Who Killed the Fudge King?

Who Killed the Fudge King?

How I (possibly) solved a cold case on my summer vacation.

The Atavist Magazine, No. 143


Tom Donaghy writes for theater, television, and film. His plays have been produced by the Atlantic Theater Company and Playwrights Horizons, among others. He created the ABC drama The Whole Truth and cocreated, with Lee Daniels, the Fox musical drama Star.

Editors: Jonah Ogles and Seyward Darby
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Kyla Jones
Illustrator: Nate Sweitzer

Published in September 2023.


The fudge sold at Copper Kettle was so creamy, so sweet, so beyond compare, that many candy shops on the Ocean City boardwalk didn’t even sell fudge, because there was no point. During summer vacations to the Jersey Shore in the 1970s, my father would take my brother and me as a treat, when we behaved. A pretty girl in a pinafore would greet us outside with a tray of free shavings. We’d load up on them until her smile strained, then proceed inside. Once we popped actual cubes of the magic stuff into our tiny mouths, we were as high as kids are allowed to be.

For decades, Copper Kettle lived in my head as a kind of childhood memory-scape: the salt air coming off the ocean, the shiny vats of molten fudge, the too much sugar all at once. Then, during the pandemic, my family decided to return to the Jersey Shore for my mother’s birthday, so everyone could gather outside. I told my brother we should make our way back to Copper Kettle, and he informed me that it had long since gone out of business. He had some more information too: about what had become of Harry Anglemyer, the man behind the fudge.

In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge factory—something that would’ve taken his Willy Wonka–ness to the next level—when he was savagely beaten to death on Labor Day 1964. His body was stuffed under the dashboard of his Lincoln Continental, parked at an after-hours nightclub called the Dunes. The case was never solved.

I spent the next two years sorting through a trove of whispers and accusations around the murder. At first I was just curious, but the more I learned about Harry—a figure beloved by friends and strangers alike—the more intent I was to identify his killer.

I scoured blogs, Facebook groups, newspaper archives, and thinly veiled fictional accounts of the crime. As one local put it, over the years a veritable “Jersey Shore QAnon” had blossomed around the murder, raising questions of culture, class, sexuality, and hierarches of power. I discovered a plausible myth, a trove of red herrings, and, finally, what appeared to be the truth.

Almost six decades on, I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it. When I visited Ocean City while reporting this story, a shop owner I engaged about Harry Anglemyer lowered her voice and said, “You know he was murdered, don’t you?”

I admitted that I did.

She responded, by way of warning: “You sneeze in this town and everyone hears it.”

The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth.

Harry Anglemyer, a stocky charmer out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was born in 1927. His high school summers were spent in Wildwood, New Jersey, where he apprenticed at Laura’s Fudge Shop. He was told that this was a little sissy. He didn’t care.

He left high school to join the Navy, served two years at the end of World War II, then returned to the Shore to open his own fudge shop in 1947. In those days, Ocean City seemed postcard perfect. Ten blocks at its widest, situated on a barrier island about 11 miles south of Atlantic City, it was lined with boarding houses, deep porches with rattan rockers, and striped canvas awnings that softened the summer sun. It called itself—and still does—America’s Greatest Family Resort.

The author Gay Talese, who grew up there, once described Ocean City as “founded in 1879 by Methodist ministers and other Prohibitionists who wished to establish an island of abstinence and propriety.” Prohibitionists remain. To this day, you can’t buy booze within city limits. Or have a cocktail at a restaurant. Or go to a bar, since there are none. If you want to bend an elbow, you must belong to one of the few private clubs that allow it. You can also import your own adult beverages, stopping at the Circle Liquor Store in Somers Point before entering town across the Ninth Street Bridge.

You would think that such a gauntlet might encourage at least a semblance of abstinence and propriety, but a 2017 USA Today article deemed Ocean City the drunkest city in New Jersey. It was and is a place of contradictions.

Just like Harry Anglemyer was a man of contradictions. He donated generously to civic causes and charities, including religious ones. He sat on the city’s planning board at the behest of the mayor. He joined the Masons and the chamber of commerce. He befriended prominent men and their wives, whom he squired to social functions when their husbands were busy. He hobnobbed with local luminaries, including the Kelly family of Philadelphia, who kept a summer cottage in Ocean City that Grace Kelly visited—first as a child, then as a movie star, then as a princess. Harry was so well regarded that 1,500 people showed up at the Godfrey-Smith Funeral Home in September 1964 to view his body. Businesspeople, politicians, and socialites came to pay their respects, packing the place with flowers.

Many of them also knew of Harry’s other, less civic-minded side. When he wasn’t delighting families with his fudge or charming the local elite, he liked to go out. He shut down bars. He was a fixture at Atlantic City’s racetrack, where he played the horses. He spent time at the nearby Air National Guard base. During the summer of 1964, he seemed to have acquired boyfriends from both locations.

Harry was, in fact, a little sissy.

Which everyone kind of knew. He was 37 and handsome, he’d never married, and he dressed fastidiously. He had a small dog, acquired on a trip to Fort Lauderdale—which, he confided to a friend, was perhaps “too obvious.” He once had a girlfriend who wondered why they weren’t having sex. She seems to have been the only one in the dark. Men both known and strange came and went from his large suite of breezy, ocean-view rooms above Copper Kettle, right on the boardwalk, where he lived in the summer.

Harry took no pains to hide any of this, an astonishing fact given the pre-Stonewall, postwar pinko-homo panic. In the early 1960s, and especially in small towns like Ocean City, which had a population of about 7,500 during the off-season, men were expected to find a girl and put a ring on her. Especially handsome men with killer smiles, fitted jackets, and penny loafers that shined like onyx.

But something saved Harry from too much scrutiny—for a time, anyway. He was an entrepreneur, and he elevated the boardwalk’s game. He saw the future, which might have been his shield. Other local business owners looked past his sexuality. They wanted even a little piece of his magic.

Harry placed gleaming copper kettles in the windows of his boardwalk shop, poured in liquid fudge, and positioned above them teenage boys with bronzed skin and sparkling white teeth, gripping big wooden paddles, churning and churning. Outside on the boardwalk, children panted as they watched, their faces cracked from too much sun, their bare feet sandy, their eyes wet and hungry. They wanted that fudge so bad. At night, after the last box was sold and the shop had closed, the kettles remained pin-spotted from above like Ziegfeld girls.

Money surged in like the tide. Soon Harry had shops in Atlantic City, Sea Isle City, and Stone Harbor as well. The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth. He purchased a two-story colonial in the Gardens, Ocean City’s fanciest neighborhood, where he lived in the off-season, and kept two cars: the Lincoln Continental where his body would later be found, and a Chrysler Imperial purchased just months before his death.

Most spectacularly, he acquired a blinding ring: five emerald-cut diamonds, approximately eight carats total, set in a band of white gold. It was valued at about $10,000, almost $100,000 in today’s dollars. Harry wore it everywhere. Which was quite a big deal. With the exception of a few families, including the famous Kellys, whose fortune came from brickmaking, Ocean City was for the most part a resort of the working class. Its tourists and year-round residents had likely never seen such jewels except on television, worn by the likes of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Or Liberace.

Harry’s success made him an object of allure and envy, though by all accounts he shared his fortune with others. He frequently bought dinners for his staff. He gave loans to friends and told them to take their time paying him back. (After his death, his family found a drawer full of IOUs.) He even had a brand-new clothes dryer delivered to a young mother burdened by a bad marriage. She wept knowing there was at least one good man in the world.

That’s what most people said about Harry: how good he was, generous and kind, fun-loving and curious. But in the summer of 1964, they noticed something else about him. The Fudge King was uncharacteristically on edge.

Harry was up against the upright citizens of America’s Greatest Family Resort who feared it would become another Atlantic City, that den of iniquity next door that was fast sinking into squalor and corruption.

Of course, the whole country was on edge. JFK had just been assassinated. Vietnam was heating up, and the draft was coming for young American men, including those stirring that fudge in Copper Kettle’s windows. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law on July 2, and now Ocean City could no longer confine people of color to the Fifth Street beach. (Before that, according to one resident, if Black beachgoers breeched the jetty that separated their beach from the other beaches, they were greeted immediately by a chorus of “Go back!”)

Meanwhile, the Mad Men era of whiskey sours and steak Diane was giving way to the Beatles, beads, and flower power. On August 30, the week before Harry’s murder, the Fab Four themselves came through Atlantic City on their first North American tour, and the young people of the state lost their minds.

The youthquake was on the horizon. The Greatest Generation was holding its breath. If Ocean City wasn’t immune from time’s great march, what was?

Certainly not Harry, who saw himself out in front of that particular parade, a fact he’d made clear two years prior by challenging Ocean City’s so-called blue laws. For decades the blue laws had handed over the seventh day almost entirely to the Lord. Most business was prohibited, unless it was church business. You attended service, then went home and kept quiet.

Abstinence and propriety were enforced, as merchants who occasionally tested the laws learned. Two arcade owners were fined for opening their doors; a grocer was arrested for selling a cantaloupe. But generally the boardwalk, both its amusements and its stores, remained shuttered. An ordinance forbade Harry from even making fudge on Sunday.

All this seemed ridiculous to him. How could a resort community be closed for business for an entire day every weekend? The weekends were the moneymakers! If it rained on Saturday, keeping beachgoers at home, it was a total bust. Harry had come to believe that “puritanical restrictions” were holding Ocean City back.

Some in town were inclined to agree. Those who owned businesses, specifically. They appointed Harry head of both the Ocean City Civic Betterment Association and the Ocean City Boardwalk Association. Harry seized the moment, gathering friends and colleagues, telling them that while it was fine for shops to be closed on Sunday mornings for church, they should be allowed to open for the remainder of the day. He further informed them that he would state his case privately to D. Allen Stretch, Ocean City’s director of public safety and the custodian of the blue laws.

Stretch did not agree with Harry. Even a little. He wasn’t about to have the so-called Fudge King tell him what to do, no matter how many business owners Harry had at his back.

Emboldened, affronted, or perhaps not quite reading the room, Harry refused to stand down. During a meeting at city hall, he decided to say aloud to everyone in town what he’d said to Stretch. All hell broke loose as an opposing faction coalesced—one that wanted to keep the laws in place. Harry was up against the upright citizens of America’s Greatest Family Resort who feared it would become another Atlantic City, that den of iniquity next door that was fast sinking into squalor and corruption.

Ocean City’s commissioners, wringing their hands, decided to put the matter of the blue laws to a referendum. When voting day arrived in May 1963, enough locals sided with Harry that the laws were relaxed, allowing certain shops to open their doors on Sunday for the first time. Newspapers reported Harry’s triumph over the pious prohibitionists, who were none too pleased.

This is where things get weird.

Three weeks after the referendum, Harry was arrested on three counts of carnal indecency, or what the press described as “homosexual behavior.” He was fingerprinted and booked at the Cape May County Courthouse. The thing that everyone had pretended to overlook was now being used to indict him. This was no misdemeanor. Sodomy laws were still on the books in New Jersey, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Interestingly, the accusers were all public employees: Thomas Sullivan, a bridgetender for the state highway department; James Luddy, who worked in the office of the city engineer; and a local detective, sergeant Dominick Longo, who claimed that “an incident” had occurred in Harry’s apartment above the fudge shop. An explanation for why Longo was up there in the first place came from none other than D. Allen Stretch, who announced that he had instructed Longo, an ambitious cop looking to advance his career, to “get the goods” on Harry because of complaints his office had received, although Stretch did not specify what those complaints were.

According to Longo’s New Jersey Superior Court indictment, Harry Anglemyer “unlawfully, malicious, lewdly and indecently did take the private parts of him the said Dominick Longo in the mouth.” Stretch insisted to the Philadelphia Inquirer that if Longo had permitted Harry’s “unnatural attentions,” it was only because he was “doing his duty.” (The other two alleged incidents came to light soon after Longo made his accusation—apparently, they’d gone unreported for years.)

Harry was furious. He vowed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that he would continue his campaign against the blue laws “despite this legal action which has been brought against me personally.” He then promptly filed his own complaint against Longo. He didn’t deny that there had been what the press called an “incident.” Rather he claimed that it was Longo who’d tried to force Harry into giving him a blow job.

None of this was a good look for America’s Greatest Family Resort. Yet however much the thought of homosexuality disgusted many people, some residents quietly agreed with their beloved Harry that Stretch and Longo were retaliating for his campaign against the blue laws. A grand jury, however, upheld the charges against Harry while dismissing those against Longo.

The first case—the one regarding Sullivan, the bridgetender—went to trial in early April 1964. Harry was acquitted in 18 minutes. The jury, it turned out, felt that something was amiss. Harry took the news in stride, telling a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was a “sitting duck for all the nuts around here until I beat the rest of these charges.” He then vowed to permanently dismantle Ocean City’s blue laws, come hell or high water.

The town roiled, people chose sides, and a trial was scheduled to litigate the remaining charges against Harry—the ones involving Longo—two weeks after Labor Day.

This is when friends noticed Harry’s fastidious presentation begin to fray. Trouble seemed to follow him. He was the victim of several robbery attempts. Some he reported, others he only discussed with friends. Investigators would later learn that he was rolled for money by two young punks, one of whom dragged him from his car at a stoplight and gave him a black eye in the middle of the intersection.

In the weeks leading up to his death, Harry sported not one but two black eyes. He laughed them off as injuries from clumsy falls or from dancing too hard and running into a wall. Maybe he didn’t want people to be more worried about him than they already were. One of his fudge cutters suggested that he hire a bodyguard. Harry said no thanks, he could take care of himself.

Later, people would speculate that he was meeting Longo, that the latter had suggested a late-night rendezvous to lure the Fudge King to his death.

Harry loved the Dunes, an after-hours nightclub just over the bridge from Ocean City, parked on a sandbar at the edge of Egg Harbor Township, an unincorporated no-man’s land. “Dunes to dawn!” patrons liked to say. Harry said it a lot that summer. He was well-known at the Dunes, to staff and patrons alike. Some even suggested it was where he’d met Longo the night “the incident” took place.

The music at the Dunes was loud, the beer plentiful, the air sweaty. On the night Harry walked through the door for the last time, 2,500 people were crammed inside, dancing to house bands the Rooftoppers and the Carroll Brothers.

Harry had been on a bit of a bar crawl that night. First he went to the Bala Inn to arrange for Copper Kettle’s annual employees’ dinner the following night—he told proprietor Engelbert Bruenig to expect at least 80 people. Then he was off to the Jolly Roger Cocktail Lounge, before heading to Steel’s Ship Bar for some live music. Next up was Bay Shores, followed by Tony Marts, where Bill Haley and His Comets sometimes jammed. Here, Harry invited two women to come with him to the Dunes, but it was 2 a.m., too late for their blood.

He tried again at O’Byrne’s—this time inviting a former Copper Kettle worker and his girlfriend. They too said no. On the way out, Harry asked Mrs. O’Byrne herself if she wanted to come with him. She declined.  

Harry continued on to the Dunes. He had to meet someone there. He seemed ambivalent about the mysterious rendezvous, but also determined to go. He mentioned this to a couple of people that night, in one of the many places where he was allegedly seen. Over the years Harry, like Elvis, was reported to have been seen in more places the night he died than would have been humanly possible.

Later, people would speculate that he was meeting Longo, that the latter had suggested a late-night rendezvous to lure the Fudge King to his death. If Longo could get Harry out of the picture, people theorized, there wouldn’t be a trial in September and Longo could get back to his ambition. (He would become Ocean City’s chief of police in 1975, and remain in that position for 20 years.) But considering the two men’s legal tango, it didn’t make sense for Longo to have initiated the encounter, much less at a place where they’d both be recognized. And even if Longo had made such a request, surely Harry wouldn’t have fallen for it.

Who, then, was Harry meeting?

Sometime between 3:30 and 4 a.m., his maroon-colored Lincoln, its whitewall tires dusted with sand, pulled up to the Dunes. The parking lot was so full, Harry had to circle the building, and two doormen would later recall him searching for a spot. He eventually found one on Ocean Drive.

Once parked, he proceeded in the side door, box of fudge in hand. (He’d brought every proprietor he saw that night their favorite kind, as an end-of-summer gift.) He settled in at the bar, where owner John McCann—a former bootlegger—bought him a drink. They shared some laughs, including one at Harry’s expense: When a man on the prowl for a date wandered over, McCann pointed to Harry and said, “Why do you need a girl when Harry’s right here?”

Harry laughed the loudest, bought people drinks, then fought off sleep while waiting for whomever he was supposed to meet. At about 5 a.m., he left.

Six hours later, as the tide went out and the mud hens squawked, one of Harry’s delivery men, making a fudge run to Atlantic City, observed his boss’s Lincoln still in the parking lot. Peering through the window, he saw Harry’s body wedged on the floor of the passenger side. Conspicuously absent was his spectacular diamond ring.

He was 37 years old.

The news hit the papers that afternoon. People in town were horrified to read that Harry had been found with “severe head injuries,” his skull fractured in at least two places. Though some were quoted as saying that Harry “practically asked for it,” or that he’d made “too many important enemies.” In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stretch and Longo expressed their regret that the criminal charges brought against Harry never resulted in his “being ordered to accept psychiatric treatment which he badly needed.”

The rumor mill roared to life. Was this a revenge killing? A robbery gone wrong? A crime of passion? Because it wasn’t immediately clear who had killed the Fudge King or why, a fog of dread set in. The Dunes was padlocked. The grocer who’d been fined for selling the Sunday cantaloupe claimed that he’d received an anonymous phone call warning him not to drive by the Dunes ever again—as he did every day on the way to market in Atlantic City—or he too might meet his end.

The investigation ran into an immediate snag: The crime had occurred on the busiest day of the year for New Jersey state police. Potential witnesses had already scattered to the winds. With the summer season coming to a close, some 150,000 people took to the New Jersey Turnpike, migrating back to their suburban lives in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. To make matters worse, there were no fingerprints in Harry’s car, the result of what police described as a “film of dust which adhered to the dampness of the dew from the previous night.”

But within 48 hours, investigators caught a break. They identified two witnesses to the murder: a young couple, Joyce Lickfeld and Kenneth McGinley, who were sitting in a red convertible parked two car lengths behind Harry’s Lincoln. The couple reported that when Harry approached his car after leaving the Dunes, he was with another man. Lickfeld and McGinley weren’t locals, so they didn’t recognize Harry or who he was with. The two men slipped into Harry’s car, and all was quiet for several minutes.

Then Lickfeld and McGinley heard someone shout, “Get out of here, you creep!” Harry and the man burst from the car and brawled onto Ocean Drive, tangling viciously. Soon after, the couple heard a loud crack as Harry’s head hit the pavement.

According to Lickfeld and McGinley, the man told Harry to get up, but Harry lay motionless, facing up toward the crescent moon. Cars began to honk; one, parked across Ocean Drive, seemed to do so with particular urgency. Suddenly, two men appeared out of the darkness, running toward Harry. They grabbed him under each arm and dragged him, penny loafers scraping the pavement, to his car. They told the couple that they had matters in hand. The couple, shaken, went inside the Dunes.

Lickfeld and McGinley helped police make a sketch of the killer. If anyone else saw what happened, they never came forward.

Months went by. The Dunes remained padlocked. Harry’s sister, Elaine, took over the fudge shops. Then months became years. Finally, in 1967, authorities announced that they had indicted someone, but not anyone who’d been whispered about by locals. Instead, it was a man named Christopher Brendan Hughes, 27, who was in a federal prison for his part in an extortion ring that targeted gay men. But while the Kansas City Star reported that “shaking down homosexuals had been Hughes’s major source of income for several years,” he insisted to the paper that he was no killer and pleaded not guilty to murdering Harry. Still, the authorities felt sure that they had their man—not least because Hughes had been in possession of Harry’s ring.

Harry’s sister told reporters that her family was glad to see a suspect in custody, and many Shore locals agreed that Hughes must have been the culprit. Three years after the crime, they were hungry for a trial, for answers. Meanwhile, Joyce Lickfeld did her best to keep her head down. She was told she would be the prosecution’s most important witness—she, not McGinley, had gotten a look at the killer’s face.

In September 1969, the case finally went to trial. This was just two months after the Stonewall riots, and the culture was shifting. Gay people were suddenly willing to fight their oppressors. Some were beginning to think of them as a protected class. In this climate, the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office might have felt a keener pressure to convict the killer of a well-known gay man.

Harry’s bloody penny loafers, slacks, Ban-Lon polo, and pinstriped jacket were entered into evidence. Scores of witnesses were called. Expectations ran high that there would finally be justice. But the whole thing sank like a stone. A onetime cellmate of Hughes’s named Ronnie Lee Murray, who had an uncanny ability to break out of jail—he’d managed three escapes in his career, and was even caught trying to flee his cell in the weeks just before the trial—refused to repeat under oath what he’d apparently told police during the investigation: that Hughes had confessed to the murder. Even being charged with obstruction of justice didn’t loosen Murray’s tongue. When the judge asked why he’d changed his mind, he replied, “I don’t want to get into it.”

A conviction would have to rely entirely on Lickfeld’s testimony. She took the stand and was asked to describe what she’d seen at the Dunes, and then to point out who in the courtroom resembled the man who killed Harry. Lickfeld fretted and fumbled and looked right past Hughes, who was sitting a few feet away from her. Instead, she pointed to a very surprised sheriff standing in the back. The courtroom erupted.

Hughes’s attorney, Leland Stanford III, called no witnesses. Hughes was acquitted in under an hour. His wife and sister leapt from their seats and cried, “My God!” The Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger reported that unless new suspects appeared, “law enforcement officials regard the murder case as closed.”

No suspects ever did.

The trial had been a horrible show, nothing more, she told me. She was glad someone “on the outside” was finally looking into the story.

For a long time, for a lot of people, this is how the story ended: abruptly, unceremoniously, with what seemed like more questions than answers. But a cohort of Ocean City residents insisted that the answers were right there for anyone who bothered to look. They believed that a toxic brew of prejudice, rage, and power had doomed the Fudge King.

I agreed, and thought that the story might make a great screenplay—a kind of South Jersey noir or David Lynch fantasia, where the flowers are pretty above the surface but gnarly worms lurk just below. Yet, soon I was hooked more deeply by the story of a fellow gay man living a relatively out life in the town where my family had spent our summer vacations. Someone whose reward for trying to yank Ocean City into the future was to become a target of hate and hypocrisy.

I started my research by reaching out to William Kelly, a journalist, local historian, and blogger who had written about the case on the ground in South Jersey. Initially we talked on the phone. His voice was reedy, phlegmy—I imagined him with a white beard and a fisherman’s cap. He assured me that the case could be solved entirely by the evidence from the investigation. But law enforcement didn’t have that evidence, he told me, because it had been destroyed. Which was convenient, he claimed, since law enforcement itself was involved in the crime. Ocean City power players at the highest levels.

There was someone he wanted me to talk to immediately: the young mother in a bad marriage to whom Harry had gifted that new clothes dryer. Now in her eighties, she remained angry about Harry’s murder, adamant that he’d been crushed by a cabal of powerful locals—and certain she knew who’d killed him. The trial had been a horrible show, nothing more, she told me. She was glad someone “on the outside” was finally looking into the story. She felt that it was time for “the truth to be known.” And while she insisted on remaining anonymous, she did have some information for me.

She was at the Dunes the night Harry was killed, she told me. Her father was a manager there. She saw Harry leave, and whom he left with. “Everyone knows who got away with murder,” she told me.

The killer, she claimed, was a ne’er-do-well from a prominent family. He was still very much alive, in Florida, to which he’d relocated soon after the crime. Where exactly in Florida she didn’t know. But she promised to engage his family in Ocean City, with whom she socialized on occasion. Perhaps they would tell her where he was.

