Held Together

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

By Lucy Sexton & Joe Sexton

LUCY

I am the daughter of a newspaperman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUCY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUCY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOE

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

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

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

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

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

“They’ve got guns,” Mea said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who is Mohammad David?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No God, please.

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

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

“You there?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Pierre said.

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

LUCY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It made me smile.

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

LUCY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUCY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUCY

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

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

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

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

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

JOE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUCY

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOE

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

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

I’d always found this both true and damning.

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

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

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

LUCY

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

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

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

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

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

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The Quality of Mercy

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

By Anna Altman

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

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from The Atavist Magazine

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I’ve Gone to Look for America

American Hindenburg

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The Curious Case of Nebraska Man

A fossil tooth, a splashy debate, and a strange chapter in America’s long history of science denialism.

By Madeline Bodin

The Atavist Magazine, No. 134

Madeline Bodin is a science and environmental journalist in Vermont. She has written for publications including Hakai, High Country News, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, and Popular Mechanics.

Editors: Seyward Darby and Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Julia Shipley
Illustrator: Lan Truong

Published in December 2022.

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1.

The rancher plucked the tiny tooth out of the sand of a dry creek bed. Around him was a grassy plain studded with low, flat hills. The small, dark object in his hand was worn down by use in life and by the water it had encountered over millennia. The tooth had long since petrified into stone.

Harold J. Cook had uncovered fossils in western Nebraska for much of his life. As a teenager in 1904, he led a paleontologist from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum to a trove of early-mammal bones. The fossils practically tumbled from a hillside on his family’s ranch, known as Agate Springs. Among the bones were remnants of Dinohyus, an animal resembling a pig that stood as high as eight feet at the shoulder, and the still mysterious Moropus, a horse-like creature that dug in the earth with hooves that resembled claws.

The news that the Cooks’ land was bursting with the bones of ancient mammals set off a polite war among the leading natural history museums, which hoped to gain exclusive access to the fossil beds. Harold’s father, however, wanted the institutions to work together to wring all possible scientific knowledge from what would be known as the Agate Fossil Beds. He never profited from the treasure on his land. His family’s contributions to paleontology were celebrated in other ways: One scientist named an extinct rhinoceros in his honor, and an antelope with two of its four horns on its nose after young Harold.

Another scientist, Henry Fairfield Osborn, lured Harold Cook to New York City to work at the American Museum of Natural History and to study with him at Columbia University. Cook returned home after a year to help run the ranch when his mother became ill. That meant he both knew the land and knew fossils, making him a valuable hire for any paleontology expedition in the region.

In 1917, the year the United States entered World War I, Cook assisted paleontologists from the Denver Museum and the American Museum in digs at fossil beds along Snake Creek, some 20 miles south of his family’s ranch. Whether he picked up the tooth while scouting for those excavations, during one of them, or sometime after, he never said. Broken bits of fossil, turned blue-black by iron phosphate, were common in the region, and had little scientific value compared with the bones of entire herds of pony-size rhinoceroses or the corkscrew-shaped dens of prehistoric beavers. But Cook believed he had found something truly special. Based on his knowledge of fossils, he suspected that the tooth belonged to a primate, and not a mere monkey—an ape perhaps. An even more tantalizing prospect was that the tooth belonged to an early human.

If Cook was right it would be a heady find, as scientists had yet to identify either variety of fossil in America. Meanwhile, paleontologists around the world were eager for evidence of so-called missing links—transitional fossils that could help prove that humans evolved from apes. Men who claimed to have found missing links often became famous.

Cook was correct about one thing: The tooth was important. But it would become part of history in a way he never imagined.

2.

Four years later, in October 1921, William Jennings Bryan stood behind an ornate wooden pulpit in the auditorium of the Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. The room’s delicate stained-glass windows glowed in the fading autumn light. Bryan had strong opinions about fossils and their potential to destroy the worldview that he and others in the room held dear.

The dozens of students and faculty who packed the auditorium, which also served as the seminary’s church, had every reason to expect that Bryan’s lecture would be an experience they would talk about for the rest of their lives. Bryan, then 61, was a national sensation at the age of 36, when as a Nebraska congressman his electrifying speech at the Democratic National Convention swept him into position as the party’s candidate for president. He went on to receive two additional Democratic nominations, granting him the dubious honor of being among only a handful of U.S. presidential candidates to receive electoral votes in three elections without prevailing in any of them.

Bryan, a lawyer by training, supported a woman’s right to vote, an eight-hour workday, a progressive income tax, the regulation of banks and the stock market, and the prohibition of alcohol. He despised the way unchecked industrial capitalism ground down working people, sometimes robbing them of their savings in bank failures and stock market swindles. He reserved special disdain for the financier John Pierpont Morgan. That Bryan himself lived a lavish lifestyle didn’t seem to mar his reputation: His plainspoken appeals to the average citizen earned him the nickname the Great Commoner. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson appointed Bryan secretary of state, but Bryan’s pacifism led him to resign the post two years later, when Wilson’s response to the sinking of the Lusitania signaled America’s march toward war in Europe.

