” It was sappy, but also true.

Loughborough, England, 2017

Mogadishu was Brookman’s last heady cocktail of drama and danger. Ladouceur left the UN, and the organization didn’t call on Brookman again. One day, though, a letter arrived from a lawyer, asking if he would be a witness for Shiine. The rapper had applied for asylum. After 20 years of living in Kenya, his residency document had been revoked by officials in Nairobi as part of a controversial strategy to expel Somali refugees.

Scanning the material the lawyer sent him, Brookman’s attention fell on a clause entitled “Bombing of vehicle convoy, Mogadishu; March 2013.” It described the car bomb that had gutted the minibus shortly before the festival, the carbonized remains of which Brookman had seen. The legal statement claimed that Waayaha Cusub, which al-Shabaab may have believed was traveling with the festival team at the time, had been the probable target.

Shiine told me that had Brookman’s group not been late setting off that day from the City Palace Hotel, they might now be dead. “If they’d seen the white man?”—he paused to exhale—“They like that. They’re more interested in a white man than they are a Somali.” In killing one, that is.

When I asked Brookman about the matter, he agreed that it seemed plausible. If true, “then I went and filmed my own funeral,” he said, referring to the photos he took of the bombing’s aftermath. Melodrama aside, he confessed that the chance, however small, that he might bear some responsibility for the deaths of innocent people on the minibus distressed him. “I don’t know whether to take that responsibility to my maker or say, ‘You’re not to blame, Bill,’” he told me.

“I don’t know whether to take that responsibility to my maker or say, ‘You’re not to blame, Bill.’”

Like the UN, Brookman was imperfect and in need of modernizing. When I asked him once how he would respond to criticism of his work—a foreigner parachuting into places he doesn’t know to do theatrical work some people might find trivial—he answered solemnly, “Come along and join us, and see if there’s any animosity from anybody anywhere we go.” He’d always championed local artists and traditions, and he took seriously the possibility that his mere presence in a place could cause people harm. He offered to do whatever he could to support Shiine.

Brookman attended the asylum hearing in a nondescript office off Fleet Street. He felt proud to be British as his country offered Shiine a fair hearing. The court discussed the finer points of the case, ironing out the contradictions and debating the merits. By the end of the proceeding, Shiine’s asylum was granted.

Not long after, age proved a greater enemy to Brookman than any gang member or militant ever had. He suffered a heart attack at 60. He recovered but knew that his days of dangerous travel were likely behind him. He had to focus on taking his pills—and on getting married. In August 2017, Brookman wed for a second time at the church he’d attended for most of his life. His new wife was a woman named Madeleine, whom he’d known since he was a young boy but had reconnected with only a few years prior. After the ceremony, Brookman donned his one-man band and performed for his bride, family, and friends.

Not long before the wedding, I asked Brookman if he had exorcised his grandfather’s ghost. “No” was the firm reply. When he’d recently got word of a potential assignment in Sudan, he admitted, his “heart started to beat again.” Brookman told me that in his darkest moments, he wondered if he’d proved himself a man of valor. Making his dead grandfather proud may have been a “pathology,” but he’d been helpless to stop it from setting the course of his life.

After a brief pause, Brookman began to recite from memory Alfred Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” a poem about an elderly hero, stalked by death, whose insatiable longing for adventure leads him out to sea on one final—and perhaps fatal—quest: “How dull is it to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! … Come, my friends / ’T is not too late to seek a newer world.”

Then he jumped to the poem’s conclusion, his voice tinged with purpose: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

You can still catch Brookman performing around Great Britain, at big festivals like Glastonbury and smaller ones closer to Loughborough. Or you can pull up on YouTube what he calls the biggest production of his life: his 2016 appearance on Britain’s Got Talent, the popular variety competition show.

Brookman traveled to Liverpool, one-man band and candy-cane-striped stilts in tow, to perform before four judges, dozens of cameras, a studio audience of thousands, and a live TV audience of more than ten million. When he clanked on stage, a bewildered blond judge asked her colleague, “Is that a colander on his head?” The main camera showed a young girl in the crowd exclaiming, “That is amazing!”

As Brookman played, the audience—including his soon-to-be-wife, to whom he blew a kiss—cheered and clapped in time to the music. Two of the judges stood up from their chairs to dance. Ultimately, they would vote him on to the next round but eliminate him soon after. “You are exactly the kind of British eccentric we love,” one said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6BnL_oGVpw

“What’s your name, please?” asked judge Simon Cowell, the music producer notorious for his scathing commentary on American Idol and other reality programs.

“Bill Brookman.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m 60.”

“Bill, do you work?” Cowell asked.

Brookman hesitated for a fraction of a second, as if unsure how to answer, of which role to play. Then he found his voice. “I work for the United Nations,” he said.

Not Fuzz

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Not Fuzz

They were partners in fighting crime. The only problem: Neither was a cop. But when one friend turned on the other, things got real.

By David Mark Simpson

The Atavist Magazine, No. 69


David Mark Simpson is a journalist based in Los Angeles. He’s written about immigration, dinosaur bones, sperm donation, and Mexican baseball.


Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Jake Scobey-Thal
Illustrator: Jessica Rather

Published in July 2017. Design updated in 2021.

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The phone rang: a call from an unknown number. Through a window near my cubicle, I could see a blood orange sunset falling over the Pacific Ocean. It was a Friday evening in June 2014, and I was working late in the newsroom of the Santa Monica Daily Press. The newspaper’s op-ed page had recently become a virtual war zone for local residents and commercial developers at odds over building projects in the beachfront city. As my desk phone pealed, I decided that I didn’t want to risk getting dragged into yet another debate about the semantic decision to use “city owned land” instead of “resident owned land” in our copy. I didn’t answer. The ringing stopped.

After a brief silence, it started up again. This time I grabbed the receiver, planning to keep whatever conversation transpired as short as possible. A frantic voice was on the other end. The caller, a man, wanted to talk about a developer, but not in the manner I’d feared.

“Steve Farzam was arrested by the FBI,” he told me. “They’re raiding his mansion right now. You could take a picture of it.”

Read a 2020 update on “Not Fuzz”

I knew who Farzam was. Everybody in Santa Monica did. He was the chief operating officer of the Shore Hotel, a boutique hot spot situated next to the city’s iconic pier. I’d seen him accept awards for environmental stewardship and social responsibility, wearing a practiced megawatt grin and spouting corporate maxims to groups of local business owners. He was 35, with a doughy face and salt-and-pepper hair. He lived in a multi-million-dollar home and was a natty dresser, sometimes donning a plaid tie or jacket. Now the man on the phone was telling me that this pillar of the community had been hit with some 60 criminal charges, most of them felonies.

In my 11 months at the newspaper, I’d never heard dirt on Farzam. Nothing immediately came up in an internet search. In a previous reporting job in Atlantic City, I’d written about mafia cases with multiple defendants and several years’ worth of investigation; none had ever begun with anything close to five-dozen felony charges. I asked for the caller’s name, but he wouldn’t give it. He had to be insane, I thought. Still, after we hung up, I called the local jail.

When the watch commander answered, I apologized for phoning about such a weird tip. “Hey, we don’t have old Steve Farzam in custody, do we?” I heard him shout to a colleague. A pause followed. “Oh shit, we do?” the watch commander replied incredulously. Then to me he said, “You’re going to have to call the California Department of Justice. It’s their case.”

I had barely put down the receiver when the phone started ringing again: the untraceable number, the excited caller. He was eager to hear what the police had said. “I’ve been working the case for months,” he exclaimed. “They’re going to put him away for a long time.” He still wouldn’t give me his name, but he offered a number with an Orange County area code and told me to call him back after I’d talked with state authorities.

I phoned the California DOJ. A spokesperson confirmed that there was a case against Farzam—a big one. It was a joint operation that also involved the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), FBI, and Santa Monica Police Department. The agencies were investigating numerous alleged crimes, including identity theft and illegally importing an assault rifle. And the mysterious caller hadn’t inflated the number of charges—he’d underestimated them. After the raid on Farzam’s mansion, 77 charges would be filed, all but four for felonies.

I dialed the number the anonymous man had given me to tell him what the DOJ had said. He referred to me as “partner” and crowed some more about the case. He said he worked with a federal agency, but he didn’t provide any specifics. In hindsight the wording was deft. I made the jump he likely was hoping I’d make.

Holy shit, I thought. I have a real live FBI mole for a source.

The caller’s name, I eventually learned, was Christopher Dancel. I’ve now spoken to him multiple times and met him once in person, at a Denny’s in the San Fernando Valley. He is 48, tall, and well built, with a wide, heavy face and close-cropped brown hair. His light blue eyes turn down slightly at the corners, making him look perpetually despondent. One of his muscled biceps bears a tattoo in a rigid font that reads, “I have a high art: I hurt with cruelty those who wound me.” It’s a quote from the writings of Archilochus, a Greek poet of the Archaic period.

Dancel is not a federal agent. He never has been. He is many other things: native Angeleno, father, ex-husband of a porn star. For more than a decade, he was also Steve Farzam’s close friend.

The pair met in a peculiar social netherworld. Generously, you could call them police wannabes: guys who long to be associated with or, better yet, mistaken for officers of the law. Dancel and Farzam spent years obsessing over police culture. They became fluent in the lingo, from “copy” in place of “I understand” to the numbered codes cops use when speaking over radios; a favorite is “417,” which means “I’m armed.” They accumulated dozens of certificates in skills like handling firearms, picking locks, using Tasers, and responding to accidents. At the time of the 2014 raid, Farzam’s home was filled with law-enforcement memorabilia, including a fabric display pinned with dozens of badges from the FBI, Los Angeles Police Department, and other agencies. A full-size fire truck was parked in his driveway.

The friends’ methods of pretense, though, were different. Dancel, who worked briefly as a police officer, spent much of his career as a security guard for hire. He conducted a handful of citizen’s arrests and in casual conversation implied that he was a sworn, employed officer, even when he wasn’t. If he deceived, he did so by omission, as he did with me.

Farzam, on the other hand, tried and failed to become a public-safety officer, but he brazenly feigned otherwise. Whether out of a fondness or a fetish for law enforcement, he became a skilled, serial impersonator. He flashed badges, infiltrated government databases, and adopted the identities of real agents. Along the way, he took or threatened legal action against several people he felt had crossed him. Some individuals who know Farzam declined to be interviewed for this story or would do so only anonymously, for fear of retribution. (Over three years of reporting, Farzam did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Even before The Atavist Magazine initiated contact with him as part of its standard fact-checking process, a lawyer for the Shore Hotel sent a letter to the editors alleging that “multiple sources” had said the article might include “defamatory statements”; the letter threatened legal action in case of “improper publication.” Neither Farzam nor the lawyer subsequently replied to requests for verification or comment on the details reported here.)

This is a buddy cop story that careened off the rails of a bizarre, untenable track. It’s thick with ego and delusion, and punctuated by lies and betrayal. Because while Christopher Dancel was not a member of law enforcement, as he intimated when we first spoke, he was working as a government informant.

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Santa Monica’s waterfront exudes privilege. The sidewalks and avenues are wide, the manicured bluffs along the beach dotted with lofty palm trees. The pier’s famous arched sign, standing since 1941, advertises yachts, fishing, and food in neon green and yellow. The elegant spokes of the Pacific Park Ferris wheel tower over the sand and waves of the original Muscle Beach. By day, across the Pacific Coast Highway, sunlight illuminates the glass and metal exterior of the Shore Hotel, which is U-shaped and hugs a swimming pool like a bygone mid-century motel.

One April afternoon in 2014, Farzam and Dancel cruised along the oceanfront drag in the hotelier’s black Hummer. They were heading for Farzam’s home on South Rockingham Avenue, the street in the tony neighborhood of Brentwood that became a household name during the O.J. Simpson trial. They were hankering for a meal, or “code seven” in cop-speak.

“I haven’t seen a Unitrol system since I was in academy,” Dancel said at one point, referring to the sirens Farzam had rigged in his SUV, along with flashing lights. Dancel meant it as a jab; the system was outdated. It was also an excuse for him to allude to his real-world police experience.

“They’re badass, though,” Farzam replied, dismissing the judgment in his high, nasal voice. “The air horns sound so gangster.” When he blew them, their muffled blare was likely felt as much as heard in the Hummer’s cab. “Sounds beefy,” Dancel conceded.

It was a typical day in an unlikely friendship.

Dancel, who is Italian American, was born in 1969 and grew up in Highland Park, a diverse neighborhood south of Pasadena. His parents weren’t in the picture; his aunt and uncle raised him. They divorced when he was six, and Dancel and his cousins bounced between two homes. When he was a teenager in the 1980s, Highland Park was known for violent gangs like the Avenidas and the 18th Streeters. Around the Fourth of July one year, Dancel and some friends were on their way home from a recreation area, dressed in white shirts and jeans to make clear that they weren’t in a gang. Two guys, later determined to be high on drugs, appeared in the street and began shooting at them. Dancel hid behind a parked car, where he watched a bullet rip through a friend’s thigh.

His biological father was a cop, but Dancel met the man only when he was very young. More consistent in his life were the LAPD officers who patrolled Highland Park’s streets. “They used to roll through and get out of their cars and give you baseball cards,” Dancel recalled. They also responded to horrific events, restoring a sense of order. In February 1986, 16-year-old Dancel was standing with friends outside Barney’s, a corner store topped with a block-letter sign reading “LIQUOUR,” when a car pulled up in the street. From one of its open windows someone yelled a gang affiliation before firing shots. Eighteen-year-old Louie Lamborena, a member of a rival gang and a friend of Dancel’s since childhood, was struck in the chest and killed. “I was scared, so freaking scared,” Dancel told me. Then the cops showed up.

“There was a lot of positivity to law enforcement,” Dancel said. “It was different from today’s climate.” As a young man, he enrolled at Pasadena City College to prepare for a career as a cop.

“There was a lot of positivity to law enforcement. It was different from today’s climate.”

Farzam grew up just 20 miles away but a world apart. Born in 1978, he had three brothers and a sister. They spent their childhood in Brentwood. His father, Siroos, an Iranian immigrant, purchased seedy Santa Monica motels when the city was a far cry from the sanitized playground for the ultrarich that it is today. Its homicide rate in 1980 was 19.2 per 1,000 residents, nearly double the national average. The pier was dilapidated, and Ocean Avenue, the strip along the Pacific, was lined with biker bars and empty storefronts.

In 1986, the city filed suit against Siroos Farzam for attempting to forcibly evict a long-term tenant of the Ocean Park Motel. The Evening Outlook, Santa Monica’s paper of record at the time, reported that Farzam was convicted after a short municipal trial. “Our office doesn’t bring many criminal prosecutions against landlords,” a city attorney told the newspaper. “However, Mr. Farzam has acquired considerable enforcement activity.” The same year, according to the Los Angeles Times, Santa Monica sued Farzam for 60 alleged violations of municipal codes, including evading taxes, building without a permit, and knowingly permitting the use of his properties for prostitution.

Many of the records from these cases no longer exist, and the prosecutors involved either don’t remember the details very well or have died. But Siroos Farzam’s indiscretions and any penalties he incurred seemed to fade quickly into obscurity. Commercial development began to improve Santa Monica’s fortunes in the late 1980s, and property values ballooned. As Steve Farzam entered adolescence, his family built a new motel. Eventually, they would expand their Brentwood home to cover some 12,000 square feet.

Farzam attended Palisades High School, where the movie Carrie was filmed. Friends of his whom I tried to interview declined to speak, making it difficult to discern what Farzam was like in his youth. State records, though, indicate that as a teenager he may have begun to test the boundaries of his comfortable upbringing. In 1996, Santa Monica police named him as a suspect in a string of burglaries, extortion attempts, and acts of vandalism. The LAPD separately alleged that he had threatened to vandalize a local business. (The outcomes of these cases aren’t publicly available.)

Nonetheless, Farzam hoped to work in public safety. After high school he moved north to Santa Barbara and joined the city’s police-cadet program. His enrollment still gets an early mention on his LinkedIn page as evidence of his “passion to serve his community.” But he never finished. “It’s not uncommon to [enroll] these cadets and they get a little bit carried away,” said former Santa Barbara police officer Charles McChesney, who was on the force when Farzam was in training. They relish the allure of becoming a cop and the power the job imparts, so much so that they sometimes attempt actions—pulling over a speeding car, arresting a suspect, interrogating people—beyond their competency level. “You get rid of them because they start playing,” McChesney said.

He can’t remember the precise reason why Farzam left the program. A subsequent encounter between the two men, however, left a stark impression.

Near midnight on a shift in the summer of 1999, McChesney sat in his squad car processing a routine traffic stop. A 1996 Ford Crown Victoria appeared on the road. It bore no police decals, but red lights were visible in its rear window. The car sped toward McChesney, made a U-turn, and stopped. “He pulled in behind me like he was going to cover me on this traffic stop,” McChesney recalled. “I recognized him, and he recognized me.”

The driver was Farzam. The Crown Victoria had tax-exempt plates—reserved for vehicles used by government agencies—a spotlight, and a police scanner. Farzam coolly explained that he worked for a business called State of California Metro Private Enforcement; he even handed McChesney a business card. McChesney was wary, but Farzam’s trappings and nonchalance convinced him to let the young man drive off into the night.

Farzam had inserted himself into police work before. In March 1998, he contacted local authorities about a drunk driver and tailed the suspect through Santa Barbara. After the driver caused a collision, Farzam detained him until the cops showed up. He won public plaudits for his efforts, including letters of commendation from local police. In that case, Farzam acted as a civilian, if an unusually audacious one. The interaction with McChesney was different.

Around the same time in 1999, a firefighter told the Santa Barbara police that some kid had shown up at an emergency scene and directed traffic like it was his job. The cops determined that this was Farzam. They spotted him pretending to be a public-safety officer several other times, including on his 21st birthday. (Available records don’t describe the incident in detail.) State of California Metro Private Enforcement, it turned out, was a company registered in Farzam’s name. The police discovered that he’d obtained exempt plates by walking into a DMV branch and announcing himself as a probation officer. Buying or forging the gear necessary to seem legitimate—a badge and handcuffs, for example, both of which Farzam carried—would have been easy enough.

The police issued a warrant for Farzam’s arrest and picked him up in August 1999. Prosecutor Lee Carter told me that Farzam pleaded guilty to several misdemeanors. He was sentenced to three years of probation and community service.