For a while it seemed like this would happen, but then the balking began. “Maybe this whole thing wasn’t such a good idea,” she said. Then: “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone.” Then: “Oh, I won’t see his family for a while.…”

When I expressed my frustration to Kelly, he advised me to forget about her, but to follow up on what she’d told me. What I needed, he said, was to get my hands on a certain affidavit that would prove her allegations. The document in question, which Kelly claimed to have seen, was dictated by a milkman named Lou Esposito who’d been out making deliveries the morning Harry’s body was found. Esposito told Kelly that he’d driven by the Dunes, seen state police examining the scene, and pulled off the road to learn what he could. At that point, he claimed, he’d heard voices behind him in the marsh. “He didn’t have to die,” one of them supposedly said. Esposito then turned around and recognized three local men, including the one the young mother told me she’d seen leave the Dunes with Harry. He was throwing a bloody shirt into the water. Esposito then sped off, believing he’d gone undetected. That night, however, he got a call demanding his silence or else. Soon after, Esposito purported, he was awarded a long sought-after job with the fire department—a reward, he believed, for keeping his mouth shut.

At the end of his life, Esposito wanted to unburden himself, so he dictated all this to his lawyer. He then gave a copy of the affidavit to Kelly, who promptly made copies for several of his friends for safekeeping. Kelly had since misplaced his copy, and most of the people he’d given the others to had died—as had Esposito and his lawyer. The only person who might still have one, Kelly said, was a local architect named Jack Snyder. But Snyder didn’t return any of my calls. Or emails. Or letters. Because he had recently died.

I felt more than a bit of skepticism about the affidavit. But at this point, I was in thrall to the local myth, however unbelievable it sounded. I was also struck by an anonymous comment in one of Kelly’s blogs that said of this story, “I believe the delivery man you refer to was my dad. He told me many of the details you mentioned [before] he died in 2003.”

If this was Esposito’s son, perhaps he would know where the affidavit was. Kelly told me that the son had the same name as his father and was “listed in the phone book.” So I called him. Lou Junior picked up on the first ring, listened to my spiel about the affidavit, and paused before responding.

It was a dirty bit of business, he finally said—a broad cover-up, he agreed. Harry was a great guy who did a lot for Ocean City, and law enforcement had most definitely been involved in his death. Lou had been ten years old when Harry was murdered, and even then he knew that Harry was gay. Everybody did. But he couldn’t help me with the affidavit, because, he told me, I was talking to the wrong Lou Esposito. See, there had been two Lou Espositos in town, and I was talking to the son of the other one.

His father had known the Lou Esposito who supposedly gave the affidavit, because they used to get each other’s mail. His father had even made payments on the other man’s car loan before the mistake was discovered. The correct Lou Esposito had some daughters, he told me. Maybe they would have their father’s affidavit? They were still around, but he didn’t know their names: “They got married and stuff,” he said.

I longed to set sail from the land of dead architects and lost affidavits. I wanted concrete information. Preferably a gun that smoked.

I decided to return to Ocean City, declare myself a child of its summers, and talk to locals and the law enforcement agencies that had handled the initial investigation. Maybe doors would open, and documents—if any were left—would be coughed up. At the very least I could hear for myself that they no longer existed.

I flew from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in May 2022, picked up my brother and our mother—who asked, “Is it wrong to be excited about a murder?”—and headed down the Shore.

The three of us stood at 11th Street and the Boardwalk, where Harry’s flagship store had been. The shop was no longer the gleaming showstopper I remembered, and it now had the affrontery to sell someone else’s fudge. Above it was the suite of rooms where Harry had lived, where Longo went “to get the goods.” Its many windows were flung open, and inside a cleaning crew busied about, readying the place for summer.

Standing in the shade of the old Copper Kettle, the full force of what I experienced as a child suddenly returned. Something had never felt quite right about Ocean City: I could never really be a part of it, however much I wanted to. There was nowhere for someone like me, with my queer desires, to go in America’s Greatest Family Resort, except under or out.

Which made me wonder: Why had Harry stayed? Why didn’t he park his talents elsewhere? In the 1960s, large communities of gay people were establishing themselves in his hometown of Philadelphia and in New York. Harry had to know about them. Why would such a charming and innovative businessman remain in Ocean City?

Just then my phone flashed: “Cape May County Prosecutor’s Office.” The very office where Harry had been booked on lewdness charges. Before my flight, I’d left a message with Lieutenant Joe Landis, its LGBTQ liaison, thinking I’d have a sympathetic ear.

Landis told me that he was not in his office, that he was still working remotely because of the pandemic, and that the records on the lewdness charges against Harry were probably long gone. He suggested I call Captain Pat Snyder at the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office, which might have records on Harry’s murder.

I left Captain Snyder a message, then followed my mother into a bookstore, where she asked a clerk if they had any books on Copper Kettle. This was the clerk who lowered her voice and said, “You sneeze in this town and everybody hears it.” Realizing that I had a live one, I pushed the issue of Harry’s death, asking if she had any idea who might have been involved. She paused, then wrote a name on a piece of scratch paper and passed it to me.

“Longo.”

She then insinuated that Harry and Longo had been having an affair. My mother looked at me, her eyes big behind her glasses. On the same piece of paper, I wrote another name—the one given to me by the young mother in a bad marriage. The man she said had left the Dunes with Harry, the same man Lou Esposito allegedly swore was one of the men he saw in the marsh after the killing. I passed it back to the clerk.

She glanced at it. Yeah, he was involved, too.

Could she tell me more? She exchanged looks with another clerk behind her. No, she said, that’s all she had. Could she think of anyone who might tell me more? She suggested a local author who had written a book that included a chapter about Harry’s murder, albeit in fictionalized form. But the book was out of print. And its title escaped her.

I asked if I could have the author’s name so I could search for the book online. She exchanged another look with her fellow clerk. No, I could not have his name—he was a local who wrote under a pseudonym “because he knew too much.”

But he came into the store all the time, she added. I left my contact for her to convey when she saw him next. She promised she’d pass it along, to which I responded, trying to break the accumulating tension, “I’m just in it for the fudge.”

The two clerks chuckled, then fell silent as we left.

I decided to call the young mother in a bad marriage, to tell her that I was in town and that someone had just confirmed the name she’d given to me. She seemed startled that I was in Ocean City, claimed she was under the weather, and said she’d call back. I never heard from her.

Bells were ringing, locals were ghosting, and there was, I have to admit, something delectable in the Nancy Drewness of it all.

“Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office” flashed on my phone. Captain Snyder himself was now calling, intrigued by the message I’d left. His voice was serious, full, resonant. I launched into my spiel about the Fudge King’s unsolved murder.

“Was that the case where the victim was gay and romantically involved with a cop?” he asked.

He told me that he would ask around for any materials that might still exist, although after all these years it was probably a long shot.

I hung up and googled Captain Snyder. He was one of the top detectives in Atlantic County and a graduate of the FBI Academy. Not a bad person to have taken me seriously. Better still, from his online photo he looked to be somewhere in his forties—which meant that he was one or two generations away from anyone still spooked by the crime. Also, he didn’t stumble on the word “gay” like several locals had up to this point.

I circled back to William Kelly, the blogger. Could he meet? He suggested the Anchorage, one of the bars where Harry was allegedly seen the last night he was alive. I left my mother and brother on the boardwalk and drove our Kia rental to Somers Point, where the Anchorage, a candy-colored Victorian tavern, sits just a few yards from Great Egg Harbor Bay.

I immediately spotted Kelly at the bar—a big man in his seventies, ruddy, with watery eyes, his breathing loud and labored. He was sitting with his girlfriend, a Kewpie-ish redhead somewhere in her sixties, and a male friend, around Kelly’s age but smaller, taut, watchful.

Kelly told me that he’d just had a blood transfusion and wasn’t sure how long he’d last with his health problems. Every man is remembered for one thing he did on this earth, he said. Solving the Fudge King’s murder would not be his. He implied that he had bigger fish to fry, glancing around. His friends were silent.

I wondered if we shouldn’t move to a quiet corner. We were in full view of the other patrons. But he said that he wasn’t scared to discuss the crime out in the open, or to have written repeatedly about it over the decades, naming names and pointing fingers at people he’d known his entire life.

“What could they do,” he said, “kill me?”

Kelly told me not to put too much stock in Captain Snyder’s promise to help. “He had to say that,” he said. He offered more names of people who might have intel on Harry’s murder. A well-connected local who had mob connections. Another milkman who’s now a real estate agent. His friend suggested that I talk to a UPS guy who parked himself on a barstool at Gregory’s at 5 p.m. every day.

I felt myself once again drifting from the facts.

In the small talk gluing it all together, we got onto the topic of the Warren Commission. Kelly looked at me incredulously and said, “You don’t actually believe one gunman killed JFK, do you?”

I slumped, dejected and day drunk, into the parking lot—just as Captain Snyder called back. He had found something, he said, sounding a little amazed. Materials pertaining to the investigation.

What materials? I asked, astonished.

He was not permitted to say, he replied.

I said I’d be right over. He said no, I would need to file a public records request. The entire process would take some weeks, and he couldn’t guarantee that what had been found would be made available to me.

OK, I said, could he at least tell me the nature of what he’d found?

No, he could not.

Because the windshield of their convertible was covered with dew, she couldn’t see what was going on, so she peeked over it. That’s when she witnessed Harry being assaulted.

Back home in Los Angeles, I called a lawyer friend to ask her about submitting an Open Public Records application. She offered to be the Harper Lee to my Truman Capote, holding my hand as I drafted the request. She cautioned me not to get my hopes up: “Records in these cases could mean cops’ coffee receipts.” I worked with my Harper, lit votives, burned sage, sent my request, and was rewarded two weeks later with a terse email that read, “The agency possesses no responsive records.”

I called Captain Snyder with more than a little bass in my voice and said, “What gives?” He paused, reiterated that some materials had been found, and instructed me to file again—this time to a certain person’s attention. I refiled, cc’ing the good captain to let him know I meant business.

Two weeks later I received in my inbox 168 pages of investigative material pertaining to Harry Anglemyer’s murder: from the initial investigation by the New Jersey State Police, through the handoff to the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office some years later, and up to but not including the trial. The courtroom records, I learned after filing another request, had been destroyed, which was standard procedure at the time for any trial resulting in an acquittal.

Captain Snyder had been slyly schooling me about how to get what I wanted, and now it was pouring out of my printer. Scores of typewritten interviews and reports, much of it reprinted from old-timey carbon copies, then mimeographed, then digitized into PDFs. There were redactions everywhere, and big chunks of it were out of order, as if everything had been thrown loosely together and shoved in a filing cabinet.

I stayed up all night reading, ruining my eyes. The pages filled out gaps in the news reports from the day, revealing much that had been hidden from the public. I’d expected Mayberry-level ineptitude, but this was a comprehensive investigation with almost 100 witnesses, handled by the New Jersey State Police, law enforcement agencies in several other states, and the FBI.

According to news reports, they began by looking for anyone with damaged fists, as the assault had been so brutal. Meanwhile, they talked to people who’d seen Harry in the 24 hours prior to his death: His secretary, Daniel LeRoy. His sister Elaine, who also had an apartment above the fudge shop. Dunes staff who remained local when the summer ended. All of them were eliminated as suspects. Many couldn’t recall seeing Harry at all that night, nor could two Egg Harbor Township patrolmen assigned to the area—although one had noticed Harry’s distinctive car gleaming under the parking lot’s lights.

Two bartenders who’d been swigging champagne in the parking lot said that they’d seen Harry in the hours before his death with his head on the bar. Standing next to him was a man in his late twenties, taller than Harry, who had long dark hair and was wearing a dark suit; he was “possibly Italian.” The bartenders asked the man if Harry was “bothering” him. The man said no. They asked Harry if he needed help to his car. He said what he always said, that he could take care of himself.

The police interviewed Copper Kettle staff, including a former fudge cutter who’d apparently vowed to “get Anglemyer’s ring by Labor Day.” They also spoke to a local with a “Beatles haircut” who turned out to be one of the punks behind Harry’s black eyes. The young man claimed that Harry had grabbed him “by the privates,” then admitted to being after Harry’s ring too. Both the fudge cutter and the punk had criminal records. But when they took polygraphs, they registered no reaction when questioned about the killing. Police ruled them out as suspects.

Investigators soon located Joyce Lickfeld and Kenneth McGinley, who were in their twenties and had broken up earlier in the summer, only to run into each other that fateful night at the Dunes. They weren’t up to no good, as some newspapers implied—they were discussing what had torpedoed their relationship. (Eventually, the intensity of the investigation and their role in it would bring them closer, and they would marry.)

Police asked them to recount what they’d witnessed that night. Lickfeld said that they were sitting in the car when “two fellows” approached from the rear. One of the men, presumably Harry, was “walking like a girl.” The two men entered the car in front of Lickfeld, then, after a few minutes, exited and began arguing. Because the windshield of their convertible was covered with dew, she couldn’t see what was going on, so she peeked over it. That’s when she witnessed Harry being assaulted. McGinley intervened, offering his help. Harry’s assailant replied, “That’s OK, buddy,” as if he and Harry were just a couple of drunk friends having a bad night.

Lickfeld told police that she got a good look at the killer because she was sitting against the convertible’s passenger-side door, facing the Dunes, when Harry and the man walked by. She said that the man was in his late twenties, white but with a dark complexion, and sported slicked-back hair. He was “maybe of Italian extraction,” medium build, taller than average, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and black tie. This sounded to me a lot like the man the two drunk bouncers saw Harry talking to at the bar.

When the sketch of the killer was published in newspapers, people called investigators in droves.

It looked like a cook in a Wildwood restaurant who “beats up women and queers.”

Someone’s daughter’s piano teacher.

“That manager of Aunt Jemima Restaurant.”

“An usher at the General Motors exhibit” at the New York World’s Fair.

A man who “acted like a homosexual, spoke of hairdressing, and made remarks of being in Harry’s pad.”

People inserted themselves everywhere, throwing enemies under the bus, suggesting people who bore no resemblance whatsoever to the sketch, and offering up their opinions as they pretended to be Harry’s best friend—or distanced themselves from him when questioned about being seen with him that summer.

At one point, investigators wondered if Harry’s nephew Charles, who worked at Copper Kettle, was involved in the killing, but Charles denied it. He said that he’d always worried about his uncle. When Harry “talked openly about his homosexual problems,” Charles counseled him to “do it elsewhere,” so as not to get in trouble in Ocean City. Yes, he’d sometimes followed his uncle, but only to make sure he was safe.

Some of the more promising information came from Catherine Lee Gordon, Harry’s maid. Gordon had seen quite a bit while keeping house for Harry that summer. Men came and went via the apartment’s three entrances. Investigators asked her to provide names of everyone who’d visited the apartment that summer, especially anyone she thought was close to him. Straight away she mentioned jockey Howard Grant, whom Harry had picked up at the Atlantic City racetrack. Grant had moved into the apartment in July, bringing with him his mother and one of her girlfriends.

Gordon also told police about airman Thomas Campbell, who’d come into the picture even before Grant moved out. Gordon found him more agreeable than the jockey. Campbell liked to play the piano, so a besotted Harry had one delivered to the apartment. Next came Campbell’s friends for raucous parties; they liked to sing into the wee hours, full of whiskey. This was the kind of party that took place the weekend before Harry’s death, Gordon said. It started with dinner, after which a man who resembled the sketch stopped by. Harry showed him around the apartment, but Catherine didn’t get the man’s name.

All these tips were dead ends. There is no record of Grant ever being questioned by police, and case files show Campbell learning about Harry’s death from a mutual friend on the beach, then flying to Germany a few days later to fulfill his Air Force duties.

Longo’s name comes up three times in the entire 168 pages. The first is with regard to an anonymous letter that arrived at the offices of the state police. “Why don’t you ask Longo what happened?” it read. “A couple of the ones involved in those ‘morals charges’ would love to have Harry out of the way.” Later, a caller told police that the sketch of the suspect looked like Longo, then hung up after refusing to give her name. The third reference to Longo came courtesy of the man himself: He contacted an investigator to say that the sketch resembled a “drifter from Longport whose father has an Esso gas station.” Longo knew this man to play the horses and hang out at the Dunes, and Ocean City police had a warrant out on him for writing bad checks.

Stretch’s name appears once in the files. An anonymous caller claimed, “Stretch is the guy who put the money up to have Anglemyer killed, and three henchmen did the job.” The tipster promised to call back the following week with more information but never did.

If police followed up on these tips—including Longo’s drifter—there’s no record of it in the files made available to me. Nor is there any documentation of Longo or Stretch being questioned about Harry’s death or providing alibis for the night of the murder. Though parts of the file were redacted, nothing I read suggested that law enforcement considered either man a suspect. Lickfeld and McGinley don’t seem to have been shown their photos either. I couldn’t ask Longo, who died in 2006, or Stretch, who died in 1985.

As I was coming to the end of the files, I found something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up: a formal mention of the 1963 lewdness charges against Harry in a two-page memo issued by an Atlantic County detective. Dated the day after the murder, it lists his three accusers: bridgetender Thomas Sullivan, engineer James Luddy—but not Longo. Instead, the memo gives the third man as someone named Bill Blevin.

That was the name of the man the young mother in a bad marriage told me she saw leaving the Dunes with Harry. One of the names supposedly in Lou Esposito’s missing affidavit. The person the bookstore clerk believed was involved in the killing.

But how had Blevin’s name wound up replacing Longo’s in the memo? It appears nowhere else in the investigation files I received. And no one else I spoke to could connect Harry to Blevin.

I attempted to locate Blevin, turning up an address at a Fort Lauderdale strip mall and one on the Gulf Coast. Letters sent to both were returned. I reached out to his cousin Robert—who as it happened had worked with Longo on the local force before succeeding him as chief of police—and also to a surviving Blevin sibling, without success.

Then I got a tip. A friend of Blevin’s had heard that I was asking around, and he was willing to talk.

I was skeptical. The friend had been described to me by one local as someone who was less than trustworthy. Maybe so, but information he gave me checked out. He knew all the places Blevin had lived since leaving Ocean City when no one else did. And he provided me with Blevin’s obituary from 2002, printed by a newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee, establishing that he was not alive and well in Florida.

And the story he told me was this: For reasons that are unclear, Blevin had become a target of Longo’s ire and, knowing Longo’s expanding sphere of influence, set sail from the Shore forever.

This at least had a ring of truth. Longo, according to some of my local sources, had a history of personal retaliation. People started calling him King Dominick at a certain point because of the power he wielded around town. Still, this was just one man’s version of the past.

With Blevin’s obituary in hand, I was able to locate two of his children: Beth Blevin and Teri Gagliardi. My heart about stopped when they described their father as “Italian looking”—just like Lickfeld, McGinley, and the Dunes bouncers had characterized the man last seen with Harry. But the Blevin daughters also described their father as scrawny, which didn’t square with the description of the suspected killer. And neither Beth nor Teri had any recollection of the names Harry Anglemyer or Dominick Longo.

I was no closer to determining how Blevin’s name wound up in the memo instead of Longo’s. It certainly seemed odd, because everyone in town knew that it was Longo, not Blevin, who’d accused Harry of lewdness. (And Blevin’s name appears nowhere else in the investigation files.) Could Longo have replaced his own name with Blevin’s as part of his grudge against the man?

Maybe, so many years after the fact, no one could provide the answer. But I did begin to wonder if the erroneous memo naming Blevin, along with the references—or lack thereof—to Stretch and Longo in the case files, were the seeds from which a legend grew. Perhaps these mysteries made their way into Ocean City’s water, reaching people like William Kelly and the young mother in a bad marriage and the bookstore clerk—people perhaps inclined to believe that the grassy knoll was lousy with gunmen.

Just as bootlegging arose from Prohibition, so did the extortion of gay men arise from laws criminalizing queer behavior.

Over the course of the investigation, New Jersey law enforcement ruled out suspect after suspect until only Christopher Brendan Hughes’s name remained. He was the father of two small children with a common-law wife in Pennsylvania whom he hardly saw because he was busy extorting money from gay men from Baltimore to Chicago. His name was given to New Jersey state police by the FBI, after the bureau interviewed an associate of his named Thomas Rochford, aka Tommy Ryan.

The extortion ring Hughes and Rochford were in was known to police as the Chickens and the Bulls. The group’s MO was what law enforcement used to refer to as “fairy shaking,” where they would target a gay mark, then send in a “chicken” to lure the target to a hotel room. Soon after, a “bull” would bust into the room, flashing a badge and handcuffs, pretending to be a vice cop, and demand money. If the mark didn’t comply, the bull would threaten arrest, which carried the risk of being named a homosexual in the press.

The Chickens and the Bulls were an insidious success, managing to snare thousands of targets, from congressmen to military brass. It was rumored that they almost brought down Liberace, but Mr. Showmanship could afford to pay them off. Other men weren’t so lucky. They went bankrupt, got divorced, lost jobs—one Navy admiral even killed himself.

Law enforcement had long overlooked crimes against gay men, and even tacitly encouraged them. Just as bootlegging arose from Prohibition, so did the extortion of gay men arise from laws criminalizing queer behavior. But around the mid-1960s, law enforcement became interested in prosecuting the Chickens and the Bulls, in no small part because cops didn’t appreciate being impersonated by criminals. So began what the FBI referred to as Operation Homex, a coordinated effort to take down the Chickens and the Bulls.

Hughes was netted in the operation. He was a chicken—and an effective one. He was young. He was smart. He was pretty. And according to FBI files, Hughes took Harry’s ring to Chicago to fence it. The ring was later stripped of its stones. One became part of an engagement band given to the fiancée of one of the Bulls; another was placed in a tie pin for which a dirty cop held the pawn ticket.

Prosecutors couldn’t lean on other members of the Chickens and the Bulls to place Hughes at the Dunes the night of Harry’s death. Rochford was institutionalized—his lawyer said that his memory was “wiped from shock treatments.” The boss of the whole ring, Sherman Kaminsky, was in the wind. (The FBI didn’t catch him until 1978, when he was living in Denver under an assumed name and overseeing a business breeding rabbits.) Law enforcement interviewed some of Hughes’s associates from Marcus Hook, the hardscrabble Pennsylvania town where he grew up, but none of them were called to testify at trial. Instead the prosecution relied on Ronnie Lee Murray, Hughes’s old cellmate. But he ultimately refused to take the stand.

And then there was Joyce Lickfeld. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hughes looked “a good deal like the police sketch drawn of him,” the one Lickfeld made possible. But that wasn’t true. He had fair hair, blue eyes, and a slight build. “Slender and stoop-shouldered,” the Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger wrote, “looking more like a high school teacher than a brawler.” It’s no wonder that when Lickfeld looked around the courtroom for Harry’s killer, she didn’t finger Hughes.

But then hadn’t the prosecution showed Lickfeld photos of Hughes during the investigation? Only one person could tell me for sure.

Joyce was afraid because the case remained unsolved. She was worried that people might come for her.

Joyce is now divorced from Kenneth and remarried, with a different last name. She’s in her eighties and lives in a ranch-style home in a small central New Jersey town. Inside, on practically every surface, are seashells.

“I just love the seashore,” she said.

It hadn’t been easy to find Joyce, and at first she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk. Eventually she said yes, and we scheduled a visit via text, which included a lot of emojis on her end. Now we sat at her dining table having coffee. She’d put out an array of muffins. With her were her sister and her son with Kenneth.

Joyce had startling blue eyes, almost turquoise, and she wore a blouse of the same color. Her hair was chestnut red. Her manner was shy, and there was something about her that felt like it needed protecting. Which is perhaps why her son and sister were there.

She told me that for years she kept a scrapbook of news clippings about the murder. She wasn’t eager to bring it out. I proceeded gingerly. Joyce was afraid because the case remained unsolved. She was worried that people might come for her. She also felt partly responsible for the mysteries that had accumulated over the previous 60 years, and also guilty that she couldn’t help Harry’s family find closure. Even though she knew none of it was really her fault. Still, “witness trouble” was what law enforcement officials had blamed the collapse of the case on, and she was keenly aware that she’d been the prosecution’s sole eyewitness.

Her recall was quite good, and the account she gave me of the murder matched the one she’d given the police, including the sound of Harry’s head hitting the road, that crack so sickening she can still hear it today.

She did add one thing that she hadn’t mentioned to investigators: As Harry walked past the convertible where she was sitting with Kenneth, he was holding hands with the other man. Why hadn’t she mentioned this to investigators? I asked. Because, she said, such things weren’t discussed back then. Instead she told police what I had read in the files, that Harry “walked like a girl.” This was, she said to me, the best she could do in 1964.