Once out of office, Bryan didn’t recede from public life. He kept doing what he did best: give speeches. Public lectures were popular middle-class entertainment in the years before radio and movies were commonplace. Prior to his appointment as secretary of state, Bryan sometimes gave two of them per day on the Chautauqua and Lyceum circuits, sleeping in his train seat between engagements and using his coat for a pillow. Now he traveled from coast to coast to speak.

A devout Christian—among his first aspirations as a boy was to become a Baptist preacher—Bryan also wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column about the Bible and taught Sunday school classes to thousands of people in a public park in Florida, where he and his wife had moved for her health. He became such a popular religious figure that he was asked to give a week of lectures at the Union Theological Seminary, an honor typically reserved for the nation’s leading ministers. Bryan focused his talks on a topic outside his usual purview: science.

Bryan’s words, which still echo across America a century later, were some of the first shots fired in a new battle over evolution, pitting science against faith.

It was not a subject he had any special interest in prior to World War I, but during that conflict, Bryan told his listeners, European had slaughtered European without a thought that they were all children of God. He attributed that blind savagery to what in the end was his own flawed interpretation of Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution, which Darwin had introduced to the world some 50 years earlier. Bryan argued that Darwin’s painting of humans as the descendants of apes was a demotion in ontological priority that provided tacit permission for the deaths of millions. Bryan quoted liberally from The Science of Power, a book by Benjamin Kidd that linked Darwin to the “selfish” and “godless” philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. “Darwin’s doctrine leads logically to war,” Bryan declared.

War wasn’t the only thing Bryan blamed on the theory of evolution. He was also disturbed by reports, mostly from parents, that students were losing their religious faith by studying Darwin’s ideas, as well as geology, in college. “If it is contended that an instructor has a right to teach anything he likes, I reply that the parents who pay the salary have a right to decide what shall be taught,” Bryan said.

Bryan’s words, which still echo across America a century later, were some of the first shots fired in a new battle over evolution, pitting science against faith. Bryan further promoted his cause by printing hundreds of copies of a pamphlet containing one of his Richmond lectures. He sent it to editors and friends and in response to fan letters. A year later, the Union Theological Seminary published Bryan’s speeches in a book titled In His Image.

While Bryan was promoting the book, The New York Times invited him to contribute to its pages. Though he loathed big cities and East Coast elites—basically everything the Times seemed to represent—he accepted the offer. Bryan often drafted his public writings in a large scrawl, using either a soft pencil or a thick-nibbed pen. It was up to his secretary, a Mr. W. E. Thompson, to corral the wild stampede of letters into neat, typewritten lines.

Bryan’s New York Times editorial condemning Darwinism, which cribbed generously from his Richmond lectures, was published in the February 26, 1922, paper, a Sunday edition. Despite there being “millions of species,” Bryan declared, scientists “have not been able to find one single instance in which one species has changed into another, although according to the hypothesis, all species have developed from one or a few germs of life.”

Newspapers across the country reprinted the piece or ran glowing commentaries about it. If Bryan hoped to be God’s PR flack, he earned his full commission with that editorial alone.

However, one sentence from it would soon come to vex Bryan. Not only was Darwin’s theory an insult to God, Bryan had noted wryly, but it was also unpatriotic. Darwin “has us descend from European, rather than American, apes,” he wrote. An eminent scientist would soon seize the opportunity to turn Bryan’s quip into a taunt.

3.

By the gray light of a March day in 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborn took a close look at the fossil that had just arrived from Harold Cook. Osborn, the president of the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan, was perched on the window ledge in his top-floor office. He saw that the fossil was dark in color and small enough to fit in a pillbox. It had a crown and roots—undoubtedly, it was a tooth.

Osborn had taken a liking to Cook from the moment they met in Nebraska many years prior. “Harold Cook is one of the most attractive young men I have ever met,” Osborn wrote in a letter to his wife. “He knows all the fossils … is an ideal young ranchman, a good geologist—refined and charming.” Cook went on to coauthor a scientific paper with William D. Matthew, one of Osborn’s lieutenants at the museum, after finding dozens of fossils belonging to ancient rhinoceroses, rodents, and peccaries in the same fossil beds where Cook found the tooth that Osborn now held in his hand.

Two weeks before the tooth itself arrived in New York, Osborn had received a note from Cook. “I have had here, for some little time, a molar tooth from the Upper, or Hipparion phase of the Snake Creek beds, that very closely approaches the human type,” it read. Cook wanted Osborn to examine the fossil and give his expert opinion. Osborn would do more than that: The tooth was exactly what he needed in his fight against William Jennings Bryan.

While The New York Times was preparing Bryan’s article for publication, it had asked Osborn to write a rebuttal. Osborn had the swagger required to answer a former secretary of state who happened to be one of the most famous men in America. He had been museum president for 14 years and was a distinguished Columbia professor. At the age of 64, his days of digging in the earth were long over. He visited archaeological sites around the world to drum up publicity, not to get his hands dirty; with his well-tailored suits and push-broom mustache, Osborn did not object to having his picture taken.