That didn’t stop Farzam from continuing his charade. In January 2000, probation officers conducting a search of his belongings found secret recordings Farzam had made of conversations with a young woman; in them, he told the woman that he was a cop investigating a crime involving her boyfriend, with whom Farzam had a personal quarrel. He was charged again, this time for a probation violation, and admitted to the crime. A judge sentenced him to a short jail stint, driving yet another nail into the coffin of a law-enforcement career.

Dancel wasn’t a cop, either. He’d gotten a DUI in 1990, which wouldn’t be expunged from his record until 2003. He’d also become embroiled in a child-custody dispute with an ex-girlfriend, which sucked up time, energy, and money. Dancel fell into jobs as a conflict-of-interest manager at law firms and worked as a nightclub promoter. Once, standing outside a club with a date, he narrowly missed being shot in a drive-by. A puff of white smoke blinded him for an instant: One of the bullets had struck a plaster wall behind him. “That’s one time where I said to myself, Ah man, I wish I was a cop right now,” he told me wistfully. “I could get in my car and chase them.”

He had friends in law enforcement and was envious when they talked about going on foot chases or helping people who’d been robbed at gunpoint. “I was finally like, Man, I gotta do something,” Dancel said. He started picking up private security gigs. Wannabe cops, he told me, are mainstays of this niche freelance market.

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One of his jobs, sometime around the turn of the millennium, was at a church carnival in eastern Los Angeles County. A friend in the local sheriff’s department had hooked Dancel up with what promised to be a quiet daytime patrol. The most exciting thing Dancel recalled happening was a “647,” or drunk person, who got belligerent in the carnival’s beer garden. Dancel mostly shadowed money drops: Booth operators took in cash, church staff collected it, and he made sure the exchanges went smoothly. “They would walk from the bouncy house to the spinning cups to the whatever, and we would stay back 25 yards,” he told me.

The carnival security brigade included a young man who stalked around with a gun on his hip: Steve Farzam. Dancel found him arrogant. “We chatted a bit, and he was like, ‘Well, what about you? What do you do?’ Trying to compare dicks or something,” Dancel recalled. “I was like, whatever bro.”

As the carnival went on, Farzam toned down the macho act. Dancel left the event still unsure if he liked the guy, but when he bumped into Farzam on other security jobs, he started to come around. Farzam had a wicked sense of humor, and both men shared a deep love of all things law enforcement. “He ended up just being a nice guy,” Dancel said. “He wasn’t such a dick.”

According to Dancel, Farzam told his new friend that he was a former cop.

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Everyone pretends from time to time. We don metaphorical masks to avoid painful truths or to seem more glamorous than we are. Sometimes, paradoxically, we do it to expose what’s beneath the versions of ourselves that the world sees: our base instincts, desires, and beliefs. “Masquerades disclose the reality of souls,” writer Fernando Pessoa once said. “As long as no one sees who we are, we can tell the most intimate details of our life.”

Serial impostors are cut from a more pathological cloth. Police impersonators in particular, according to people who’ve studied them, crave power and authority they otherwise can’t have. Many manipulate their identities in order to commit serious crimes. Serial killer Ted Bundy pretended to be a cop to lure at least one of his female targets. Other impersonators “like to pull over women on the highway for the purpose of trying to sexually assault them,” N.G. Berrill, a forensic psychologist who has worked with imposters, told me. “What they capitalize on is people’s compliance with law enforcement.”

The problem is common enough that the New York City Police Department has a unit dedicated to tracking it, housed in the Internal Affairs Bureau since 1994. In the book Blue on Blue: An Insider’s Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops, published in early 2017, former IAB chief Charles Campisi explains that the unit formed because the NYPD “was having a big problem with bogus cops who were hitting bodegas, travel agencies, or other small businesses, primarily in immigrant communities. They’d flash police badges, identify themselves as cops, steal the money from the cash register or the cigar box under the counter, and then warn the victims not to report it.” Campisi describes working in the unit as “the most coveted assignment” in IAB because “cops generally despise criminal police impersonators; they’re like a personal affront, and they make real cops look bad.”

“Cops generally despise criminal police impersonators; they’re like a personal affront, and they make real cops look bad.”

A more enigmatic type of impersonator wants cops to look good—and to look like a good cop. Berrill described this variety, almost always male, as having a severe personality disorder with compulsive behavior. He knows he isn’t a police officer but pretends he is to satisfy some deep emotional need. “These are highly emasculated, highly emotional, highly insecure people who don’t really feel very good about who they are,” Berrill said. “It’s like an escape, like playacting.” He pointed to George Zimmerman, the Florida man who killed teenager Trayvon Martin, as an example. Prosecutors argued that Zimmerman had pursued, fanatically and unsuccessfully, a law-enforcement career. As a civilian, he hectored 911 operators and followed people he suspected of being criminals around with a gun.

Impersonators often hoard or manufacture credentials. In October 2016, 33-year-old Kirk Figueroa of Boston was killed in his apartment during a firefight with police after an altercation with a roommate. Figueroa, who was wearing body armor at the time, had told friends that he wanted to “revolutionize policing.” He was a certified constable (a civilian law-enforcement position in Boston), drove a Crown Victoria emblazoned with “ElitePolicing.org,” and regularly boasted of his military and security experience. In reality, he never attended so much as basic training, and he was denied an investigator’s license in Florida. He was arrested once for impersonating a detective in Georgia. (After Figueroa’s death, Boston pledged to review the vetting process for constables.)

McChesney, the former Santa Barbara cop, said that to his layman’s eye, Farzam suffered from a “self-identity crisis”—a need to “create this other persona just because he doesn’t like himself or he needs to feel like he’s somebody.” An investigator who worked a case against Farzam, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me, “He’s like a mosaic. You can’t understand him by looking at any one incident, but over the years, patterns emerge.”

Consider the pieces. Not long after his first arrest, Farzam began amassing certificates. In 2000, he finished three training courses in firearms use, including one hosted by the National Rifle Association; another in tactical baton instruction; and one in “officer survival in low-light conditions,” offered by an entity called the Surefire Institute. Two years later, he completed a course with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department on traffic-collision investigations and another in San Bernardino County on responding to domestic violence.

Some training efforts fell flat. Farzam flunked out of a paramedic internship program with the Coronado Fire Department in San Diego County, according to Mike Blood, the current chief. “A big part of that process is evaluating: Would you want this person working on a member of your family?” Blood told me. “If they’re not up to speed, you can’t pass them.” California would deny Farzam—twice—certification as a paramedic. As cause, it cited violations of the state’s Health and Safety Code: “the commission of any fraudulent, dishonest, or corrupt act” and “conviction of any crime which is substantially related to the qualifications, functions, and duties of prehospital personnel,” as well as “demonstration of irrational behavior.” The DMV would also twice reject Farzam’s applications for an ambulance-driver’s certificate.

In 2002, he enrolled in discounted courses of Krav Maga—a self-defense technique developed by the Israeli military—and other hand-to-hand combat by passing himself off as a cop. On the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, he was spotted posing as a firefighter in Los Angeles. The LAPD arrested him, and he pleaded guilty, resulting in a jail sentence. In 2004, Farzam began teaching EMT courses at East Los Angeles College. A female student who pointed out in class that he contradicted the textbook said Farzam began harassing her, compelling her to obtain a restraining order. In 2006, Farzam failed to disclose his criminal record in an application for an EMT permit and was denied it. He did so again two years later.

Despite arrests and rejections, Farzam sought the spotlight. In the mid-aughts, he was featured on The Tyra Banks Show as a public-safety expert. In a blurry tape of the segment, posted on YouTube by user “Steve Farzam,” he wears a blue paramedic’s uniform with boots, a dark goatee, and an excess of confidence. He tells viewers of the Oprah-style program what to include in emergency-preparedness kits. “You have to have sugar,” Farzam says. “When you don’t, that’s when you get hypoglycemic.” So just keep granular sugar in your kit? Banks asks, mimicking the shaking of a jar. “That will absolutely work,” Farzam replies.

From a pragmatic perspective, it’s easy to impersonate public-safety officers. The market for police equipment is valued at some $7 billion. SWAT vests, handcuffs, batons, badges, radios, helmets, and other gear are available from specialty stores and websites, as well as commercial behemoths like Amazon. Customers often don’t have to show law-enforcement or military credentials to buy items. Police agencies sell used vehicles to private buyers, and people with enough money and know-how can navigate tighter restrictions on things like firearms and uniforms.

Weak penalties also serve as perverse incentives. In many states, impersonation of a cop is a misdemeanor. “Unfortunately, there is not a lot of downside for a criminal,” commissioner Edward Davis of the Boston Police Department told The New York Times in 2011. “The way the law views this crime, it’s as an innocent or silly prank.”

Under Section 8 of California’s penal code, impersonation is punishable by no more than a year in county jail and a maximum fine of $2,000. Farzam, in other words, could break the law at little cost and suffer minimal public scrutiny.

As they grew closer, Farzam and Dancel started calling each other “brother” and “partner.” When they hung out, they compared security gigs worked, certifications earned, and gear purchased. In 2005, Farzam, who volunteered with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Los Angeles, flew to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as part of the organization’s disaster-response team. “I was the only fucking non-sworn,” he later told Dancel. “They would let me put on a vest and fucking do everything shy of having an exposed gun. They didn’t know I had a gun in my pocket.”

Once, the pair traveled to New Mexico together for a five-day training course, entitled “Prevention Response to Suicide Bombing Incidents,” with the state’s Institute of Mining and Technology. Farzam got them in by applying through Emergency Medical Response, a company he’d founded in 2006. State records indicate that he violated a legal prohibition on the inclusion of the word “emergency” in a business’s name unless it “is staffed and equipped to provide emergency medical services.” An investigator compared Farzam’s registering of companies, which he used to project aptitude and expertise, to people who declare a post office box as their address in order to hide where they live. “It kind of gave him a fig leaf of validity,” the investigator said.

“I was the only fucking non-sworn. They would let me put on a vest and fucking do everything shy of having an exposed gun. They didn’t know I had a gun in my pocket.”

Sometimes the friends acted tough in public. “He never had a slow button,” Dancel said of Farzam. He would tell drunks he was an ex-cop, flash a badge, and threaten to “hook ’em and book ’em.” One day, Farzam accompanied Dancel on a private security shift. As the two friends pulled into the parking lot of a Ralphs, the ubiquitous Southern California supermarket chain, they noticed some teenagers smoking marijuana in a car. According to Dancel,  he approached the vehicle first. “Hey guys, you need to hit the road. Put out the shit,” he told the kids. Then Farzam jumped in. “I need you to step out of the car,” he instructed, as though he was a cop. Dancel laughed when recounting the story, which ended with him telling Farzam to chill out and his friend getting upset and going home. Usually, they were on the same page.

Dancel said he first started to question Farzam’s behavior while they were working a security detail with an off-duty officer. “Keep your distance,” Dancel recalled the cop saying when Farzam was out of earshot. “He’s carrying a gun concealed.” In California, a permit for a concealed weapon, also known as a CCW, is available to law-enforcement officers. Rare exceptions are granted for other people. Farzam didn’t have a CCW. Dancel described the conversation as one big eye-roll: The off-duty officer thought Farzam was embarrassing himself.

Listen: Farzam describes having a fake concealed-carry permit, or CCW.

Eventually, Dancel said, his friend confided in him about getting arrested in Santa Barbara in 1999. However, Farzam offered a different version of the story. He said he was a cop at the time and happened to be off-duty in his personal car, which he’d rigged with flashing lights. When he saw a fire truck headed to an emergency scene, he flipped the lights and cleared an intersection for the racing vehicle.

At first, Dancel felt bad for his friend, believing some uptight firefighter had ratted him out for using a personal vehicle as though it was an official one. “On the other hand, I was like, why are you carrying lights on your car? Nobody does that,” he told me.

If he had qualms, Dancel set them aside. He testified on Farzam’s behalf when his friend was hauled in for an alleged probation violation in May 2007. After Dancel started his own security company, called Officer Off-Duty, he offered Farzam a gig. Farzam agreed but told Dancel that he didn’t need a uniform: He’d already had one made.

In his thirties, Dancel enrolled in a police academy at Rio Hondo College in Whittier, California. He graduated but put his ambitions on hold once again. He started a relationship with a British woman working as a porn actress under the name McKenzie Lee. “She looked like Kate Beckinsale,” he told me, adding, “I met Kate Beckinsale when I worked off-duty in Beverly Hills.” They were engaged within three months of meeting; she became pregnant soon after. When money grew tight, they moved for a while to Washington State, where Dancel put his security company on the back burner and got a job at a law firm.

Not long after they decamped, Dancel got a call from Farzam. He wanted to fly up for New Year’s Eve with his then girlfriend. Dancel told Farzam that he and his wife didn’t have anything planned, but his friend told him that was fine. When Farzam arrived, he went to Costco and bought groceries—enough for the group to share and more for after he left.

“Our refrigerator wasn’t empty. He was just doing something to make it easy on us,” Dancel told me. “I would definitely say now that was an important time.”

For the Farzams, real estate proved a family business. As adults, the five siblings got involved one by one in what their father had started. Briefly, though, Steve struck out on his own a few hours south of his home turf. In the summer of 2007, he relocated to a condo in Chula Vista, near San Diego. The condo was yellow and tan with a red roof and a “Beware of Dog” sign out front. Farzam got a job teaching classes on emergency medicine and rescue skills at Southwestern College—until someone in human resources checked his qualifications, including an American Heart Association Healthcare Instructor card, and discovered that they were bogus. Farzam was fired. He sued the human resources employee who’d exposed him, but the defamation case was thrown out.

Farzam kept in touch with Dancel but made new friends, too. One of them was Ben Hogan, a cop Farzam met while walking his Belgian Malinois, a common breed of police dog. Hogan owned a Malinois, too. “His had a little harness that made it look like a working dog,” Hogan told me. “We just struck up a conversation, and I said, ‘Hey, who do you work for?’ He said, ‘Oh, we’re working for Uncle Sam,’ indicating that he’s a canine handler for one of the border agencies.” Mexico is a few miles south of Chula Vista.

When Farzam let slip that he’d had some trouble with the law, Hogan started looking into his background. After learning about the impersonation charges and convictions, he cut ties with Farzam and left it at that. Then one day, when Hogan was at Ace Uniform, a store in downtown San Diego that sells law-enforcement apparel, Farzam breezed past carrying a bundle of shirts. He said hello on his way out the door.

When Hogan realized who it was, he stopped dead in his tracks. He asked the clerk how Farzam had identified himself, and it turned out that Farzam had flashed a badge for the Department of Homeland Security. He’d used it to buy three restricted uniforms.

“He’s extremely convincing. He knows all the jargon. He talks like a cop. He had his vehicle set up like a cop car.”

Hogan reported the incident to law enforcement. According to state documents, DHS agents executed a search warrant for Farzam’s condo—he told officers several times that he didn’t live there before admitting that he did—and turned up three restricted uniforms and two semiautomatic pistols. In his SUV, registered to Emergency Medical Response, they found a Taser, a baton, and a police-issue emergency light.

Ultimately, no charges were filed. I obtained documents from the case after a local TV affiliate in San Diego posted them online. The investigating officers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Hogan speculated that agents must not have found the “mother lode” of forged credentials that he suspected Farzam had. “There’s something not right in his head,” Hogan told me. “If you were to come to me and say, ‘Hey, his name’s not even Steve,’ I’d believe you 100 percent.”

There’s another incident from his time in San Diego that Farzam likes to tell people about—one that showed he could save lives. Driving on the South Bay Expressway one day in 2008, he saw a vehicle smashed into a pole. It had burst into flames, and an unconscious man was inside. Farzam pulled over. With a fire extinguisher that he kept in his car, he put out the blaze. His efforts saved the driver’s life. In recognition of his bravery, the San Diego–based Burn Institute gave Farzam an award.

But even Farzam’s heroism came with a touch of embroidery. Today, he references his Medal of Valor in his Shore Hotel bio and on his LinkedIn page. It’s the first thing mentioned on his Twitter profile. The website SteveFarzam.net describes him receiving the medal for a rescue conducted while “off duty.” His YouTube profile says, “I have the Medal of Valor for bravery and heroic work.”

The national Medal of Valor is the highest honor a U.S. public-safety officer can receive. It’s a blue, five-pointed star surrounded by gold, and it bears the seal of the White House. California’s Medal of Valor is bestowed by the governor. In 2016, it was given to officers who responded to the mass shooting in San Bernardino.

What Farzam won is called the Spirit of Courage award. At a Burn Institute banquet in 2009, he was handed a wood and metal plaque.  

According to Dancel, Farzam’s family grew tired of him getting into trouble. Siroos Farzam offered to pay for Dancel to go to law school if he would help Steve get a degree, too. Once, Dancel told me, Siroos threw some of his son’s collected tactical gear into a dumpster. “You want any of this shit?” Dancel remembered his friend asking forlornly when they talked on the phone after the incident.

In 2009, Farzam got serious about something other than law enforcement. Freshly back from San Diego, he was named chief operating officer of a new venture—the crown jewel of his family’s real estate holdings. The Farzams planned to demolish a Travelodge and neighboring motel they owned near the Santa Monica pier and erect a chic, eco-friendly property in the same location. “In my 20’s I mainly focused on a career in public service particularly in emergency medicine,” Farzam later told the website VoyageLA. “I worked as a paramedic on a helicopter where I learned the art of delegation in stressful situations and hectic environments…. In 2009, I turned in my flight helmet for a construction helmet, to oversee the building of the Shore Hotel.” I reached out to the company Farzam purportedly worked for, called TriState CareFlight; at the time, a representative was unable to find a record of his employment.

Farzam seemed to take to hospitality management. The four-star Shore Hotel opened its doors in October 2011. It offered 164 guest rooms with orange and teal accents. Some had expansive views of the Pacific Ocean and the pier. The hotel also featured a solar-heated pool, a fitness center, event spaces, and an upscale Mexican restaurant. The hypermodern building was certified gold by the United States Green Building Council, its second-highest ranking for environmental friendliness. Rooms started at more than $300 per night.

The project was a public relations coup for Farzam. There were glowing reviews on travel websites and positive write-ups in newspapers. A picture of him wearing a hard hat and standing before the hotel was featured on the front page of the Los Angeles Business Journal. Articles made no mention of his criminal record.

Farzam was suddenly Santa Monica royalty. By 2013, he would be named chair of the committee overseeing the Santa Monica Tourism Marketing District, a branch of the local visitors bureau. He would golf with top brass in the city’s police department and offer them discounted stays at the hotel. He would brag to Dancel about cops dropping by his office just to chat. “They’re going, ‘OK, this guy’s not an asshole. He’s pretty decent if you get to know him a little bit,’” Farzam said in one conversation.