As for Christopher Brendan Hughes, yes, Joyce had seen mug shots of him in 1967, when he was indicted. And back then she thought, sure, this could be the man from the Dunes. But she never saw Hughes in person until the trial, because he’d been in prison. When she finally did, it seemed to her that he could only be the killer if he’d lost a lot of weight and dyed his hair. Ultimately, she didn’t believe he was the man she saw that night. So she pointed to the surprised sheriff in the back, who had dark skin and hair, because of all the men in the room he looked the most like the culprit.

“Would you like to see the scrapbook?” Joyce finally asked.

She picked it up off a credenza behind her and placed it between us. In it were not only newspaper clippings about the murder, but also souvenirs from her life: coasters from the bar where Kenneth proposed, postcards, dried flowers. There wasn’t one section for the murder and one for mementos—it was all mixed together, showing her life, the good and the terrible, as it happened.

Was there anything else she wanted me to know? Only that she’d met Harry’s mother and sister at the courthouse right after the trial, and they told her she could have a job at Copper Kettle if she wanted. That meant a lot to Joyce.

After our visit, I went to Harry’s grave at Northwood Cemetery in Philadelphia. He’s buried in a mausoleum along with his mother, though it wasn’t his initial resting place. Mrs. Anglemyer had her son disinterred at some point and commissioned the much grander resting monument for the two of them. From it you can see the house they lived in when Harry was a child.

The cemetery was ancient, in disrepair. A groundskeeper led me to the plot, explaining that Harry’s mother had paid for “perpetual care.” The mausoleum gleamed, and the grass around it was mowed, while the rest of the cemetery was gray-brown.

Tucked in the iron grate of the mausoleum’s door, through which I could see Harry’s name and that of his mother on the crypt, was a small American flag—the kind you’d wave in a parade—and a nosegay of fresh flowers. Two striking flashes of color in an otherwise monochromatic landscape.

I remarked to the groundskeeper that the flowers and the flag must have been part of “perpetual care.” But he said no. He had no idea who’d put those there.

“Are you sure they’re all dead?” Joyce had asked me about the suspects. It was a hard question to answer—the uncertainty shot through the whole story meant that there were surely names of suspects I didn’t know about. But there were plenty I did know about, based on my interviews and the investigation files. Some of them had been ruled out by law enforcement, but I wasn’t convinced—the files weren’t thorough enough for that. I started making a list: men of interest.

Longo and Stretch were on it. So were Kaminsky and Rochford. Bill Blevin, though I had serious doubts. The fudge cutter who claimed he “would get Anglemyer’s ring by Labor Day.” Arthur Marshall Brown, aka Arthur Kebabs, and Frank Ozio—the punks who rolled Harry a few weeks before he died. A Dunes bouncer named Saba “Buddy” Taweel, who looked like the sketch of the suspect and whom Lou Esposito allegedly named in his affidavit as one of the men in the marsh near the scene of the killing. Frank “Birdman” Phelan, who’d gunned down a couple in the basement of a Philadelphia restaurant. John “Chickie” Binder, a diamond-obsessed burglar who, according to an informant, had spotted Harry at the Dunes that summer and knew him to be “an important queer” he might roll. Another Dunes bouncer. A Dunes doorman. Christopher Brendan Hughes’s associates from Marcus Hook, who had rap sheets and, in interviews with police, placed themselves at the Shore the night of Harry’s death.

I couldn’t ask the Atlantic County prosecutor who worked the case—the aptly named Solomon Forman—for his opinion on any of these names. He was long dead. I assumed other key figures from the 1969 trial were gone, too. But maybe not Hughes’s attorney, whose job it had been to at least consider alternate theories of the crime. Hughes was a small-time crook who, despite his success in the Chickens and the Bulls, surely didn’t have the money for a private attorney. Which meant that he would have had a public defender. Perhaps someone precocious, eager to make a name for himself. Someone at the start of his career. Someone in his twenties in 1969 who might still be alive.

After Joyce couldn’t identify Stanford’s client in court, the only thing Atlantic County had on Hughes was Anglemyer’s ring.

“My client was innocent,” Leland Stanford III told me. Hughes was only put on trial “because of all the public pressure, because of Harry Anglemyer being so popular and well-known.”

Stanford, like Joyce, is in his eighties. Retired now, he left the Jersey Shore over a decade ago and today lives in a beach community farther down the coast. He had more to say than anyone I’d talked to, and not only about Hughes, his former client. His memory of the trial was astonishing. He attributed this to it being an indelible moment in his life, his first high-profile case, an extremely heady time.

Stanford had never seen the case files—the process of discovery back then was much more selective—so I told him what I knew. And he told me what he knew. He said that the sheriff standing in the back of the courtroom, the one Joyce had pointed to, was a buddy of his, a man named Samuel Shamy who was, incredibly, the first cousin of Dunes bouncer Saba “Buddy” Taweel. Was I once again in the land of local conspiracy? Stanford said no, Taweel’s alibi was airtight. That his cousin was in the courtroom had been merely a small-town coincidence.

What Stanford did think significant was that Shamy and his cousin were of Lebanese descent, with dark skin and hair, as Joyce and Kenneth had described the killer having. Further, both men had a unibrow, as did the suspect in the artist’s sketch. This was the first I’d heard about this detail. But when I looked closely at the sketch, I could see what Stanford was talking about: a dusting of hair above the bridge of the nose. No descriptions of Hughes mention it.

Stanford had no knowledge of the Longo and Stretch theory, nor of the name Bill Blevin. He told me to be wary of narratives built up over time. His only concern was clearing his client based on what he knew from his own pretrial investigation. And he felt certain that Hughes had not committed the crime. “The first words out of his mouth were ‘I’m innocent,’ ” he said. Hughes was a career criminal, I pointed out, and one who extorted gay men. But Hughes told Stanford that he never would have gone after Harry, that he only targeted men who didn’t want the world to know they were gay. Stanford was saying that Harry was basically too out of the closet to be extorted.

He had a point. In fact, when Harry was accused of lewd acts by Longo and the other men, he didn’t deny being gay—he only denied the specific charges against him. He didn’t have a wife to worry about, or a boss who might fire him if the truth came out. He wasn’t the kind of target the Chickens and the Bulls preferred.

Also, after Joyce couldn’t identify Stanford’s client in court, the only thing Atlantic County had on Hughes was Anglemyer’s ring. “He looked nothing like the drawing, and there was no direct evidence of any kind identifying him,” Stanford said. It wasn’t enough to prove murder. Which Stanford didn’t believe Hughes was capable of, physically or otherwise.

Did Stanford have any idea who had killed Harry Anglemyer?

He said that he did.

Could he tell me?

No, he could not.

Why?

Because the person might still be alive.

Was he afraid that this person would come after him?

No, he said. They’d be very old at this point. And the case could hardly be retried after all this time, so he wasn’t being professionally cautious.

I changed tack: Why was he convinced of the real killer’s identity?

Finally, he said: “Because of some things Christopher Hughes told me.”

When other bars closed, Hughes and his friends proceeded to the Dunes. Inside was Harry Anglemyer, diamond ring blazing.

Suspicious of lawyers, Hughes initially represented himself. Eventually Stanford came on board, and midway through the trial, Hughes trusted him enough to take him into his confidence. He admitted to Stanford that he was indeed at the Shore the night of the crime, partying with some of his boys from Marcus Hook. When other bars closed, Hughes and his friends proceeded to the Dunes. Inside was Harry Anglemyer, diamond ring blazing.

According to Hughes, it was one of the other guys from Marcus Hook who targeted Harry—a guy who looked Italian. He wasn’t known to be a member of the Chickens and the Bulls, but was extremely close to Hughes—at the very least familiar with Hughes’s line of work.

Hughes, then, may have been one of the men who came running when Harry hit the pavement, who helped the real killer stuff him in the car. Hughes admitted to Stanford that he eventually absconded with Harry’s ring, which explained why he was able to transport it to Chicago.

Hughes’s version of the story describes a crime of opportunity that happened to involve a member of the Chickens and the Bulls. While I still didn’t have the real killer’s name, I was inching closer to the truth. But one thing still rankled me: Harry had told various people that he was going to the Dunes to meet someone. Perhaps the whole thing, I pondered, was more planned than Hughes admitted to Stanford. Maybe Hughes or one of his associates identified Harry over the summer from all the press they’d been reading in connection with the lewdness charges brought by Dominick Longo, with D. Allen Stretch’s support. Maybe they arranged to meet Harry that night for what they hoped would be an easy grab-and-go robbery, only to have it end in murder.

I ran all this past Stanford, who, ever the lawyer, refused to speculate. I asked him if he’d encountered the man Hughes had identified as Harry’s killer before.

He said that he had. Several times. The man actually attended Hughes’s trial on and off—though presumably not the day Joyce testified, lest she identify him. He also showed up, unannounced, in Stanford’s office during that time. Stanford didn’t know why and sent him packing. “I wanted nothing to do with him,” he said.

Which makes it all the more notable that the day after the acquittal, Stanford received a call from this man. “He sounded like he was partying,” Stanford told me. “He just wanted to make sure, in my opinion, that he could not be charged with the murder now. I told him no, it didn’t appear he could be. He would have been charged by then if prosecutors felt they had something. The fact is, they had stopped investigating.”

Did you ever give his name to anyone else? I asked Stanford.

He said that he had. To none other than Solomon Forman, shortly after the Hughes trial.

Forman, then in his sixties, never learned how to drive, so he often got a ride to the courthouse with Stanford. It was during one of these drives that Stanford told him that they’d picked the wrong suspect to prosecute, then offered the name Hughes had provided as the real killer of Harry Anglemyer

On hearing it, Stanford said, Forman became quiet. He then admitted that he’d thought the county’s case against Hughes was lousy, and agreed that the wrong person had been tried. Furthermore, he said that he’d been assigned to the case—he was Atlantic County’s best trial attorney at the time, and after five years of the Fudge King’s murder remaining unsolved, there was considerable pressure to put the damn thing to bed.

About the name Hughes had given Stanford, Forman didn’t disagree. “You are probably correct,” he said.

But if the wrong person was indicted, I asked, why hadn’t authorities retried the case with a new suspect? Because there wasn’t enough evidence, Stanford explained. Nothing physical certainly. And because no one wanted to touch the matter at that point. Prosecutors had spent five days putting witnesses on the stand, only to end up with a drubbing acquittal in under an hour. They had lost all credibility. Without an utterly airtight case, they weren’t going to charge anyone else with Harry’s murder.

I understood that to get the suspected killer’s name from Stanford, I would need to prove that he was dead. Immediately after our call, I snail-mailed him the obituaries I’d assembled of everyone I considered to be a suspect. I would have sent them via email, but for some reason Stanford never received the other messages I sent that way. He never called me either, so after I knew the obituaries had arrived, I called him. Repeatedly. Comcast kept telling me that his cell phone was offline for “service interruptions.”

When I got through, an excruciating week later, I asked him if he was satisfied that the person he believed had killed Harry was well and truly dead.

He was, yes.

Was he now prepared to tell me his name?

He was. And he did.

The name made immediate sense. Investigators had tried to reach him as they looked into Harry’s murder, but were unable to locate him.

It was Kevin Hughes, Christopher Brendan Hughes’s younger brother.

Kevin had a longer—and more violent—rap sheet than Christopher, including a string of burglaries, two years on the lam, armed robbery, and assault and battery of a police officer. Witnesses told investigators that he was a “cop hater.” And he looked much more like the artist’s sketch of the killer than his brother did. He was taller, dark, muscled. According to Stanford, “It was like they had different parents or something.”

Although Kevin’s photograph was requested by police, there is no information that it was ever received, let alone shown to Joyce and Kenneth, or that he was ever considered a suspect. His brother was the more obvious culprit, said Stanford—the guy fencing Harry’s ring and extorting rich gay men. Kevin Hughes would live out his life without ever being implicated in the murder. He died in 2004 at Shore Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where Harry’s autopsy took place.

As I researched the Hughes brothers, a few things pulled me shockingly close to them. Things I couldn’t have imagined when my brother first told me about the Fudge King’s murder. They grew up in the same county I did—Delaware, aka Delco. They went to the same Catholic high school I briefly attended, where I, like Harry Anglemyer, was called a sissy and smacked around by tough boys like the Hugheses.

I searched my school’s online archives and found their names and class—but no photos. Some kids couldn’t afford to have their pictures taken back then. Or didn’t bother to. Or they dropped out before graduation. Kevin and Christopher Brendan Hughes’s names were accompanied by blank squares.

It’s a long shot, but maybe someday soon there will be a measure of justice for the Fudge King after all.

In the spring of 2023, I was in Philadelphia visiting my mother when I noticed a brass plaque on an old brownstone near Rittenhouse Square. It read “The Vidocq Society.” I knew this to be a consortium of private investigators, largely former law enforcement, who had banded together to help solve cold cases—most recently, Philly’s infamous “Boy in the Box” case from the 1950s. My mother, still excited by murder, wondered if we shouldn’t go in. We did, and there we met with director William Fleisher in his mahogany-paneled office, the walls filled with degrees and citations. He listened patiently to everything I’d uncovered about the death of the Fudge King.

What I told him was, of course, only a theory—hard to prove without, say, forensics. Harry’s bloody clothes or shoes, for instance. He nodded, then said he couldn’t help me. The Vidocq Society only works with police agencies, not private citizens. But he suggested I contact someone with the recently formed New Jersey State Police Cold Case Task Force. He then handed my mother his card with his cell number, in case she ever got “in trouble in the neighborhood.”

I called the task force and connected with detective Taylor Bonner. He was reluctant to look at the case, as he didn’t have any files on it, or even a file number. I had all that, of course, but after I presented it to him, there was still a bit of hesitation on his part. It was Atlantic County that had tried the case, and Bonner felt it was theirs to reopen or not. I offered Captain Snyder’s name immediately—with more than a little ta-da—and Bonner said he’d get back to me.

It took him some weeks, but he did. He had spoken with Pat Snyder—Snyder has since been promoted to chief—and after some back and forth they wanted me to know that they would work together to re-review the case. Currently, there is an Atlantic County detective assigned to it and one other high-profile cold-case murder. It’s a long shot, but maybe someday soon there will be a measure of justice for the Fudge King after all.

If this new theory turns out to be true, it will complicate the local myth surrounding Harry’s death, the one whispered and blogged about and alluded to in a hastily scribbled note from a bookstore clerk. Blogger Kelly says he’s fine with that—and continues to offer the names of people who might know more.

But Leland Stanford III, for all his help, has been impossible to reach recently, either by phone or registered mail. I even sent him a box of assorted fudge but received no reply. I can only hope that he stopped talking to me because he’s now talking to the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office as it reinvestigates the case.

Whatever comes of the theory that Kevin Hughes was Harry’s killer, I’m not keen to let Longo and Stretch off the hook. Their fear and loathing of Harry—businessman, dandy, Good Samaritan, and the thing that dare not speak its name—may have set in motion a string of events that culminated in his death. Their open bigotry and defamation of Harry, both during his lifetime and after his murder, mark them as villains in my book.

It’s gratifying to feel that I may have moved the needle on an unsolved murder. Especially the murder of Harry Anglemyer, a man I came to see more vividly as time went on, as if he were emerging from a fog, bringing the past back to life—both his and mine. I am not a great believer in ghosts, but I can say that on more than one occasion these past two years I have felt his nudge. Sometimes quite forcefully. As if Harry wanted this solved, the truth finally revealed.

Harry, like all of us, was caught in the grip of time. Of the world changing, as it insists on doing, and too fast for some people’s liking. In Harry’s case, he found himself caught between midcentury notions and a more tolerant era approaching, firmly believing—perhaps naively so—that he could ride the seismic cultural shifts coalescing around him to wealth and happiness.

But history’s rhythms can be maddening. Advance, retreat. Waves against the shore. Ocean City was recently in the news for replacing several members of its school board with those endorsed by Moms for Liberty, a right-wing nonprofit that advocates for “parental rights” with regard to shaping what kids are taught about, among other things, LGBTQI issues. The featured speaker at one of its campaign rallies was pastor Gregory Quinlan, who believes Christ “defined sex.”

What would Harry make of this? I imagine he would have looked to the horizon while savoring everything as much as he could. Which is what he did in the summer of 1964, even with so much on his mind. He was by all accounts a good and charming and, yes, horny man who believed that in the end, if we’d only live and let live, have more sex, cheer on more jockeys, sing more songs while someone tickles the ivories, and buy fudge on Sundays, the future might be a much more delicious place.


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The Romance Scammer on My Sofa

The Romance Scammer on My Sofa

A writer’s quest to find the con artist in Nigeria who duped his mother.

By Carlos Barragán

The Atavist Magazine, No. 140


Carlos Barragán is a Spanish writer. He previously reported for El Confidencial and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Columbia University, thanks to a Fundación “la Caixa” scholarship.


Editor: Seyward Darby
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Kyla Jones
Illustrator: Kumé Pather

Published in June 2023.


Natasha Bridges blanketed the Facebook inboxes of men she didn’t know with the simplest of greetings:

hi 
hi
hi                            

Plenty of the men never replied to Natasha, but it was striking how many did. Even more striking was how quickly some of them seemed to fall for her.

Can you love an older man?

So wrote a guy named James* after just a few hours of messaging. James said that he was 56 and rode a Harley. After sending Natasha pictures of his bike, James told her, unprompted, how he would perform oral sex on her.

*Unless otherwise noted, the names of scam victims have been changed.

Other men were starry-eyed. They told Natasha that she was gorgeous, that they liked her smile and her flirtatious way of chatting, that they couldn’t wait to meet her one day. There were also sentimental types, like Brett:

I don’t know if I’ll ever be truly happy again. I think the only dream I have is if I had a special woman with me.

You know I mentioned it a couple of days ago, but I haven’t seen you for a very long time. Would you please send me a few of your pictures? I would really like to see you.

Natasha had yet to respond to Brett’s latest lovelorn message. Her silence would have been callous if she was who she said she was. But given the truth—that Natasha Bridges didn’t exist—the real cruelty might have been replying.

The person sending messages to Brett, James, and dozens of other American men was named Richard, but he preferred to be called Biggy. He was 28 and from Nigeria. The photos he used in the Facebook account where he posed as Natasha—a 32-year-old single mother from Wisconsin, interested in economic development and cryptocurrency—were pilfered from the social media of a real woman named Jennifer. He’d used other accounts to pretend to be a gym instructor, and a lonely American soldier deployed abroad.

I knew all this because Biggy was sitting on a green sofa in my hotel room in Lagos, playing the video game Pro Evolution Soccer 17 as I read the private messages he’d sent to unsuspecting foreigners on his iPhone 6. When I asked why he was ghosting Brett, Biggy, scoring yet another goal for Australia in the Asian Cup final against Japan, shrugged. “Bro, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Being a Yahoo boy is very stressful,” he said without taking his eyes off the game. “Do you find it easy to make someone fall in love with you? The hustle is the same as real life, with just one difference: You have to pretend to be another person.”

In Nigeria, Yahoo boys are online fraudsters. Their nickname comes from the email service Yahoo, which became popular in Nigeria in the 2000s, and they are descendants of the infamous 419 scammers, who, first with letters, and later in emails, promised to help strangers get rich for a nominal advance fee. (The number is a reference to a section of the Nigerian criminal code pertaining to fraud.) Biggy is a particular kind of Yahoo boy: a romance scammer who pretends to be other people online to seduce foreigners into trusting him and giving him money.

Biggy’s game is all about intimacy. He invests time in building what seems like a real relationship with his victims. He flatters them, tells them jokes, asks intimate questions. “The most important thing about being a Yahoo boy is keeping the conversation alive,” Biggy told me. “Dating is all about patience. It takes a long time before a client starts trusting you.”

Yahoo boys, I was learning, love euphemisms.

Biggy estimated that over his ten years—and counting—as a romance scammer, he’d lined his pockets with $30,000 from people he conned. People yearning for love. People like my mother.

Hi Silvia, how are you? This is Brian. We contacted each other on Tinder, I hope you are having a wonderful day. It would be a delight for me if we can get to know more about each other, and to answer your question, I was once married, but now I am single after the divorce.

I would hope to hear from you soon
warm hugs
Brian Adkins
Carmel, NY 10512
bcmakins@aol.com 

By a lot of metrics, my mother, Silvia, is a successful woman. She opened her own dental clinic in Spain before she was 30, and over the next two decades she served some 10,000 patients. She got married and gave birth to three boys, of which I am the youngest. But her divorce from my father in 2003, when she was 44, was turbulent and costly. After the split, my brothers and I lived mostly with our mom in various rented apartments around Madrid. For a long time, her only asset was an old Citroën C1. The bulk of her income was spent on food, education, and yearly vacations with us. “Books and travel—no matter what, there’s always going to be money for that in my house,” she’d say. 

One day in December 2015, my mother’s face seemed brighter than usual. She told us at Sunday lunch that she’d met someone. They’d connected on Tinder, an app I’d encouraged her to use. The man was named Brian, and he was a handsome, divorced 52-year-old American soldier. My mother said that her feelings were real, and that Brian’s were, too.

At first my brothers and I didn’t pay any of this much attention. Jaime and Miguel were in their twenties, launching their careers. I was 19 at the time, the only one of us still living at home, but I was busy studying at university. My mother’s blossoming romance was background noise. But when she later told us that Brian was on a mission in Syria, Miguel, a pilot in the Spanish air force, scoffed. “Come on, you really believe that? It’s sketchy,” he said.

After that my mother shared updates about her new love more sparingly, and mostly with me. She showed me some of the long, passionate emails she and Brian exchanged. She’d studied English in high school but still used Google Translate to better express herself. Brian’s messages had grammatical mistakes, too—but I thought, so what?

“Sometimes I tell Brian, ‘You’re going too fast!’ ” my mother confided in me. She’d said as much in one of her messages to him:

I hope there will be many ends of the year together. I think the love of a couple is a way to go, I am sure our beginning is good and I like it. We are in different situation, my life is very comfortable, yours not, I am surrounded of friends and family, you are only with other men fed up like you. And so…and so. I understand you hang on me and in some way I appreciate it very much, but in other way it makes me feel a little bit anxious about responsibility of being what you expect of me. 

Whatever doubts she had, the joy she felt overrode them. One day she came home with two rings: one for her, and one for Brian. “He’s coming to Spain,” she said, grinning. He’d told her that he wanted to leave the military and be with her.

Now my brothers and I were officially concerned. We asked her if she’d ever had a video call with Brian; when she said no, we told her we found it shady that, apart from a few photos, she’d never even seen the guy who claimed to love her. We argued, and my mom, hurt that her sons weren’t supporting her, shut herself in her bedroom. “I’m going to talk to my boyfriend,” she said before closing the door.

In early January 2016, about five weeks after my mother first connected with Brian, Jaime sent me a message while I was studying at the library for a microeconomics exam. “Carlos, we have to do something,” he wrote. I could feel his anxiety behind the typing bubble on my phone’s screen. “This guy told mum he’s going to ship her some bars of solid gold he’d found in a terrorist stash,” Jaime continued. “It’s a scam.”

I put down my books and did something I should have done already: I googled “scams” and “American soldiers.” Dozens of results appeared. There were warnings about con artists, many of them in sub-Saharan Africa, professing love to victims at warp speed, then asking for money. Some of these scammers told their targets that they could deliver gold, gems, or cash that would help them build a new life together, if only the target helped cover shipping costs or customs fees. Once the victims delivered the money, the scammers either continued stringing them along or simply vanished.

My mom was almost certainly being targeted. It didn’t make sense—I was sure that she was smarter than the people you hear about on the news who lose their life savings to online con artists. Still, realizing that it might take hard evidence to convince her that Brian wasn’t who he said he was, I did some research and found an app that could trace an email sender’s location through their IP address. Now I just needed to get into my mom’s Gmail account to pinpoint where Brian really was.

In the meantime, Jaime confronted her with the truth over lunch. My mother was confused: Brian had sent her so many emails and photos, confessed his feelings and fears. How could he not be real? “Mom, I’m sorry, but there will be no gold,” Jaime told her. “End of story.”