Osborn had expanded his museum’s collections, facilities, and prominence in city life with his fundraising. His connections to wealth ran deep: He grew up in New York’s high society, with a railroad tycoon for a father and a mother who came from old New England stock. John Pierpont Morgan, a target of Bryan’s blistering political attacks, was his uncle; Theodore Roosevelt was a childhood friend. As a young man, Osborn traveled to Britain to study with the biologist and anthropologist Thomas H. Huxley, who was known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his fierce defense of evolutionary theory. Osborn even met the great man himself when Huxley gave an aging Darwin a tour of his lab, where Osborn at the time was dissecting a lobster brain.

Like Bryan, Osborn was a Presbyterian and a pious churchgoer; also like Bryan, he read the Bible regularly. But while Bryan worried that science was eroding faith, Osborn believed the two went hand in hand.

Osborn’s steadfast faith in God, and in what he believed was life’s innate yearning for higher forms, put him at odds with the growing number of scientists who accepted that human origins were messy. He couldn’t abide natural selection and what Darwin called “chance variation” as the mechanisms of evolution. To Osborn, evolution proceeded in a straight line and toward a definite goal.

In his written response to his adversary, Osborn strove to speak the language of a believer. He mentioned St. Augustine. He quoted from the Book of Job: “We find the guiding precept of the naturalist, ‘Speak to the earth and it will teach thee.’ ” He insisted that there was no conflict between science and religion, no clash between morals and empirical facts. “Evolution by no means takes God out of the universe, as Mr. Bryan supposes,” he wrote, “but it greatly increases both the wonder, the mystery, and the marvelous order which we call ‘Natural Law.’ ” Osborn saw evolution as God’s means of creating living things. He wanted Bryan and his followers to see it that way, too.

Osborn delivered his rebuttal to the Times’ offices personally. It was published on March 5, in another Sunday edition. Bryan soon launched an additional volley in this war of words, this time via the New York Herald. “Papers full of evolution of man and religion,” Osborn wrote in his datebook.

He wondered if he should retire to the Hudson Valley mansion left to him by his father to write a book countering Bryan’s campaign. Perhaps a fellow Princeton alum could help him. “Write to Charles Scribner,” Osborn’s datebook reads. He would meet Charles and his brother Arthur for lunch a few days after jotting down this note. The argument with Bryan was one that Osborn wanted to win, presumably one he felt he needed to win—for his own pride, for his museum, and for science.

The timing of the tooth’s arrival was almost providential, as if God himself were responsible. The fossil, which Osborn guessed to be a few million years old, might influence scientists’ ongoing search for humanity’s ancestors. More important for his purposes, it would almost certainly embarrass his rival. Perhaps, contrary to Bryan’s quip in the Times, there was an American ape after all.

“Tooth just arrived safely. Looks very promising. Will report immediately,” Osborn telegraphed Cook on March 14. Later that day, he followed up with a jubilant letter. “The instant your package arrived, I sat down with the tooth, in my window, and I said to myself: ‘It looks one hundred per cent anthropoid,’ ” Osborn wrote. “I then took the tooth into Doctor Matthew’s room and we have been comparing it with all the books, all the casts and all the drawings, with the conclusion that it is the last right upper molar tooth of some higher Primate.”

Osborn was known as a snobbish sophisticate, but in his letter to Cook he gushed with excitement. “We may cool down tomorrow,” he wrote, “but it looks to me as if the first anthropoid ape of America had been found by the one man entitled to find it, namely, Harold J. Cook!”

After dispatching the letter, Osborn set in motion a publicity machine that is hard to imagine working so swiftly in today’s scientific communities, with their safeguards like peer review. It helped that Osborn controlled one of the cogs. On April 25, the museum’s own scientific journal, American Museum Novitates, published a paper by Osborn announcing “the first anthropoid primate found in America.” Osborn named the newly discovered species Hesperopithecus haroldcookii.

The same day, Osborn used his influence to obtain a last-minute speaking slot—just five minutes, he promised—at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. He stood beneath an arched proscenium and addressed the most esteemed men in his field. “A single small water-worn tooth, 10.5 millimeters by 11 millimeters in crown diameter, signalizes the arrival of a member of the family of anthropoid primates in North America,” Osborn began, with the signature mix of exactitude and significance that characterizes so many scientific presentations. Near the end of his talk, around the four-and-a-half-minute mark, Osborn’s tone shifted. “It has been suggested humorously,” he said, “that the animal should be named Bryopithecus, after the most distinguished primate which the state of Nebraska has thus far produced.”