His newly minted profile was a boon in some outlandish ways, too—ones not immediately discernible to outsiders. He was able to bring his law-enforcement obsession to work. He hired a former cop and Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy to work security. Through a private company called Seaside Public Safety—its business address was another Farzam hotel one block away from the Shore—Farzam filled out incident reports on suspicious people he saw on his family’s properties; in at least one instance he conducted a citizen’s arrest. On the back of his black office chair, Farzam had the words “commander-in-chief” embroidered in red. According to a deposition, he kept weapons on-site, including a Beretta handgun, a shotgun, and a rifle.

On the back of his black office chair, Farzam had the words “commander-in-chief” embroidered in red. 

The hotel seemed to reconfigure the power dynamic between Farzam and Dancel. For years Farzam had worked alongside his friend and sometimes for him. Now Farzam offered Dancel jobs patrolling private parties and tailing ex-employees he was worried might try to stain his blossoming reputation. In the same conversation that Farzam boasted about his relationship with the police, he told Dancel that he’d been asked to audition for The Millionaire Matchmaker. The popular reality-TV show, which ran on the Bravo channel from 2008 to 2015, professed to help wealthy men and women find love, with a hefty dose of zany drama.

“You’re gonna bring attention to yourself,” Dancel said skeptically.

“Why don’t you do it?” Farzam replied.

“I’m no millionaire, fool,” Dancel said. “I’m a negative millionaire.”

Dancel had briefly held down a police job at the Naval Air Weapons Station in China Lake, California, but he’d been fired in 2009. (He claimed that his superiors didn’t like him working private security jobs on the side; station officials declined to discuss personnel matters.) He then picked up a with a Veterans Affairs office. He was fired after two years but alleged in a lawsuit, settled out of court, that his termination was retaliation for blowing the whistle on a supervisor who’d tried to force religion on him. Once a month, Dancel drove six hours east to Maricopa County, Arizona, to participate for a few days in a sheriff’s “posse,” a volunteer group that supported local law enforcement. During those trips, he carried a badge and a gun and wore a uniform. The work was important to him, but he didn’t get paid.

Meanwhile, his marriage was beginning to crumble. It wasn’t his wife’s sleeping with other men as a career that bothered him. Dancel even appeared in one of her movies, produced by a company called Dogfart Network as part of its “Cuckold Sessions,” donning an LAPD uniform and watching as several men had sex with his wife on the roof of a car. Rather, Dancel alleged abuse. He took out a protective order claiming that his wife had punched him. He told me she had an alcohol problem and that he once recorded her screaming and banging on the door of their bedroom after he locked himself inside. (She didn’t reply to interview requests.)

One day, Dancel called Farzam and left a message in a shaky voice when his friend didn’t pick up. “Hey, bro. You’ve been a good friend to me, man, and I want to thank you for everything,” Dancel said. “I’m not under duress. Somebody might say I might be, I don’t know.” He asked Farzam to take care of his dog, Saber. “He’s going to be your responsibility now,” Dancel said. “I’m sorry, bro. But shit happens, you know?” The recording suggested that Dancel was considering killing himself. “Do me a favor, when you talk to my family, make sure I’m not cremated, dude,” he said. “Thanks again, bro. Thanks again, seriously. You always had my back.”

I asked Dancel about the message in a phone interview. He exhaled audibly, then skirted the issue of suicide. He told me that he’d left the recording when he was “done” with his marriage and planning to “move away.” Farzam responded and agreed to take care of the dog. But he wound up not needing to, because Dancel decided to stick around.

While Dancel’s life spiraled, Farzam’s ambitions became grander. If he couldn’t be a cop, maybe he could run an agency that provided a cop-like public service. In May 2013, he contacted a lawyer to ask how he could establish a law-enforcement unit that would provide security for a nonprofit transportation service he wanted to create “predominantly [for] victims of domestic violence in addition to underprivileged members of our community.”

Around the same time, Farzam invited Dancel on a road trip upstate. At first, as they drove north in a BMW 7 Series, Farzam didn’t fully explain where they were going or why. He chattered about plans to remodel his Brentwood home, maybe even put a gun range underneath it, Dancel recalled. “The conversation was all light-hearted,” he told me. Then Farzam got down to business: They were heading toward a small town called Bridgeville, north of San Francisco, because he wanted to buy it.

Farzam got down to business: They were heading toward a small town called Bridgeville, north of San Francisco, because he wanted to buy it.

Bridgeville is little more than a road surrounded by evergreen trees and mountains. A quaint cement bridge crosses the Van Duzen River. The town’s post office is painted pastel pink and green, and the local school looks like a large storage container. Bridgeville made headlines in the early aughts when it was put up for sale on eBay and cycled through several owners, including Los Angeles entertainment manager Daniel La Paille, who bought it in 2006 for $1.3 million and planned to build a hotel there. La Paille committed suicide, however, and the town went back on the market. Farzam wanted to make a bid.

In an email to Humboldt County supervisor Estelle Fennell, Farzam had proposed developing 20 affordable new homes, a camping area, a laundromat, and a small lodge with a western motif. “All of these structures would be built with the strictest eco-friendly guidelines at our forefront,” Farzam wrote. “Essentially, Bridgeville would be ‘The Nations Greenest Town.’ We would build a town police station to include a fire station.”

The latter idea was the one he impressed upon Dancel during their ten-hour drive. “I could make you the chief,” Dancel recalled his friend saying. When the pair stopped for gas, Dancel was dismayed to see that Farzam was visibly carrying a gun and a badge. “I keep my shit hidden,” he told me. “Even as a sworn police officer, if I’m not on duty, you’re not supposed to be showing your gun.” (Dancel was not a working officer when he told me this.)

Once in Bridgeville, the men met with Fennell, a warm woman in her sixties with deep-set blue eyes. She recalled Farzam being well dressed and driving a nice car. He struck her as a dreamer. “It seemed a little, I’m not going to say far-fetched, but it seemed like it was a high bar to reach,” she said of his proposal. The pair also met with Jean-Louis Carmona, who led Bridgeville’s volunteer fire crew. “It mostly sounded like a lot of bullshit,” Carmona told me.

Farzam talked about wanting to start his own police force, and Fennell said that he would have to take it up with the county sheriff. Later, according to Dancel, Farzam said that he wouldn’t buy the town if he couldn’t start a police department. He suggested that if he beat the sheriff in a local election, he could do whatever he wanted. “Dude, that’s a big gamble,” Dancel responded.

After the trip, Farzam contacted the sheriff, who Fennell said was adamant that Bridgeville’s law enforcement would remain as it was. The deal to buy the town never materialized. “This was just one more crazy antic,” Dancel told me. “It was kind of entertaining, because I was like, what is the next thing he’s going to come up with?”

Over the next several months, though, something changed for Dancel. He started to see Farzam in a different light—a less amusing, less quirky one. The reasons for the abrupt shift are murky, so much so that they still baffle people close to this story. “We don’t know why a guy would go to great lengths,” one investigator told me, “to get his friend and employer” in trouble.

But that’s exactly what Dancel did.

In his version of events, there was no beef or falling out between the friends, no jealousy or resentment either. Farzam’s behavior just began to rub him the wrong way. “He likes being that Superman—everybody likes to be that—but he’ll take it so far,” Dancel said. “He thought he could get away with anything.”

That supposedly included moving guns: M4-style assault rifles, to be exact, which are illegal in California unless they were purchased and registered decades ago. According to Dancel, Farzam boasted to his friend that he was clandestinely buying and selling them through a contact at the sheriff’s department.

“He likes being that Superman—everybody likes to be that—but he’ll take it so far. He thought he could get away with anything.”

If true, it would be “a whole other beast” from the ruses Farzam usually pulled, Dancel told me. It would be a felony, for starters, and the backdoored weapons could wind up on the street. “You can make citizen’s arrests if you want to. That’s cool, whatever,” Dancel said of civilians who want to be cops. “But when you start crossing the line to where you’re making it your life and seriously overstepping your area—different story.”

In early spring 2014, Dancel placed a call to the California DOJ in Sacramento. His adrenaline was up, and conflicting thoughts ran through his head. This is gonna be it, he realized. I’m not going to be able to make any more money now on the side, because I’m going to be burned. “I definitely had that moment of, Oh fuck, here we go,” Dancel told me. When someone answered the phone, Dancel shared what he knew.

His tip traveled up the ladder. When authorities got back to him, they gleaned a different impression of Dancel’s motives. “He tried very, very hard to sell this case to any agency that would listen,” one investigator told me. I asked two state employees close to the case in a joint interview if they thought Dancel might have turned on Farzam because he recognized an opportunity to work a big investigation like a legitimate cop. They glanced at each other.

“That’s a very interesting theory,” one said with a smirk.

On April 16, 2014, special agent James Hirt of the California DOJ called Dancel. According to an official summary of their conversation, which Hirt later compiled, Dancel was an encyclopedia of information about Farzam’s purported crimes. If proven, the offenses would vastly expand the hotelier’s rap sheet—and possibly land him in prison.

In addition to buying and selling guns, Dancel claimed, Farzam had figured out a way to access California’s warrants database, which isn’t available to the public, and to request DMV records, which requires special codes distributed only to law enforcement. Dancel said Farzam also carried a counterfeit CCW. “I asked him how he knew,” Hirt’s summary states, “and he told me because Farzam told him so and that Farzam had a program on his computer for manufacturing false documents.”

Their conversation ended when Dancel said he had to get to a meeting with the ATF: He was shopping the case with that agency, too. But his day didn’t end there. In the afternoon, Dancel went to the Shore Hotel. Wearing a microphone, even though the departments he’d met with hadn’t explicitly asked him to, he recorded several hours of conversation with Farzam.

At the beginning of the encounter, Dancel asked if he should shut the door to Farzam’s office. After it clicked, Dancel noisily opened a box containing an assault rifle. He whispered the serial number: LE190249.

“Dude, this is sick!” Dancel exclaimed. “This is tits right here.”

“Don’t hurt yourself on that thing,” Farzam instructed. “Badass, huh?”

Farzam said he’d bought it on a trip to Ohio—not from a sheriff’s department connection after all—along with two other rifles. He’d already sold that pair to some law-enforcement contacts. One had gone for $2,000.

The men talked for a while about Farzam’s quest to get a real CCW. He hoped that obtaining a private-investigator’s license would force the state’s hand, because without a permit to conceal, he’d have to carry a visible firearm when he was on a job.

Then Farzam started bragging about his access to databases. He called the DMV on a burner cell phone; a woman answered. Farzam was winning, calling her ma’am and asking how her day was going. He provided her with an access code, claiming to work for the FBI. Farzam asked the woman to run the license plate “ROKSTUD,” attached to a Chevrolet Corvette. He wanted to see if the car’s driver—the boyfriend of a disgruntled former Shore Hotel employee—had committed any legal infractions.

Listen: Farzam refers to himself as “Andrew Clark.”
Listen: Dancel asks who Andrew Clark is.

Farzam gave his name as Andrew Clark, and he provided a driver’s license number as proof of his identity. “Who the fuck is Clark?” Dancel asked after Farzam hung up.

“He’s my boy, dude,” was the reply.

Authorities would later determine that Clark wasn’t Farzam’s friend. Ten years prior, in 2004, Farzam had been walking his dog on the grounds of Kenter Canyon Elementary School in Brentwood when the real Clark, a local resident, asked him to leave the property. An altercation ensued, after which Farzam filed a police report alleging that Clark had assaulted him with a deadly weapon. The case was thrown out, and authorities charged Farzam with reporting a false emergency. Somehow, in the years that followed, Farzam got ahold of Clark’s driver’s license number and used it to craft an alias as an FBI agent. How he got his hands on a legitimate DMV requester code remains unknown, but records indicate that someone with the name Andrew Clark used it to make 20 separate requests for DMV records between 2010 and 2014.

When I called Clark, he sounded terrified to hear Farzam’s name and wouldn’t speak to me. An investigator described Farzam’s behavior as “vindictive,” adding, “He’s the guy who I expect to steal my identity and open credit cards.”

After talking to the DMV, Farzam dialed the number for the warrants section of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. He claimed to be an officer with the Miami-Dade Police Department, and he didn’t use a code. Instead, he asked the representative to confirm that two individuals—the former employee’s boyfriend, along with Dancel’s estranged wife—were wanted by law enforcement in California. “I recognized his approach as social engineering,” Hirt wrote in a subsequent report. “Instead of asking the operator to run the two individuals he asked her to confirm that the two people he had detained had warrants. He then gave the operator the names he wanted run…. By her telling him they were not wanted, she provided him with the information he was seeking, but in the opposite manner from the way a warrant check is normally conducted.”

The day after he made the recording, Dancel called Hirt, like an officer debriefing his commander. Hirt brought him in for a face-to-face meeting, which officers from the ATF and DMV joined, too. In a blue-walled conference room in Glendale, just a few miles from where Dancel grew up, he played his recording. He didn’t get the reaction he’d hoped for, however. The officers were keen on the evidence, not on Dancel. They were skeptical of his intentions, which made him feel like they thought he was, in his words, “some freakin’ scum bucket.”

At one point, Dancel recalled, Hirt asked him, “Does [Farzam] have something on you, and that’s why you’re going after him? It’s just kind odd that you would put your neck on the line for this.” The two men began yelling at each other, as Dancel took offense at the question and failed to provide an answer that satisfied the agents. The group decided to take a break, and the officers left Dancel in the conference room by himself. “It felt like a situation where I’m some fucking dirty cop sitting in a room while they go talk,” he told me.

When the meeting resumed, Dancel offered to get Farzam on video breaking the law. “He kind of thought he should be calling the shots in the case,” an agent later said. But there were procedures to follow—evidence to gather, risk to assess, judicial review to undergo, operations to plan. When the agents said as much, Dancel was insulted. “This isn’t my first rodeo,” he told them. But his work with the Arizona posse, which he touted as his experience, didn’t impress them. “I’ve got into fights. I’ve made arrests. I said, ‘Dude, I do nothing different from what you do except I’m on the street!’” he told me, his voice growing heated at the memory.

An agent I spoke to compared Dancel’s approach to Law and Order. “If you were doing this as a 40-minute television episode, it’s about as complicated as someone saying, ‘Pull the guy’s LUDs,’” the agent said, referring to local usage details, a record of a phone’s incoming and outgoing calls. “There’s no magic guy out there that’s just a LUD puller. We have to write search warrants for all this stuff.”

“I’ve got into fights. I’ve made arrests. I said, ‘Dude, I do nothing different from what you do except I’m on the street!’”

Dancel thought about backing out of the case, until Steve Goerke, an ATF agent, talked him down. “We can’t do this without you,” Dancel recalled Goerke saying. “You are the only one who can do this.” (Goerke didn’t respond to multiple interview requests.)

That the officers couldn’t afford to lose Dancel was true enough. The case was expanding rapidly to involve six agencies and an astonishing number of potential charges. With automatic weapons purportedly changing hands and Farzam’s long history of impersonation, investigators wanted to build the best case possible to nail their target. Dancel’s information and proximity to Farzam were vital. “The expression that we sometimes use is that the Pope is busy and Mother Teresa is dead,” one agent quipped. “You take what you can get as far as informants go.”

As the weeks passed, Dancel prodded investigators. They reiterated that it was their case, not his, despite a fear that he might flip and tell Farzam everything. In early May, agents were finally ready to act. They decided to use Dancel as bait. Wearing a wire—a government-issued camera—he would purchase the assault rifle that he’d handled in Farzam’s office.

To initiate the sale, Goerke suggested that Dancel tell his friend that a posse leader in Maricopa County wanted the gun. In exchange, Dancel would promise to get Farzam into the group, which the hotelier’s criminal history made difficult. A position, even a volunteer one, with a sheriff’s department might also pave the way for Farzam to get a legitimate CCW. “He would definitely go for that in a second,” Dancel replied.

Around 3:30 p.m. on May 7, 2014, a cluster of California law-enforcement officers met in a parking lot next to several tennis courts. Wearing plain clothes, they stood in a loose horseshoe around Goerke, who had on blocky sunglasses and a navy blue windbreaker. He held a map in his left hand, a pen in his right, as he explained how the buy would go down: Dancel would get the rifle from the Shore Hotel and drive to his friend’s mansion. “He’s gonna take the gun in, they’re gonna fuck with it a little bit,” Goerke said. “He’s actually gonna videotape it for us.”

Goerke turned and faced Dancel, pointing at him for a second. Dancel already had the hidden camera attached to his torso and turned on. It caught an image of the agents looking at him. The scene was “pretty cool,” he told me. “I’d never worked any undercover cases.”

When the briefing ended, Dancel went to the hotel. Once he’d secured the gun, he rolled up to Farzam’s house in his red sedan. While the tactical team watched him from a van—“That’s when I was like, Holy shit, this is like a movie,” Dancel said—he waited silently for the mansion’s electronic gate to slide open. He parked in the driveway next to Farzam’s fire engine, partially covered with a tarp, and hauled the rifle out of his trunk.

As Dancel approached the mansion carrying the gun in its cumbersome cardboard box, a dog began barking at the front door. “Dude, I’m gonna shoot Tracer if she bites me again,” Dancel said.

Watch: Farzam pretends to be FBI agent Rafael Garcia.

Farzam appeared in the camera’s view. Tall and husky, he wore athletic shorts, bedroom slippers, and a dark blue T-shirt with “DEA” emblazoned in yellow across the back. Before Dancel arrived, he’d been getting ready to eat with a young blond woman. “You hungry?” Farzam asked, taking a seat at a long wooden table with curly fries and a blood-red beet salad in front of him. He wasn’t in a hurry to make the sale, so Dancel would have to hang around for a while.

The camera captured the home’s unusual decor: a firefighter’s helmet mounted on the wall, a replica of a rescue helicopter suspended from a ceiling, a red and blue light bar mounted on top of a vintage arcade game, an American flag adjacent to photographs of George H.W. and Barbara Bush, a gumball machine. At one point, the camera caught a glimpse of Dancel in a mirror. He wore a blue uniform, which he explained by saying that he was heading to a security gig that evening. “I’m working,” he told the young woman, Farzam’s girlfriend at the time.

After 20 minutes in which the friends mostly discussed K9 training and shouted commands at Tracer, they finally turned to the gun. Farzam lifted it from the box and raised it to shoulder level. He moved through the dining area, across the living room, and finally into his office, aiming the gun’s barrel around his home like a SWAT officer checking for armed criminals. “Easy, entry guy,” Dancel said.