When I arrived home that evening, my mom was alone and upset. She wasn’t ready to let go of the fantasy—she clung to a glimmer of hope that it was all a misunderstanding. We sat on our sofa and, using the app I’d downloaded, I showed her how it could determine where an email came from. As an example, I used an email from my father, who lived in China. “You see? He sent me this email from Shanghai,” I told her. My mom then gave me her Gmail password, and I used the app to locate Brian. His emails weren’t coming from Syria; they were coming from Lagos.

My mother’s face went as white as the wall behind her. When she spoke, it was with quiet shame: “What a fool I am.”

Then, within days, she seemed to move on. She deleted most of the emails from her scammer, as well as the dating apps on her phone. “I’m done with men for a while,” she said, laughing. She kept busy at work, and a few months later was interviewed by a newspaper about her clinic. In the photo accompanying the article, she wore a uniform and a big smile. She told the reporter that she liked restoring people’s self-esteem.

Eventually my mom dated again, but never seriously. From time to time she would tell me, “I think another scammer contacted me.” She acted as if falling in love with someone who didn’t exist was funny. I remembered how, when I was a child, she taught me that each morning was a new opportunity to put the past behind you. She seemed to be living her own advice.

In February 2020, four years after learning the truth about Brian, I moved into an apartment with a friend. I was 24 by then and working as a journalist. Jaime was living in Germany, and Miguel was stationed in Badajoz, over 200 miles from Madrid. I knew that my leaving would be difficult for my mother, but then, just two weeks after I moved out, the prime minister declared an unprecedented state of emergency: Spain was one of the hardest-hit countries in the early stages of the pandemic.

During three months of mandatory lockdown, my mother became anxious and depressed, so I started violating COVID rules to stay with her three days a week. I would drive through Madrid’s deserted streets, hoping to avoid the police, mad at my brothers for not being close enough to help, mad at the world for putting me in this position, and mad at myself for being mad. My mother and I would watch the news over dinner, and she’d talk about being alone. This led to arguments. “You don’t understand what it’s like when no one needs you,” she said. Sometimes I felt like I might as well have been invisible.

I was surprised to find myself thinking about Brian, now four years gone from our lives, and wondering again why my mom never suspected him. She was capable and independent, our family’s anchor, the constant amid the ups and especially the downs, which could have put me or my brothers on a disreputable or self-destructive path. How did she become so unmoored? What had I missed? It was as if there were a mirror in my mind, and when I put my mother’s sadness and isolation in front of it, the reflection I saw was her scammer. Except of course I had no idea what Brian looked like, what his real name was, or how he plied his criminal trade.

A year and a half into the pandemic, I told my mother I wanted to go to Nigeria to find her scammer. She was in the kitchen, whipping up something to eat, and as soon as I asked the question, I worried how she would react. “If not find him,” I quickly added, “at least try to understand why he did it.”

My mother looked at me and smiled. She nodded several times. “Every time I hear John Legend’s ‘All of Me,’ I remember him,” she said. “He dedicated that song to me.”

No one has been able to quantify the precise number of romance scammers in Nigeria, but it may well be in the hundreds of thousands.

My fixer, Bukky Omoseni, was waiting for me at the Lagos airport when I arrived close to midnight in March 2022. I already knew that Bukky, whom I met through a journalism acquaintance, was skeptical that we’d be able to locate Brian. “It’s easier to find a needle in a haystack,” he told me on a phone call before I left Madrid. He was probably right. No one has been able to quantify the precise number of romance scammers in Nigeria, but it may well be in the hundreds of thousands. The only lead I had was the email address Brian had used with my mom. I sent a message to it, pretending to be her, saying that I missed him, but the email bounced.

At the very least, Bukky promised to connect me with other romance scammers, and he was true to his word from the start: He brought Biggy with him to the airport to pick me up. Biggy, whom Bukky referred to as his “assistant,” took his nickname from Biggie Smalls, and he bore a slight resemblance to his “mentor,” as he called the long-deceased rapper. “He’s the Notorious Biggie, I’m the glorious Biggy,” he joked.

With Bukky’s driver, who called himself Skulls, at the wheel, we headed to my hotel in Ikeja, on the mainland. It was a two-story building with a patio, a club, and an indoor swimming pool on the ground floor. When we got to my room, I could feel the walls shaking—the party downstairs was at its peak. A hotel waiter knocked at the door; he’d brought up a bottle of whisky and some ice. “Let’s celebrate,” Bukky said. “Carlos is here!”

Drinking quickly set things in motion. After two glasses, we went down to the club, where dozens of women were dancing, a band was playing Afrobeat songs, and men were throwing cash on the floor, making it rain. Bukky joined in with a few Yoruba singers while I sat on a couch with Biggy, who was drinking and smoking silently. I tried to start a conversation, but the music was too loud. Instead, I asked him for a cigarette, to have something to do as I watched the scene before me.

The next morning, Bukky started acting strangely. He went to the bank to deposit some money but couldn’t remember his PIN. When he got back he looked unwell, and he kept repeating a single word: September. September. September. I wondered if he was still drunk from the night before or if he’d taken drugs. Biggy calmed me down. “He’s probably sick from malaria,” he explained.

Bukky fell into a fitful sleep. He woke up periodically and apologized to me; each time, I begged him to go to a doctor, only to have him say that he was feeling better before closing his eyes again. The cycle continued for several days. (Bukky did eventually go to the hospital; his mother later said that he was diagnosed with malaria and typhoid.)

That was how I wound up spending most of my time with Biggy. When I wasn’t interviewing one of the dozen other Yahoo boys I met during my trip, we watched old Hollywood movies and replays of British soccer matches in my apartment. Biggy also became my unofficial guide to Africa’s largest city.

One morning the two of us went out for breakfast. It was a Sunday, and the streets throbbed with life. Lagosians abhor slackness; as the pidgin saying goes, I no come Lagos come count bridge (I didn’t come to Lagos to count bridges). The phrase refers to the city’s geography, which includes a coastal lagoon. As Biggy and I snaked through the stalls of vendors selling food, animals, and every ware imaginable, a spirit of entrepreneurship was palpable.

“Do you want to eat something international? Pizza? Sushi?” I asked Biggy.

“Tired already of jollof rice, man?” he replied.

“No! Love it. But maybe you want to try out something different later.”

“I’ve never tried sushi, but I don’t like Chinese food.”

“Chinese don’t eat sushi, Biggy. Japanese do.”

“Are you drunk?!” Biggy shouted over the noise of the street. “Sushi is Chinese. Everybody knows that.”

We settled on pizza.

Biggy was stout, with a carefully groomed beard and stylish outfits. That day he wore an Adidas hat and a Toronto baseball jersey. He moved around Ikeja as if he owned the place, even though, when he wasn’t crashing at my hotel, he lived more than an hour away, in a working-class neighborhood. Biggy seemed to have a sixth sense for where danger might lurk, but he betrayed no fear. He waved at everyone who made eye contact with him and spoke boastfully in his deep bass voice.

“Look,” he told me at one point, slowing his pace and grabbing my arm. He discreetly pointed to two young men with dreadlocks and fancy clothes who were climbing into a Lexus. “Those guys are into Yahoo.”

You just have to mention the words Yahoo boys to a Nigerian and watch their reaction to understand how deeply embedded scammers have become in the national conversation. A lot of people see them as young men who’ve chosen a life of crime, preying on foreigners and marring Nigeria’s reputation. “They are blinded by greed and the desire to make fast money,” Ademola Adeeko, a political writer, told me. A high-ranking police officer said that their upbringing was to blame: “It is not an issue of ‘what can the police do?’ It’s only their parents that can guide them properly.”

There’s another side to public opinion, however, one that sees Yahoo boys as young men pushed to the brink by their circumstances. Nigeria has an estimated 53.4 percent unemployment rate among 15-to-34-year-olds, and an average monthly income on par with what it was in 1980. Many people complain that the government is riddled with corruption far more serious than what the Yahoo boys are up to. “Scammers steal from foreigners, and they spend the money here,” a Lagosian musician told me. “Politicians steal from us and spend the money abroad.” One romance scammer I spoke to put it this way: “Are you going to apply for a job that will pay you 25,000 naira when a bag of rice in Nigeria is 30,000 naira? Inflation is crazy. Prices are skyrocketing. The only thing in Nigeria young people can do to survive is joining Yahoo. No office work can give you the kind of money that Yahoo will give you.”

That’s why Biggy began “hustling,” as he calls it, in 2012. He was 19 at the time. He noticed that some of his friends had nice clothes, watches, and phones. They were Yahoo boys, so he became one, too, focusing on romance cons. “I started doing it for a better life, because the country itself is fucked up,” he said. “We are brainers, not scammers. Would you be able to cook up a story and tell it to someone who has never seen you in your life and get them to send money?”

The playbook for romance scamming starts with creating, buying, or hacking a social media account to pretend to be another person, usually a white, attractive American. Biggy’s first identity was Frederick Bolten, a U.S. soldier based in Afghanistan. Biggy told me that it’s better if a fake account has existed for a while, because that helps it appear legitimate. When he created Natasha Bridges’s profile, he joined lots of American Facebook groups, prompting members to send Natasha friend requests, which in turn made it seem like she had a network. Then he left the account alone for two years before he started “bombing,” slang for sending messages to hundreds of strangers.

Think for a minute—you may have received one of these messages on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, or any number of dating apps, asking how you’re doing or complimenting your profile pic. You may have even joked about it with your friends. Scammers know that most people won’t reply, but occasionally someone does. That person becomes a “client,” and the dance begins.

At first, Biggy wasn’t sure what to do when someone responded to him. How am I supposed to start a conversation? he remembered thinking. How can I build a relationship with this stranger? In time he decided that he had a real gift for making people fall in love with him. He was able to work in a range of emotional registers. He saw that a simple “How was your day, babe?” could mean a lot, and that making a client laugh kept them interested in a conversation. “You need to have a good sense of humor,” Biggy said. “If they crack a joke, you should also crack a joke.” On the flip side, he had to be ready to go deeper. Take his exchange, as Natasha, with a man I’ll call Bob:

B: Im battling Father Time and Mother Nature. And losing both races
N: Well you can’t run both races one has go for one
B: Which one becomes more influential?
N: Well those that make u happy
B: Hmmmm. What makes you happy?
N: Being able to handle my financial business without stress.

How long it takes to earn a client’s trust varies. “It might take a month, it might take a week, it might take two days,” said Biggy’s friend and fellow scammer Smart Billion. “All you have to do is keep talking.” What’s certain is that, once they establish a close relationship, a reason will come up to ask for money. He’ll say that he has a medical emergency or unexpected legal fees, or that he wants to get a plane ticket to meet in person. “Just don’t be a dumbass. Don’t ask for $50 after two days,” Biggy said. “That will be a red flag.”

One of Biggy’s strategies as Natasha was to ask for money for child care, so that she could visit a client for a weekend without her daughter. Mentioning money causes some victims to become suspicious and drop out of the conversation, but others are so emotionally invested that they give the scammer whatever he requests, no questions asked. They don’t care that they’ve never met the person asking for money, someone who speaks in clichés and whose messages are often filled with typos—a function, Biggy explained, of talking to so many people at once. (English is Nigeria’s official language, and many scammers are college educated.)

Some Yahoo boys are so successful, they live lavish lifestyles by Lagosian standards—hence the scammers we saw getting into the Lexus, and the young men filling fancy clubs around the city night after night, buying bottles of Moët. Visible affluence has made scammers into powerful symbols in some circles, where they inspire not shame but pride. In Nigeria’s hip-hop culture, for instance, they’re synonymous with wealth and luxury. “Yahoo Boyz” and “Am I a Yahoo Boy” are just two of the songs about con artists to rack up millions of views on YouTube.

Some musicians also paint Yahoo boys as populist heroes—modern-day Robin Hoods, taking what they need from those who have more than enough, because their country won’t provide for them. “No job for street / No pay, no way, how boys eat / … Dem no go do Yahoo if dem get choice,” raps Xbusta. In 2019, Naira Marley, a popular hip-hop artist, said publicly that Yahoo boys aren’t doing anything wrong, implying that their cons are a price the West must pay for the legacies of slavery and colonialism. His statement stirred up considerable controversy, particularly after Marley was arrested on online fraud charges. (The case is still pending.)

Biggy told me that he earned enough from hustling to cover his personal expenses as well as his parents’ rent. When I asked what his mom and dad thought about how he makes his money, Biggy bristled slightly. “It isn’t they don’t care, bro, but do you have a solution to unemployment?” he said. “If you say I should stop this hustle I’ve been doing for years, would you give me a job? That will pay me more than I’m collecting? If you can’t answer the question, then you can’t judge me.”

“For every successful Yahoo boy that makes $100,000 from a victim and buys a house,” Bukky said, “there are hundreds with a phone in the slums who get no more than a hundred dollars.”

History shows that cons beget cons and rackets evolve. The first documented 419 scam, according to Stephen Ellis’s book This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime, was staged by P. Crentsil, a former employee of the colonial government in Lagos. On December 18, 1921, he wrote a letter to a contact in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) presenting himself as “a Professor of Wonders.” The recipient, he promised, would experience the benefit of Crentsil’s magical powers—if they paid him up front.

Crentsil, however, was merely putting a twist on what, in 1898, The New York Times referred to as “one of the most successful swindles known to the police authorities.” The so-called Spanish prisoner con involved a scammer sending a letter in which they posed as someone writing on behalf of an inmate in one of Spain’s notoriously brutal prisons seeking funds to secure release; the people who received the letters, often merchants, were promised a reward for their support. As it happened, prominent individuals living in Nigeria during the colonial period were the targets of some Spanish prisoner cons; in April 1914, the Nigerian Customs and Trade Journal reprinted a letter from the British ambassador to Spain, Arthur Hardinge, who wrote, “It is considered advisable that the public in Nigeria should be warned to be upon their guard.”

Incidence of 419 fraud ramped up in the 1980s, as Nigeria’s share of the global oil market shrank and the national economy contracted. Letters purportedly written by Nigerian princes or petroleum executives were sent around the world, becoming such a problem for the country’s image that Nigerian embassies bought full-page ads in European newspapers warning readers about the too-good-to-be-true offers that might show up in their mailboxes. When the World Wide Web was born, scammers went paperless. Where previously a lot of them had worked for organized syndicates, now anyone could be their own boss—all they needed was an internet connection, which was readily available in Lagos’s proliferating cybercafes. The police sometimes raided these establishments, but with the advent of wireless internet and smartphones, there was little law enforcement could do. Not that they haven’t tried: Cops have been known to check young people’s phones for messages sent to Westerners via Facebook or dating apps. The practice led to backlash during Nigeria’s End SARS movement, a series of massive protests against police brutality, and in 2020 the government ordered law enforcement to stop.

These days, Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is tasked with cracking down on scammers and anyone aiding or abetting them. Outside the commission’s headquarters, there’s a sign with the slogan “EFCC will get you, anywhere, anytime,” under a picture of a menacing-looking eagle. But the truth is that at best the EFCC is playing Whac-a-Mole. Meanwhile, foreign authorities are barely in the game: By the time victims in Western countries inform law enforcement what happened to them—if they do at all—the perpetrator is almost certainly in the wind.

There are still criminal organizations running rings of scammers in Nigeria; Biggy told me that he worked for one when he first started out, sitting in a cramped apartment and sending 20,000 spam messages a day to foreigners, hoping for a few replies. He made about $30 a month, and described it as the worst time of his life. It’s much more lucrative to go it alone, he explained, if you can pay for your own internet. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get rich right away, or ever. I remembered something Bukky told me on the phone before my trip: “For every successful Yahoo boy that makes $100,000 from a victim and buys a house in Lekki,” an upscale part of Lagos, “there are hundreds with a phone in the slums who get no more than a hundred dollars.”

Biggy told me that he often hangs out in a “crack house” on the outskirts of Lagos, where five to ten guys huddle in a room, discussing clients and doing drugs to stay awake—Yahoo boys tend to work at night because of the time difference with the United States. They swap stories about their experiences to help one another. “We grab a joint, listen to music, and share ideas,” Biggy said.

Recently, one of his friends had been scamming a 61-year-old truck driver in Florida who, after 33 years of marriage, was in the middle of a divorce. “He said his wife had sued him in court,” the friend told me. “I think she’s gonna win the case, and my client will lose his properties. That’s bad for me. I’m sad for him. I’m telling him everything will be fine, trust me, believe in God.” As for Biggy’s friend Smart Billion, he once didn’t sleep for three nights in a row because he was talking nonstop to Jennifer, a woman in Iowa. She sent him more than $500, then abruptly blocked him online.

Had he said the wrong thing? Did Jennifer get wise to his con? Smart Billion might never know, but there were Yahoo boys who, when their scams weren’t going well, turned to higher powers for help. Early one morning, Biggy, Skulls, and I drove to the working-class neighborhood of Ejigbo to meet with a practitioner of what’s known as “Yahoo plus.” The man was a juju priest who claimed to help romance scammers improve their game.

We met Gbenga in the middle of a road, and he led us to the backyard of a building through a worn metal door as a cluster of kids watched from a distance—they likely weren’t used to seeing oyinbo (white people) in the area. There were boxes holding live animals in the yard, and tires were scattered about on the dusty ground. Gbenga pulled out plastic chairs for us, then went inside the building. When he returned he was wearing orange pants, an apron, and a belt covered in small skulls. He was holding a potion made of soap and snake’s egg—one of his most in-demand products, he explained. The cost: 250,000 naira (roughly $500).

Gbenga told us that he made around 1.25 million naira ($2,500) every month selling the concoctions, many of them purchased by Yahoo boys, who then consumed them. His is a family business: “All my ancestors were herbalists, and I hope my kids do the same.” At one point during our visit, Gbenga grabbed a pot, poured liquid from a recycled bottle of Fanta into it, then mixed in a few eggs. He said that if he made this potion while looking at a picture of a Yahoo boy’s client, it would make the scammer “successful in love.” 

Drinking potions isn’t the only form of Yahoo plus. On the instruction of juju priests, young men will sleep in cemeteries, eat feces, or bark like a dog, all in the hope of improving their relationships with clients and making more money. Footage of these rituals has gone viral on social media, and even made the international news. Some scammers scoff at the stories. They think Yahoo plus is bullshit and call juju priests “the 419s of the 419s”—the scammers’ scammers.

Yahoo boys also have a word for their victims: maga, which means foolish, senseless, or gullible. One of the most popular hip-hop songs about scammers is “Maga Don Pay.” Brian, who as my trip wore on I came no closer to finding, probably used the term to describe my mom.

When I asked Smart Billion over lunch one day how he perceived his own clients, he said, “I don’t see them as fools. I see them as my helpers.” He reached for another slice of pepperoni pizza as he spoke. Biggy had bought us a huge meal: several pizzas, boxes of chicken wings, soft drinks, and ice cream. All told he’d spent around 45,000 naira ($60), more than many Nigerians’ monthly income. As we talked about clients, he posted pictures of us on Snapchat.

Data from the Federal Trade Commission suggests that Americans over 60 lose the most money to online fraud. This trend is likely true in most Western countries with a lot of scam victims. But Biggy and other Yahoo boys told me that age isn’t what makes someone fall for a romance scam—loneliness does. “It’s only a lonely person that will pay attention to you,” Biggy said. “Loneliness is the number one key to be scammed.” Exploiting it, he said, required feigning empathy. “You have to fabricate a story saying that you also are lonely,” he explained. “Because if you can’t show that you are also lonely, how can you convince your partner that you share the same problem?”

A recent Harvard study suggests that more than a third of the country feels “serious loneliness,” including 61 percent of young adults and 51 percent of mothers with young children. A deep sense of isolation has been linked to elevated blood pressure, dementia, anxiety, and paranoia. It can also affect how we reason with ourselves and interact with the world. “Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language,” author Yiyun Li has written. “That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections.” It’s no mystery why the romance-scam business skyrocketed during the pandemic, when so many people found themselves cut off from normal life. According to the FTC, Americans lost $1.3 billion to romance scams in 2021, an 80 percent increase over 2020 and a sixfold jump since 2017.

Biggy said he sometimes felt like his clients’ therapist. “Their lives would be worse without me,” he claimed. Take Pamela, whom he’d been talking to for almost three years. Pamela lived in Texas, and was the mother of two daughters, one of whom had died in a car accident. She thought Biggy was an American named Christopher. At some point, despite divulging that she was on welfare, Pamela began sending money to Biggy, eventually depositing about $2,000 into accounts he directed her to. She also suggested more than once that she might commit suicide. In December 2021, Biggy replied to one such threat:

I swear to God I will help u baby
I don’t wanna lose u or let u die
I don’t know if u can open coinbase and binance baby
That’s the one going
Let’s do this fast my queen
You been out in the cold too much
I love u

A few weeks later, when Biggy wished her a happy New Year, she replied bitterly:

Who cares that it’s a new year, another year the same fucken bullshit.

Later, in January 2022, she got drunk and sent him a raft of messages:

I might not show it I smile for everyone to see but inside I’m broken nobody knows cause I don’t talk about it.

The love I feel for you will never change.

Seeing these messages was like reading someone’s diary without their permission—I felt uncomfortable, even embarrassed, knowing what Pamela had said. I asked Biggy if he ever felt the same, or if he at least worried about her. “She’s not going to kill herself,” he said. “She just craves attention.” It sounded like he was convincing himself as much as me.

“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, you know?” he continued. “If I feel sorry, how I’m gonna get money?” 

If it was only about money, I asked Biggy, why was he still talking to Pamela when she hadn’t sent him any in a while and he didn’t think she would again?

“Dunno,” he said.

He told me that he knew of clients who didn’t get angry when they figured out they were being conned. “When they’re totally in love with you, when they fall fully in love with you, they don’t give a fuck if you are a scam or not,” he said. “There are some whites that know you are a scam, but they will still pay you. They will tell you, ‘I know you are a scam, but I love you.’ ” He burst out laughing at the thought.

Like everyone else, Smart Billion didn’t have a clue who Brian was, but he did have an opinion about my mom: “She was ready.”

Biggy acknowledged that he thought about quitting the Yahoo life, but not because he felt guilty for swindling his clients. “I don’t want my kids to know that their father was a scammer,” he explained. Plus, he was in love with a Nigerian woman he’d met on Facebook, and he wanted to start a family with her. (She was real, he insisted. He’d talked to her on video, and Biggy, like all my sources, said there are very few female romance scammers.) Like a lot of Yahoo boys, he also hoped to become a hip-hop musician one day. Maybe then he could stop scamming.

There are stories of Yahoo boys who left the game because of their clients. I visited one of them, a man I’ll call Bamidele, in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, near the end of my trip. It was morning when I arrived, and already stiflingly hot. I was thankful to cool off in Bamidele’s Toyota Corolla.

Bamidele said that he’d been living on his own in Abuja since he was 18. He moved there from his hometown south of the city because he wanted to be a hairdresser, and he got a job in exchange for a place to stay, which turned out to be a small shipping container. He hated it—“surviving was hard, I only ate gari for a while,” he said, referring to ground cassava root often cooked into a porridge. One day in 2018, someone took him to a house where young people scammed Americans for a criminal syndicate. He became a Yahoo boy but again made no money; payment was in the form of food and accommodation. Eventually, he got a paying job as a scammer, and he became better and better at duping his targets. He told me that he’d persuaded a Dutch client to send him $3,500, and that a woman he messaged with ended up traveling to Afghanistan, thinking that the man she’d fallen in love with was there.

Then there was Yolanda, who gave me permission to use her real name. (When I first spoke to her on the phone, she told me, “My story is like a movie.”) Bamidele found her on Instagram, where he pretended to be a white American man. They chatted for two months before Yolanda, who was from Spain, became suspicious and read up on romance scams. She wrote a message to Bamidele, translated it online into Yoruba, then sent it off.

When Bamidele read it, his face grew hot—he’d been discovered. He tried to deny the truth, but Yolanda was no fool. Normally, this was when Bamidele would block a client and turn his attention to other targets, but Yolanda surprised him by asking for a video call. He accepted, and an unlikely friendship was born. Yolanda even flew to Abuja to meet him. She started an NGO to support women and girls kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram, and she gave Bamidele a loan. After meeting Yolanda, he stopped scamming to become an Uber driver.