Osborn was of course referring to Bryan, and taking aim at his New York Times article. “It is certainly singular that this discovery is announced within six weeks of the day,” Osborn continued, “that the author advised William Jennings Bryan to consult a certain passage in the Book of Job, ‘Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee,’ and it is a remarkable coincidence that the first earth to speak on this subject is the sandy earth of the Middle Pliocene Snake Creek deposits of western Nebraska.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that, at the event, jokes about Bryan were “bandied about by octogenarian members of humorous proclivities.” Soon the New York Times published a feature, complete with jibes, about the former congressman’s feud with Osborn. Later the paper issued a pointed editorial on the matter. Titled “The Tooth of Time,” the editorial invoked Shakespeare to suggest that the fossil from Nebraska had appeared at the worst possible moment for Bryan. “Sharper than a serpent’s tooth it must seem to Mr. Bryan,” the editorial read.

Meanwhile, Osborn had casts of the tooth made and sent them to paleontologists around the world. If he was expecting agreement on the fossil’s significance, however, he didn’t get it. Arthur Smith Woodward, a curator at the British Museum of Natural History, needed just three paragraphs in the prestigious journal Nature to assert, gently, that the tooth was more likely to belong to a species of ancient bear known to exist in North America than to a primate. After all, no ape living or extinct was known to be native to the continent. Grafton Elliot Smith, another paleontologist in Britain, gave the early-20th-century version of a hot take: He declared the tooth to be one of a human ancestor and took the opportunity to restate, for a popular audience, his own racist notions of human evolution, which he saw as culminating in a superior northern European race. Smith’s take received splashy coverage in the Illustrated London News.

Osborn disagreed with both men’s assessments of the tooth, writing that Woodward had “shown too great incredulity” and Smith “too great optimism.” He also took issue with an unrealistic two-page illustration of “the ape-man of the Western world” that accompanied Smith’s article. In the image, drawn by Amédée Forestier, an artist who specialized in historical illustrations, two hunched, ape-like people stand on the bank of a river. Behind them are horses and camels, representing other fossils found near the tooth, and the low buttes of western Nebraska. One of the figures, a man, drags a wooden club. Though based on Forestier’s “fancy,” as Smith put it, rather than actual science, the illustration would inform the public’s conception of Hesperopithecus haroldcookii.

Osborn organized a team of researchers, including his junior colleague William K. Gregory, to study the tooth more closely. They published their findings in January 1923, along with photos, measurements, and a comparison of the tooth with one belonging to Java Man, the moniker given to what at the time was believed to be the earliest hominin fossil ever discovered. (Found in the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—in the early 1890s, Java Man would be formally designated a member of the species Homo erectus in 1950.) Osborn’s team concluded that the tooth belonged to a higher primate of some kind “hitherto unknown.”

Osborn was sure that the tooth would be a lasting contribution to science, crowning his illustrious career. He was a recognized expert in the study of ancient horses, elephants, and the rhino-like titanothere, and his prowess in promoting science to the public was unmatched. The tooth would distinguish him further, securing his place in the ranks of great men who studied human origins, a field maturing into what we now know as paleoanthropology.

But Osborn’s aspirations would be overtaken by events. Soon, evolution itself would be on trial.

4.

Bryan never wavered in his quest to squelch evolutionary theory. He was a staunch advocate for laws banning schools from teaching it, but success came in half measures. Oklahoma prohibited evolution from being mentioned in textbooks, but not the teaching of it; Florida declared instruction of the theory “improper and subversive,” but passed no law against it.

Only in March 1925 did Bryan finally secure a victory, when Tennessee outlawed the teaching of “any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Mississippi followed in 1926, as did Arkansas in 1928. In the meantime, the Tennessee law became the subject of a legal case orchestrated to be a public showdown.

The case is one of the most famous in history: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced that it was seeking teachers willing to challenge the new law in order to bring the question of its constitutionality before the courts. John Thomas Scopes, a 24-year-old teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, volunteered to be the defendant, incriminating himself by stating that he had taught the theory of evolution to high school students. Attorneys for the town agreed to prosecute him for violating state law in the hope of bringing publicity to a community that had seen better days. Scopes was indicted in May 1925.

A clock started ticking for Osborn. If he wanted to maximize sales of his book defending evolution, the one he had proposed to Charles Scribner three years prior, he needed to publish it before the beginning of a trial that was sure to be a national spectacle. He hurriedly finished writing—his 1922 Times article criticizing Bryan made up an entire chapter—and included a foreword that placed the book in the context of the legal dispute. He dedicated the book to Scopes himself, quoting from the Bible: “The truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Scribner rushed the text into print, with the title The Earth Speaks to Bryan.

As the trial approached and press coverage grew to a roar, reporters and editorials quoted liberally from Osborn’s book, favoring a sentence declaring that Bryan, not Scopes, was the man really on trial in Tennessee. Osborn’s chief asset in his argument against Bryan was the Hesperopithecus haroldcookii tooth, which he described as the “still small voice” of God that spoke to Elijah in the Book of Kings. In response, Bryan, who had secured a position on the team prosecuting Scopes, penned an article criticizing Osborn for believing “that a tooth in his hand is an irresistible weapon.” Bryan continued: “The Professor’s logic leaks at every link, but it is no worse than that of his boon companions who, having rejected the authority of the word of God, are like frightened men in the dark, feeling around for something they can lean upon.”