Seated at a desk, Farzam delayed the sale again by placing a call on a flip phone. “Hi, how you doing? It’s Rafi,” Farzam said. Holding the phone away from his mouth, Farzam whispered to Dancel, with a grin, “The DA of L.A. County! Number two!” He was putting on a show.

For a few weeks, Farzam had been telling Dancel about a Santa Monica police officer he thought was cute. He found out that she’d been charged with a DUI, so he decided to call Ellen Sarmiento, the city attorney he now had on the line, for help. He identified himself as Rafael Garcia, an actual high-ranking FBI agent Farzam had found on the agency’s website. Farzam told Sarmiento that the Santa Monica officer was an informant in the bureau’s case against Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. “He has a lot of scary money and does a lot of bad things, and his tentacles are pretty long,” Farzam said. He asked Sarmiento to dismiss the DUI case so that the informant could keep working.

Mid-call, he impassively counted the thick stack of bills that Dancel had brought as payment for the rifle.

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When Farzam hung up, the friends went to the house’s garage, where Farzam picked up and put back various weapons like a carpenter might when looking for a tool at his workbench. He announced that he wanted to shoot the assault rifle, to say goodbye to it. “In the backyard?” Dancel replied, dumbfounded. “I shoot back there all the time,” Farzam said. His house overlooked an elementary school; it was a Wednesday.

As the pair moved through the garage and into the yard, Dancel was never more than arm’s length away from Farzam. He could have reached out and hugged him. He considered that if Farzam had guessed what was really going on, he might be taking him outside to kill him. “If he raised it [the gun] towards me or anything, I wanted to be in close quarters with him so I could actually reach it, as opposed to being far away where he could take a round off,” Dancel told me. “I was concerned that he knew who I was.”

But Dancel was being paranoid. Farzam trusted his friend. In the backyard, the hotelier loaded a single round into the rifle’s chamber. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he aimed the gun downward. He pulled the trigger and pumped a bullet into the ground.

Dancel left that day with the rifle. Law enforcement, though, didn’t arrest Farzam. They decided to first confirm various details captured by Dancel’s camera.

On May 14, Hirt called Ellen Sarmiento. “She was shocked when I told her he was not an FBI [agent],” Hirt later wrote in a report. “She said she had queried the FBI’s web site for LA and found him listed there. She described him as very personable and [said that he] talked as if he knew what he was doing. Ms. Sarmiento said she truly believed the caller.” In the days that followed, Farzam contacted Sarmiento several more times pretending to be Rafael Garcia. According to Hirt’s report, he “was pretty insistent about getting the DUI case dismissed. He also told her he was worried about his request becoming public.”

Hirt and Goerke then called the real Garcia, who had moved to Washington, D.C., from Los Angeles about three months prior. He said he’d never spoken to Sarmiento. He also described an odd incident that had occurred just before he relocated. “He received a call from one of the local sheriff’s departments,” Hirt wrote. “The caller asked him if he had gone to the county jail to interview an inmate. He said he had not. He felt the call was strange, but he thought they must have mistaken him for another FBI Agent Garcia.” (Neither Sarmiento nor Garcia responded to interview requests.)

Goerke, meanwhile, ascertained the assault rifle’s provenance. A woman named Marcia Masters had purchased it at a firearms store in Ohio in March 2013. It was then sent to California via FedEx in Farzam’s name. The shipment’s contents were reported as violins.

Masters was a police officer in the small town of Oakwood, Ohio. In 2005, when she was still attending a police academy and working nights at a steakhouse in Cleveland, Esquire magazine named her hostess of the year. The accompanying photo showed her with long auburn hair, wearing a tight, strapless black dress and holding a menu. “She’ll probably make an even hotter cop,” the website Cleveland Scene suggested in a write-up. Hirt discovered that in January 2011, Masters and Farzam had tried to sneak into the Golden Globe Awards as security. I asked Dancel how Farzam and Masters knew each other. He said he wasn’t sure but recalled encountering her several years prior, and her being introduced as Farzam’s friend.

There were more strange revelations. According to Santa Monica police, Farzam had allegedly assaulted a homeless man with pepper spray outside the Shore Hotel at the beginning of May 2014. That March, he’d encountered a public attorney named Mitch Fox at a Costco in Culver City. Fox, who’d prosecuted Farzam in the false-emergency case involving Andrew Clark back in 2004, told Hirt that Farzam approached him, pulled a CCW card from his wallet, and said he’d “straightened out [his] life.” According to Hirt’s report, “Fox said he saw a bulge on Farzam’s right hip which was consistent with a firearm worn under the shirt.”

Listen: Farzam describes his support for Paul Tanaka.

While the police gathered information for an arrest warrant, Dancel kept recording conversations with Farzam. In one taped on May 10, Farzam talked about supporting Paul Tanaka, who was then running for sheriff of Los Angeles County; state records from that month indicate that Farzam personally donated $1,500 to the campaign and the same amount under the auspices of Emergency Medical Response. Farzam said he knew Tanaka’s “right-hand fucking dude,” who’d promised to help him get a law-enforcement gig if Tanaka won. Dancel pointed out that Tanaka wasn’t doing well in the polls. “The only thing that’s fucking him up is that he worked with Baca,” Farzam replied, referring to Lee Baca, a former sheriff. “Baca got in trouble and borderline indicted for, like, beating the niggers down in fucking men’s central jail.” (Tanaka lost the election and two years later was convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice for attempting to stymie an investigation of police abuse in county jails.)

On another phone call, Farzam told Dancel that he was going to send him copies of his various certifications—“It’s a shit ton,” Farzam said, “probably 50 different certs”—so that Dancel could share them with the posse leaders in Maricopa County. “Some people trip out,” Farzam said, warning Dancel that he might be overwhelmed by all the documents. “They always say this shit—‘You’re overqualified. Why do you have all this and why aren’t you working now as a cop?’”

Listen: Farzam discusses his training certifications.

“And what do you tell them?” Dancel asked.

“That I’m a convicted child molester, that’s what,” Farzam deadpanned.

On May 14, Farzam got more personal. “Saw my shrink,” he told Dancel on the phone. “She thinks I’m codependent.” The therapist had told him to stop calling an ex-girlfriend whom he worried about. “If I still have an urge to call her, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to call you instead, is that cool?” he asked Dancel.

“Of course,” Dancel said. “I’ll just say, ‘Hey, dumbass, you need some hobbies.’”

Farzam recapped his therapist’s analysis. “Your fucking problem is that paramedic part of your brain wants to always save and help people out,” Farzam said. “You can’t be coming to the fucking rescue of some fucking chick. You need to take care of yourself and respect yourself.”

Listen: Farzam talks about wanting to join the Maricopa County posse.

Then the friends started talking about Farzam’s ambitions. “If they extend the privilege of allowing me into that tight-knit group,” Farzam said, referring to the Arizona posse, “I would love it. I wouldn’t let anybody down, especially myself.” In fact, it would be a relief to be the “low guy on the totem pole.”

“I want something, dude, where I can go somewhere and be the best at what I can be for just a couple days a month,” Farzam said. “Fucking yes sir, no sir, thank you sir, and just fucking lemme do my thing, dude. Tell me what you want me to do. Do you want me to wash windows? Fuck it, I’ll do it.”

Agents watched Farzam leave his mansion’s driveway in a white Chevy Tahoe on the morning of June 27, 2014. They wanted to arrest him away from his home, which they knew was stocked with security cameras and guns. After a few minutes, weapons drawn, they pulled him over on San Vicente Boulevard. They handcuffed him, confiscated a loaded handgun, and put him in the back of a Santa Monica police unit. Then they drove him back to his house, where they served a search warrant for the residence as well as the Shore Hotel.

They recovered three assault rifles, a forged vehicle registration, counterfeit Los Angeles County Superior Court seals, and a fake CCW. In the Tahoe, they found a siren and warning lights. They also discovered two radios and a light bar that had been reported stolen from the sheriff’s department. Farzam had told Dancel that he’d acquired the gear from an inside contact. (The sheriff’s department declined to comment for this story, citing the state DOJ’s jurisdiction over the case.)

Agents reported that Farzam was cooperative at first, even waiving his Miranda rights. He got emotional when Los Angeles Animal Services came to take custody of his dogs. “That made him cry,” one agent said. “He said it was allergies, but I know the difference.”

It soon became clear that Farzam, Miranda rights or no, wasn’t going to give up any information, and he grew testy as he tried to determine how much the officers already knew. So they drove him to the Santa Monica jail. He was fingerprinted, photographed, and booked on the 77 charges, ranging from identity theft to forgery to illegal use of a weapon to assault someone (the homeless man at the hotel). His bail was set at $805,000. He was out in a matter of hours.

A few miles away, my desk phone rang. Dancel—though I didn’t yet know his name—was giddy as he divulged information about the case. Even if he didn’t get public credit for his undercover stint, one reporter covering the story would know that an unheralded law-enforcement officer had made the high-profile arrest possible. That seemed to be his hope, at least. But things didn’t go according to plan.

That evening I sat in the Santa Monica Daily Press newsroom, stunned by the odd story that had landed in my lap and wondering who the man on the phone was. I hacked out some quick copy about the news and posted it online. I waited for larger media in Los Angeles to pick it up and do their own reporting. But Saturday and Sunday passed with virtually nothing. The story seemed to be a victim of the always slow weekend news cycle.

Several weeks later, I got an email from the anonymous man, using an address with the handle “LEOKneeDragger.” (“Knee dragger” is slang for someone who drives a motorcycle.) The message was brief—just one sentence—and pointed me to an attachment: the official charging document in Farzam’s case. I confirmed with local authorities that the file was legitimate and wrote another story. Still, no larger media picked it up.

Looking back, given what I now know about police impersonation, perhaps the crimes Farzam was accused of seemed ridiculous—certainly less important than other illicit activities afflicting Los Angeles, including drug sales, human trafficking, and gang violence. There was also the fact that Santa Monica feels like a small town in a big city. On the one hand, that can nurture gossip and social blacklisting. On the other, people can be quick to avoid discussing anything that might disrupt or embarrass the moneyed community.

As a free daily, the newspaper didn’t have the resources to cover a complex legal case alongside its traditional fare: A City Council election was heating up, as was controversy over proposals for three skyscraping hotels along Ocean Avenue. I was told that Siroos Farzam approached the business side of the paper and made a soft plea for it to stop running articles about his son. No one ever instructed me not to write a story. Still, given all the hindering factors, I realized that untangling the Farzam case would have to become a side project.

The anonymous man kept emailing me; he didn’t want the story to go quietly. He sent footage of Farzam acting like a cop and forwarded emails in which Farzam discussed everything from his relationship with the Santa Monica police to troubles he was having with an ex. Once, while sitting in gridlock traffic, I called the man on the Orange County number he’d given me when we first spoke. He unloaded several stories: Farzam’s quest to buy Bridgeville, for instance, and his arrests stretching back more than a decade. Based on what the man told me, I began requesting public documents.

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Farzam, meanwhile, was fighting the charges against him. Six months after his arrest, he was scheduled to appear in court. I planned to attend. But the night before, when I checked the DOJ’s website, I discovered that the appearance had been canceled. A deal had been struck in which Farzam pleaded guilty to just three of the 77 charges: unauthorized computer access, impersonation of an FBI agent, and possession of an assault rifle. There wouldn’t be a trial or testimony from any witnesses or experts. All that was left was sentencing, which wouldn’t happen until the spring. At most, based on the remaining charges, Farzam would get two years in county jail.

“Both shocked and frustrated is an eloquent description,” an investigator on the case told me when I asked about law enforcement’s reaction to the news. “We quite frankly expected state prison time, especially based on this guy’s prior record.”

Agents told me that Farzam’s legal team proffered ameliorating arguments. One was that Farzam was harmless: Nothing he’d done had caused pain or suffering. (Except to the homeless man he’d pepper-sprayed—an act Farzam admitted to in one of Dancel’s recordings—but the assault charge had been dropped.) A second argument was that Farzam simply admired cops and wanted to be friends with them. “There couldn’t be anything further from the truth,” one agent told me. “He kind of wants to be his own show.”

Listen: Farzam describes pepper-spraying a homeless man.

In the months leading up to Farzam’s sentencing, I nagged the DOJ until it sent me the arrest declaration that Hirt had written. It was impressively comprehensive about the investigation’s twists and turns and the evidence gathered along the way. The declaration also revealed the name of the state’s key witness—or, as I knew him, the man on the phone: Christopher Dancel. According to the document, Dancel had known Farzam for many years.

Why would a law-enforcement officer be friendly with an impersonator? I wondered. I called several investigators to clarify. Only one called me back. Speaking anonymously, the agent explained that Dancel didn’t work for the FBI. He was just a buddy of Farzam’s. I asked why Dancel had become an informant and got a version of the same response I’d hear for the rest of my time reporting this story: We never were able to get a clear answer on that.

“The person wasn’t the issue,” the same agent later told me. “It could have been anybody. If you remove Dancel and Farzam from the equation, if some guy had called and spoken to our headquarters in Sacramento and said, ‘I’m aware of somebody who is breaching the state’s classified computer networks,’ which is where this case started, we would have taken the case. The fact that it happened to be these two clowns just adds the icing to the cake.”

In March 2015, I took the subway into downtown Los Angeles to attend Farzam’s presentencing hearing. The county courthouse’s halls were cold and beige. While I waited in line to pass through the metal detector, I saw Farzam arrive. He looked sharp, with a fresh haircut and shave, carefully pressed suit, and phalanx of powerful-looking men around him. He chatted amiably with the sheriff’s deputy manning the metal detector.

In the courtroom, I took a seat in a back corner. Farzam’s attorney, former county prosecutor Decio Rangel, flitted around, joking with court employees, Farzam’s parents, and DOJ agents. Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Rangel worked for an L.A. Law producer before getting his degree. As a county attorney, he’d specialized in prosecuting public officials, including lawyers and cops. In private practice, an agent close to the Farzam case told me, Rangel was a smooth operator. He’d appeared on TV as a legal commentator, discussing high-profile stories like Michael Jackson’s death and Lindsay Lohan’s run-ins with the law. With a full head of graying hair, a fit build, and an animated face, he commanded the courtroom. (Rangel didn’t reply to a request for comment.)

When the hearing began, two years behind bars was already off the table as a potential sentence. Discussion centered instead on a 90-day jail term. Farzam politely answered every question the judge asked him. He also offered to enter custody voluntarily before the official sentence came down at a later date. Court was dismissed, and Farzam exited the room a prisoner.

“Of all the guys I’ve arrested over 30 some years, he’s the one guy who kind of gives me the willies.”

I met with Natasha Howard, a deputy attorney general and the prosecutor in the case, at the California DOJ’s labyrinthine office in Los Angeles. Howard, who has long dark hair and speaks slowly and deliberately to reporters, wouldn’t discuss the backstory of the plea deal. But she said that she’d pushed for a two-year jail sentence. The evidence supported it, after all. “At the end of the day, I have a video I can play to the jury,” she told me. “You can think whatever you think about Mr. Dancel, but this is the video depicting exactly what happened, as it happened.”

Still, she defended the case’s outcome. For the first time in his life, Farzam was a convicted felon, Howard pointed out. He could no longer carry firearms, even if he claimed he needed one for a private security detail.

It was something, certainly. But it wasn’t what investigators had hoped for. “Of all the guys I’ve arrested over 30 some years,” one told me, “he’s the one guy who kind of gives me the willies. He’s very obsequious to you in public, but then you know he’s scheming and plotting.”

The next time Farzam appeared before a judge was in June 2015—a year after his arrest and the same month that Marcia Masters was sentenced to two years in prison in Ohio. Farzam wore an orange jumpsuit and had grown a beard. He looked tired but smiled often.

“Mr. Farzam, your attorney gave a very vigorous defense to you,” the judge said at one point. “You got a break in this case. I am telling you, come back and you violate probation, the consequences will be very serious. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, your honor,” Farzam replied.

When the judge sentenced him to 90 days already served and five years of probation, Farzam left the courthouse a free man—and still COO of the Shore Hotel. A campaign to restore his public reputation was already under way. That winter, before going to jail, Farzam had announced a $1,000 donation to a local food bank. In April, while he was still incarcerated, he’d released a statement publicizing that he would be volunteering personally at the food bank that summer. The statement didn’t mention that the schedule lined up with when Farzam would get out of jail.

“The fact that Steve Farzam would take time out from his incredibly busy career in hotel management and the hospitality industry will not surprise anyone who knows him,” the release read. “For years, he has been an active and generous member of the Santa Monica community who is willing and able to give back and help others.”

Quietly, another campaign had commenced, too—this one to smear the state’s informant.

Dancel said he never saw or spoke to Farzam again after his arrest. He heard from a cop that Farzam was telling people Dancel had been in trouble with the law and turned on his friend as part of a plea deal. (This wasn’t the case; in addition to his DUI, law-enforcement records in Los Angeles indicate that Dancel violated a court order in the 1990s and was the subject of a domestic-violence charge in 2003, which was either dismissed or not prosecuted.) He grew anxious that Farzam might come after him while the case was pending. One day, before Farzam went to jail, Dancel found his garage door broken and worried that his ex-friend might use the opportunity to enter the house and hurt him. A witness getting attacked or snuffed out—it’s the stuff of pulpy crime novels.

According to Dancel, when he arrived at his home, he would exit his car with his gun drawn and tell his two young daughters to remain in their seats until he made sure everything was safe. “I am getting out in total darkness on our cul-de-sac and would have to push this garage door open,” Dancel said. “Our house backed up right against a giant greenbelt, like a big park, so [an intruder] could easily come through that back area.” He hung bulletproof vests on the railings designed to keep his daughters from rolling out of their beds. “If Daddy tells you to put on the vest, put on the vest and get in the corner of the room and wait until I come in,” he told them. The girls even practiced. “I made them put it over their heads and then sit in a little ball in the corner of the room,” Dancel said to me.

His home remained secure, but Dancel did lose something valuable. In August 2014, he contacted Natasha Howard to claim that Farzam, posing as a reporter, was calling the Maricopa County posse leadership and accusing Dancel of being under investigation for posing as a cop and illegally selling assault rifles. Howard sent an email to Goerke, the ATF agent, asking him to intervene on Dancel’s behalf. “It looks like Farzam is trying to dirty up [Dancel’s] image since he is a key witness in our case,” Howard wrote.

Dancel hung bulletproof vests on the railings designed to keep his daughters from rolling out of their beds. “If Daddy tells you to put on the vest, put on the vest.”