Over beers and wings on a terrace overlooking Jabi Lake, I told Bamidele about my mom and Brian. Because Brian’s emails had come from a computer instead of a smartphone, my hunch was that he worked for a syndicate with the resources to provide scammers with hardware. Bamidele, who had a boyish face, chuckled at my ignorance. “It could have been anyone,” he said.

Then his tone turned serious; the sun was setting as he spoke. “You must understand that victims tell everything to their scammer. Everything!” Bamidele said, emphasizing each syllable of the word. “I’m 100 percent sure that your mother told things to her scammer that you don’t know. Things about her that you have never imagined in your life. Her ambitions, her flaws, her broken dreams. They are looking for someone that will listen to them, period.”

I resented the suggestion that someone my mother never met might know more about her than I did. But Bamidele’s words echoed something I’d heard from Smart Billion. At the end of each interview with a Yahoo boy, I’d show him messages between my mother and her scammer, hoping he might know who Brian was. “This guy is goooooood,” Smart Billion had practically crooned. Like everyone else, he didn’t have a clue who Brian was, but he did have an opinion about my mom: “She was ready.”

All my life, since I was a child, then as a wife and then as a working mother I spend my life taking care of the others and now I wish someone takes care of me.

I really want to hear your voice before year ends. I want this present from you. As I told you if you would be able to tell me by email you are going to call me I could answer it is allright. I have seen WhatsApp is not a good idea. Anyway I have written I want the time passed very quickly and to be with you as soon as possible. 

Take care of yourself. There is someone in Spain waiting for you!

Un beso, Silvia

One of the most vivid memories from my childhood is holding hands with my mother as she walked me to school. I was probably seven years old; this was in the middle of my parents’ divorce. I remember my mom looking down at the ground as we walked, and I was vaguely aware that she was sad. To cheer her up I squeezed her hand, and she answered me by squeezing back. We created our own silent language with our fingers.

Perhaps because my parents’ split was messy, I felt older than other kids my age, which made for a kind of loneliness. To keep myself company, I made up stories. I also spent countless hours in front of my PlayStation, pausing between games or levels to look through the window and wonder if the world outside was getting away from me. I don’t remember feeling particularly sad, just empty, like a shoebox without shoes in it.

At one point, my mom entered a romantic relationship that lasted several years. Rather than be happy for her, my brothers and I were mostly annoyed. Where’s mum? Who is this guy? We don’t like him! Sometimes, instead of going out, she would invite her boyfriend and others over to the house on a Saturday evening, fix them drinks, and play Nina Simone or Amaral on a loop. I remember being at least somewhat aware that she was staying in because otherwise I’d be by myself. There were other Saturdays when it was just the two of us, and we’d play Monopoly for hours, rolling the dice and buying properties late into the night.

When I started university I became less solitary, but I still enjoyed spending time with my mom. On weekend mornings, I would read novels and she would make jewelry, with classical music playing in the background. We’d have lunch, and drinks later in the day. We talked, of course, but I was convinced that our relationship was built on a comfortable silence. We didn’t need words. “My last son,” she sometimes said, “what am I going to do when you leave?”

My mother never had another serious boyfriend, which confused me. She was intelligent, funny, and pretty, with hypnotic eyes she inherited from her own mother. Privately, I began to wonder if her trouble finding a partner was because she was too picky (Hes bald) or because she actually wanted to be alone (He can’t keep up with me). That was easier than acknowledging her when, after another failed date, she would ask me, “Is this the price I have to pay for having three wonderful sons?”

At some point my mindset changed. I spent time with my mom more out of pity than anything else. I told my friends that I felt bad for her, that I felt guilty leaving her alone. There’s a thin line between compassion and condescension when it comes to one’s parents, and it’s hideously easy to tip from one sentiment into the other.

It’s also easy to judge the victims of romance scams—I did it with my mom, wondering how she could have been so foolish. Speaking to others like her, it became clear that this knee-jerk reaction could be devastating. During my reporting, I joined several Facebook support groups for victims of romance scams, shared my mother’s story, and talked to anyone who reached out. There were widows, divorced people, and retirees. Some of them had lost tens of thousands of dollars, gone deep into debt, or mortgaged their homes to get scammers the money they asked for. I spoke to the loved ones of victims still in thrall to their scammers, including Zed, who was trying to convince his father he was being conned. “I’ve told him, I’ve showed him articles, I’ve sent him videos of scammers admitting they scam,” Zed wrote to me. As a last resort, he posted his father’s email address to a Facebook group so strangers who’d been victimized could contact his dad directly and share their experiences.

Several victims talked about vengeance. Even more talked about shame. They’d heard the same question over and over, or had asked it of themselves: How could you be so stupid to fall for a romance scam? “It’s the saddest crime on earth,” a California woman told me. Another woman confessed that she’d been in communication with multiple scammers and that cutting them off had been hard. “I used to miss talking to my scammers,” she wrote, “but I quickly realized it wasn’t them, it was how they filled my day.”

I heard Smart Billion again in my head: She was ready.

He meant that my mom was ready for Brian—or for someone, anyone, like him. Whatever affection there was in the silences of her life, in the unspoken bond with her sons, the people who loved her most, my mother longed for certain words, needed them, and for a while Brian had provided them. He once wrote to her:

At the end of the day I have this joy in my heart because I have found you. it is a beautiful feeling, I feel like I’ve not felt like this in a very long time. Do you also have that feeling like you were in high again? the feeling of being happy and scared at the same time? I am just keeping my fingers crossed, hoping for the best. I want to be happy and I know I can be happy with you.

By the time I left Bamidele to his Uber shift, it had become clear that visiting Nigeria was never entirely about finding Brian. It was also about trying to bridge the gap between my sense of my mom and her sense of herself.

I’d also recognized that my mom had a mask of her own—she often wore it with me and my brothers, to protect us as much as herself. And she’d cast it off for a stranger, a choice that was perhaps never mine to understand.

Bukky looked like a new man. When I returned to Lagos from Abuja, we spent my last few days in Nigeria together. Fully recovered from his illnesses, Bukky took me to the Nike Art Gallery, a massive compound that hosts more than 8,000 works from artists across Africa. I met with the founder, Nike Davies-Okundaye, an artist known for her exquisite embroidery and cloth work. “If there’s no love, if there’s no adventure, what is life for?” she said to me.

On the final day of my trip, after I settled my bill at a hotel on Victoria Island, Bukky and I spotted an elderly white woman and a twentysomething Nigerian man holding hands. We wondered to one another if he’d scammed her, and whether, once she found out, she’d traveled to Nigeria and they decided to be together. “If we were making a movie,” Bukky said, “you couldn’t make this thing up.”

As I waited at my gate to fly home, I opened my notebook to review everything I’d written down during the trip. On the first day, in capital letters, I’d scribbled an Igbo proverb I read in an interview with author Chinua Achebe: “The world is a dancing masquerade. If you want to understand it, you can’t remain standing in one place.” In Igbo culture, masquerades involve acrobatics, dance, and elaborate costumes that conceal the wearers’ identities. The regalia, beautiful and often fearful, is intended to evoke the spiritual realm. Achebe’s interpretation of the saying was that “we, as inhabitants of the world, must learn to adapt, to change, and to move.”

When I read it again, the proverb struck a new chord. I’d spent a long time standing in one place, seeing things one way. By traveling thousands of miles, I’d encountered young men who donned masks to manipulate people and get what they wanted from the world. I’d also recognized that my mom had a mask of her own—she often wore it with me and my brothers, to protect us as much as herself. And she’d cast it off for a stranger, a choice that was perhaps never mine to understand.

My mom listened carefully when I told her about my trip, and she only had compassion for the Yahoo boys I’d met. “I understand why they do it,” she said. She mentioned the John Legend song again, the one she associated with Brian, and it occurred to me that she had never outright blamed him for scamming her. Now 63, my mom goes every week to a book presentation, a painting class, or a flower-arranging workshop hoping to meet a man she’ll fall in love with. She’s optimistic about her future; momentary disappointments always give way to new hope.

I’ve kept in touch with Biggy on WhatsApp. He’s still scamming, but not as Natasha Bridges—he prefers other fake identities. He sometimes asks me about my mother, which makes me think of the last night I hung out with him in Lagos. We were in my apartment, where Biggy was rolling a joint, and I asked him if he had any advice for my mom. He laughed. “Tell her, please—do video calls.”

There was a long silence before Biggy spoke again. “You have to be skeptical in life,” he said. “Not all that glitters is gold.”


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Blood Cries Out

Blood Cries Out

On a Missouri farm, two families worked the land side by side, until a murder shattered their American dream.

By Sean Patrick Cooper

The Atavist Magazine, No. 85


Sean Patrick Cooper is a journalist and essayist. His work has appeared in The New Republic, n+1, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Baffler, Tablet, and other publications. 

Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Daniel Moattar
Illustrator: Dola Sun

Published in November 2018. Design updated in 2021.

Part I


1990

In Chillicothe, Missouri, a farmer knew what kind of year he’d had by early November. The grueling harvest season, when combines ran day and night swallowing up crops and soil turned men’s hands the color of old pennies, was finally over. Farmers tallied their corn, wheat, and soybean yields at the grain elevator. If the numbers were high, children would find stacks of presents under the Christmas tree and farmworkers would pocket bank envelopes fat with cash bonuses. If the numbers were low, the holidays would be spare for many of the town’s 9,000 residents.

After the harvest, whether good or bad, there was always a holiday parade. In mid-November, farmers washed the grime from their tractors and applied fresh coats of wax, preparing the machines to pull holiday floats down Washington Street, Chillicothe’s main drag. Along the ten-block route, people huddled on sidewalks and bundled up in lawn chairs, drinking hot cider that shook in cups as the heavy bass drums of the high school marching band walloped past. The crowd waved gloved hands at homecoming kings and beauty queens beaming from the backseats of pristine antique convertibles. A man dressed as Santa Claus glided by atop a fire truck, while cheerleaders tossed candy to children.

The week of the holiday parade in 1990 started out well for farmers Lyndel Robertson and Claude Woodworth. The harvest had been robust, a relief to the former high school classmates and longtime business partners, who co-owned a few thousand acres. Their families lived in ranch houses built facing each other across Highway 190, a narrow country road snaking west and then north of Chillicothe. Life followed a familiar routine: farmwork, sports practices, piano lessons, home-cooked meals, church on Sundays. At night the inky sky absorbed the glow of lamplight from the families’ living rooms, situated 300 yards apart. The Woodworths’ seven children and the Robertsons’ five had grown up playing together on that stretch of earth, running around the thin trunks of young pine trees.

On the night of Tuesday, November 13, 1990, Lyndel and his 11-year-old son, Scott, lounged in the living room watching John Candy flip giant pancakes with a snow shovel in the movie Uncle Buck. Rhonda, the Robertsons’ 15-year-old daughter, arrived home around 9:30, after eating dinner at her boyfriend’s house. When the film ended, Rhonda and Scott, along with their sisters Renee, 13, and Roxanne, 8, went to bed. Lyndel and his wife, Cathy, stayed up to watch the news. They were in their early forties and had been together for more than two decades, since meeting as teenagers at a picnic. Lyndel was slope shouldered and shorter than Cathy, and he had a pronounced limp from a severe case of childhood polio. Cathy had green eyes that softened around the edges when she laughed. She was a stay-at-home mom who liked to keep her hands busy: She fashioned Easter baskets in spring and cultivated strawberries in the backyard every summer. That night, Cathy had made progress on a 4-H craft project at the dining room table.

When the news ended, the Robertsons went to their room. They made love before falling asleep. They didn’t hear someone stealing through the house just before midnight.

That person left the floor safe in Lyndel’s office, where he kept bricks of cash, and Goldie, the family dog, undisturbed. They approached the door of Cathy and Lyndel’s bedroom and pushed it open. They raised a .22-caliber weapon and fired six shots. Cathy was struck twice, in the skull and in the chest. Lyndel was hit by the other four bullets. One ripped through his cheek and shattered his teeth. Another lodged near his liver.

No one else in the house heard the gun or the shooter fleeing. Scott was roused from sleep by the sound of his father groaning. He walked across the hall to his parents’ room and flicked on the light. The glare revealed Lyndel, naked and struggling to hold himself up against a wall beside his bed. His arms and torso left streaks of blood wherever they touched. Fragments of teeth were scattered on the bed.

With his mangled mouth, Lyndel managed to tell Scott to wake up his mother. The stunned boy did as he was told, walking to where Cathy lay in blood-soaked sheets. Scott repeatedly asked his mother to get up, louder and louder each time, until he was yelling. She didn’t move. Scott’s cries woke Roxanne, who appeared in the hallway outside the open bedroom door. “Go get Rhonda!” Scott said through tears, and Roxanne ran to her sister’s room in the basement. “Something happened to Mom and Dad!” she screamed, banging on the door.

The girls rushed to their parents’ room, where Scott had already helped his father into a pair of underwear. Their younger sisters watched as Rhonda and Scott maneuvered Lyndel down to the floor, resting his head on a pillow so he wouldn’t choke on the blood streaming from his mouth. Rhonda then corralled her siblings into the living room; their bare feet left bloody tracks on the soft carpet. Rhonda picked up the white phone beside the couch and called her boyfriend’s house and 911. When he arrived at the scene, Brian Alexander, her boyfriend, called the Woodworths.

The family across the road was asleep when ringing cut through their dark, still house. The Woodworth kids were spread among various rooms and the basement, where the eldest, 16-year-old Mark, had his own space. Claude’s wife, Jackie, groggily lifted the phone’s handset. She heard Brian Alexander say there was an emergency. “I’ll be right over,” Jackie said, now alert. She told her husband where she was going. Claude later recalled thinking that maybe one of the Robertson kids had appendicitis.

To avoid the late-autumn chill and get to her neighbors’ as quickly as possible, Jackie slid behind the wheel of her family’s red Chevrolet truck. As she was heading up her driveway, she spotted the lights of emergency vehicles flashing on Highway 190. After arriving at the Robertsons’ and learning what had happened, she turned the truck around, sending its headlights flashing across her house’s windows. By the time she parked, Claude was in the doorway.

“Something terrible happened,” Jackie said, tears filling her eyes. “You’ve got to go over there.”

When Claude arrived at the Robertsons’ house around 12:30 a.m., paramedics and police were rushing around the scene. He stepped through the front doorway, across a threshold he’d passed hundreds of times before, and was told about the shooting. The children were waiting for investigators to swab their parents’ blood, drying on the young Robertsons’ skin and nightclothes, for evidence. Lyndel, miraculously, would survive. He would be airlifted to a medical center in nearby Kansas City for surgery to remove bullet fragments from his sinuses and jawbone. He wouldn’t return home for several weeks, which meant that he’d miss the somber event scheduled for the same day as the holiday parade: his wife’s funeral.

Word of Cathy’s killing sent a jolt through the community. Violent crime was uncommon in Chillicothe, but by sheer coincidence the town was already reeling from a series of murders perpetrated by an elderly couple. Not two weeks before the Robertson shooting, Faye Copeland had been convicted in a Chillicothe courtroom of helping her husband, who was awaiting his own trial, kill several itinerant farmworkers. On the morning of November 14, in coffee shops and hair salons along Washington Street, people were incredulous. First a farmer’s wife was party to murder, now another one had been shot dead in her bed. This wasn’t the stuff of a quiet, God-fearing town.

At Terry Klein’s maintenance garage, Claude talked about the crime with other farmers and their hands, perched on a smattering of stools. Among the men was Chris Ruoff, a sturdily built 25-year-old with a black mustache and a touch of baby fat lingering in his face. Ruoff didn’t work on the Woodworth-Robertson farm, but his crew shared a radio frequency broadcast from a small tower near Lyndel’s house; workers used it during harvest season to call for backup on walkie-talkies. Ruoff told the men that he’d driven past the Robertsons’ not long before the shooting, on the way home from dropping off his girlfriend after eating dinner at Golden Corral. From Highway 190, he’d seen a car in the Robertsons’ driveway that looked like a Ford Bronco or a truck with a camper attached. It was near the front door, where visitors usually parked. Given the late hour, Ruoff thought that the car belonged to one of the daughter’s boyfriends, probably Brian Alexander, who had a Bronco. At the garage, however, Ruoff reconsidered his assumption.

“Now that I think about it,” he said, “that couldn’t have been that Alexander boy’s truck, because didn’t he get into a wreck in that Bronco—wasn’t that him last month?” The men agreed, recalling that Rhonda had been in the accident and had worn a neck brace during her recovery. So whose car had been in the driveway?

Later that day, Ruoff walked into the squat Livingston County sheriff’s office in downtown Chillicothe, where he told the deputy on duty about the car. The department informed the Missouri Major Case Squad, which mobilizes law-enforcement agencies in proximity to a serious crime, and it connected the tip to a suspect: teenager Brandon Hagan, whose family had a white Ford truck with a camper. Brandon was the boyfriend of the Robertsons’ eldest daughter, 20-year-old Rochelle.

Read Chris Ruoff’s statement. 
Read Chris Ruoff’s statement. 

Once crowned the prettiest girl at the Livingston County fair, Rochelle had slender hips and long hair, with bangs she liked to tease to a crisp high above her forehead. She often dated boys her mother didn’t approve of. Brandon, Rochelle’s latest beau, was a competitive wrestler four years younger than she was, and he had a violent temper. He’d given her a black eye at least once and threatened her on several other occasions. Rochelle had ignored Cathy’s concerns about Brandon, insisting during screaming matches with her mother that she was in love, often punctuating the point with a slammed bedroom door. Now away at college in St. Joseph, about 75 miles west of Chillicothe, on the Kansas state line, Rochelle lived with a roommate and worked at a clothing store called the Brass Buckle. She came home frequently, however, and she was still seeing Brandon.

Lyndel himself accused Brandon of being the shooter. When he awoke at the hospital, Lyndel told doctors and police that he was “almost 100 percent sure” the 16-year-old had committed the crime because Brandon was a “psycho” whom the Robertsons had wanted Rochelle to stop dating. Brandon, however, had an alibi. His family had recently moved 100 miles southwest of Chillicothe, to Independence, Missouri, closer to a job site where his stepfather operated a crane. When investigators interviewed them, Brandon’s mother and sister said that he was home the night of the shooting. As for the truck, Brandon’s mother claimed that he wasn’t allowed to drive it.

Investigators concluded in a report, “No information has been developed which can put him anywhere but home that night.” Eventually, Lyndel stopped pointing a finger at Brandon. Rhonda, who became the family’s de facto spokesperson, would later explain, “We thought it was Brandon just because that’s who we thought could do it.”

Law enforcement considered a few other individuals—men with personal or professional beefs with Lyndel, for instance—but no evidence stuck. The Robertsons didn’t give up hope that a perpetrator would surface. Nothing in the house had gone missing the night of the shooting, which indicated that robbery wasn’t the intruder’s motive. Most likely whoever it was had simply wanted the Robertsons dead. Lyndel began to wonder if it was someone he and Cathy had trusted intimately, someone who lived close enough to cross Highway 190, fire a weapon six times, and get back home without anyone noticing.

In early 1991, Lyndel told some farmhands that Claude might have been involved. Because they were in business together, the two men had taken out a $100,000 life-insurance policy on each other; maybe, Lyndel speculated, Claude had decided to collect. Claude denied wrongdoing, and he passed a polygraph test. Yet there was no saving the bond between the two men’s families from Lyndel’s chilling suspicion, which to many people in Chillicothe seemed to come out of the blue. The farming partnership, sealed with a handshake 17 years prior, dissolved in the spring of 1991. A lawsuit ensued. Lyndel kept a portion of the land but sold his house and moved his children closer to town.

For the next two years, police made no arrests in Cathy’s murder, leaving Chillicothe in a state of perpetual unease. Eventually, rumors and mistrust engulfed the town, pitting friend against friend and neighbor against neighbor. The narrative of the killing and the ensuing investigation challenged the town’s very idea of itself. In the middle of it all, a culprit emerged and paid the price for Cathy’s murder.


2008

The Law Offices of Michael R. Bilbrey, a 15-person firm just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, were generic in every sense of the word. The attorneys took on workplace-injury cases, specializing in claims of asbestos poisoning, while a squad of administrators handled paperwork and court filings. They operated out of a nondescript brick building with frosted glass doors and dark-wood accents in a suburban office park. Every day was a race for billable hours.

When Robert “Bob” Ramsey arrived at Bilbrey’s in 2008, he didn’t quite fit into the culture. He was a defense attorney and a journeyman who’d roamed around St. Louis for two decades, working at firms large and small and even trying his hand at a private practice. The constant movement was a product of Ramsey’s desire for independence and his tendency to abruptly leave a firm as soon as he learned of any unsavory legal behavior. He’d come to Bilbrey’s as something of a favor to a friend, who’d departed the office to accept a seat as a circuit judge. Ramsey took over a slate of complex cases with potentially lucrative payouts.

Yet big-ticket litigation wasn’t Ramsey’s favorite part of his job. He had a soft spot for underdogs and what he sometimes referred to as ten-foot-pole cases: ones that seemed so unwinnable, no other lawyer would touch them. Sixty years old, with dense gray hair and a goatee to match, Ramsey had inherited his conscience from his father, Brooks, a Southern Baptist minister. In the early 1960s, in Albany, Georgia, the elder Ramsey used his pulpit at the First Baptist Church to advocate desegregation, much to the consternation of some of his own congregants, including members of the Ku Klux Klan and one man who nailed a 95-point doctrine on white supremacy to the church’s front door.

In 1962, Brooks Ramsey took his son, then 14, to see Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a stirring sermon on racial tolerance at a black church. The next day, King was supposed to do the same thing before Pastor Ramsey’s white flock. When the civil rights leader arrived at the First Baptist Church, however, he was met by an angry crowd. Ushers prevented him from entering, throwing King and some of his entourage down the front stairs. A riot ensued along bitter racial lines, spreading throughout Albany until the National Guard arrived.

That night, a cross was staked in the Ramseys’ front lawn, hot orange flames engulfing its wooden arms. At school the next day, Bob Ramsey arrived to find “nigger lover” scrawled in big letters on the chalkboard of his homeroom. Soon after, his family left Albany. “It made me question the whole religion,” Ramsey recalled, “how the church always told us that everyone is equal in the eyes of God—and then to treat whites and blacks so differently.”

Ramsey studied English at St. Louis University. When he decided to go to law school, he prepared for the LSAT by reading classic Russian novels like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Once practicing, he made a name for himself mounting cases to free women imprisoned for killing their abusive husbands. He also took on what he believed to be wrongful convictions. In one instance, he embarked on a freedom march from St. Louis to Kansas City in honor of a woman whose original lawyer had been paid off by her boyfriend and codefendant, forcing her to take the fall for a murder she didn’t commit. Mel Carnahan, the governor of Missouri, had pledged clemency for the woman before he died in a plane crash; Carnahan’s successor made no such offer. Ramsey, who represented the woman, decided to go on a five-day, 175-mile walk to draw media attention to her appeal. Among the people who saw Ramsey’s bold stunt was a state lawmaker who’d taken a particular interest in what he believed was another miscarriage of justice, this one in the town of Chillicothe. He asked Ramsey to take a look at the case. Ramsey did one better: He agreed to represent the defendant.

At Bilbrey’s, word spread through the office grapevine that Ramsey had brought a longshot case to the firm. It involved the murder of a woman named Cathy Robertson and a man convicted twice for the crime who was now serving a quadruple life sentence. Over the nearly eight years he’d been working the case, Ramsey had regularly driven up to Chillicothe and to the small town of Cameron, where the convicted murderer was in a state penitentiary. He’d gathered court records and taken depositions, amassing several brown boxes’ worth of documents that he believed supported his client’s innocence—or, at the very least, the right to a retrial. The odds that he would get the conviction overturned were slim. As far as the state of Missouri was concerned, the case was closed; it had already been subjected to the scrutiny of one appeal.