Osborn was expected to be one of the defense’s expert witnesses in Dayton. Prior to the trial, Scopes had traveled to Manhattan to visit his ACLU sponsors, and Osborn met with him to offer advice. He provided names of people he thought would be good witnesses and told Scopes to beware of support from leftist radicals; Osborn suspected it would hurt the case. But Osborn was too late. Clarence Darrow, a well-known defender of union leaders and anarchists, had already joined Scopes’s legal team.

The day of his encounter with Scopes, Osborn declined to testify at the trial. “Mr. Scopes was a little disappointed with the meeting,” the Chattanooga Times reported. Osborn said his decision was based on the fact that his wife was ill, but there may have been other reasons, including his distaste of Darrow. Still, Osborn agreed to show members of Scopes’s legal team around his museum’s Hall of the Age of Man, which featured reconstructed busts of prehistoric humans, murals depicting how they may have lived, and of course fossils. Osborn wanted the attorneys to see evidence of evolution for themselves before mounting their defense.

The organization of the hall reflected Osborn’s views on human evolution, including the idea that the races were different species, with the white race the most advanced. Like many prominent scientists of his day, Osborn was a eugenicist. He had persuaded Scribner to publish his friend Madison Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, an important rallying point for the eugenics movement, and even wrote the preface. (A few decades later, Adolf Hitler would call the book “my Bible.”) In 1918, Osborn helped found the Galton Society, a group of American scientists who supported selective breeding. In 1921, he hosted the Second Congress of Eugenics, where speakers discussed whether sterilization would protect desirable heredity—or, as Osborn believed, whether segregation would do the job.

How we love the stereotype of the haughty scientist, so sure that his knowledge makes him superior to most, if not all. But Osborn was not that man. It was not his erudition, nor his father’s money or his family’s place in society, that he believed made him better—it was his genetic material.

Osborn might have been content to spend the summer of 1925 promoting his ideas about evolution, inscribing copies of his book, and commenting on the Scopes trial from afar. But in mid-June, he received a dispatch from Nebraska. An Austrian paleontologist named Othenio Abel had discovered another tooth in the Snake Creek beds, and it was in much better condition than the one Harold Cook found. Albert “Bill” Thomson, a fossil collector in western Nebraska who worked for Osborn, was with Abel when he unearthed it. Thomson immediately wrote to Osborn informing him of the discovery.

Osborn wrote back to Thomson, marking the envelope “confidential.” The rancher who owned the land where the tooth was found was requesting $400 for the right to dig further, but Osborn thought it could be had for $150, as long as the rancher didn’t know how important the tooth was. “In the meantime,” Osborn wrote, “guard the tooth as if it were the Koh-I-Noor diamond, because I consider it priceless.”

Osborn sent his best fossil hunter to the scene. The man’s name was Barnum Brown. Some twenty years prior, Brown had scratched from the dry earth of Montana the bones of a large, carnivorous dinosaur that in a scientific paper Osborn had named Tyrannosaurus rex. Now Brown arrived in Nebraska with a chimpanzee skull, which Osborn had sent along so the team could compare the new tooth, and anything else they turned up, with a higher primate’s features.

As it happened, the rancher wouldn’t budge from his offer. With only $250, which Osborn had provided to cover expenses, Brown and Thomson resorted to sneaking around the site. In short order, they found another tooth and a jaw.

As the attorneys presented their opening statements at the Scopes trial in Tennessee, Osborn finalized plans to travel, but not to Dayton. Instead he would visit Nebraska, perhaps to convince himself that the new finds were everything he hoped they were. On the day the Scopes judge ruled against allowing the jury to hear scientific testimony, since in his view the only question at hand was whether Scopes had violated the law—a major blow to the defense’s dreams of making the case for evolution—Osborn boarded a train and headed west.

Osborn relished being back in the field. He enjoyed a camp breakfast surrounded by Nebraska’s low, flat hills. He was glad to see Cook again. In his datebook, he noted where in the timeline of early-mammal fossils his team’s new finds might belong.

But the biggest discovery would happen after Osborn returned to New York. A single day of screening gravel in dry washes at a new digging site revealed a dozen more teeth that could have belonged to primates, along with three bone fragments that everyone on hand interpreted as either human-made tools or evidence of their use. One looked like an awl with a hole in it, another was shaped like a “trowel or paddle,” and a third bore hack marks. “We discovered yesterday evidence of early man,” Bill Thomson wrote to his boss.

Osborn was “tickled to death and thinks this is the greatest find of the season,” Barnum Brown wrote in a letter of his own. Not least this was because Osborn was hopeful that the bones would mean defeat for his nemesis. Bryan could mock one tooth, but how could he deny a growing body of evidence that ancient primates, and possibly human ancestors, had inhabited his home state?