Dancel was terminated from the posse that fall. Distraught, he phoned Goerke—and recorded the call—to demand his help. Goerke explained that, because Dancel was a civilian, the ATF wasn’t under any obligation to contact or cooperate with the Maricopa County authorities.

“This has cost me my job now with the department. There is no other reason. I’ve never been in trouble there,” Dancel said. “This is out of control now, when I stepped up and helped out.”

Goerke said he would see what he could do. When Dancel kept pressing, Goerke grew irritated. “You’re a civilian! You’re not law enforcement!” he exclaimed at one point.

Dancel never got his posse position back.

A few months later, attacks against Dancel began appearing online. In March 2015, around the time Farzam went to jail, user “Christopher Dancel” put a short video on YouTube—the only one ever posted by that account—accompanied by whimsical instrumental music. The video shows a photograph of Dancel and warns viewers to “BEWARE!!!” of this “scam artist.”

Then came ChristopherDancel.com, an amateur website dedicated to revealing intimate, embarrassing details about its namesake’s life. It still exists and is registered to Domains by Proxy LLC, a company through which people can purchase URLs and shield their ownership information from public view. The site contains copies of documents pertaining to Dancel’s financial troubles and legal disputes over the years, and a close-up photo of him with bandages wrapped around his scalp, chin, and nose, as if he had been in a fight or had plastic surgery. There’s also information about Dancel’s marriage, which by early 2015 had ended, and a link to a GoFundMe page that Dancel set up to raise money for legal fees incurred trying to get custody of his two daughters.

Most shocking, though, is the recording of Dancel’s seemingly suicidal phone message, left on Farzam’s phone a few years prior. It automatically plays when the site loads.

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In October 2015, Dancel emailed me. He’d been out of touch for several months, presumably because I wasn’t writing stories about the case anymore. Farzam “is now harassing me and I am looking for an attorney,” he wrote. “This case ruined my life and he got off with a slap.”

I’d been able to amass numerous documents pertaining to the case and to track down plenty of sources, but the DOJ hadn’t given me the recordings from the investigation’s sting phase. I asked Dancel if he had copies of them. He said that he did but wanted cash for them. He asked me to contribute to his GoFundMe page. When I declined, he went silent again for a few months.

Then, in January 2016, he sent another email out of the blue. “Did you ever get the story off?” he asked. “This fucker is harassing me and created some fake website with all my info.”

By this time, I’d found a regional magazine interested in publishing a story about Farzam, and its editors offered to pay Dancel $100 for the recordings. (The publication later declined to run the piece in the lead-up to an ownership change.) He told me to meet him one day in early February at a Starbucks in Calabasas. It would be the first time we’d ever spoken in person.

We wound up meeting instead at a salon where his girlfriend had an appointment. Dancel wore blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt with an apparel logo scrawled across it in dramatic Gothic script. “Hey, partner. How’s it going, man?” he said, shaking my hand. He made a comment about how awfully long it takes women to get their hair done.

We got into Dancel’s car and went looking for a restaurant where we could talk. Eying my recorder, which I hadn’t switched on yet, Dancel claimed that under California law, in his capacity as a law-enforcement officer, he was allowed to tape someone without consent. In fact, California penal code requires two-party consent for the recording of private conversations. Exceptions are made for an employed public officer acting “within the scope of his or her authority.” Search warrants are often required.

Soon after we arrived at a Denny’s, the battery on Dancel’s laptop died. He approached a waitress and introduced himself as “a former police officer” meeting with a newspaper reporter, by way of explaining that he needed to charge his computer in order to give me his files. When we began talking about Farzam, he insisted that the hotelier wasn’t a close friend. “I wouldn’t count on him if I was in a car accident,” Dancel said, an ironic statement given that Farzam once saved someone from a burning vehicle. “But we definitely had a good rapport.”

“I wouldn’t count on him if I was in a car accident,” Dancel said, an ironic statement given that Farzam once saved someone from a burning vehicle. 

Dancel ordered a house salad with ranch dressing; I had french fries. While we ate, we traded information and rumors. He said his decision to help the FBI and ATF get Farzam was a matter of “integrity.” He used “we” when talking about law enforcement. He suggested people I could talk to but seemed astonished by the details about Farzam’s history I’d already been able to turn up. “You’re better than a private detective,” Dancel said, as though rendering a professional opinion.

He was thrilled that someone else wanted to talk about the case. His voice projected authority mixed with regret. “I had no clue that my agency was going to turn their back on me,” he said at one point, referring to the Maricopa County posse. “If I wouldn’t have worked this case, I wouldn’t have had any problems.”

When his files were done uploading, he wanted to keep talking. He got looser and angrier, inadvertently revealing that he knew Farzam better than he’d claimed earlier in the conversation. “His parents have always coddled him,” Dancel said at one point. He talked about knowing Farzam’s siblings, including which ones liked their brother and which ones thought he was a screwup. (One of Farzam’s brothers, on top of working in real estate, is Kanye West’s personal physician.) He described Farzam as a “weirdo” who he’d always assumed would “get caught sooner or later.”

We left the Denny’s and he drove me back to my car at the salon. When I thanked him for his time and the files, Dancel said he was glad to keep helping out.

That meeting was nearly a year and a half ago. In the time since, as I’ve pieced together this story, Farzam hasn’t landed in legal trouble for impersonation. He still leads the Shore Hotel, where rooms now go for upwards of $700 per night. He’s been interviewed for websites and podcasts about leadership in the hospitality business—even as his hotel has come under scrutiny from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a range of allegations, including sexual harassment, illegal termination of employees, unlawful interrogation and coercion of staff, and surveillance of employees participating in union activity. (Per the NLRB’s website, the parties in those cases reached settlements in 2017.) I’ve reached out to multiple people in the Santa Monica business community, and those who’ve agreed to talk have had little to say. Former mayor and longtime city council member Kevin McKeown told me that a different Farzam brother “has represented the Shore Hotel in all matters in which I’ve participated.”

In February 2017, Steve Farzam told VoyageLA, “In my personal life, I always strive to improve. As an example, I’m in my last year of law school with the intention of using my Juris doctorate degree to better suit the hotel operations needs as we continue to grow.” Describing his hands-on management style, he said, “I personally stay at the hotel on occasion and fill in some of the management positions to see what the organization is like firsthand from the guest experience all the way down to the hourly employee vantage point. These ingredients have lead for [sic] a recipe for continued success, mindfulness, and humility.”

A month later, Farzam posted a photo on Instagram of what appears to be a certification document and badge from the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians. “Yes! It’s official!” he wrote in the caption. “I’m certified again! #paramedic.” I checked the NREMT website and saw that Farzam was registered with the organization. I sent a query about him, to which the NREMT never replied. As of this story’s publication date, Farzam’s status online had been changed to “not registered.”

Dancel and I have remained in touch. Recently, he decided to study to become a nurse. He told me that he had to leave California and now uses a different name because of the anonymous efforts to discredit him. Like in the old days, when he was an unnamed informant on the other end of a phone line, he hasn’t revealed what he calls himself. In our most recent conversations, he’s asked me to help him determine if Orange County authorities are taking seriously allegations he’s made against a local investigator. Dancel claims that the man is dating his ex-wife and investigating him unlawfully.

When he isn’t ranting about this new “case,” he still claims that the Farzam investigation wrecked his life. But when I asked him if it was the highlight of his law-enforcement career, he didn’t hesitate to answer. “I would definitely say that,” Dancel replied. “For sure.”

That professional zenith, such as it was, marked the end of an eccentric but intimate camaraderie. Dancel captured one of its waning days in an audio recording, made on the afternoon in April 2014 when he and Farzam cruised through Santa Monica in the Hummer.

“Lock up fucking Tracer,” Dancel exclaimed as Farzam texted his then girlfriend to say that he was heading home with a friend in tow. “You’re lucky I’m not 417.”

“Why didn’t you bring a gun, fool?” Farzam asked. Dancel listed a few of the weapons he owned—a .40 pistol and a Glock 27 among them—and explained that they wouldn’t fit in the storage compartment of his motorcycle, which he’d ridden to the Shore Hotel that day. The men laughed.

As the vehicle rumbled along, their conversation was easy, shifting from the merits of tinted windows to “crying-heart liberals,” in Farzam’s words, who gave him “ugly looks” for driving a “gas guzzler.” Dancel noted, “They don’t even know it’s diesel.”

At one point, they slipped into silence—the sort that’s only comfortable between close friends. Dancel yawned. Then he spotted what he thought was a familiar location. “Isn’t that the place we came for lunch?” he said. “We ate hot dogs or something in there.”

“Oh yeah,” Farzam acknowledged. “It was across the street.”

“Dude, that was so many years ago. That had to be like 12 years ago.”

“Time flies, huh?”

“Yup.”

أتباع الشيطان

In death, what do Islamic State fighters deserve? A journey through the ruins of Mosul in search of answers.

القوات العراقية تقوم بقتل الآلاف من مقاتلي تنظيم الدولة الإسلامية ( داعش ). ما الذي يستحقونه بعد الموت؟ كينيث آر. روزن ( Kenneth R. Rosen ) و أثناء بحته عن الأجوبة في مدينة الموصل المخربة، يكشف الستار عن جريمة بشعة.

I

هناك الى أسفل التل، يتدحرج الحجر فيشتبك مع جزء من القماش إلى أن يتوقف عند الجزء السفلي من العمود الفقري لشخص آدمي. بالقرب منه وعلى عشب وتراب الوادي المُشمس – واحد من بين آلاف الوديان الصحراوية الصغيرة المنتشرة في شمال العراق – تتناثر بعض العظام، منها عصعص، عظمة فخذ، معصم ومفصل كوع. في بركة قريبة أرى أضلع بشرية، كل هذه العظام متسخة ومصفرة ومتآكلة.

مجلة أتافيست، عدد 68.

إقرأ المقالة بالإنكليزية

كينيث أر. روزن كاتب في النيويورك تايمز، والتي انضم إلى فريقها سنة 2004 هو زميل في لغان للقصص الواقعية، ظهرت أعماله في كل من The Atlantic، New York، و  .Foreign Affairsبالإضافة إلى أعماله الأخرى، فقد قام بتغطية للشرق الأوسط، شمال إفريقيا، بالإضافة إلى أمريكا الشمالية.


تحرير: Seyward Darby
تصميم: Jefferson Rabb
التدقيق من الحقائق: Tekendra Parmar
محرر النسخ: Sean Cooper
صور: Alex Kay Potter
شكر خاص لكل من: Tim Arango, Erin Banco, Rasha Elass, Dexter Filkins, Luke Mogelson, Kiran Nazish, Runa Sandvik, Douglas Schorzman و العديد ممن بقيت أسماؤهم مخفية لغرض السلامة.

حسن، 24 سنة، مجند في الشرطة الفيدرالية العراقية، يقف في الطريق الرملية التي تمتد كالأفعى على طول الحافة الشرقية للوادي. الهواء مثقل برائحة المطاط المحترق، الأجساد المتيبسة، ونيران البترول. حسن، الذي اكتفى بإعطائي اسمه الأول فقط، ذا اللحية الخفيفة، يرتدي زي أزرق ورمادي وأحذية عسكرية سوداء. نفس الحذاء الذي رفس به الحجارة التي ترقد الآن بالقرب من بقايا الرجل المتحلل. هذا جزء بسيط مما يحمله الوادي: على مسافة قصيرة وبالقرب من غطاء محرك سيارة هامفي مدمرة، توجد جثة أخرى، مجرّدة من اللحم ولكنها لازالت تحتفظ ببقايا قميص بني كان يرتديه الضحية لحظة مقتله.

هذه اللحظة كانت في شهر فبراير، عندما كان الجو أكثر برودة في البو سيف، هذه القرية التي تقع بالقرب من نهر دجلة على بعد بضعة أميال جنوب الموصل. اجتاحتها القوات العراقية في طريقها لاستعادة ثاني أكبر مدينة في البلاد من تنظيم الدولة الإسلامية. بعد شهرين أصبحت القرية هادئة، الوجهة الشمالية للموصل، التي يقسمها نهر دجلة، يكسوها الظلام. سكة القطار الحديدية التي تعبر عبر الابو سيف قبل أن تنتهي بالجهة الغربية للموصل، هناك حيث يوجد آخر مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية، متوقفة تماما. حوالي 340000 شخص تم ترحيلهم خلال الستة أشهر الأخيرة، هاربين من أعنف حرب أهلية منذ الحرب العالمية الثانية، بينما سيضاف لهذا العدد أكثر من 100000 شخص في منتصف الصيف. محطة القطار الرئيسية في الموصل تحولت إلى خراب، أنقاض خرسانية تُذكِر بالأماكن التي تواجدت بها المباني في الماضي. المباني التي لازالت صامدة، تحتضن أشخاص يشبهون النسيج الجسدي الذي يرفض التحلل.

يمشي حسن على طول الطريق ليريني المزيد من مخلفات تحرير البو سيف. هيكل عظمي لازالت تكسوه الملابس على التل، متحجرا على شكل شخص حاول الهروب عبر الوادي. رؤية شيء لازال على حاله في مكانه الذي سقط فيه، يعطي إحساس غريبا بالراحة، يبدو أن الوقت توقف في ذات اللحظة.

“كل ما تبقى منهم هو العظام” هكذا قال حسن بتبجح. يرتدي قبعته العسكرية المموهة ويرفع غطاءها إلى الأعلى بينما أربطة أحذيته مرتخية. يمسح العرق عن جبينه ويقول “جاءت قواتنا من الأعلى مرورا عبر هذا المكان. وهذا ما وجدناه عندما قمنا بقتلهم.”

“لقد كانوا من مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية”، سلوك حسن الواضح يخبرني أنه لا يكترث لهم ويتوجب عليّ القيام بالمثل. لقد كانوا بالكاد بشرا عندما كانوا أحياء، ليسوا سوى عظاما ولحما وشراٌ مطلق. الآن بإمكاني إلقاء حجارة عليهم أنا كذلك، إن أردت. ربما هذا ما يتوقعه حسن مني.

يحرك جسده ويضع يديه في جيوبه. لا ينظر الي مباشرة عندما يتحدث، ولا يخوض كثيرا في تفاصيل المعركة التي حدثت هنا بشكل أكبر من أي مكان آخر: جاء الجنود، وجدوا مقاتلين عسكريين، قاموا بقتلهم، و انتهى الأمر. لا يمكنني الجزم ان كان هذا السلوك ناتج عن العار، او التواضع، أو الصدمة.

ولكن، ماذا لو أخبرني الحقيقة؟ هل كنت لأصدقه؟

كل ما يمكن للشخص تصديقه أثناء الحرب هو أن الجميع يكذب.

أثناء النظر عبر تلال صحراء البو سيف، كل ما يمكن رؤيته هو مزيج من الماضي والحاضر. تمر مسارات محافظة نينوى عبر سدود ترابية ودخان غارات جوية وقصف مدفعيات وقذائف الهاون، هذه الطرق الصغيرة تؤدي إلى مستوطنات شكّلت في بعض الحالات شكل شمال العراق منذ آلاف السنين.

كان طوب مباني بلاد ما بين النهرين في القديم يتشكل من الحجر والطين والقش والماء. كان الطوب جافا وقاسيا، وهذا ما ساعده على الصمود امام مناخ الشرق الأوسط الجاف وحرارته التي لا تطاق. ولكنه مع مرور الوقت، تفتت. من أجل تلك القرى ان تبقى، كان يجب على الأسطح أن تكون محصنة مرار وتكرارا. في بعض الأحيان، كان يتم تدمير هياكل القرية وإعادة بناءها حسب التصميم القديم، فيتم استعمال بقايا المباني التي صمدت في الماضي لاستخدامها كأساس لما تم بناءه لاحقا: يرتفع مبنى جديد من حطام مبنى آخر. هذه السلسلة كررت نفسها على مدى قرون، والتي أعطت تراكمات إعادة بنائها شكلا أشبه بتسلق مملكة جبلية ترتفع بروي نحو السماء.

في اللغة العربية، يسمى هذا الشكل بالتل (أو تلال في الجمع)، إذا قمت بحفر طبقاته، كأنك تسافر عبر الزمن إلى الوراء. في مدينة أربيل الكردية، على بعد حوالي 50 ميلا جنوب شرق الموصل، تقع قلعة من القرون الوسطى، انتصبت على بقايا حضارة من الألفية الرابعة قبل الميلاد. إن الدمار في العراق كان دائما هو أصل البقاء.

كل هذا كان بإمكانه أن يكون إرثا جميلا لو لم تخفيه سمعة البلاد التي تتسم بالتركيز على عنف وشراسة الإنسان. هذا الوضع لطالما وقع  تحت وطأة الاهتمام العالمي. العراق، حاله حال المنطقة الواسعة التي يتواجد بها، يتم رؤيته على أنه بؤرة من العنف و النزاعات الطائفية و الغزوات الأجنبية و الفظائع الجماعية والتمرد الإرهابي الذي لا نهاية له.

آخر هذه الآفات كانت في شهر حزيران/يونيو 2014 عندما قام مسلحي الدولة الإسلامية، في سيارات تويوتا هيلوكس لامعة محملة بمدافع رشاشة ملحمة، باجتياح الموصل والرمادي والفلوجة في الجنوب. عندها القى أفراد قوات الأمن العراقي أسلحتهم وفرّوا هاربين، وكأنهم يهدون القادمين الجدد أسلحتهم، ذخيرتهم، عرباتهم المدرعة و منشآتهم العسكرية، وظل ما يقرب من مليون مدني في محافظة نينوى تحت حكم المتطرفين.

في هذه الأرض العريقة الباسلة والتي لا يعني الموت فيها إلا القليل: فإن الجثث، سوآءا كانت الروح التي تغذيها نقية أم شريرة أثناء حياتها، فما هي الآن سوى بقايا يُبنى العراق عليها من جديد.

بعد أكثر من عامين، وفي أكتوبر من سنة 2016، بدأ ائتلاف من القوات المسلحة – العراقية والكردية والأمريكية والفرنسية والبريطانية والأسترالية – عملية استعادة للمدينة.  بحلول أواخر كانون الثاني / يناير، تم تحرير شرق الموصل تحريرا كاملا، بينما استقر مقاتلو الدولة الإسلامية على ضفاف نهر دجلة في البلدة القديمة، المكان الذي لم يتغير شكله المعماري ولا أزقته الضيقة، كالمتاهة، عبر مرور الزمن. يتواجد داخل البلدة القديمة مسجد النوري الكبير، حيث تمت مبايعة أبو بكر البغدادي زعيم الدولة الإسلامية، هذا المسجد تدمر كليا بعد ثلاث سنوات على يد أتباعه.