Still, Ramsey never considered abandoning the Chillicothe case, even when he died, briefly, in 2003. A fit man who regularly practiced the martial art of aikido, Ramsey suffered sudden cardiac arrest while working out at a YMCA. He was revived with a defibrillator, then fell into a coma; the doctors told his wife and two children that he had little chance of recovering. Ramsey underwent surgery, during which his heart stopped a second time. When he woke up and finally seemed to be out of the woods, he told his client’s family in Chillicothe that if they wanted to get a different lawyer he’d understand. But they’d nurtured an almost religious faith in him after struggling for many years to retain good counsel. Ramsey’s client went to the bare-bones prison chapel to pray that his lawyer would live to defend him in court.

Ramsey never considered abandoning the Chillicothe case, even when he died, briefly, in 2003.

When Ramsey’s health returned, he got back to the matter of proving his client’s innocence. Not everyone was pleased. “You’re going on a fishing expedition,” a judge told Ramsey when denying his request to depose a key figure in the case. An occasional fly-fisherman, Ramsey found the statement encouraging: A person only fishes where there’s something to catch.

Ramsey wasn’t the only staffer at Bilbrey’s struggling to acclimate. So was Kelly Williams, recently hired as an administrator. Williams was 35 and a single mom of two kids. In her twenties, she’d worked as a blackjack dealer at the Alton Belle, a riverboat casino on the Mississippi. She stood just over five feet tall, smoked Marlboros, and had a brash, infectious laugh. She was good at her job—organized, quick, intuitive—but she ran afoul of a supervisor with her outspokenness, to the point that her job was on the line.

Ramsey liked Williams. She’d worked with him on a few settlement cases, and he was impressed with how her mind worked, particularly her memory for little details tucked away deep in legal filings, the kind that could make or break a case. When he heard about the trouble with the supervisor, Ramsey took Williams on as his assistant.

He ushered Williams into his office, where stacks of paper, legal pads, and court documents were on every surface, including the floor. Ramsey settled into his desk chair and pointed to the infamous brown boxes full of his work on the Chillicothe case. Williams had heard chatter about how it was a lost cause.

“I need your help,” Ramsey told her.

Williams knew that Ramsey had saved her job, but she didn’t think that was any reason to run a fool’s errand with him and said so. Ramsey’s client had been convicted by two juries. “Anyone in their right mind would believe he was guilty,” Williams said.

When Ramsey began to explain why he believed otherwise, Williams was adamant that she would prove him wrong. “Since I was itty bitty,” she said, “if I’m right, then I’m going to find out one way or another to prove that I’m right.” Williams announced that she would pore over the case files and find what she needed to disabuse Ramsey of his misplaced certainty.

That night she took one of the boxes home. Eventually, she took another, then another. Using a color-coding system, she organized depositions and created timelines based on witness testimony. After feeding her kids dinner, she sat on the couch, documents scattered around her, filling up legal pads with notes. Instead of proof of guilt, Williams kept finding holes in the prosecution’s case. At the casino, she’d caught a few cheats; she believed she had an instinct for when a system was being gamed.

After she was done going through the files, she walked back into Ramsey’s office. “Alright, he’s innocent,” she said, giving her boss no chance to say I told you so. “How do we get him out of prison?”

The client in question was Mark Woodworth, Claude and Jackie’s son. Nineteen when he was arrested, Mark had spent almost his entire adult life behind bars. Ramsey was convinced that the case “stunk like a dead skunk in the road,” and Williams now agreed. Their determination to free Mark would throw Missouri’s legal system into turmoil.

Part II


1990

As a teenager, Mark kept to himself. Shy and awkward, with doleful brown eyes and a narrow chin sprinkled with pimples, he was more comfortable building cabinets in shop class than memorizing formulas in algebra. He wasn’t one to join clubs or sports teams. In his free time, he preferred to work in his dad’s fields and listen to farmhands talk about what rain does to seeds and the nuances of chemical fertilizers. In 1990, Claude set Mark up with a few acres of soybeans to manage, a trial run to determine if the teenager would be a good addition to the family business.

The morning after the shooting, Claude treaded mournfully down the stairs to his basement and jostled Mark, then 16, awake. Mark was characteristically quiet, even in the face of tragedy. “I was shocked,” he later said. “I couldn’t believe that happened, and I didn’t know what to say.”

Initially, Mark flew under law enforcement’s radar. His parents said he’d been home the night of the murder. His gentle temperament and modest intelligence, friends pointed out, didn’t fit the profile of a killer. “I knew that boy ever since he was born,” George Quinn, a farmer, said once. “If I’d asked him to go out and handle a dying animal, Mark sure couldn’t even shoot a cat out of its misery.” Where some people saw innate virtue, however, others started to wonder if there was simmering menace. “He was very much a loner,” Rhonda Robertson said of Mark as a child. “Scott would always ask him to come out and play, but he just wanted to sit alone in his room.”

Soon after the murder, investigators located a box of ammunition in a shed behind the Robertsons’ house. The .22-caliber shells, a few of which were missing from the box, were the same type the shooter had used. They were sitting on a workbench; according to Lyndel, they were usually stored under a stack of cigar boxes. To law enforcement, this suggested that someone might have taken the shells out on the night of the crime. Investigators lifted a thumbprint from the box and tried to find a match in Missouri’s legal databases. No luck. Then, during an interrogation with investigators, Mark gave his prints. One of them was a match.

Asked whether he’d ever visited the Robertsons’ shed, Mark gave inconsistent statements. He first claimed that he’d never been inside. Then he said he’d once helped pour concrete in the structure and maybe entered it a few other times on some weekends. A ballistics expert analyzed a bullet from the crime and decided that it was probably shot from a Ruger revolver found in the Woodworth home, where Claude kept it in his and Jackie’s bedroom. Law enforcement suspected that Mark had taken the weapon, used it, and put it back without his sleeping parents realizing.

By the fall of 1993, the sheriff’s office was ready to arrest Mark. He was a high school dropout living at home, working on his dad’s farm, and attending vocational classes for his GED. Police showed up outside one of those classes on the morning of October 20, put him in handcuffs, and read him his rights.

Mark’s parents were bewildered. As far as they knew, their son didn’t have anything against Cathy, a woman who’d cared for him as a kid when Jackie ran errands. Even as he sat in jail, held without bail, Mark told his father that he wasn’t worried, because he hadn’t done anything wrong. “I don’t think he realizes what he’s charged with,” Claude told the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune. “It has not really soaked into him.” Jackie had trouble sleeping and struggled to comfort her six other children. Ashley, then in the third grade, would get off the school bus some afternoons in tears because kids had teased her about having a murderer for a brother.

While awaiting trial, Mark failed a polygraph test. In a report dated July 18, 1994, the test’s administrator wrote, “I advised Mr. Woodworth that he had lied to me and was responsible for shooting the Robertsons.… I told him it wasn’t a question of who any longer, but rather a question of why.” Mark nodded, but when asked directly why he’d committed the crime, he answered, “I didn’t.” The administrator pressed him, reminding Mark that “if he was a cold-blooded murderer and found guilty of capital murder, he could be taken and executed for the killing, but if the shooting and death were accidental, that was another situation altogether.”

“Well,” Mark replied, “we all have to die someday.”

People in Chillicothe interpreted the statement in one of two ways. Some thought that Mark was referring matter-of-factly to the prospect of his own death. Others thought he was talking about Cathy’s murder and revealing his dark personality. Rhonda Robertson would later describe the comment as displaying “unbelievable callousness.”

The Robertsons’ relationship with the Woodworths had only grown more toxic since 1990. When their partnership dissolved, Claude hired an accountant to go through their books, which Lyndel had always been responsible for. The accountant discovered records indicating that Lyndel had siphoned cash from grain sales and skimmed extra money from a shared bank account to purchase cars and home appliances. Claude sued Lyndel for $150,000 in damages, but Lyndel claimed that he was innocent. If anything, he said, Claude hadn’t done his fair share in the partnership.

“The breakup broke my heart,” Claude later said. When Mark was arrested for Cathy’s murder, that sense of betrayal cut even deeper. “I was feeling sorry for him, that he just lost his wife, and taking the whole thing pretty hard, too,” Claude said. “Then it was like he stabbed a knife in my back.”

After the indictment in October 1993, a year and a half passed before Mark’s case went to trial in Clinton County, 70 miles from Chillicothe. Lawyers hoped to find there what they couldn’t in Mark’s hometown: an impartial jury. Everyone in Chillicothe had an opinion on the case. Woodworth defenders would clam up when a Robertson supporter came into the local bank to make a deposit. In the aisles of the livestock supply depot, heated debates broke out over whether Mark had pulled the trigger.

The divide was so intense that Lyndel felt compelled to write an op-ed in the Constitution-Tribune answering charges that he’d “swindled” Claude—Lyndel would eventually settle the embezzlement suit for $17,500—and that Mark had been “railroaded.” Lyndel wrote: “I am completely bewildered by this type of reaction. It is not my place, nor is it the responsibility of the people of this community to decide the guilt or innocence of this 19-year-old individual—that decision belongs to a selected jury.” Privately, though, the Robertsons told friends that they were sure Mark was guilty.

In the aisles of the livestock supply depot, heated debates broke out over whether Mark had pulled the trigger.

Mark’s trial—as an adult, though he’d been a minor at the time of the shooting—began on March 13, 1995. Kenny Hulshof represented the state. A special prosecutor and rising star in the Missouri attorney general’s office, Hulshof was a farmer’s son, tall and blond, with a folksy, winning demeanor. He’d captivated jurors in small towns all over the state while prosecuting murder cases, including the one against Faye Copeland in Chillicothe right before Cathy Robertson’s killing. Fellow lawyers sometimes traveled hours to watch Hulshof’s arguments.

On the other side of the courtroom was Mark’s attorney, a mild-mannered man named James Wyrsch, who tried to undercut the evidence against his client. The thumbprint on the box of .22-caliber shells in Lyndel’s shed? It could have been left there while Mark was target-shooting with some farmhands or when he was moving things around in the shed to find some stored item. Wyrsch briefly homed in on the absence of a clear reason Mark might have wanted Cathy dead. “I will submit to you that a 16-year-old boy with no motive whatsoever, trying to get on in life, did not shoot this individual,” Wyrsch told the jury. When he tried to suggest other suspects, however, the judge rebuffed Wyrsch on the grounds that investigators hadn’t amassed sufficient physical evidence to support another theory of the crime.

Hulshof addressed motive while questioning Lyndel on the stand. Hadn’t the Robertsons been angry at Mark for not paying expenses associated with the soybean crop he’d grown on the patch of land his father had given him to manage? Lyndel said yes. And wasn’t it possible that Mark had decided to shoot his neighbors to keep them quiet about his failure to pull his financial weight? Possibly, Lyndel said. For his part, Mark testified that he didn’t know the Robertsons were upset with him about the soybeans.

Later, in his closing statement, Hulshof played to an emerging cultural fear, stoked by the media, that some American teenagers were just bad seeds—kids like the so-called West Memphis Three, convicted the year prior in Tennessee for allegedly murdering three young boys as part of a Satanic ritual. “We flip on the news and we see these senseless crimes. And that’s exactly what it is—it’s senseless. There is no reason,” Hulshof said. “Folks, yes, [Mark] was 16, but how has our society changed such that we have 16- and 15- and 14- and 13-year-olds that are doing things that we can’t comprehend?”

Hulshof drew attention to Mark’s affect while giving testimony, which had been hushed and stilted. “Put yourself, for a minute, in the shoes of someone who was, according to them, falsely accused of a crime,” Hulshof instructed the jurors. “Are you just going to sit up there and [say], ‘No, never, no, never,’ with this flat tone?… You’re going to see some emotion. You’re going to see some tears. You’re going to see some anger. You’re going to see something other than what you saw.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Hulshof said, “I think you saw a glimpse right then of the cold-blooded nature of Mark Woodworth.”

Dana Williams, a farmhand’s wife who attended the trial, marveled at Hulshof’s oration. “He was just, wow, a standout, like an actor starring in his own movie,” Williams later said.

After close to 11 hours of deliberation, the jury found Mark guilty of murder in the second degree, burglary, assault in the first degree, and two counts of armed criminal action. The judge sentenced him to 31 years in state prison. The trial had lasted four days.


2008

Crossroads Correctional Center sits about 40 miles due west of Chillicothe, atop a gentle, grassy slope. The complex’s tan walls and green roof blend into the surrounding farmland, broken only by country highways and a Walmart. When Kelly Williams accompanied Bob Ramsey to the prison for her first visit with Mark, she felt like she knew their client already. She imagined a man hardened by the legal system, but the prisoner who slid into a chair across from her in the visiting area was far from bitter.

Mark was 34, and his dark cropped hair was tinged with silver. In a soft, steady voice, he asked Ramsey questions about his case. He knew the main players, but he didn’t grasp all the details. The man Hulshof had cast as seething and threatening seemed to Williams guileless and meek. “His demeanor, how simple he was—it broke my heart,” she recalled.

Williams listened to Mark talk about how he passed his days: welding metal cabinets, rehabilitating rescue dogs for adoption, praying in the chapel. She thought about everything he’d missed on the outside—weddings, Christmases, the births of nieces and nephews, finding love. Williams excused herself from the visiting area and went to the bathroom. She stayed there until she stopped crying.

Mark and his family had already had their hopes dashed once. Two years after Mark’s conviction, an appeals court reversed the verdict on the grounds that the judge had improperly excluded evidence about other suspects’ potential motive and opportunity. Mark was released from prison and went home to await retrial, which took place in 1999. Hulshof had recently been elected to Congress, after campaigning on his record of locking up violent criminals, so another prosecutor argued the case before the same judge who’d presided over the first trial. The Woodworths hired a new lawyer, too. According to the family and a paralegal who spoke under oath, the attorney struggled to remember where he’d placed key documents. He often rang up Wyrsch’s office to obtain new copies. At trial he questioned Brandon Hagan, who maintained his alibi, with support from his mother’s and sister’s testimony, and Lyndel, who described his initial accusations of Brandon as purely speculative. “I was real disorientated and didn’t know what was going on,” Lyndel said of waking up after the shooting. The Woodworths were so dissatisfied that they asked if a different lawyer could handle the closing argument. Their request was granted, but Mark was convicted nonetheless. This time the judge gave him the maximum penalty: four life sentences plus 15 years.

Before being taken away from the courthouse, Mark told his mother, “Just don’t forget about me, OK?”

She didn’t. Jackie coordinated weekend visits to Crossroads, staggering various siblings’ and other relatives’ time with Mark. On the two weekends each year when visitors could bring food to prisoners, Jackie made Mark’s favorites: lasagna, corn casserole, and peanut brittle. Every August, the women in her Sunday school class sent Mark birthday cards. At home, Jackie kept Mark’s room the same as he’d left it, with a quilt neatly smoothed over the bed and boxes of toy John Deere tractors stacked under a window.

Before being taken away from the courthouse, Mark told his mother, “Just don’t forget about me, OK?”

When Williams and Ramsey visited the Woodworths in Chillicothe, they sat elbow to elbow with the family around a long farm table for meals, passing platters of homemade noodles, mashed potatoes, and beef. As she had been with Mark, Williams was struck by Jackie and Claude’s apparent lack of anger. The Woodworths had been together since they were teenagers, when Jackie, thin and blond, would watch Claude, heavyset and strong, compete in tractor pulls. Middle-aged now, the couple were resolved about Mark’s situation. They kept living and working in a community where many people believed they’d raised a killer, and they were confident that if anyone could get their son out of prison, it was Ramsey.

Ramsey had several concerns about the way investigators had handled Mark’s case. Why had the prosecution been so comfortable with Lyndel recanting accusations, first against Brandon Hagan, then against Claude? How had suspicion landed on Mark at all, and so many months after the shooting? What happened to witness testimony—Chris Ruoff’s sighting of a car, for example—that suggested someone other than a close neighbor was the killer?

Ramsey shared these thoughts with Williams and the Woodworths. “He was asking the right questions,” Claude said. Answering them, though, would require Missouri’s judiciary to accept a new appeal of Mark’s case. Only then would Ramsey have free rein to collect new evidence as part of pretrial discovery. In late 2008, a court considered an appeal, which Ramsey and Williams built around the charge that Mark’s rights had been violated by incompetent counsel and a secretive grand jury. The motion was summarily denied. Ramsey and Williams went back to square one, scrambling to figure out another way to reopen the case.

One day, Ramsey got a phone call from an Associated Press reporter named Alan Zagier. While working on a profile of Hulshof when he was gearing up to run for Missouri governor—a race he lost—Zagier had something interesting in the state attorney general’s office: documents pertaining to Mark Woodworth that had never been discussed in court. In fact, they didn’t appear anywhere in the case files, suggesting that they’d never been made available to Mark’s lawyers. If so, they represented new, potentially exculpatory evidence.

The documents were letters dating back 15 years, and they were the keys that Ramsey and Williams needed to unlock their investigation. “We sped off,” Ramsey said, “like we’d been let loose on the Autobahn.”

Part III


1993

The correspondence had a convoluted backstory. Several months after the shooting, Lyndel hired a private investigator named Terry Deister, a recent arrival in Chillicothe, to dig up information on Cathy’s murder. The case was going nowhere; maybe a fresh set of eyes would help. A few days after taking the job, Deister met with Gary Calvert, chief deputy of the Livingston County sheriff’s office, whom he’d worked with on an undercover narcotics sting at a previous job as a vice-squad officer. According to Deister’s notes, the men convened to “evaluate the possibilities of a working relationship” on the Robertson case. They agreed to pursue “the remainder of this investigation as a team.” (Calvert and Deister declined to comment for this story.)

Two years later, based on interviews and forensic evidence, Deister, Calvert, and Lyndel hoped that the county prosecutor, a man named Doug Roberts, would bring charges against Mark. Roberts refused, because he didn’t think the case was strong enough. Indicting Mark, then, would require assistance from a more powerful force who wanted to move the case forward—someone like Ken Lewis, a circuit judge in Livingston County.

Lewis’s interest in Mark’s case seemed to have strange roots. In December 1990, about a month after the Robertson shooting, a local newspaper had published an article detailing how Lewis, an avid duck hunter, had been instructed by county commissioners to remove a barrier he’d placed on a public road alongside his property to keep other hunters away. Lewis took umbrage with language in the article, insisting that it jeopardized his authority as a judge. He sued the county commission—a move so rare for a member of the bench that several legal scholars interviewed for this story said they’d never heard of it happening. Lewis lost the case, but he kept his sights trained on the county commission.

Lewis’s personal lawyer at the time was Brent Elliott, who’d been the county prosecutor prior to losing the post to Doug Roberts. Elliott was friendly with Calvert and talked with him and Deister regularly—sometimes several times a week—about their work on the Robertson case. Calvert and Deister expressed to Elliott their frustration that Roberts wouldn’t indict Mark. Deister later recalled Calvert dismissively describing Roberts as being “good at traffic tickets.”

The letters that eventually landed at the AP began on September 24, 1993. Lyndel addressed one—actually written by Deister on his behalf—to Lewis, imploring that Roberts “be released of his duty in my particular case” so that evidence against Mark could come before a court. “Until this time, I do not feel that justice has been served and my life is at a standstill,” the letter read. “I am pleading with you to act upon this, within your power, to have this case presented before a grand jury.”

Ten days later, Roberts wrote his own letter to Lewis. “It has come to my attention that the complaining witness in this matter has requested you disqualify me for ‘lack of enthusiasm.’ Mr. Robertson confuses my desire to make a thorough review of all the reports in this case,” he wrote. “I can understand his frustration, but recall that soon after this crime, Mr. Robertson was adamant that we charge another young man.” Still, Roberts acknowledged that he should step away from the case. “The appropriate disposition of this matter requires that the prosecuting official have the confidence of, as well as confidence in, the complaining witness. This I do not have,” he wrote.

Read the Lewis letters.
Read the Lewis letters.

Two days later, the next of the Lewis letters, as they would come to be known, was sent by the judge to Kenny Hulshof. It referenced “various telephone conversations” the men had had about Hulshof coming to Chillicothe to take over for Roberts on the Woodworth case. Lewis noted that he’d already initiated the convening of a grand jury; he and a county clerk would select the 12 members, including a foreman who was friendly with Lewis and who had worked as an accountant for Lewis’s law firm before he became a judge. In his letter to Hulshof, Lewis included a copy of Lyndel’s pleading missive and noted that the three-year statute of limitations on several of the crimes committed against the Robertsons—“felonious assault, burglary in the first degree, and armed criminal action charges”—would soon run out.

The proceedings against Mark began on October 15, 1993, and they moved swiftly. Hulshof successfully argued for the state to file charges. Over subsequent months, the grand jury considered a laundry list of other issues, including whether the county commission had misused money in the form of modest charitable donations. With Lewis presiding, the grand jury indicted several commissioners. They would eventually be exonerated, but not before spending tens of thousands of dollars defending their support of a food bank and a children’s hospital.

On the evening of the grand jury’s final meeting, in 1994, someone strung a long white banner along the stone base of Chillicothe’s courthouse, which faces Washington Street. A photo of it ran in the next day’s edition of the Constitution-Tribune. Five words hastily painted on the fabric read, “Ding-Dong the Witch Hunt’s Dead.”


2009

When Ramsey read the Lewis letters, he was stunned. Was it possible that at the heart of Mark’s convictions sat a judge who wanted to hunt ducks in solitude and needed a case substantial enough to justify convening a grand jury that could also adjudicate complaints against his political enemies, a state prosecutor eager to strengthen his tough-on-crime persona, and a shooting victim, private eye, and deputy sheriff collaborating against the son of that victim’s former business partner? The whole scenario seemed outlandish in the way only small-town business can.

For the purposes of an appeal, what mattered was that the documents appeared to be new evidence of possible due-process violations against Mark Woodworth. Ramsey was astonished that the letters even existed. “I can’t believe people put this stuff in writing,” he said. “So many rules were being broken.”

All the more peculiar was the fact that various other documents from the grand jury chapter of Mark’s case had gone missing, including the transcript of the proceedings. The first time Ramsey visited Chillicothe, after sipping tea with the Woodworths in their living room and promising to fight for their son’s release, he’d stopped by the courthouse to pick up whatever files from the case were available. The clerk had nothing from the October 1993 hearings. When Ramsey asked why, the sentencing judge in both of Mark’s trials said that the transcriber hadn’t done his job—an odd claim given that he’d diligently recorded other sessions of the same grand jury.

Ramsey and Williams hoped to get to the bottom of that mystery during discovery, but first they had to file an appeal. This time, based on the Lewis letters, the pair made the case that Mark hadn’t received a fair trial because Lewis had abused his power and acted beyond the purview of his role; they also asserted that Lyndel had wielded undue influence over the empaneling of the grand jury. The appeal was denied twice in lower courts, but Ramsey and Williams kept pushing, and in mid-2010 their petition reached the Missouri Supreme Court.

The judges ruled in Mark’s favor, putting his case on their docket. They assigned a special master, Judge Gary Oxenhandler, to preside over hearings where lawyers could present evidence and question witnesses. The hearings wouldn’t lead to a verdict; rather, Oxenhandler would submit a report to the Supreme Court, which would use it to rule on whether Mark’s constitutional rights had been violated.

When Ramsey called to tell the Woodworths, Jackie answered the phone in her kitchen. She yelped with joy, startling her sons, Chad and Colin, who were eating lunch between shifts working in the fields. “It was the first big break we’d gotten,” Jackie remembered. “Everything we tried to do, we’d run right into a wall. But all we needed was one little chip in the wall, and the little chip would keep getting bigger and bigger until we could break the wall down.”

In the fall of 2010, Oxenhandler scheduled an evidentiary hearing for the following May, giving Ramsey and Williams about five months to prepare. They quickly got to work. Williams had grown close to the Woodworths and was indignant about Mark’s situation. “She was pissed,” Ramsey said, “and fearless.” Williams made lists of people to interview, files to access, evidence to track down. She marked boxes and file folders with sticky notes indicating what was inside them. She worked nights at home, sleeping an hour or two before heading into the office each morning.