In Dayton, despite a fellow prosecutor’s protest, Bryan had agreed to answer questions on the stand. His testimony set the stage for the trial’s most dramatic day; the judge had to move the proceedings outside because of the number of spectators who showed up. Darrow peppered Bryan with questions about the Bible. Did he believe, as was implied in the story of Joshua, that the sun revolved around the Earth? He did not. Did he believe that Eve was literally made from Adam’s rib? He did. Darrow asked Bryan if he believed that the Earth was only some thousands of years old, where Cain’s wife came from, and if the first rainbow appeared following the flood that had necessitated Noah building his ark.

Finally, Bryan jumped to his feet and accused Darrow of slandering the Bible. “I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes,” Darrow replied.

The next day, the jury spent only a few minutes finding Scopes guilty, after Darrow had asked them to do just that. The trial had always been for show, and since the judge wouldn’t allow scientific testimony, Darrow wanted to hustle ahead to an appeal, seeing it as a second chance to bring evidence of evolution to a national audience by way of press coverage. (The ruling was overturned on a technicality, however, so the defense never got quite the case it wanted. The Tennessee law would remain on the books until 1967.)

Scopes was fined $100, which the ACLU intended to pay. Bryan also offered to cover the amount—a token of appreciation, presumably, for helping to bring the debate that was his life’s work to such prominence.

Osborn never got the chance to find out how Bryan would react to the new fossils from Nebraska. According to his biographer, Lawrence W. Levine, immediately after the trial Bryan seemed happy enough. He spent the next few days writing, traveling, and lecturing. Then, on the afternoon of the Sunday following the verdict, he laid down for a nap after dinner in Dayton and never woke up.

Bryan’s body was sent to Washington, D.C., by train. According to Edward J. Larson in his book about the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, admirers lined the tracks. Bryan was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. “What really moved him was a lust for revenge,” journalist H. L. Mencken wrote after Bryan’s death. “The men of the cities had destroyed him … now he would lead the yokels against them.”

An enduring effect of the Scopes trial was to help cement cultural stereotypes and deepen divisions like the ones Mencken described. In the years and decades that followed, the battle over evolution would continue to ebb and flow. And while Osborn’s primary foe was dead, his position on the front lines would soon shift.

5.

The intellectual empires of paleoanthropologists rise and fall based on fragments of rock and bone. So do their reputations. Osborn undoubtedly knew this, which might explain why he didn’t carpet the press or the scientific world with announcements about the 1925 finds in Nebraska like he had after Harold Cook’s discovery of the tooth.

Some of his colleagues expressed doubt soon after the new fossils appeared. Back in New York that August, Barnum Brown sent a letter to Bill Thomson. “In looking over the teeth,” he wrote, “I am still very doubtful as to whether they are ‘primate.’ ” Determining the truth would require locating a specimen attached to a larger fossil that could be more easily identified. “I think the question will not be settled until you find a jaw containing one or more of these questionable teeth,” Brown wrote. “So good luck to you.”

No conclusive judgment would be made for a few years. In the meantime, Osborn kept pushing his ideas about evolution. On at least one occasion he referenced the recent discoveries in Nebraska: In April 1927, at the bicentennial conference of the American Philosophical Society, he cited the tool-like bone fragments as “ancient evidence of man.”

The bulk of what he said at the meeting, however, meant that afterward nobody was talking about the tools. “I regard the ape-human theory as totally false and misleading,” Osborn told those assembled. In its account of the lecture, a newspaper in South Carolina wrote, “ ‘Fundamentalists’ may derive cheer, perhaps, from the recent statement from Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who takes issue with the ‘monkey theory’ of evolution.”

Osborn, of course, wasn’t a creationist, nor did his comments before the American Philosophical Society represent an about-face. Rather, he was laying out a theory he had been working toward for years. Osborn argued that modern apes and humans had evolved independently through distinct lines of ancestors, each having sprung from “neutral stock” millions of years ago. “We should now resolutely set our faces toward the discovery of our actual pro-human ancestors,” he said. Osborn believed those ancestors would be found in Asia.

Three weeks later, Osborn again presented his theory, this time closer to home, at the Medical Society of Kings County, in Brooklyn. Spectators filled every seat and spilled out the door, according to the Brooklyn Times Union. A neurologist joined Osborn to talk about the evolution of the human brain. The third speaker was William K. Gregory, Osborn’s deputy at the museum and one of the coauthors of the 1923 paper on Hesperopithecus haroldcookii. Gregory vehemently disagreed with Osborn’s ideas about human evolution, and it was he who grabbed the Times Union’s headline: “Suffer from Pithecophobia? Many Do, Says Dr. Gregory.” Pithecophobia, the paper explained, is “the dread of apes, or at least the dread of them as our ancestors or relatives.”

Gregory wasn’t done challenging Osborn. In December 1927, he published a retraction in the journal Science distancing himself from the previous findings about Hesperopithecus haroldcookii. The man Osborn once described as having “an eagle eye on Primate teeth” now argued that the tooth plucked from obscurity by Harold Cook did not come from a primate at all—it belonged to a kind of peccary. (Similar to boars, peccaries are native to North and South America; the javelina of the desert Southwest is a species of peccary.) “This much may be said: Nearly every conspicuous character of the type can be matched in one or another of the Prosthennops teeth,” Gregory wrote, referring to an extinct genus. In short, he claimed, Hesperopithecus haroldcookii had never existed.