تطلب إخراج مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية، من هذه المتاهة العمرانية، الكثير من العمل الشاق و المضنى، ولكن في أواخر أبريل / نيسان، أفادت قوات التحرير أن عدد المسلحين في الموصل قد تضاءل إلى أقل من 1000. وبحلول منتصف حزيران / يونيو، سوف ينخفض العدد إلى أقل من 500. في هذه الأثناء، يجري هجوم صارم من أجل استكمال استرجاع المدينة: وحدات من القوات الخاصة العراقية والشرطة تتقدم من الجنوب، في حين أن الميليشيات الشيعية بالإضافة الى الوحدة التاسعة للمدرعات في الجيش العراقي تتقدم من الشمال و الغرب، حيث لازالت أعلام الدولة الإسلامية السوداء ترفرف فوق المباني المنتشرة على امتداد الصحراء التي تفصل بين الموصل و الحدود السورية.

ينتشر الموت في كل مكان، بأعداد مذهلة وصادمة. آلاف المدنيين قُتلوا أو أصيبوا جراء الغارات الجوية أو بسبب تواجدهم في خط المواجهة منذ بدء الهجوم على الموصل. في آذار / مارس، قصفت قنبلة أمريكية منزلا في حي الجديدة وحولته إلى كتلة من التراب، مما أدى إلى مقتل أكثر من 100 مدني، لقد كانت هذه الحادثة من بين أكثر الحوادث فتكا منذ الغزو الأمريكي للعراق عام 2003. كما شن مقاتلو الدولة الإسلامية هجمات بأسلحة كيميائية بينما كانت طائراتهم الصغيرة تراقب وتنشر الرعب في الأجواء. كان المسلحون يلقون قذائف الهاون بلا هوادة ويستخدمون المدنيين كدروع بشرية و يقومون بإعدام كل من يحاول الهرب. آلاف الجنود العراقيين لقو حتفهم، وآلاف أصيبوا، بينما امتلأت ثلاجات المشرحة في مدينة القيّارة التي توجد جنوب مدينة الموصل بجثث الضحايا. اما باقي الجثث فتم وضعها في غرف تم تعديل المكيف الهوائي فيها على 60 درجة فاهرنهايت ( 15 درجة مئوية )، وهي ادنى درجة حرارة يمكن ان يصل اليها جهاز التكييف.

تم تخصيص أماكن لدفن الضحايا و ذلك في مقابر منطقتي وادي عقاب ووادي الحجر، لكن القتال جعل الوصول إلى العديد من المواقع شبه مستحيل. هذا الوضع السيء جعل الأهالي يدفنون جثث أحباءهم، وفي بعض الأحيان جثث غرباء، في الحدائق الخلفية لمنازلهم، حيث يسكن الهدوء وتنتشر الخصوبة في ظل الدمار الشامل الذي تشهده المنطقة. عادة يقوم الأهالي بدفن أطفالهم في المكان الذي يموتون فيه، في نفس اللحظة وفي نفس المكان الذي كانوا يلعبون به منذ ساعات قليلة، حتى وهم يرتدون أقمصة ديزني.

ما يحدث لقتلى تنظيم الدولة الإسلامية – آلاف القتلى حسب تقديرات البنتاغون – هو أمر مغاير، لا أحد يريد الحديث عنه. في هذه الأرض العريقة الباسلة والتي لا يعني الموت فيها إلا القليل: إن الجثث سواءا كانت الروح التي تغذيها نقية أم شريرة أثناء حياتها، فما هي الآن سوى بقايا يُبنى العراق عليها من جديد. على الرغم من ذلك، عندما تسأل السكان عم ما يستحقه المتطرفون الذين قَتلوا واغتَصبوا ونَهبوا، بعد موتهم، فالجواب يكون بديهيا: لا شيء. “كل ما يهم هو تخليص بلدنا من الشر بأي شكل من الأشكال ومحاولة التأقلم والعودة إلى الحياة من جديد”. ربما يكون هذا جوابا منطقيا، ولكنه يظل غير كاف وغير مقنع، فالألم يتغلغل عميقا في نفوس الناس في هذه المنطقة، وتظل آثاره بادية حتى بعد نهاية القتال.

خلال رحلتي عبر الموصل، كنت أتوقع أن أشاهد حالات من العفو عن من يطلبون العطف و الرحمة من مقاتلي الميليشيات، ولكن هذا لم يحدث – على الأقل ليس بالسرعة التي كنت أتخيلها. اضطررت لأن أستمر في البحث عن أي شكل من أشكال العفو، لأنه وكما هو الحال في أي حرب، فإن الأحياء في العراق، هم الذين يساهمون في كتابة قصة الموت. الانتصار هو الذي منحهم هذا الامتياز، هم الآن يقومون بكتابة نص و شروط الخطأ و الصواب في رواية معركة الموصل من الجانبين، الواقعي و الأخلاقي، حيث يتم ربط  القصة بعيدا عن المصالح الذاتية و تدمج بالإيديولوجية و الوطنية اللتان تلعبان دور الحجاب الذي يغطون وراءه قسوتهم.

التحكم في قواعد الحرب هو الثغرة التي يستغلها كل المنتصرين، وكسرها هو بحد ذاته يجعل من الأبطال يتحولون الى أشرار. هذا هو الدرس الذي تلقنه الجثث والعظام المهترئة لمقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية في البو سيف.

II

توقفت أمامي سيارة هامفي مدرعة بصفائح مضادة للرصاص من كل الجوانب، حتى مضاد الصدمات الأمامي لها، بقربي كان حسن. بعد لحظة، أصبح المكان يعم بالفوضى والاستجواب والصراخ وسوء الفهم، كل فرد يريد معرفة الفرد الآخر، كل شخص يريد أن يعرف ما الذي يريده الآخر، و ماذا يفعل هنا، كانت لحظة فوضى مشبعة بجزء من الحياة الطبيعية في ذلك المكان. من جهة الراكب الأمامي للعربة، خرج شرطي فيدرالي عراقي، متبوعا بجندي قصير يرتدي نظارات أوكلي رخيصة ويبدو متحمسا لإرضاء قائده، أثناء ذلك، قام الجندي بتوجيه بندقيته نحو التلال من أجل تفقدها من أي تهديد محتمل. ثم قام حسن بإلقاء التحية العسكرية بشكل هادئ.

لقد بدا الفخر واضحا على محيي العقيد الذي كان يمشي بشموخ، لقد كان يلقب نفسه بصلاح. بعد استطلاعه للمنطقة، أعطى أوامره بتحرير القرية، الأمر الذي يجعله المؤلف الأساسي للقصة التي يتم إخبارها للصحفيين مثلي.

تكلم صلاح باقتضاب، وصفني بالصديق، بل أكثر من ذلك، بالأخ، حيث قال اننا نتحد من أجل القضاء على عدو مشترك، وأن النصر أصبح قريب، ونهاية الدولة الإسلامية أصبحت وشيكة. أخبرني أنهم يقومون بكل ما هو ممكن من أجل الانتصار، ولكن يجب علينا أن نتفهم أن النصر ليس سهل.

في هذه اللحظة، أشار صلاح الى أسفل التل حيث تتواجد العظام، فاتجه الجندي نحو عربة الهامفي بالخطأ، فسحبه من سترته ووجهه للمكان الصحيح وهو الوادي. اتجهنا إلى هناك عبر ممر ضيق، وأثناء نزولنا، كانت رائحة التعفن تزداد قوة، حيث أن قوتها كانت تخنق الأنفاس.

أراد صلاح أن يخبرني بما حدث هنا، حيث لا شيء ينمو وكأنه مستنقع ضحل. أخبرني بأن المعركة حدثت في يوم ممطر من شهر فبراير. كان يشير بيده نحو السماء وهو يرسم خطوطا من ملامح المعركة، اراني كيف ان زجاج سيارة الهامفي الأمامي مشقوق من طلقات الرصاص التي تلقاها، وكما أشار الى العدد الكبير من الرصاص الفارغ من البندقيات والرشاشات التي تم استخدامها للسيطرة على الوضع، كما تذكّر صراخ الرجال على الراديو و قال “لقد فقدنا سائق هنا”، ثم أشار إلى غطاء المحرك المرمي في الوادي، كما تكلم عن فقدان جندي آخر أثناء المعركة.

“لكننا قتلنا عدد كبير منهم “، هكذا استمر في حديثه، مشيرا إلى المقاتلين، كما أكمل حديثه قائلا “عدت في اليوم التالي من أجل استرجاع الهامفي ودفن بعض الجثث، لقد كنت أخشى الحشرات و الأوبئة.”

“نعم، هذا صحيح” هكذا قام حسن بالتأكيد على كلامه.

لا توجد أي حفرة في الأرض، الأمر الذي يعني عدم استعمال قنابل، أو قذائف هاون، أو حتى قنابل يدوية. لابد أن عدد القوات التي تم استخدامها لإلقاء القبض عليهم كان كبيرا – الأمر الذي يبدو غريبا، خصوصا، ومن المنظور التكتيكي، عندما تكون القوات منتشرة أثناء المعركة.لقد تم اعدام أفراد الدولة الاسلامية رميا بالنار بشكل فردي،  سواء في الوادي أو أعلاه.

بينما كنت أفكر في السيناريو، قال حسن ” دعهم يتعفنون، لابد أن يأتي أحد لاحقا ليدفنهم” ولكن هذا الشخص لن يكون من الشرطة أو الجيش، لقد اتفق صلاح وحسن على أن مهمة التنظيف ليست مهمتهم.

على الضفة الشرقية لنهر دجلة، شمال الموصل مباشرة، يوجد تلة يعود تاريخها إلى 600 سنة قبل الميلاد. عندما حفر علماء الآثار هذا التلة، والمعروفة باسم كويونجيك في خمسينيات القرن التاسع عشر، اكتشفوا مكتبة أشور- بانيبال و التي تعود للمُلك الآشوري. إحتت المكتبة على آلاف الألواح الطينية التي تعود بنا إلى واحد من أقدم مصادر الأدب المعروفة حاليا. بما في ذلك ملحمة جلجامش، قصيدة الملك الذي يبحث عن الخلود. أثناء رحلته، قام جلجامش باستدعاء صديقه المتوفي إنكيدو من أجل إخباره عن حال جنوده المتوفيين.

“هل التقيت بالشخص الذي مات في المعركة؟”

“لقد رأيته، لقد قام كل من أبيه و أمه بتخليد ذكراه بينما لاتزال زوجته تبكي فراقه”

“هل رأيت الشخص الذي تُركت جثته ملقاة على السهل؟”

“لقد رأيته، ظله لا يوجد حتى في عالم الأموات”

نفس النمط يسود العديد من الأعمال القديمة، بما في ذلك “الإلياذة”، حيث أنه في نهاية ملحمة هوميروس، يقوم أخيل بذبح هيكتور قائد جيش طروادة، وقام بسحب جسده عبر جدران طروادة، حيث تقول الرواية ” قام بعمل ثقب في أوتار كلتا القدمين، ثقب يمتد من الكعب إلى الكاحل، ومرر شرائط جلدية عبر الشقوق التي قام بها، وهكذا جر جسده بسرعة نحو العربة، تاركا الرأس موجهاً نحو الأرض”. بعد ذلك رفض أخيل دفن الجثة المشوهة، مما جعل الآلهة تفزع وتتدخل من أجل ضمان عودة جثة هيكتور سالمة إلى أهله. انتهت الإلياذة على توافق كل من الإغريق و الطرواديين على هدنة حتى يتمكنوا من إقامة جنازة لهيكتور.

أبو بكر، أول خليفة بعد وفاة الرسول محمد اعطى أوامره التالية

احترام الموتى أصبح من بين التعاليم التي تنص عليها الأديان الرئيسية، بما في ذلك الإسلام. قام أبو بكر، أول خليفة بعد موت الرسول محمد، بإعطاء الأمر التالي للمحاربين “لا تستخدموا الغدر ولا تحيدوا عن الطريق الصحيح ولا تنكلوا بالجثث.” كما أن المسلم الذي يموت في المعركة يصبح شهيدا. يُعتبر القرآن مبهما في الطريقة التي يتحدث فيها عن دفنهم، ولكن -الحديث، وهو الكلام الصادر عن الرسول محمد وفيه يشرح الشريعة الإسلامية، ينص على أن الشهداء يجب دفنهم بدمائهم دون غسلهم و لا تكفينهم.

في العصر الحديث، اصبح احترام الجثث أمر واجب من طرف الجيوش، حتى لو أنها تخص الأعداء، وذلك بناءا على القانون الدولي. تحظر اتفاقية جنيف التنكيل والقيام بكل ما هو غير أخلاقي بالجثث. كما تطالب باتخاذ تدابير معقولة لدفن الجثث بطريقة إنسانية، و في الوقت ذاته، يعتبر النظام الأساسي للمحكمة الجنائية الدولية أن “الاعتداء على الكرامة الشخصية بما في ذلك الجثث، جريمة حرب”.

احتضنت السلطات العراقية وبشكل رسمي، أقوال مأثورة يعود عمرها إلى آلاف السنين في مواجهتها مع تنظيم الدولة الإسلامية. وقد ذكر آية الله علي السيستاني، وهو رجل دين تقليدي بارز، في كتابه “المشورة والتوجيه للمقاتلين في ساحة المعركة” الصادر في عام  2015، على أن المقاتلين يجب أن يحترموا تعاليم الدين الإسلامي التي تقول ” لا تنغمس في أعمال التطرف، ولا تقلل من الاحترام تجاه جثث الأموات، ولا تلجأ إلى الغدر”. ووفقا لوسائل الإعلام المحلية، أكدت اللجنة المستقلة لحقوق الإنسان في كردستان العراق في رسالة في شتاء هذا العام إلى وسائل الإعلام على أن ” القيام بأفعال غير ملائمة ضد الموتى يعتبر أيضا انتهاكا لحقوق الإنسان”، يجب دفن الجثث في أماكن يسهل ايجادها ووفقا للمعايير الدولية، بالإضافة إلى إرفاقها بالمعلومات الشخصية داخل قارورة زجاجية حتى تتمكن العائلات من التعرف عليهم لاحقا – وهذا يشمل عائلات مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية كذلك.

مع ان تلك التدابير تتسم بالعدالة والاحترام فهي غالبا ما تكون مستحيلة، فنادرا ما يحمل المقاتلون أوراق تثبت هويتهم، فالأغلبية يحملون أسماء أو ألقاب حربية، والعديد من العائلات ترفض أقاربها الذين غادروا بيوتهم واختفوا خشية أن يتم ربطهم بالإرهابيين. مما يزيد صعوبة للتعرف هو انضمام أكثر من 20 ألف مواطن أجنبي إلى تنظيم الدولة الإسلامية في العراق و سوريا، حيث وصل عددهم إلى أكثر من 3000 شخص من بلدان الغرب.

كما أن تقلبات الصراع تعرقل الإلتزام الديني، فغالبية سكان العراق من الشيعة العرب يدفنون أمواتهم في أكبر مقبرة بالعالم، حوالي 5 ملايين قطعة أرض تمتد على أكثر من 4000 فدان في مدينة النجف، و التي تكبر سنويا حوالي  50 الف قبر. بينما في الموصل، والتي فيها أغلبية سنية (احتضنت المدينة كذلك كل من المسيحيين واليهود والأكراد والإيزيديين والأقليات الأخرى) مما جعل الأمر معقدا من حيث التركيبة الديموغرافية لمحافظة نينوى و التي أشار إليها T.E لورانس سنة 1918 بعلامتي استفهام). أن تنظيم الدولة الإسلامية يتألف من السنة. كلتا الطائفتين تقتضيان وجوب تنظيف الجثث (الغسل) و تغطيتها (الكفن) والصلاة بإمامة رجل دين، ثم دفنها في أقرب وقت من موعد الوفاة. على الرغم من التحفظات التقليدية حول التبرع بالأعضاء، فإن الأمر تغير الآن في ظل الحصار المفروض على العراق، أصبح الأمر يخضع للتشجيع لأن إنقاذ حياة رجل، تساوي إنقاذ البشرية جمعاء.

قبل بضعة أشهرـ اقترح بعض المسؤولين المحليين على أن يتم إنشاء مقبرة واحدة لمقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية – والذي يصبح بمثابة نصب تذكاري على هزيمتهم، ومكان يمكن لعائلاتهم زيارتهم به، حيث لم يكن للطقوس الدينية مكان في هذه المعادلة. الغرض كان ابقاء الجثث الممقوتة بعيدا عن تلك التي كانت بريئة أثناء حياتها. ولكن، ماذا لو تحولت هذه المقبرة إلى حج لكل من يعتبر هؤلاء القتلى شهداء في سبيل الله؟ جاعلين من الجثث المدفونة أبطالا؟ عندها سيصبح هذا المكان الذي دفن فيه مقاتلو الدولة الإسلامية مكانا لتخليد ذكرى جرائم  ضد الإنسانية من طرف المقاتلين أثناء حياتهم. هذا الوضع أدى إلى إلغاء الفكرة.

أن يتم نقلك ودفنك بإستعمال جرافة هي بالتأكيد نهاية مريرة، لكنها ستكون أفضل، يمكنني أن أؤكد لكم أن هذا أفضل مما كانت لتقدمه الدولة الإسلامية.

تجري المعركة بوتيرة سريعة هنا، حيث لا يمكن التنبؤ بمسار القتال. لا يمكن نقل الجثث بشكل منتظم عندما تتغير معالم وخطوط القتال بشكل مستمر. أن المقابر الجماعية – وهي عبارة عن العشرات من الجثث التي يتم دفنها بشكل جماعي في حفرة في الأرض – هي غالبا ما تكون أفضل ما بإمكان مدينة الموصل القيام به، حيث تُستعمل الجرافات من أجل الإسراع في نقل جثث المقاتلين، على شكل أنقاض، واحد فوق الآخر، ليتم دفنهم دون ترك أية وسيلة للتعرف عليهم على سطح الأرض. الحفر في المستقبل هو السبيل الوحيد لمعرفة من يرقد تحت الأرض، تركوا العار ورائهم بعد أن كانوا أبناء، إخوة، أزواج أو أصدقاء.