High on Williams’s list was locating the missing transcript of the grand jury hearing. She drove to Chillicothe and insisted her way into the dusty attic of the county courthouse, where she searched through hundreds of boxes of stenography. Every court reporter has a unique shorthand they use to record what a trial’s speakers say out loud; the reporter then uses those raw notes to generate a complete transcript. In the folder where the stenographs for Mark’s hearing should have been there was nothing. Williams went downstairs and told the clerk, who agreed that it was unusual for the notes to be missing. The clerk began searching for them in cabinet after cabinet, drawer after drawer. If there’d been a mix-up, the stenographs had to be somewhere in the building.

In the meantime, Williams hoped that the court reporter, a man named Bernard Faustenau, might provide some answers. He’d worked in Missouri’s legal system for 31 years before retiring. In early February 2011, Williams and Ramsey called Faustenau to be deposed on March 2. Then, a little over a week before the deposition, Faustenau died of a brain aneurysm at the age of 68.

Dismayed, Williams called Faustenau’s wife of 51 years. Williams offered her condolences, explained the situation as gently as she could, and asked the widow if Faustenau had kept any of his court notes at home. Faustenau’s wife said she wasn’t sure but she’d keep an eye out. She soon called Williams back to report that she’d found three perfectly typed pages of the opening minutes of Mark’s grand jury hearing. The text confirmed Judge Lewis’s animus toward Doug Roberts; Lewis accused the prosecutor of speaking to the local press about the grand jury despite not being present for its proceedings. “I have reprimanded Mr. Roberts … because he is not involved in this matter here today,” Lewis said. Roberts had denied telling journalists that the Robertson shooting was the grand jury’s main focus, which Lewis said “brings to my mind a line from Shakespeare, when he said, ‘The lady doth protest too much.’”

If Faustenau had typed up the first portion of the hearing, it stood to reason that he’d done the same for the rest of it. But the remaining pages were nowhere to be found. Back at the courthouse, the clerk finally turned up some materials, including the grand jury’s attendance sheet and a copy of the gag order preventing members from talking about the hearing outside the court. The documents weren’t what Williams wanted, but the location where the clerk found them gave her pause: They were tucked inside the county’s adoption files, considered among the most sensitive records in any courthouse and thus accessed by very few people. The papers had been either bizarrely misfiled or deliberately hidden. By whom was yet another mystery.

The dead end regarding the transcript was “a big setback for us,” Williams later recalled. She and Ramsey focused their attention elsewhere, hoping it would bear more fruit. Terry Deister was arguably the biggest enigma of the case. The private eye employed by Lyndel had never been called to testify at either of the murder trials, yet his copious case notes showed that he’d played a pivotal role in the investigation.


1992

When Lyndel hired him, Deister was in his early fifties, with a paunch, a wide black mustache, and the low, craggy voice of a heavy smoker. He’d spent 17 years in law enforcement in Platte County, Missouri, and he acted the part of a hard-bitten detective, using gruff language and wearing a beleaguered demeanor proportionate to his sacrificial duty before the high calling of the law. His one-man private-eye business was called DunCourt and Associates, a fictional name he’d chosen because he liked how it sounded.

Lyndel paid Deister $40 an hour for his work, which involved more than just probing the shooting. Lyndel also wanted Deister to look for evidence to counter Claude’s accusations of embezzlement. The dual assignment represented a conflict of interest. Deister seemed to realize that the work was shady: His notes indicate that in at least one instance he and Calvert met in an “undisclosed location” near a cornfield, where they were unlikely to be seen together. He also recorded Calvert, who shared the case files on the Robertson shooting with Deister even though law enforcement isn’t supposed to let private parties access information about active investigations, as urging him to “keep a very low profile.”

For several months after the murder, law-enforcement officials tried to find out all they could about the suspicious car in the Robertsons’ driveway; they were confident it would lead them to the killer. Chris Ruoff said he’d seen an SUV or truck. When examining the scene, police noted what appeared to be tire tracks from an accelerating vehicle. Moreover, Scott Robertson initially told investigators that he’d heard a car engine when he was in his parents’ room helping Lyndel. Ruoff, Scott, and Lyndel saw a hypnotist a few weeks after the shooting, a visit that investigators hoped would draw more specific evidence or even a lead out of the trio. It wasn’t productive.

Then one day in 1991, Deister did something that shifted the entire course of the investigation. According to his records, he suggested in one of his meetings with Calvert, “What if there hadn’t been a vehicle parked at that location? Would this open up a new area of thought?”

“Definitely, yes,” Calvert replied.

If a car “didn’t exist,” Deister continued, “it made Mark Woodworth a prime suspect in the case.”

The leap seemed sudden and huge. Not only was there no evidence at the time implicating Mark, there was also no reason to doubt Ruoff’s story or the tire tracks indicating that a car had left the crime scene.

When Ruoff got a phone call from Calvert in January 1992 asking him to come downtown to recount what he’d seen the night of the murder, Ruoff was glad to do so. In a small witness room, he sat across a table from Calvert, who casually thumbed through the case files. The deputy sheriff introduced Ruoff to Deister, who was puffing on a cigarette. Smoke gathered above the men’s heads as Deister began to talk.

“She ever come on to you?” he asked Ruoff, referring to Cathy Robertson.

Ruoff thought Deister was kidding. He was dating a woman who would soon become his wife. Cathy had been a devoutly Catholic mother two decades his senior. She’d been cordial with farmhands, sure, but there was no unsavory subtext to it. Ruoff laughed; Deister kept looking at him, stone-faced. The farmhand realized that the question wasn’t a joke.

“So who put you up to this?” Deister asked in his hoarse voice, suggesting that Ruoff had lied about seeing a car outside the Robertson residence.

“I was just trying to help Lyndel out,” Ruoff said, “to help them find out who shot Cathy.”

Deister came at Ruoff from several angles, questioning the young man’s eyesight, mental health, and short-term memory. He and Calvert also described driving out on Highway 190 one night when a car was parked in the Robertsons’ driveway. They weren’t able to see it in the dark. Ruoff maintained his certainty until, after two hours of interrogation, he finally gave an inch. “Maybe I didn’t see it,” he said.

At Mark’s first trial, Ruoff would stick to his story, saying that he’d bet a million dollars he saw the car. But the seed of uncertainty served the prosecution’s purposes: If it was possible that a car hadn’t been in the Robertsons’ driveway, then it was possible that the killer had arrived on foot—the most logical way for someone who lived nearby to get to the house without attracting attention. Kenny Hulshof undercut Ruoff by calling him an “overprepped” witness and attacking his recollections of a “mystery vehicle.”

The other evidence of a car mattered little. Police had never tried to match the tire tracks outside the Robertsons’ house with a particular make or model, and Scott had reconsidered his original story. He hadn’t heard an engine, the Robertsons’ only son said at trial. Lyndel testified, “A young kid may not have heard what he thought he heard.”

Connecting Mark to the crime was more difficult. Deister and Calvert staked out the Woodworths’ house on Fourth of July weekend in 1992, waiting for Jackie and Claude to leave for a visit with family in Illinois so that they could approach Mark alone. They asked him to come to the sheriff’s office for questioning. Mark was cooperative; he didn’t request a lawyer, and he agreed to be fingerprinted, which would lead to the match with the print on the box of .22-caliber shells found in the Robertsons’ shed. Mark didn’t express outrage or suspicion when Calvert and Deister dropped the pretense of why they’d brought him in—a vandalism complaint that went nowhere—and accused him of murdering Cathy. He simply denied doing it.

A second interrogation went much the same way. This time, Mark gave the conflicting statements about when he’d been in the Robertsons’ shed. He also agreed to draw a rudimentary layout of his family’s house and indicated that his basement room was near a back door, which Calvert and Deister suggested he could’ve used the night of the murder without his parents and siblings knowing. Mark seemed confused in the interview, as if he didn’t follow all the questions he was being asked.

When his parents, who’d again been away when Mark was picked up the second time, heard that he was at the sheriff’s office, they were furious. They drove downtown and burst into the building. In the ensuing confrontation, captured on video, Claude yelled, “You’re fucking with somebody you don’t have no fucking business with—you’re talking with a kid there. To start with he’s dumber than hell. You know that. You can talk to him and tell that. He ain’t well educated.” To Deister, who was in the room, Claude said, “Who’s paying you for being here now?” Deister replied, “I don’t even know if I’m being paid right now or not but I am—Lyndel has been paying me.”

By then, Calvert and Deister had already turned their attention to the ballistics evidence in the case. Of the six bullets fired by Cathy’s killer, five were recovered at the scene. They were too damaged to be analyzed for legal purposes, but based on X-rays, the bullet stuck near Lyndel’s liver looked to be in decent shape. So the Livingston County sheriff’s office covered the $25,000 expense of surgically removing it. In August 1992, after a three-hour operation, the bullet came out. Shortly after the surgery, Calvert confiscated Claude Woodworth’s Ruger pistol as part of a purported reexamination of potential murder weapons.

According to Calvert’s report, he “sealed the [bullet] in an evidence bag and transported it to Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in the evidence room for safekeeping.” However, there is no record that the bullet was ever signed in to the property room, and Deister’s notes contradict Calvert’s, indicating that the private investigator was the one who took the bullet from the hospital and kept it in his custody:

Lyndel’s surgery at Research Hospital.

10:55 a.m. entered surgery—1:55 p.m. received bullet from [Nurse] Woodson

2:20 p.m. spoke with doctor

At the time, Deister was married to a woman from England, and during visits to his wife’s home country he’d befriended a man named Roger Summers, who was the head of forensics for the police department in Derbyshire. A few weeks after Lyndel’s surgery, and after two separate analyses in Missouri had indicated that the extracted bullet wasn’t fired from Claude’s revolver, Deister called Summers to discuss the case. Ten days later, Deister sent Summers a letter detailing his involvement in the shooting investigation. The letter wouldn’t be introduced into legal evidence until Ramsey subpoenaed Summers’s lab almost two decades later.

“I was hired by Lyndel Robertson (the husband) to investigate the murder of his wife,” Deister wrote, adding that before he came aboard, the “Livingston County Sheriff’s Department had pretty much given up on the investigation.” He continued, “I zeroed in on the business partner’s 16-year-old-son, who lived across the highway,” because he sensed that Mark saw an opportunity to enact vengeance, and to gain his father’s approval, as the farming partnership deteriorated. Then Deister wrote:

As I mentioned during our telephone conversation, our case against this boy is very weak without the ballistic evidence, and even though I’m not a quitter, I really don’t think we will ever have a good case if this firearm can’t be identified as the shooter’s weapon. Therefore, we are willing to take whatever steps necessary, within reason, to identify this weapon.

On October 20, Deister packed the bullet and gun in his luggage and flew to England for a nine-day visit. Calvert sent a FedEx package containing other bullet fragments from the crime scene; instead of signing the mailing slip with his title at the sheriff’s office, Calvert indicated that he was an employee of DunCourt and Associates. An investigator ran tests on the evidence. When Deister returned from his trip, he submitted annotated expenses—airline tickets, lodging, meals, sundries—to Lyndel for reimbursement.

Read Terry Deister’s call log from the fall of 1992.
Read Terry Deister’s call log from the fall of 1992.

A forensic investigator named Steve Nicklin issued three reports based on his analysis, a preliminary one in April 1993 and two finalized versions that June. The first stated that Claude’s gun could have fired the bullet removed from Lyndel but that there was not “enough detail agreement to show a conclusive association between the two items.” Consequently, Nicklin was “unable to rule out the possibility that some other weapon fired the bullet.” A June 7 report stated much the same, though Nicklin said that details of the analysis “in my opinion, strongly suggest” Claude’s gun fired the bullet. The final report, from June 22, went further: While it reiterated that there was no “conclusive association” between the pieces of evidence, it also described a scratch on the ridges inside the gun’s barrel as being “a very unusual feature.” The scratch appeared to line up with a marking on the bullet, leading Nicklin to conclude that “the likelihood of some other weapon being responsible … seems extremely small. I hope this clarifies the position for you.”

He was addressing Deister. According to Nicklin’s subsequent testimony and Deister’s own notes, Deister spoke multiple times with the lab in England when it was completing its reports.

Claude and Jackie insisted there was no way Mark had used the gun. They said they kept their bedroom door locked while sleeping and the gun loaded at all times on top of a dresser near the bed. Deister suggested that the lock was easy to pick and that Mark had reloaded the gun with Lyndel’s ammunition after using the weapon to shoot the Robertsons. Somehow he’d been so quiet as he moved that no one in the Woodworth or Robertson house heard him.

“If a boy was going to slip in a bedroom and snatch a gun off the chest of drawers, go over, and shoot somebody, do you think he’d bring it back empty?” Deister asked.

“Do you think that after you shot somebody you would be really in your right mind to think, yeah, I’ve gotta load this gun?” Jackie replied.

“To be real honest with you, Jackie,” Deister said, “with somebody with emotions as quiet as your son, yes.”


2011

In the lead-up to the Oxenhandler hearing, Ramsey and Williams were running ragged. Long days and late nights kept Ramsey from cooking Sunday dinner for his family and in-laws, a weekly tradition. He slept little and ate rarely, which worried his wife, given his heart problems. Williams saw her children only in brief spurts, which weighed on her maternal conscience. Still, she considered the work she was doing important, and she hoped to be an example to her kids.

Sensing that, like the dealings revealed by the Lewis letters, Deister’s involvement in the case might constitute a violation of Mark’s legal rights, Ramsey and Williams wanted to talk to Deister under oath. Ramsey dispatched a paralegal from Bilbrey’s to meet with Deister, who was then 77 and semiretired, at a Panera Bread in Kansas City. Deister consented to a deposition and, according to the paralegal’s notes, said he “had done nothing wrong” and “never had a doubt that Mark Woodworth was guilty.” Deister continued, “Mark should have just quit after the first trial. He would probably already be out by now.”

The deposition took place on March 1, 2011, at the Chillicothe library, located behind the courthouse. Children read picture books about heroes and villains in a nook by the front windows. Ramsey and Williams met Deister and a representative of the state attorney general’s office in a conference room. Deister’s black mustache had long since turned gray, his belly hung over his belt, and a bald patch had given way to a liver-spotted scalp with wisps of faded hair. Though he looked world-weary, he was combative when he spoke.

“Why were you concerned about how they were going to react?” Ramsey asked, referring to Deister’s decision to keep the full extent of his and Calvert’s work—Deister’s access to the case files, for instance—private from other law enforcement.

“Why not?” Deister retorted.

“I’m asking you, sir,” Ramsey said.

“Because I’d be concerned about anybody having objections to me working the case with the sheriff’s department, with Gary,” Deister said.

“Why would the troopers have an objection to you?” Ramsey asked.

“Why would they?” Deister said, again using a coy restatement of Ramsey’s question. “For no reason other than the fact that there’s a civilian out there doing some of the work.”  

“It had nothing to do with the reason you resigned from the Platte County sheriff’s department?” Ramsey asked, hitting on a sore subject.

“Why don’t you go look up a different street?” Deister said, his tone now tense. “No, it didn’t have anything to do with that.”

Ramsey was referring to an incident from 1981, when Deister was still on the vice squad in Platte County and was leading an investigation of a prostitution ring tied to a business called Utopia Health Studio. Allegedly a massage parlor, Utopia boasted several mirrored rooms with mattresses on raised, carpeted platforms, as well as a rock-cave suite equipped with heavy chains, a padded stockade, and leather whips. The FBI suspected that Deister might have been doing more than probing the business, and Deister faced possible criminal charges for promoting prostitution. He resigned from his job. Soon after, he hung out his shingle as a private eye.

At the conference table, Williams pulled a document out of a plastic box. Ramsey handed it to Deister.

“Page 76,” Ramsey instructed.

“OK.”

“Who is Brent?”

“Who is who?” Deister said.

“It talks about a Brent. I’ve got a telephone number here.” Ramsey directed Deister to an entry on the private eye’s call log from the Woodworth investigation.

“Brent Elliott,” Deister said, referring to the former Livingston County prosecutor who had also served as Judge Lewis’s personal attorney.

Ramsey grilled Deister about his interactions with Elliott, which seemed to incense the investigator. “I have no respect for your kind, believe me,” Deister said to Ramsey. “You’re nothing but a parasite.” Ramsey had anticipated this turn in the exchange. “One of my goals was to knock him off balance, kind of an aikido move,” he later explained. “Getting under his skin, it took about two minutes to do that.”

Ramsey and Williams presented another page of Deister’s notes, on DunCourt and Associates letterhead. “I guess you don’t remember the September 1, 1992 phone call you had with Brent Elliott, do you?” Ramsey asked. The call occurred during a week when Deister spoke multiple times with both Elliott and Roger Summers, his friend at the forensics lab in England.

“Apparently not, no,” Deister said.

In tabbed folders arranged by Williams, Ramsey had the full scope of Lyndel’s payments to Deister, totaling about $35,000 in the form of checks, the title of Cathy’s Suburban, and wheat that Lyndel sold in Deister’s name. Ramsey grilled Deister on the apparent malfeasance of his concurrent involvement in the shooting investigation and the embezzlement case. “I got about as much respect for you as I do a flea on the ground,” Deister said at one point. “You’re not even looking at the real issues on who killed this woman.” Afterward he called Calvert, with whom he was still friendly, to say how mad he was.

“I have no respect for your kind, believe me. You’re nothing but a parasite.” 

Before his own deposition a few weeks later, Calvert agreed to meet Ramsey and Williams at a small hotel in Chillicothe sometimes frequented by fabric enthusiasts because of its proximity to the Missouri Star Quilt Company. Calvert, a thin man with large-frame glasses and a tendency to speak in a mumble, no longer worked at the sheriff’s office. He’d become sheriff of Livingston County in the 1990s and then left public service in 2001, securing lucrative work doing background checks and other investigative assignments in the Middle East on behalf of the U.S. military and various contractors. He’d returned home in 2006 and started working for a security firm from a desk at his home on the outskirts of Chillicothe. Calvert had recently married a woman named Slavica, who had a thick Eastern European accent and accompanied him to the hotel room. She sat stiffly to one side during the conversation, staring at Williams.

Ramsey wanted to talk with Calvert before the deposition in hope that the former lawman’s instinct for self-preservation would kick in once he heard what he’d be asked under oath. Ramsey showed Calvert the Lewis letters; Calvert said that he’d never seen them before. “Yeah, that’s what everyone’s been saying,” Ramsey replied. (Judge Lewis, who by then had retired and was frail from a battle with cancer, was adamant in his own deposition that the letters revealed nothing unethical. He died in 2016 at the age of 79.)

Ramsey also asked Calvert about Lyndel recanting his initial accusation against Brandon Hagan. “Lyndel never changed his story in his testimony,” Calvert insisted. Which was technically true: Lyndel had never said Brandon was the killer under oath. By the time Lyndel gave sworn statements, Brandon had an alibi and the Robertsons were suspicious of Mark.

A few weeks later, at his deposition, Calvert claimed that he was unable to recall many of the details of his work with Deister—the result of a poor memory that Slavica sometimes complained about, he mused. The exchange was largely uneventful. Then, near the end, as Ramsey and Williams were getting ready to pack up their files and equipment, Calvert offered to explain how he’d once obtained Brandon’s fingerprints. “No, that’s OK,” Ramsey said, since it seemed like trivial information at best. Then he changed his mind. “Well, yeah, what happened?”

Calvert said he’d gotten the prints from police in Independence, who took them after Rochelle Robertson filed a complaint against Brandon for ignoring a restraining order that she’d obtained a week after her mother’s death. “He violated that order of protection,” Calvert said.

Ramsey and Williams were confused. They knew about the protective order, but Rochelle had testified under oath years before that Brandon had never violated it. Moreover, in the records Ramsey and Williams had obtained from law enforcement, there was no mention of Brandon breaching the order’s terms. “Would that show up in the court file?” Ramsey asked.

“I’m sure,” Calvert replied. Ramsey and Williams thought that they saw a slight smirk on his face.

Williams made a beeline for the courthouse. As with Faustenau’s transcription, it turned out that documents weren’t where they should have been. There were indeed records of Brandon making harassing phone calls to Rochelle on multiple occasions, but they’d been put in a folder separate from the protective order itself. And for some reason, the second folder had been transferred to a courthouse in another county—where none other than Brent Elliott, who’d been Rochelle’s attorney when she obtained the order, was now a judge. The records had never been produced at Mark’s trials to contradict Rochelle’s testimony about Brandon and call her credibility as a witness into question.

Several mysteries suddenly emerged: Why had Rochelle lied? Was there a good explanation, or was she trying to hide something? Who would go to the trouble of burying evidence of Brandon’s continued, illegal contact with Rochelle—and why?

Ramsey and Williams’s goal in the Oxenhandler hearing would be to show that Mark hadn’t received a fair trial. But they could also argue that the Lewis letters represented an evidentiary gateway to examine information that suggested a compelling new theory of the crime. The violations of the protective order might be that sort of information. It turned out there was more.

Part IV


1990

If she wasn’t quarreling with Brandon, Rochelle was arguing with her mother about Brandon. He was a prototypical bad boy who got into fights after drinking enough beer at high school parties. He twice beat up another guy Rochelle had dated. When he got mad at his girlfriend, he sometimes hit her, too. One time he choked Rochelle on a bed and threatened to break her neck. According to a friend of Rochelle’s who spoke under oath, if Brandon didn’t feel like his girlfriend was respecting him, he’d sometimes drive her through the countryside, accelerating to reckless speeds until she begged him to stop. If ever they broke up, Brandon threatened, he’d commit suicide.

Still, Rochelle loved him, and she hated that her mother told her what to do. Cathy said she’d buy Rochelle a car if she ended things, but Rochelle said no. Her relationship, however fraught, was her business.

Cathy’s sister later told investigators that, when Rochelle lived at home, she was “disruptive” and “self-centered.” Lyndel’s brother reported that Cathy had once “told Rochelle that she should leave and not come back.” In her own interview with police, Rochelle said of her mother, “I loved her and everything, but it’s just that—it seemed like she didn’t like any of my boyfriends and I never did anything right.”

“I could never look her in the eye,” she said in the same interview, “because I always felt that she didn’t like me very much.”

Even when Cathy was hardly speaking to their eldest child, Lyndel would slip Rochelle cash to cover her expenses. The situation with Brandon coincided with a rough patch in Lyndel and Cathy’s marriage. Farmhands sensed it on the walkie-talkies they used while working in the Robertsons’ fields. “Cathy would just rip into Lyndel on the radio,” Chris Ruoff said. On a car trip with their children the summer before the shooting, Lyndel ended an argument he and Cathy were having by slapping his wife across the face. She didn’t speak to him for several days afterward.

At the Hy-Vee grocery store, where she worked at the deli the summer before going to St. Joseph, Rochelle talked to her colleagues about the problems at home. According to her manager, Loronda Corbin, Rochelle said she “hated” her mother, “wished she was dead,” and “wished somebody would shoot her.” (Corbin was not called as a witness at either of Mark’s trials.) Later, at the Brass Buckle in St. Joseph, Rochelle was again candid about her relationship problems. Keri Lehmer, her boss, told investigators that she “knew Rochelle’s parents wanted them apart.”  

A few hours after the shooting, police came to Rochelle’s apartment in St. Joseph. She didn’t answer their knocking, so the officers unbolted her door. She said she’d been sleeping with a fan on and hadn’t heard them. Not long after, Kevin Price, a construction worker sent by a family friend, picked Rochelle up to bring her back to Chillicothe. During the drive, Rochelle said little, and Price didn’t try to draw her out. At one point, Price recalled Rochelle asking if her parents were hurt badly in the accident. Price said he told her about the shooting and her mother’s death. As they got closer to Chillicothe, Price mentioned that Brandon was a suspect. Rochelle insisted that Brandon hadn’t done it. According to Price, she said she’d spoken with her boyfriend on the phone at his home in Independence at 11 p.m., placing Brandon too far away from her parents’ house to have arrived there by the time of the shooting.