Ironically, the whole affair was more or less anticipated in 1909, when on a dig in Nebraska, Cook and William D. Matthew wrote that some fossilized peccary teeth showed a “startling resemblance” to those of primates, “and might well be mistaken for them by anyone not familiar.” Cook himself was the person who would misidentify the first Nebraska tooth, setting in motion an unfortunate chain of errors. But in retrospect, he could be forgiven for the lapse, as could the men who subsequently examined the tooth. Scientists John Wolf and James Mellett wrote in a 1985 paper that it had wear patterns more typically seen on primate teeth than on those of peccaries. The most reasonable explanation, they wrote, is that “the tooth … was rotated in the jaw in life, and that its odd position produced the primate-like wear pattern.” It is rare for a tooth to twist in the jaw like that, but not unheard of—similar mammal fossils have been found. (As for the bone fragments, they weren’t tools at all. Wolf and Mellett noted that they had likely been “crushed and split” into their unusual shapes by hyena-like dogs.)

The New York Times covered Gregory’s retraction of Hesperopithecus haroldcookii with a front-page article and an editorial. “On the whole, it was a bad day for science,” the paper said. But science triumphs when mistakes are corrected. As the Times also pointed out, “Osborn and his colleagues can snatch consolation from the extinct jaws of the toothsome wild peccary. For science, as this incident shows, demands proofs even from its most exalted.”

Osborn appeared to take his disappointment like a gentleman, quietly accepting Gregory’s explanation of the tooth’s provenance. It may have helped that, except for the Times’ article and editorial, there was little coverage of Hesperopithecus haroldcookii’s abrupt erasure from the scientific record. In no small part this was because there seemed to be nobody to wield Osborn’s mistake against him—or, more precisely, no one of Bryan’s stature, deemed worthy of front-page headlines.

John Roach Straton, the pastor of Manhattan’s Calvary Baptist Church, which sat a few blocks from Osborn’s museum, tried to take up Bryan’s mantle. “I am writing to President Henry Fairfield Osborn respectfully suggesting … that he put this tooth in a handsome glass case … but change the name … to Hesperopigdonefoolem osborniicuckoo,” Straton wrote in a lengthy telegram to The New York Times, which published it. But even with his church’s radio station, capable of broadcasting his sermons over a 500-mile radius, Straton didn’t have Bryan’s name recognition or popularity. He died in 1929 without making much of a dent in the evolution debate.

Challenges to teaching evolution petered out, too. As Larson writes in Summer for the Gods, “Discussion did not resolve disagreement; each side so deeply believed its position that further information simply increased its vehemence.” But the country also had bigger things to worry about: the Depression, namely, and soon enough World War II.

Over the years, new scientific data would strengthen evolutionary theory—Darwin’s version, not Osborn’s. In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote that humans likely evolved in Africa because chimpanzees and gorillas, the great apes he believed to be humans’ closest relatives, lived there. But in the early 20th century, Asia had its supporters as the cradle of humanity, with Osborn leading the way. Given fossils such as Java Man, there was a logic to this thinking. Fossils, however, were only part of the reason Osborn placed his hopes on Asia. The other reason was his racism: Like many of his fellow eugenicists—and today’s white supremacists—Osborn believed that a light-haired, blue-eyed Aryan people had risen from central Asia and swept westward, becoming the Nordics, the pinnacle of humanity. However, as more remains of human ancestors were unearthed in Africa, including the first australopithecine fossils, discovered by Raymond Dart in South Africa and Louis and Mary Leakey in Tanzania, it became clear that the Asia-centric view of human evolution was illegitimate.

In 1930, Gregory published another paper challenging Osborn’s work in the study of human origins. Despite their differences, the two men remained coworkers and friends. When Osborn retired, he recommended that Gregory replace him as head of the museum. (The trustees selected someone else.) “It was greatly to Osborn’s credit that he refrained from using his power to silence his former assistant,” Gregory wrote in a biographical article about his longtime boss, “and that he always treated the latter not only with perfect fairness but with unfailing friendship, so that to the day of his death there was never a cloud between them.” Osborn died in 1935.

Most scientists forgot about Hesperopithecus haroldcookii. The tooth pulled from the Nebraska sand wasn’t even terribly useful as a peccary fossil. Still, there were some who would cling to what they insisted on calling Nebraska Man. These people, fueled by anti-science beliefs, would keep the memory of Osborn’s mistake alive for a century—and likely beyond.

6.

The Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum is the second largest of its kind in Montana, but you won’t find it on the state’s official “dinosaur trail.” The reason is hinted at in a sign at the reception desk. “The Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum is proud to present its exhibits in the context of Biblical history,” it reads. As visitors enter the exhibit area, they pass the same Bible quote that Osborn used in his articles against Bryan 100 years ago, displayed in ornate lettering: “Speak to the earth, and it will teach you.”