على أن يتم جرفك نحو الأرض ليتم دفنك هو بالتأكيد نهاية مريرة، تم تأكيد هذا لي من طرف جنود على أن هذه النهاية هي أفضل بكثير مما بإمكان الدولة الإسلامية تقديمه. لقد قامت هي كذلك بعمل مقابر جماعية بما في ذلك تلك الموجودة بمجرى خسفا، والتي تقع على بعد خمسة أميال غرب جنوب مدينة الموصل. هناك المئات أو ربما الآلاف من الجثث ترقد تحت الوحل و الماء، كل تلك الجثث تم اعدام أصحابها من طرف المتعصبين خلال احتلالهم للمدينة، حيث صار معروف أن المقاتلين يقومون بقتل أفرادهم المصابين ويحملون الجثث إلى أماكن غير معروفة بعيدة عن أرض المعركة. ” في بعض الأحيان، يحملون فقط الرأس معهم ” هذا ما قاله علي قاسم، وهو ضابط شرطة فيدرالي، كما أضاف “حتى لا يتمكن أحد من التعرف عليهم في المستقبل.”

كنا نركب في قافلة خلف الخطوط الأمامية في أحياء الموصل الغربية عندما قال لي قاسم هذه المعلومات، وهو رجل ممتلئ الجسم وتبدو عليه البساطة، كان يجلس في الجزء الخلفي من العربة ويرتدي معطفا مزركشا بألوان للتمويه. لقد كان ينشر ذراعيه على طول الصف الخلفي للمقاعد كما لو أنه أمير يسافر في عربة ملكية.

على الرغم مما يقوله قاسم، فعلى الأقل قام مقاتلو الدولة الإسلامية بدفن مقاتليهم في مدينة الموصل. هناك توجد مقبرة مؤقتة في قبو أحد الأبنية حيث تتناثر أكوام من العوارض الخشبية لتدعم السقف.  حذرني أفراد الشرطة من خطورة زيارة المكان. لا يريدون تعريضي للخطر من أجل أن رؤية المكان.

توقفت القافلة في حي الطياران بالقرب من محطة للأكل: كانت هنالك شاحنة تقوم بعمل المشويات و الفلافل و البامية المقلية وخبز الصمون. بالقرب منها يتواجد عدد من الأطفال الجائعين، جزء قليل من بين الآلاف المحاصرين في المدينة، لقد كانوا يضربون على الأواني المعدنية ليُسمع رنينها، هؤلاء الأطفال فقدوا أصدقاءهم الذين تم دفنهم في مكان قريب من هنا، ماتوا بسبب عدم معرفتهم أن الشيء الذي يظنونه لعبة، هو في الحقيقة عبوة ناسفة .

يوجد في نهاية الشارع جرافتان تزنان 32 طن من نوع D7R، اثنتان من بين 132 تم ارسالها من طرف الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية منذ عام 2015، كل واحدة يبلغ ثمنها ما يقارب 200.000 دولار. لقد أصبحت هذه العربات شبيهة بعربات الغولف، ليس لأنها تتلقى ضربات من الكرات، بل من الرصاص. لقد كانت علامات الرصاص واضحة على صفائح الآلة وزجاجها.

واحدة من بينها كان يقودها شخص عشريني اسمه محمد، لقد كان خجولا، ووافق بخجل أن يتحدث عن وظيفته الجديدة في الخطوط الأمامية مع الجيش. لقد بدأ قيادة الجرافة منذ بضعة أشهر فقط، حيث قال ” كلما قاموا بالتقدم، كنت أدفع ” وأكمل ” لقد كنا ننظف الشوارع من السيارات المحطمة و العبوات الناسفة و الألغام…”

قبل أن يتمكن من اتمام كلامه والحديث عن الأشياء الأخرى التي يبعدها عن الطريق، قاطعه قائده الذي بدا عليه الغضب. عندما كنت أسأل محمد ان كان يعرف المكان الذي تتواجد به جثث مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية، لمح قائده الذي أمره بالعودة إلى الجرافة، حيث قام محمد بتشغيل العربة التي عادت إلى الحياة من جديد. وبينما كانت الجرافة تبتعد، مرّت قرب رجل يجلس منحنيا على الرصيف كأنه لا يجد مكانا يذهب إليه، ولا شيئا يقوم به.

هنالك مثل لدى الكرديين يستعملونه عندما تفقد أي شرارة للأمل “حتى الشيطان رحل “.

III

وقف العقيد صلاح وهو واضع يديه على خاصرتيه بينما يسرد تفاصيل انتصاره في البو سيف. حكى لي القصة بتواضع كاذب لتبدو شيقة اكثر حتى يُستحق سردها من طرف الإعلام الغربي، وربما كذلك الأجيال القادمة من العراقيين الذيم سيكبرون هنا.

قال صلاح أن بقايا المقاتلين التي نقف أمامها الآن تعود لمقاتلين من السعودية وسوريا والعراق وربما ألمانيا. ولكن كيف بإمكاننا أن نتعرف على هوياتهم ان كانوا لا يحملون ما يعرّف عنهم أثناء مقتلهم في المعركة؟ لقد تساءلت مرة أخرى، كيف جاء هؤلاء المقاتلين الى هنا؟ لا يوجد سوى جسر صغير يمر عبر جانب التل ليربط الوادي بالآخر و الذي يربط الشرق بنهر دجلة. يبدو هذا الممر الخرساني وكأنه عبارة عن أنبوب طويل، تهمس الرياح من خلاله.

حاولت ان افهم المعركة اكثر، هل كان المقاتلين يريدون نصب كمين لقوات التحرير على الطريق أعلاه؟ تكتيكيا، الم يعرفوا ان القصف من مكان منخفض ومن خلال نفق ضيق كالأنبوب أمر غير حكيم؟ لقد كانوا هدفا سهلا للهجوم من الأعلى من طرف صلاح ورجاله، ولكنهم اشتبكوا في وسط الطريق ليتساقطوا في الوادي عندما أُطلقت النيران عليهم أثناء القتال. ولكن، لماذا وضعوا أنفسهم كمجموعة في مكان مكشوف أمام إطلاق النار، في مكان مفتوح دون أي امكانية للتراجع؟

حاولت الضغط على صلاح من خلال مترجم مرات عديدة حتى يشرح لي كيف مرت المعركة، هل كان المطر قويا؟ كم عدد المقاتلين الذين قابلهم؟ ما نوع المقاومة التي واجهها ومن أي مرتفع باغتوهم؟ كما أنني حاولت معرفة الطريقة التي تمكن بها من معرفة جنسيات المقاتلين الذين تم قتلهم.

قام حسن بركل صخرة، ثم أخرى. بينما كان الجنود الذين حضروا على متن الهامفي يضحكون مع حسن، كان الجندي المتحمس خلف صلاح كظله في كل خطوة يقوم بها ترقباً لأوامره، لقد كان يذكرني بالكارتون G.I Joe، لقد انزعجت فعلا من هذا الاستخفاف وعدم الاحترام.

رفع صلاح هاتفه وبدأ يضحك هو الآخر، لقد كان لديه شيء يريني اياه، شيء كنت أريد أن أراه، و تمنيت لو أنني لم أفعل.

جثث مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية متفحمة، مربوطة الأيدي، معلقة على الأعمدة أو مرمية على الطريق، أصبحت تُستخدم كخلفيات لصور السيلفي، كل هذا مجرد وصف بسيط لكل الانتهاكات التي شاهدها الصحفيون وعمال الإغاثة أو شهود عيان منذ بداية الهجوم على مدينة الموصل. هناك تقوم القوات العراقية أو حتى المدنيين في بعض الأحيان من تحقيق العدالة بأيديهم.

لمحت جثة معلقة في الجهة الأخرى من الطريق، يقول السكان أنها تخص أحد المقاتلين الذين كان مسلحا شرسا، لا أحد يفسر الطريقة التي انتهى بها هذا الشخص هناك، وإن كان الغرض من هذا الفعل هو إيصال رسالة إلى باقي المقاتلين، فهم قد رحلوا الآن. ربما هذا الأمر فيه فائدة للغرباء مثلي من أجل نقل الصورة كاملة. في مدينة الموصل، يقوم الجنود الشبان بمشاركة الصور والفيديوهات المليئة بالموت كما لو أنهم أطفال يتشاركون أوراق اللعب في الساحة.  من جهة أرى صورا لجثت معلقة بحبال متينة، ومن جهة أخرى صورا لجنود عراقيين بالقرب من جثتين متكتلتين بالقرب من دراجة نارية.

جميع المصادر تخبرني بأن كل شيء تم وفق القانون، اسأل العشرات من ضباط الشرطة والمسؤولين الحكوميين والشيوخ ويعطونني أجوبة غامضة حول ما حدث لجثث مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية. أخبرني أحد الرجال قائلا “عندما نجدهم، ندفنهم” بينما يقول الآخرون أنهم يسلمون الجثث إلى الأطباء مطالبين وزارة الصحة بإتخاذ الإجراء اللازم، بينما أضاف شخص آخر “المنظمات الغير حكومية هي التي تأتي وتأخذهم.”

يقول محمد محمود سليمان من الدفاع المدني العراقي: “ليس لدينا أي علاقة بجثث داعش، نحن نهتم فقط بالمدنيين”. ويصر أحد رجال الشرطة على أنه “من الواضح اننا نعرف إذا كان الشخص الميت من مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية و ذلك من خلال ملابسه القندهارية واسلحته”. يتكلمون بثقة كأن السلاح شيء صعب الحصول عليه في العراق، كأن الرجال الذين يعيشون في الدولة الإسلامية لم يكونوا مجبرين على ارتداء ملابس شبيهة بتلك التي يرتديها حكامهم، او اُجبروا على  إطلاق لحاهم بنفس الشكل، او لم يكن المدنيون يُجبرون على القتال لصالحهم، لكان التمويه مسألة حياة أو موت، وبالتالي سيلجؤون إليه.

المتطرفون يتنكرون ايضا. فهم يلبسون زي ضباط شرطة أو يحلقون وجوههم للتسلل إلى قواعد عسكرية أو مخيمات نزوح في ضواحي الموصل. يمارسون أسلوب الخداع حتى يتسللوا إلى ساحة المعركة، مستخدمين المدنيين كدروع بشرية وشوارعهم ومنازلهم كخنادق. اليوم، هناك ما لا يقل عن عشرة قتلى من المدنيين لكل مقاتل قُتل في الحرب، وفقا للجنة الدولية للمفقودين. في القرن الماضي، كانت النتيجة عكس هذا.

في حالة الحرب، العدالة بحد ذاتها لها حدود، فالأبرياء يحصلون عليها فقط عندما يكون ذلك ممكنا، فمن السهل أن تفقد الصبر في لعبة أساسها السرعة و الإنتظار الى ما لا نهاية. البيروقراطية كقاعدة، تتخلف عن سرعة القتال، وتكافح لجمع الأدلة على الجرائم قبل أن تختفي أو يتم تدميرها، كما ان العلم بطيء أيضا. تعمل اللجنة الدولية، التي أنشئت لحفر المقابر الجماعية في البوسنة في التسعينيات، الآن في الأماكن الأخرى التي تعاني من الكوارث، بما في ذلك العراق. هذه ليست المرة الأولى التي تزور اللجنة فيها البلاد، فقد بحثت سابقا في المقابر الجماعية التى خلفها نظام البعث المخلوع لصدام حسين.

هناك ما لا يقل عن عشرة قتلى من المدنيين لكل مقاتل قتل في الحرب، وفقا للجنة الدولية للمفقودين. في القرن الماضي، كانت النتيجة عكس هذا.

ان عمل اللجنة الدولية لشؤون المفقودين شاق وصعب وذلك لأنها تبدأ بجمع عينات الحمض النووي من المدنيين، ثم تحفر في مناطق الدفن لمقارنة الحمض المأخود من الأحياء بذلك الموجود في الجثث. يقول فواز أبو العباس، نائب رئيس بعثة اللجنة الدولية لشؤون المفقودين: “يقوم الناس بدفن الأموات بشكل عشوائي، مما يؤدي إلى ذوبان الأنسجة والعظام واختلاطها، لذلك فعندما نقوم بالحفر و الانتشال فنحن لا ننتشل جثث كاملة، بل ننتشل عظاما فقط”. التطابق الوراثي يساعد العائلات على معرفة ما اذا كان هذا الشخص هو الفرد المفقود أم لا، و قد تستعمل هذه المعطيات في المحكمة الجنائية، إذا توفرت.

لم تبدأ البعثة الحفر في مدينة الموصل حتى الاّن وقد يستغرق هذا الأمر شهور. يقول أبو العباس “هذه الإجراءات قد تكون طويلة و معقدة”. يمكن التخمين من خلال ما يقوله أنه يعلم بأنه لن يتمكن من اتمام مهمته – من المرجح أن يتم ترك جثث كثيرة دون التعرف على أصحابها في حُفر لتتآكل على مر الزمن. وما لا شك فيه أن هذه الجثث ستكون اكثرها لمقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية، والتي يتم النظر إليها على أنها جثت بدون قيمة.

بدأت اللجنة الدولية لشؤون المفقودين عملها في السنة الماضية في مدينة تكريت، تقع حوالي 150 ميلا جنوبا، حيث قام مقاتلو الدولة الإسلامية بإعدام 1700 جندي عراقي في شهر حزيران / يونيو من عام 2014 في معسكر سبايكر. حينها انتشر فيديو يظهر جنود ملقيين في حفرة في انتظار اعدامهم، بينما كان آخرون يلفظون أنفاسهم الأخيرة على ضفة نهر دجلة، قرب جاموس يرعى، وفي أعماقه ترقد جثث ما لا يقل عن 100 مجند عراقي.

بعض اللجنات الحكومية باتت تختصر مسار العدالة من أجل القيام بإجراءات سريعة لعقاب المخالفين. وصلت إلى قراقوش عند منتصف النهار، على بعد 20 ميلا شرق الموصل، هذه المدينة التي كانت تمثل أكبر تجمع للمسيحيين في العراق إلى أن هجّرتهم الدولة الإسلامية او هددتهم بالقتل. وقتها لقد كانت الشمس حارقة، احسست كما لو أنها مركزة علينا من خلال عدسة مكبرة عملاقة، في مكان يقشعر له البدن. العشرات من الأشخاص يتراكمون في المكان وذلك بسبب نقل محكمة نينوى المتحدة والتي كان مقرها في مدينة الموصل. في هذا المكان تتواجد العديد من الخيام التي تحتوي على طابعات من أجل إنتاج شهادات ميلاد ووفاة او زواج، جميع الأوراق التي صدرت في حكم الدولة الإسلامية تم إلغاءها ووجب استبدالها.

بينما انا اشاهد الخيام، وصلت سيارة “بيك أب”، توجهت الأنظار إليها بسبب الصوت الحاد الصادر عنها، اصطفت عدة سيارات شرطة صفراء و خضراء حولها. ترجل منها سبعة شبان، كُبلت أيديهم وعُصبت أعينهم بنفس النوع من القماش. يقول المرافقين أنهم اعترفوا بأنهم من أتباع الدولة الإسلامية. بعد ان تم انزالهم، وُضعوا في صف بالقرب من بوابة، التي عند فتحها سمعت صوت ضجيج و كأنها مشاجرة ثم صراخ امرأة غاضبة وهي تقول أن الدولة الاسلامية هي من قتلت زوجها. كانت أوجه الشبان لزجة جراء الأوساخ التي تعرضوا لها أثناء حبسهم. بعد ذلك تم سحبهم من أقمصتهم بشكل تغيب فيه الرحمة، متوجهين إلى الأمام حيث الواحد خلف الآخر وهم معصوبوا الأعين، ثم اهتزت البوابة خلفهم.

  • alexpottera-1498578346-71-13.jpg

    القبض على مسلحين مشتبه بهم في قراقوش.

  • alexpottera-1498507256-87-13.jpg

    حبر يستعمل للبصم على الإعترافات

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    مدنيون ينتظرون قاضي في قراقوش

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    أربطة كانت تستعمل لربط أيدي المساجين

بمجرد دخولهم إلى المقر الإداري، تم إخبارهم بمواجهة الجدار، حيث بدا الوهن والتعب على رقابهم. تم إخباري من طرف مسؤول من الداخلية، والذي رفض الافصاح عن اسمه، أنه تم القبض عليهم في نمرود، وهي مدينة آشورية قديمة تقع على بعد 20 ميلا جنوب الموصل. هذه المدينة الأثرية التي أصبحت حطاما، كانت في الماضي عبارة عن أسود منحوتة وثيران مجنحة، انتصار فوق دمار! أمرت بألا أتحدث مع أي فرد من المعتقلين، فهم من المحكوم عليهم بالذهاب إلى جهنم، أو الجحيم، والذي يجعلنا نتساءل عن سبب تسميتهم بأتباع الشيطان.

أخبرني مسؤول الداخلية بالأمر التالي: ” تم اعتقالهم بسبب انضمامهم ودعمهم لتنظيم الدولة الإسلامية، أو داعش” و أتم كلامه قائلا “بعد قيامنا بالتحقيقات وجدنا بأنهم لم يكونوا من القتلة”، بالتالي سيتم الحكم عليهم من خلال جرائم أخرى كدعم الدولة الإسلامية و الخلافة.  الآن سيقومون بترك بصماتهم والتوقيع على شهاداتهم. أتم المسؤول كلامه “نحن نقدم لهم الطعام و نوفر لهم الراحة ، بل إن طعامهم أفضل من طعامنا”.

بدا هؤلاء الرجال وكأنهم لازالوا مراهقين، حيث قال المسؤول:” معظمهم لازالوا صغارا، نحن لدينا محكمة للشبان أيضا”. ولكن لم يتحدث عن وجود لجنة خاصة في المحكمة للمراهقين، حيث أنهم بموجب القانون الدولي يجب أن يتم التعامل معهم بشكل مختلف عن البالغين.

حاولت الإقتراب من أحد السجناء، فقام بتحريك رأسه محاولا النظر عبر عصبة العينين، إلى أن حدد مكان صدور صوتي، كان لديه وشم على ساعده كُتب فيه “أحبتني ثم تركتني “.

أحب امرأة من الموصل خلال الأشهر الثمانية الأخيرة، أخبرني باسمها ولكنه طلب مني الا ابحث عنها، حيث أن كل شخص على علاقة بتنظيم الدولة الإسلامية من الممكن أن يصبح هدفا. علما انه خلال أسابيع فقط من زيارتي، وصل تقرير خاص عن السكان المحليين الذين يستهدفون عائلات مقاتلي داعش، حيث قُتل 11 طفل و رجل معصوبي العينين، تُركوا تحت أشعة الشمس الحارقة جنوب الموصل.

” نعم، بالطبع أحن إليها”، هذا ما قاله السجين صاحب الوشم.

احد السجناء كان لديه وشم على ساعده كُتب فيه

هنالك العديد من القصص حول رجال ونساء ساعدوا تنظيم الدولة الإسلامية من باب الضرورة، حيث لم يجدوا خيارا أفضل من ذلك، ولا طريقا للهروب من حياة لم يتمكنوا من تحملها. ربما كان هذا السجين واحدا منهم، متمنيا أن يملأ الفراغ الذي يدفعه الحب القاتل و الحماس الديني. ربما في يوم من الأيام، وإن نجا من كل هذا، سيتمكن من لم شمله بها، لقد عهد لها الوفاء عن طريق ترك بصمة من الحبر في جسده بسببها. وبما أنه لم يقتل أحدا، فربما سيتم العفو عنه من المصير المحتوم الذي يلاقيه القتلة، وهو الإعدام شنقا في بغداد.

أو ربما سيموت كضحية من ضحايا الحرب.

تم نقل الرجال إلى فيلا خاصة تبعد بضعة مجمعات سكنية و التي أصبحت الآن بمثابة محكمة. هناك غرفتان يفصل بينهما جدار رقيق في أعلى السلم الذي يحيط به دَرابْزين ذهبي كأنه سلم يعقوب الى الهلاك. في إحدى هذه الغرف يطلب الرجال والنساء من القاضي تعويضات عن الأضرار الناجمة عن النزاع، أضرار كسيارة مدمرة أو منزل مدمر، ممتلكات مفقودة، أو فقدان قريب. في الغرفة المقابلة، يتم استجواب الأسرى، دعاني القاضي سعدون الحسن إلى مشاهدة كيفية حصول الإجراءات وقال: ” نريدك أن ترى أن لدينا ديموقراطية.”

رأيت المحامون وهم ينتظرون ردود المشتبه فيهم في القتال لصالح داعش، من أجل مطابقتها مع التقارير التي مُنحت لهم من طرف الأشخاص الذين ألقوا القبض عليهم، أشخاص كالعقيد صلاح. جميع التقارير الأولية تدينهم، ولا وجود لشهادات من طرف ثالث، لا أدلة ملموسة، مجرد اعترافات.

يجتمع القضاة والمحامون في جلسة يملأها دخان السجائر. بعد التوصل إلى جواب مقنع لجميع الأطراف، وبعد أن يقوم المتهم بوضع بصمته على ورقة التحقيق، يشير القضاة بأيديهم فيما معناه أنه يجب أن يذهب إلى بغداد لينفذ حكمه، بهذه الطريقة التي تشبه نفض الهواء من الرماد يتم الحكم.

IV

بينما كان صلاح يضحك، قام بفتح البوم الصور في هاتفه بواسطة اصبعه السميك الذي يغطيه الوحل. لقد كانت الصور تظهر وتختفي من هاتفه إلى أن توقف عند شريط فيديو ووجه هاتفه نحوي بشكل أفقي حتى يريني الصورة كاملة.  لقد كانت الصورة المتوقفة في البداية تشير إلى الوادي الذي نتواجد به نحن الآن. قال صلاح:” لقد كان هنالك 7 منهم، واعترفوا”، تماماً مثل الأشخاص الذين يمثلون أمام المحكمة.

فيما يلي اعتراف صلاح نفسه: سبعة من عناصر الدولة الإسلامية استسلموا له ولرجاله في البو سيف في شباط / فبراير. بينما أصيب اثنان بجراح. وقال صلاح بعدها “بعد استجوابنا، أحضرناهم الى هنا”، واضاف “انهم مجرمو حرب ولذلك قتلناهم”.

تم اصطحاب البعض إلى المكان الذي نقف به نحن الآن حيث تم إعدامهم، وأضاف العقيد أنه أمر جنوده بدهس أحد المصابين بسيارة الهامفي من أجل إنهاء معاناته. شغل صلاح الفيديو والذي يظهر فيه وهو يصور الوادي الذي فيه الجثث الملتوية، والملابس المتسخة بالوحل والبرك التي وقعوا فيها حديثا. بينما سمعت صوت من الفيديو يقول “عقيد صلاح، لا يوجد لدينا الآن أي جريح او أسير”.

بعدها قام صلاح بالعودة إلى الصور، والتي ظهر في إحداها مقاتل قبل أن يتم إعدامه، وهو جالس في خلف السيارة، بينما كانت يداه مكبلتين. بدا وهو يتحدث بهدوء، بل بمرح مع الرجال الذين سيقومون بقتله بعد لحظات. يبدو أن هذه هي الطريقة التي يعرف بها صلاح جنسيات المقاتلين.

نظرت بعيدا عن الهاتف فلمحت دالية تزحف عبر صدع متواجد بالقرب من المعبر، لقد كان النفق مظلما حيث يبدو الضوء الضبابي الطويل المستطيل والصادر من الإتجاه الآخر كقبر بعيد.

يبدو أنه هنالك الكثير مما يجب إضافته أو حذفه من النسخة الأولى للقصة، النسخة التي كانت مفعمة بالفخر والتي يسهل استساغتها. قال لي صلاح أن واحدة من بين الجثث تم حرقها من أجل أن يحس رجاله بالدفء في برد الليل، حيث أن درجة الحرارة تصل إلى مستويات التجمد في شهر فبراير بعد غروب الشمس.

وأتم شرحه قائلا:” لقد كان الجو باردا جدا.”

الفيديو الذي قام صلاح بمشاركته مع الكاتب موجود هنا.

تحذير: يحتوي المقطع على مشاهد صادمة للجثث، حيث ان بعضها مجردا من الملابس. 

خلال زيارتي، قامت الشبكة الإخبارية لحقوق الإنسان (IRIN) برفع تقرير يشير إلى أزمة أمراض نفسية في العراق، هذه الأمراض تفاقمت بسبب “البربرية التي استخدمتها الدولة الإسلامية طيلة ثلاث سنوات دام خلالها الصراع و التي خلّفت إصابات جسيمة في صفوف كل من المدنيين و العسكريين و أدت الى نزوح جماعي” .  وقال التقرير “أن معركة الموصل شاقة للغاية مما جعلها تُخلف إنهاكا نفسيا وجسديا في صفوف القوات العراقية”. خلال تلك المعارك “شهد العسكريين فقدان العديد من الزملاء والأصدقاء حيث تمت تصفيتهم بطرق وحشية”. أكمل التقرير على أن: “العديد من الجنود اعترفوا لشبكة IRIN برغبتهم في الانتقام من أسر وعائلات المقاتلين من تنظيم داعش.”

ليس هناك عذر للوحشية، لكن هناك تفسيرات، ولكنها تظل غير كافية. فالوحشية تجاه الجثث من مظاهر الحرب النفسية.

قام التقرير الذي أعدته شبكة IRIN بوصف الطريقة التي قام بها شرطي فيدرالي عراقي بركل رأس مقاتل ميت، ثم قام بإضرام النار في كل من لحيته وشعر رأسه ثم صرخ قائلا “هل تظن أنك ذاهب إلى الجنة ؟” و إنهار باكيا على ركبتيه.

ليس هناك عذر للوحشية، لكن هناك تفسيرات، ولكنها تظل غير كافية

وبينما كنت استرجع ما قاله لي صلاح، اقترب مني عميد في الشرطة الفيدرالية العراقية في نقطة التفتيش الموجودة بالقرب من البو سيف. كان يرتدي خاتما فيروزيا وفي جيب قميصه قلم أزرق. قام بإخباري عن حادثة وقعت غرب الموصل، حاول خلالها رجل كان يعتقد أنه مدني، أن يفجر نفسه. ضغط الرجل على المفجر الملتصق بالحزام الناسف، لكنه فشل، فأمسك بندقية وبدأ يطلق النار على الناس عشوائيا إلى أن قتله العميد.

وأكمل حديثه قائلا:” أحيانا أتساءل كيف سيؤثر علي قتل جميع هؤلاء الناس”، “في البداية، كان من الصعب قتل شخص حتى لو كان مجرما، لأنه في الأخير يظل إنسانا” لقد كانت عيناه مليئة بالدموع التي لا تنزل أبدا. وفي ظل هذا الحديث، يأتي نسيم يحمل معه بعض القمامة ويرفعها في الهواء.

وأتم قائلا:” هذا الأمر يؤثر عليك نفسيا” ثم قال: “نفس الإحساس الذي تحسه عندما تقتل كلبا أو قطا و تتمنى لو أنك لم تكن مسرعا وقتها، لما حدث ذلك”. ولكنك تمضي قدما، ملقيا اللوم على المتغيرات الطبيعية التي لا نهاية لها، وتحاول إقناع نفسك أنه لا توجد طريقة لتتجنب ما حدث.

رأيت نفس سلوك العميد الإنساني تجاه الآخرين، وذلك من قائد الشرطة الكردي سيد هزار في شرق الموصل. وكان قد دفن ما لا يقل عن اثنا عشر من مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية في ذلك الجزء من المدينة في فصل الشتاء. وذلك من خلال سحبه ما تبقى من الجثث ودفنها في قبور ضحلة ثم تكوّيم أهرام من التراب كالتلال الرملية عليها. بينما كان يجلس في مكتبه في أربيل، أراني الجروح التي تعرض لها أثناء معاركه، على إحدى يديه كان الجلد قد كشط تماما وتمت معالجته، مشيرا ان الجلد ذاب نتيجة وجوده قرب سيارة مفخخة.

“لم أتمكن من توفير توابيت لكل القتلى” هكذا علق حول طريقة دفنه لجثث المقاتلين. لقد كان يجلس بشكل جانبي ورأسه غير منحني، وكان يقول كلمات كانت لتبدو طبيعية فقط للأشخاص الذين طالتهم الكارثة، وغريبة جدا عن الذين لم يعيشوها. وقد أتم حديثه قائلا:” ولكنني قمت بدفنهم من أجل حمايتهم من الحيوانات” وأكمل قائلا: “لقد قمنا بدفنهم من باب الإنسانية، وبعد دفنهم قمنا بوضع أحجار حتى تتمكن العائلات من القدوم وايجادهم في المستقبل”. هذه الحجارة المتواجدة بالقرب من المباني والمحلات والمدارس ليس عليها أي علامات.

هنالك أيضا منير أحمد قادر، شخص ممتلئ الجسم ويرتدي دشداشة رمادية، التقيت به في إحدى الطرق الخلفية لغوغالي، وهو حي على مشارف مدينة الموصل. أخبرني عن وجود مقبرة قريبة حيث يتم دفن المدنيين والعسكريين جنبا إلى جنب. ثم سألني:” إنها على بعد ثلاث دقائق فقط من هنا، هل تود رؤيتها؟”.

بعض المقابر بدت صغيرة جدا بشكل غير معقول، أخبرني قادر:

انتقلنا عبر ممرات ترابية كان العشب ينمو فيها فقط على الجنبات والوسط بين الممرات التي تخلفها عجلات السيارات فتصبح ممرا يتبعه أي شخص. وبينما كنا نبتعد عن الموصل، بدأت المراعي الخضراء تظهر أمامنا، كانت تمتد على انحدار ضعيف تجاه السماء المفتوحة. لقد كان الجو مسالما هنا. وفي أقصى حافة الميدان يوجد سور حجري يحيط بالمقبرة. بعض المقابر يعود تاريخها إلى الحرب العراقية الإيرانية. بينما كنا نقود العربة، قال قادر: “أنا مزارع للماشية، لكني بدأت حفر القبور منذ عمر 13 سنة”، “أخي وبقية عائلتي يدفنون الجثث مجانا ايضاً، لذلك أنا أعرف كل أسماء المتواجدين هنا “.

أشار بيده إلى بقعة من الأرض قائلا:” كل هذه المقابر تعود إلى شهر أكتوبر. نحن لا نكترث إن كانت لمسلمين أو إيزيديين، أيا كانو، فنحن ندفنهم لوجه الله.”

ثم أشار إلى عدة قبور لا تحمل علامات، قائلا: “هذه تعود إلى مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية”، مجموعها 12. كانت الحجارة مصفوفة بشكل جيد حول الجوانب، بعض المقابر بدت صغيرة جدا بشكل غير معقول، أخبرني قادر:” الجثة موجودة في كيس” وأكمل حديثة:” إنها مجرد أشلاء شخص ما.”

لقد قُتل هؤلاء في غارات جوية شرق الموصل. الأمر الذي دفع بالسكان إلى التقدم بشكاوى للسلطات الأمنية من أجل اتخاد إجراءات أمام رائحة الموت التي كانت تعم المكان. عندها تم إخبار السكان أنه ان لم يعجبهم الأمر، فعليهم بدفن الجثث أنفسهم.

وفعلا، فعلوا ذلك. تم كل ذلك بدون حضور لأي رجل دين، ولا أي مراسيم، وكانت الجثث لاتزال بملابسها، ولكنها على الأقل دفنت في مقابر مناسبة، الأمر الذي يبدو فيه نوع من الرحمة.

V

أرفض أن أصدق رواية صلاح الثانية قبل أن أقوم لوحدي بتفحص الفيديو، لقد وعدني بأن يرسله لي عندما كُنا في الوادي. وبالفعل، بعد بضعة أيام أرسل الفيديو وبعض الصور الى حاسوبي. ربما ارسلها ليزيل بعضا من الذنب الذي يثقل كاهله جراء ما حدث في وادي البو سيف. أو ربما يظن أن لدي رغبة في مشاهدة الدماء.

الفيديو والصور التي أرسلها صلاح لي توثق ما يحدث عندما تتحقق العدالة خارج نطاق القضاء. حيث كان ذاك الوادي هو المرقد الأخير لبعض من أكثر الأشخاص كرها على وجه الأرض. واحد من بين المقتولين كان شبه عار في الفيديو، بينما كان الآخرين فوق بعضهم البعض. لا يوجد سوى تفسير واحد للطريقة التي تجمعت بها هذه الجثث، وهو أنه تم وضع المقاتلين جنبا إلى جنب قبل القيام بقتلهم. مما جعل النسخة الأولى من الرواية لا تمت للواقع بصلة.

عدت إلى البو سيف من أجل إعادة النظر الى المشهد على ضوء ما أعرفه، من أجل البحث عن أي خيط يرشدني إلى أنه تم التعامل ولو بجزء من الإنسانية مع ما حدث. لقد كانت السماء التي تغطي القرية مكسية باللون الرمادي وكأنها خلفية مكونة من الكروميوم الغير قابل للصدأ، والتي تعيد للأذهان معركة الموصل ضد داعش. في غرب الموصل، لايزال المقاتلين يقاتلون حتى الموت كما لو كانوا فرحين بوصوله.

قابلت ثلاثة شبان في البو سيف في نفس المكان الذي قابلت فيه حسن وصلاح، ولكن حراسي العسكريين لم يريدونني أن أتحدث معهم، قائلين أن الوضع خطير في البو سيف بسبب الألغام. خلال رحلتي، كل ما كان يريده مرافقيني هو محاورتي للسكان العائدين الى الموصل، أو لرجال الشرطة ليخبروني عن المناطق التي تم تطهيرها، أو عن القنابل التي تم إبطال مفعولها، أو العبوات الناسفة التي تم تفكيكها. مظاهر النصر هي فقط ما يجب كتابته. هذه المرة استسلموا وركبوا عرباتهم وانصرفوا.

سألت الشبان عن مقاتلي الدولة الإسلامية الذين كانوا متمركزين في البو سيف خلال فترة سيطرتهم على القرية. محمد، وهو مربي ماشية في العشرينيات من عمره، قال إنه كان يعمل في متجر للأجهزة المنزلية قبل وصول مقاتلي داعش إلى الموصل، وعندها قام بالإشارة بيده إلى منزل مهدم و قال:” لقد كانوا يعيشون هناك، وكان لديهم مكتب في ذلك المنزل هناك” ثم قام بالإشارة إلى منزل آخر قائلا: “لم يكونوا ليزعجوك لو لم تسبب لهم أي إزعاج.”

من جهة أخرى، أخبرني أحد الشبان الذي لم يفصح عن اسمه أن بعض مقاتلي تنظيم الدولة كانوا يجبرون السكان على الإنضمام إلى صفوف داعش، بينما قال رجوان مزهر، و الذي يبلغ من العمر 22 سنة:” لم يكن العمل متوفرا، لقد كانت الحياة صعبة، في حين كنا نفتش عن الخبز، داعش كانت تحتفل.”

حاول بعض المسلحين الفرار عندما جاءت القوات العراقية لتحرير القرية هذا الشتاء، لكنهم قتلوا في غارات جوية. وقال محمد: “لقد أنهت الكلاب ما تبقى منهم”. بينما كنت أسأل الشبان عن قصة العظام المتواجدة في الوادي، أخبرتهم الرواية الأولى، ثم بعد ذلك الرواية الثانية التي يملأها الذل والإعدام والتدنيس.

أجاب محمد بشكل سلبي ” نعم، هذا صحيح”، كأنه يعرف ان رواية صلاح هي حقيقة مسلّمة منذ القدم. لقد تقلص واقع الصدمة بسبب كثرة تكرارها، ولكن، ورغم ذلك، فلا يمكن أن يكون قد مات الإحساس لديه بشكل كلي.

وبينما كنا نتجاذب اطراف الحديث، استشعرت رغبة الشبان في أن تُفتح الطريق الى الموصل قريبا. هم يرغبون في الذهاب للحصول على الخضراوات و الأطعمة الأخرى، من دون علمهم ان الطعام شحيح هناك أيضا، و أن أفضل خيار لهم هو التوجه نحو مخيمات النزوح.

عندما افترقنا، رفعوا أيديهم لوداعي بينما كانوا يسيرون في اتجاه معبر ضيق خلال الوادي، أثاروا انتباهي عند رحيلهم عندما أشاروا بأيديهم إلى شق ترابي، حيث كانت المزيد من العظام التي لم أرها بعد.

بدأ الظلام يكسو المكان، في حين أن العربات المدرعة تتسارع وكأنها تطارد الضوء. لمحت الوادي للمرة الأخيرة قبل أن أذهب. هذا المكان الذي رسمته قرون من الرياح والمياه، أصبح الآن مثقلا بالظلمة والصمت والفراق، مما يظهر الوادي وكأنه حي بشكل مؤلم.  

سمعت همسة ولوهلة ظننتها صرخة.