In a small display on the second floor are illustrations and descriptions of “fraudulent attempts to find the missing link.” There are three examples: Java Man, Peking Man, and Nebraska Man. The first two are still part of the scientific canon as human ancestors, but opponents of science are keen to flaunt doubt, however fleeting, as proof of absolute error. Peking Man, discovered in the 1920s in northern China, was lost during World War II, and at least one influential creationist has asserted that the fossil casts and drawings scientists have worked with ever since were falsified to support evolutionary theory. Eugène Dubois, the Dutch geologist who discovered Java Man in 1891, prevented other scientists from examining the bones for years, raising the question of whether they were fake. Despite being untrue, the hoax claim persists among creationists.

As for Nebraska Man, Robert Canen, the director of the Glendive museum, pointed me to the website of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) for insight. Articles on the site herald William Jennings Bryan as an important figure in the field of “creation science,” such as it is, and nearly everything Bryan said or wrote with regard to evolution after 1922 includes something dismissive about the tooth. “We use [Nebraska Man] to illustrate that many times attempts are made to fill in the evolutionary progression from an ape-like ancestor to humanity,” Canen himself writes. “Even things like a single tooth can be misinterpreted, often because of the researcher’s worldview and attempts to justify that worldview.”

That much is true, but other claims about Nebraska Man made by creationists are patently false. For example, some creationist websites claim the tooth was offered as evidence of human evolution at the Scopes trial. As court transcripts and newspaper accounts from the time show, the jury heard no scientific testimony about the tooth or anything else. Still, many Bible literalists have put Nebraska Man on the witness stand and kept him there.

Nebraska Man has become a tool wielded by the anti-science set to support the very arguments Osborn once hoped it would help refute.

Creationism regained ground as a political cause among fundamentalist Christians in the 1960s, likely because anti-evolution laws such as Tennessee’s were finally being overturned. In 1972, Nebraska Man made an appearance in a popular creationist book titled Evolution? The Fossils Say No! References to it have been widespread in creationist advocacy materials ever since. Nebraska Man is mentioned in books, on websites such as Creation.com and Evolutionisamyth.com, and in children’s workshop and museum displays, including one at Kentucky’s Ark Encounter, a creationist theme park that claims to have attracted millions of visitors since opening in 2016. These venues often suggest that Nebraska Man was more than an embarrassing scientific mistake—it was a hoax. “It looks very much like part of a deliberate campaign or even a confidence trick on the part of the leading American paleontologists and cannot be dismissed as a simple error,” a 2009 creationist article states. Amédée Forestier’s illustration of “the ape-man of the Western world,” despite being just a rendering for a newspaper, is presented as artistic “propaganda” for the fraud.  

If Osborn hadn’t been so eager to confront Bryan with evidence of evolution found in Bryan’s own backyard, if Bryan hadn’t let Osborn get under his skin, and if the press hadn’t been so keen to amplify their feud, perhaps an American ape would be just another disproved idea, quietly shoved deep into science’s junk drawer, alongside a geocentric universe and the lost continent of Lemuria. Instead, Nebraska Man has become a tool wielded by the anti-science set to support the very arguments Osborn once hoped it would help refute. If there’s an axiom in this strange tale, perhaps it’s that truth isn’t always enough to skewer lies.

This is never more the case than when lies have power on their side. Today, conservative state legislatures are attempting to ban matters of scientific consensus from being taught in schools: that human sexuality is diverse, that human-caused climate change is real. Meanwhile, conservative Christian leaders are some of the foremost kingmakers of U.S. politics and have the ear of multiple members of the Supreme Court—a potential boon for lawmakers in several states who over the past two decades have supported policies limiting the teaching of evolution. Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, an organization that provides resources for teachers, said that the court’s summer 2022 ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton, allowing a public high school football coach to pray midfield after games, may well influence how evolution is treated in classrooms. “While there is a difference between a football coach praying on the 50-yard line and teaching creationism in biology class,” Branch said, “it remains to be seen what the new legal landscape is like.”

In contrast to its status among creationists, Nebraska Man could hardly be more invisible to scientists. Broken into pieces after a nervous X-ray technician dropped it in 1925, then glued back together, the tooth is kept in storage at the American Museum of Natural History, stashed in a clear plastic box surrounded by the casts Osborn made of it 100 years ago. This description comes from the noted geologist Donald R. Prothero of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona: “The crown is completely worn away, so there’s not much that can be said about it.” It is “smaller than your pinky fingernail.” By email via a spokesperson, the museum stated that its collections staff couldn’t provide any details about the tooth.

Seen from a clear vantage, the story of Nebraska Man is one of how science works: Claims are made, developments veer in unexpected directions, our understanding of the natural world lurches forward. But vanity, zeal, and misinformation complicate that view. Osborn wrote in a 1925 article, “Nature is full of lurking surprises.” So too is history, as the fate of Nebraska Man shows.

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