Price dropped off Rochelle at the home of Rhonda’s boyfriend, Brian Alexander, where the Robertson children had been taken from the crime scene. Soon after, Brandon arrived, too; Rochelle had called him as soon as the police showed up at her apartment. Brandon would later tell investigators that a friend drove him to Chillicothe, where he borrowed a Jeep that his old wrestling coach sometimes lent to athletes. Amy Baldwin, a friend of Rhonda’s, rode with Brandon from Chillicothe’s high school to the Alexanders’ house. Baldwin remembered Brandon saying, “I can’t believe this happened. I feel sorry for the family.”

The house was bustling with friends, relatives, and investigators, who were interviewing the Robertson kids one by one. Brandon gave Rochelle a hug and stood with her for a while, then walked over to Rhonda. “Do you think I shot them?” Brandon asked. Rhonda turned away and didn’t answer.

Brandon asked again, “Do you really think I did this?”

“I don’t know,” Rhonda said.

At some point, Brandon and Rochelle went upstairs into a room and closed the door behind them. According to Rochelle, they talked about questions that investigators might ask Brandon. The secrecy of the situation didn’t sit well with Marvin Alexander, Brian’s father, who knocked on the door and told them to come out.

Brandon went to the sheriff’s office to be interviewed. He gave his alibi, which his family confirmed: He’d been in his room by 9 p.m., and his sister placed him asleep in bed at 10:40 p.m., when she went in to get a blanket. His mother had been up until 1 a.m., when her husband came home from a swing shift, and she never saw Brandon leave. Brandon also confirmed that Rochelle had called him from St. Joseph before Price picked her up that morning. He described her as “real hysterical, and she was crying and everything, and she told me what happened.”

This seemed to conflict with Price’s version of events, in which he was the first to tell Rochelle that there’d been a shooting, not an accident. However, investigators either didn’t catch the disparity or didn’t think it was important enough to pursue. The same day, about 12 hours after the shooting, Brandon’s hands tested positive for gunshot residue. In Mark’s second trial, a forensic chemist would testify that the analysis fell outside the time frame for obtaining reliable results.  

Read Rochelle Robertson’s restraining order.
Read Rochelle Robertson’s restraining order.

In her own interview, with Calvert and other investigators, Rochelle reiterated that she thought Brandon was innocent. One detail in her story had changed, however: She did not tell police that she’d spoken to Brandon on the phone the night of the shooting. Instead, she said that she’d gone home after work, read part of a Danielle Steel novel, and fallen asleep before midnight. This version of events fit neatly with Brandon’s alibi, even more so than the one in which the pair talked before bed. If his sister said he was asleep before 11 p.m., Brandon couldn’t have been on the phone then.

Law enforcement confirmed that Rochelle had been at work the evening of the murder, and they interviewed her roommate, Baniki Dawson, who described Brandon as “very jealous and possessive.” The report didn’t indicate whether the officers had asked Dawson about Rochelle’s activity the night of the shooting. Similarly, if the investigators had checked the phone records from Brandon’s house, that information wasn’t included in the case files.

The tone of Rochelle’s interview shifted when an investigator suggested that the shooter must have known “right where they were going” and “had the gall to walk by” two of the Robertson children’s bedrooms before killing their mother. “The way I pictured it in my mind,” Rochelle responded, “was somebody went and opened the door, and they just stood right in the doorway, and it was dark. I don’t know how the moon was outside, but this is how I picture it in my mind. The curtains are open, and you can see because of the moonlight, and they shot my mom and then they shot my dad. That’s all that I can think of.”

An investigator asked what Rochelle imagined Lyndel doing when he woke up, before being shot. “I picture it happened so fast, he doesn’t really—I picture bang, bang,” she said. “I picture them shooting her and then him right after, before he even has a chance to sit up.”

“You think it was done with a pistol or a rifle?”

“When I picture it, I think of a pistol. But I don’t know,” Rochelle said. “I pictured myself behind the person, [looking] around their shoulder and looking right at the gun.”

Rochelle’s description of the crime made investigators suspicious. In a second interrogation, they asked about Brandon’s abuse. At first, Rochelle said that he’d never been violent with her. When investigators pressed her, she recanted. “I lied about one thing,” Rochelle admitted.

“You’ve lied about a lot more things than one thing,” an officer replied. “If you think that you’re going to skate on us just because you’re an attractive, nice-looking girl, you’re not going to skate. If you’re dirty, we’re going to prove it.”

“I’m not covering for him,” Rochelle said of Brandon. “I’m telling you everything I can tell you.”

“But what’s your gut tell you?” Calvert asked.

“When I first heard, I didn’t know who could do that. Everybody’s been talking about Brandon, Brandon, Brandon—and I started getting doubt in my mind,” Rochelle said. “In my heart, I don’t think he did that to me.”

Unbeknownst to most people in Chillicothe, at the time, Rochelle was pregnant with Brandon’s child. Nine days before the shooting, on a trip home from St. Joseph, Rochelle had shown her friend Carmen Kinsella the positive results of a pregnancy test from her college clinic. She was about three months along. She also shared the $500 estimate for the abortion she was scheduled to have a few days later in Kansas City. Brandon had offered to pay for the procedure, but he’d also waffled on whether he actually wanted Rochelle to go through with it. They’d talked about keeping the baby. Crying on a sidewalk in downtown Chillicothe, Rochelle told Kinsella that she wasn’t sure what to do.

Ultimately, Rochelle skipped her abortion appointment. Lyndel would later tell investigators that he and Cathy weren’t aware of the pregnancy. But Brandon told Rochelle he suspected that Cathy knew because she had a mother’s intuition.

Whether this was true or not, Cathy tried in earnest to break the couple up in the weeks before the shooting. One day she called Brandon’s mother, Renee Thomure, and demanded that she tell her son to stop seeing Rochelle. Cathy threatened to take out a restraining order if Brandon kept coming around, and she said that he needed professional help to get over Rochelle. Thomure reportedly tried to calm Cathy down. “I’ve never done nothing to you, you don’t know me from nowhere, and I’ve been nice to you,” she said, according to Brandon. “I’d like to expect the same from you.”

The call didn’t work, and Cathy kept her word. She went to the Chillicothe police station and got the paperwork for a restraining order. The night of the shooting, she left it sitting on the kitchen table.  

In the days after the crime, Rochelle’s family told her to terminate the pregnancy as well as her relationship with Brandon. She called Brandon to tell him that she was taking out a protective order against him. The next day, she wrote on the legal form in wide script that he “has struck me in the past, and has made frequent harassing telephone calls.” She added that he “may have murdered my mother and attempted to kill my father.” Soon after, a friend drove Rochelle to get the abortion. (The pregnancy was not mentioned at the first trial and was brought up only briefly at the second.)

Two months after the shooting, Rochelle took a polygraph test. One of the questions was “Did you shoot your parents?” She failed. Polygraphs are controversial; their accuracy in identifying lies is a matter of scientific debate. The examiner largely attributed the outcome of Rochelle’s test to her trying to control her breathing instead of acting and speaking naturally. She agreed to take another one but never did. A few days later, Claude Woodworth heard from friends that Lyndel was telling people his business partner might be involved in the murder.


2011

Rochelle arrived at her deposition with Ramsey and Williams in the Livingston County library wearing a pink T-shirt that said “Fashion Is Not a Luxury.” Metal bracelets clanked on her wrists, and a silver cross hung from a chain around her neck. Her last name was Koehly now, and she and her husband had two sons. She still lived in Chillicothe and was involved in 4-H like her mother had been.

According to Williams, the goal of the exchange was to “get onto the record all of the things that had been swept under the rug at the first two trials, all the inconsistencies” that she and Ramsey had discovered in the case files and in interviews. During the deposition, Rochelle claimed 59 times that she couldn’t recall details of events surrounding her mother’s death and the murder investigation. She attributed this to a bad memory she’d had since she was a child.

“Did you tell anyone after you found out your parents had been shot that Brandon couldn’t have done the shooting,” Ramsey asked, “because you called him at a time when he couldn’t have been in Chillicothe?”

“I don’t remember saying that to anybody,” Rochelle said.

“Did you ever see any reports of any persons, especially from a person named Kevin Price, that indicated that?

“No.”

“Would you have any reason to dispute Kevin Price if that’s what he said?”

“Who is Kevin Price?”

“Do you know Kevin Price?”

“I don’t think so. That name sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t think of who that is.”

Ramsey glanced at Williams, who pulled a document from a folder.

“I’m going to show you what’s been marked as Exhibit 13,” Ramsey said, sliding over the portion of Rochelle’s interrogation from shortly after the murder in which she’d conceded that Brandon had been violent with her. Among the instances she’d described to investigators was one in which Brandon punched the dashboard of her car. Rochelle sat silently as she read over her own words.

“How do I answer this? Because I don’t know. I don’t remember,” Rochelle said, glancing over at a representative from the attorney general’s office who was present for the deposition. “I mean, if somebody said it—and I’m not disputing that I had said it to them, but I don’t remember saying it to them. How do I—how do I—what do I do?”

“I’m just asking you if you dispute it,” Ramsey said.

“He never damaged my vehicle.”

“Do you dispute that you then later said, ‘The only thing I lied about was being punched in the eye.’”

“No, I don’t dispute that.”

Later in the deposition, Ramsey asked Rochelle why she’d lied about the abuse. “Because I was embarrassed,” she said, looking down at the table. “But then I came back later and told them.”

Ramsey directed Rochelle to another passage from her 1990 interrogation, in which she asked the officers questioning her whether they thought Brandon could kill somebody. “What do you think?” an investigator replied. “Maybe it’s just that I don’t want to think it,” Rochelle said.

Ramsey asked if Rochelle disputed that the exchange had occurred. She said she did not.

Rochelle asked the officers whether they thought Brandon could kill somebody. “What do you think?” an investigator replied.

Williams took on the task of compiling documentation of Brandon’s criminal history. Ramsey referred to Williams as his right arm, but she preferred the nickname Ramsey’s Google, given to her because she could find any detail in tens of thousands of pages of case files in a matter of minutes. Williams also proved as unflappable as a seasoned investigator when it came to tracking down police reports, cold-calling witnesses, and showing up at people’s doors.

She learned that, in 2006, Brandon was sentenced to six months in jail for drunk driving. Three years later, Sandy O’Connell, the mother of a young woman who was pregnant with Brandon’s child, approached police near the town of Lake Ozark, where Brandon was living. “He has beaten on my daughter,” O’Connell reported. “Brandon Hagan has personally threatened to kill me and has told me that he would kill me and my ‘white trash family.’” In the midst of Williams gathering evidence, police in Jefferson City received another abuse complaint against Brandon, this time from neighbors of his then girlfriend, Amanda Feuerborn. An officer observed in a report that Feuerborn’s “left eye was starting to turn black and blue,” which she said was from Brandon punching her; when she tried to get away, “he slapped her and threw her on the floor.”

Brandon’s persistent violence against women was shocking, but it didn’t implicate him in the Robertson shooting. Then a report from a man stopped Williams in her tracks. She got her hands on the document after law enforcement near Lake Ozark passed it to the sheriff’s office in Chillicothe, where a man named Steve Cox was now in charge. According to the report, an individual named Aaron Duncan had approached law enforcement and said that Brandon had bragged about being a “number-one suspect” in a murder investigation that “had gone on a long time.”

Williams drove from St. Louis to visit Duncan, a 26-year-old mixed-martial-arts (MMA) fighter who’d got to know Brandon when the former wrestler was cutting his teeth as a fight promoter, one of a few careers Brandon had tried on for size. Duncan and his wife greeted Williams and sent their children to play so that Duncan could tell his story, which he later repeated in a deposition.

One night in 2008, Duncan had gone over to Brandon’s house. The men were drinking in the garage when Brandon started rifling through some boxes. There were wrestling trophies inside, but Brandon was more interested in newspaper clippings from a time when, he told Duncan, he’d been accused of murdering his girlfriend’s mom. The girlfriend’s parents “had wanted her to stop seeing him,” Duncan recalled. “Brandon said they’d fought all the time, this and that, him and the parents. And they thought he was too aggressive for her.” Brandon also talked about “someone named Mark,” Duncan said. “He was really talking down about this Mark guy, like how stupid he was.”

Duncan said that Brandon had made self-incriminating disclosures in the past, about cooking meth in college, selling ecstasy pills, and beating someone in Chicago with a golf club. Talking about being a murder suspect was, however perversely, in character for the Brandon that Duncan knew. “I didn’t think twice about it,” Duncan said.

Two weeks after the conversation in the garage, Brandon came to Duncan and asked for a $5,000 investment in an MMA venue he was hoping to open. Duncan had young kids at home, and money was tight, so he said he couldn’t help. “He flew off the handle,” Duncan said of Brandon. When Duncan told him to calm down, Brandon threatened to kill his friend’s family.

“I’ve killed before and got away with it,” Duncan recalled Brandon saying. “What makes you think I can’t do it again?’

Williams was dumbfounded. “It was a holy-shit moment,” she said. Then again, the case was full of those, so she was getting used to how they felt. “You realize there are ten more holy shits you’re going to find after that,” Williams said. “For each one, you’re going to go back through everything in the case file to see if that changes the way you see anything you thought you understood already.”

Williams had to wonder why Brandon would boast so cavalierly about murder and risk getting caught. Maybe he had a twisted reason for bragging about a crime he didn’t actually commit. His alibi, after all, had never been contradicted in court. Then Williams and Ramsey, along with Steve Cox at the Livingston County sheriff’s office, started getting calls from people in Chillicothe with other stories about Brandon.


1990

June Cairns was used to her son Matt’s friends coming over to the house. A high school wrestler popular among his peers, Matt often held court in the Cairns living room with guys on his team. Matt wasn’t particularly close with Brandon, whom he found cocky and a little too quick to pick fights over stupid things. Still, Brandon sometimes crashed at Matt’s house after parties or hung out on the family’s couch watching TV. He even kept coming by after he’d moved to Independence. June thought Brandon had worn out his welcome.

One weekend in October 1990, Brandon stopped by the Cairns house to see Matt. He also wanted to use the family’s phone. Standing in the kitchen, he dialed the Robertsons’ number, and Cathy answered. Brandon asked to speak to Rochelle, who was home that day from St. Joseph, and Cathy said no. Brandon began yelling.

“You bitch!” June heard him say. “I’m going to slit your throat!”

June shot up from the dining room chair where she was sitting and went into the kitchen. “You don’t talk that way on my phone,” she told Brandon. She recalled him leaving the house without apologizing.

June saw Brandon again the morning of November 14. Sometime between 6 and 7 a.m., she was having coffee with her daughter and son-in-law when Brandon breezed into the house and went upstairs. Hours later, June heard about the murder of the shooting from the night before and Cathy Robertson’s death. She gave a formal statement to investigators, detailing what she’d heard Brandon say to Cathy on the phone and his arrival at her house the morning after the shooting. The investigators’ report, however, noted only that “Brandon started ‘bitching out’ Cathy Robertson and made threats toward her and Rochelle.” It didn’t include the time frame when June said Brandon had arrived at her home on November 14—which was around when Brandon had told police he’d left Independence.

An additional witness encountered Brandon at Chillicothe’s high school earlier than would have been possible if he were telling the truth. Bob Fairchild, the assistant principal, claimed to have seen Brandon in a hallway between 7:30 and 7:45 a.m. Angie Smith, a teenager who lived down the road from the Robertsons, told law enforcement that, later that day, Brandon approached her and asked if she’d seen anything the night before. Smith said she hadn’t. She told investigators that she “thought that Brandon was more concerned with covering himself than his concern over what had happened.”

At least three other people claimed to have seen Brandon in Chillicothe the night of the shooting. Melissa Suchsland, a fellow high schooler, said she spotted him at an Amoco station between 9 and 10 p.m., standing next to what looked like a Bronco. After news of the shooting spread, Suchsland’s mother took her to the sheriff’s office to report what she’d seen; Suchsland would testify at Mark’s second trial, during which the prosecution questioned her memory and suggested that she was just looking for media attention. Mike Thistlethwaite, who’d once played sports with Brandon, told a friend that he’d seen his former teammate at the town’s bowling alley around 11 p.m. The friend approached the sheriff’s office with this information, and Thistlethwaite later testified that law enforcement never contacted him to follow up.

Then there was Linda Zurmiller, who had a daughter about Brandon’s age. According to Zurmiller, around 10:30 p.m. she pulled up to a stoplight near Chillicothe’s Sonic drive-in, and she saw Brandon in the car next to her. When Zurmiller spoke to law enforcement shortly after the shooting, she noted that it was strange to see Brandon on a weeknight, and at such a late hour, because he didn’t live in Chillicothe anymore. After Mark was convicted, Zurmiller approached the chief deputy sheriff to ask why her report hadn’t influenced the case. “Deputy Calvert told me that Brandon Thomure Hagan’s mother had given him an iron-clad alibi and they couldn’t go above what his mother said,” Zurmiller stated in an affidavit. Calvert told her that Brandon’s mom “opened his bedroom door and he was asleep in bed” the night of the shooting.

“And I told him no,” Zurmiller said, “he was not.”


2011

Ramsey and Williams had gathered nearly 200 pieces of evidence that they planned to submit during the hearing. At Bilbrey’s, with just a few weeks to go, they took stock of what the raft of testimony and documents told them about the case. Much of it pointed to faulty police work and an undue focus on convicting Mark. More evidence than they’d anticipated, however, made Brandon look guilty. It was all circumstantial, which wasn’t enough for a prosecutor to build a case on—and that wasn’t their job anyway. Still, the legal team hoped to use the hearing to at least air what they’d learned about Brandon.

They also wanted Brandon himself to testify, which meant tracking him down. Williams volunteered to go to bars he’d been known to frequent in and around Lake Ozark. “I wasn’t afraid of him. I thought he was a bully, and bullies never scared me,” she said. Ramsey, though, wouldn’t hear of it. “We’re not putting you in harm’s way,” he told Williams.

Instead, Williams contacted Brandon on the phone. He bounced around a lot; his various run-ins with the law didn’t help him hold down steady employment, and when child-support payments and tax liens piled up, he sometimes moved back in with his mother in Independence. Recently, though, he’d got an apartment in Jefferson City. When Brandon answered, and Williams explained who she was, he was defensive. “Every time I talk to someone my words get jumped and turned around,” he said. Brandon declared himself innocent. “I don’t know why everyone is focused on me,” he said. “You should talk to Rochelle.”

The statement took Williams by surprise. She’d assumed that Brandon and Rochelle had stopped talking many years earlier. Why would they still be in touch?

“Do you have a number for her?” Williams asked.

“I call my mom if I need to get ahold of her,” Brandon said. “She calls Lyndel and gets Rochelle’s number for me to talk to her.” (In her deposition, Rochelle told Ramsey that she and Brandon hadn’t spoken since 2003 or 2004.)

Williams asked what Brandon’s mom and Lyndel had to talk about. Brandon said “newspaper articles about the case”—a reference to Alan Zagier’s AP reporting from a few years prior. Williams planned to inquire next about what he and Rochelle had to discuss, but Brandon cut things short.

“How would talking to me help anything?” he asked. The call suddenly dropped. When Williams tried Brandon’s number again, it went straight to voice mail. On a later call, Brandon told Williams and Ramsey that he wouldn’t talk without a lawyer. His mother also said she had no interest in talking.

A few weeks later, Williams and Ramsey showed up at Brandon’s apartment. Because of his wrestling and MMA experience, Williams expected him to have a commanding physical presence. The man who opened the door was small and compact. He held a shirt in one hand, and he had shaving cream on his face. Williams explained that he was needed to testify at the hearing about his past statements to police. “They raped me for years,” Brandon said of law enforcement. “I’m not going back to court. I’m the victim here.”

When Williams tried to ask Brandon questions, he said, “I’m not talking to you—you have to talk to my lawyer.” She pointed out that he’d eventually have to speak under oath, and he asked defiantly, “Well, what if I don’t come?”

There, on the doorstep, Brandon was served with a subpoena.

Part V


2011

On Mark Woodworth’s 3,498th day in prison, he woke up at 5 a.m. He put on a gray uniform, and guards placed his wrists in shackles. He walked down a series of sterile corridors until he reached a door. Outside was a car waiting to take him away from Crossroads Correctional. It was a nearly three-hour drive to Boone County, where the evidentiary hearing was scheduled to begin that day—May 31, 2011—in Judge Oxenhandler’s court. From the car’s backseat, Mark looked out the windows as mile after mile of flat farmland zipped by. A leaden dawn eventually gave way to bright sunshine. Mark saw green pastures, roaming cattle, and rows of freshly planted crops fading to a blur on the horizon. Once this had all been familiar; now it was foreign.

At the courthouse, officers escorted Mark to a small room, where he traded the uniform for a dress shirt, slacks, and shiny black shoes. It was the first time he’d worn civilian clothes in more than a decade. His parents, who’d brought the outfit from Chillicothe, were waiting in the courtroom with dozens of friends. Members of the Free Mark Woodworth campaign, which had raised money for his legal fees and designed T-shirts and license-plate holders promoting the cause, had met early that morning in the parking lot of Chillicothe’s Hy-Vee. Loaded down with home-baked cookies and thermoses of coffee, they’d piled into rented vans and caravanned to Boone County.

Among the supporters was Chris Ruoff, who was sure Mark had been bulldozed, and Kathy Smith, whose backyard shared a border with the Robertsons’. After Cathy was murdered, Rhonda, still in high school, would call up Smith to ask how to get a grass stain out of her brother’s baseball pants or what kind of soup goes well with grilled-cheese sandwiches. “I said ‘I would do chicken noodle soup’ and just have tears in my eyes, because that’s not something a 16-year-old girl should be thinking about,” Smith said. But while her heart went out to the Robertsons, she didn’t think Mark was guilty. “I needed to hear myself, firsthand, some of the things that had been rumored about in town,” Smith said of her decision to travel to Boone County.

On the other side of the courtroom were the Robertsons with a smaller group of allies. The siblings were now adults, raising kids of their own. The family had never wavered in their belief that Mark killed Cathy, but they were powerless to keep rival forces at bay in a place as small as Chillicothe. Rhonda and her husband had stopped buying farm supplies from a business that supported the Free Mark Woodworth crusade. Family friends had quit going to their church after the reverend offered up prayers for the Woodworths. Not long before the evidentiary hearing, an elementary school classmate of Rhonda’s son had approached him and said, “I don’t think he’s guilty,” before turning and walking away. The statement was a kind of shorthand, a fragment of knowing language that embodied the town’s intimacy and tapped into the powerful emotional charge that had pulsed through it since November 1990.

Mark, Ramsey, and Williams filed into the courtroom and took their places at the defense table. Ted Bruce and Stephen Hawke, representatives from the state attorney general’s office, sat across the aisle. Oxenhandler, a stern man with a white beard who talked rapidly, as if to convey that he didn’t have time for people to waste, called the court to order for the first of four days.

Ramsey’s plan was to petition Oxenhandler for habeas corpus relief, which would free Mark on the grounds that he hadn’t received a fair trial. To Ramsey’s mind, the case against his client represented a manifest injustice, and he would call some 30 witnesses to prove it. The prosecution, however, argued that the only question at stake was whether there was any new evidence to consider. They planned to show that all the exhibits Ramsey had mustered, including the Lewis letters, had been available to Mark’s previous attorneys. If past counsel made poor strategic decisions with that evidence, the state wasn’t to blame.

One by one, Ramsey called his witnesses. Terry Deister was on the stand for the longest stretch of time; it was the first court testimony he’d ever given about Mark’s case.

“You were working for Mr. Robertson in the capacity of helping him defend against a lawsuit, weren’t you?” Ramsey asked.

“I don’t remember anything about that,” Deister said.

Williams handed Ramsey another exhibit: a note from June 1991 in which the private eye had written, “I expressed my concerns about the profile of Mark Woodworth from what I had determined about the conversations I had with Lyndel Robertson.” What did Lyndel say about his neighbor’s son? Ramsey asked.

“I don’t remember,” Deister said.

Ramsey read directly from the evidence. “‘He seemed to be a prime candidate to fall under the profile of an individual who would do almost anything to get the approval [of] his father,’” Ramsey said. “What facts did you base that on? Was that the information you received from Lyndel Robertson?”

“Possibly, yes,” Deister said.

“You knew at that point that Mr. Robertson, your client, was being sued by Mark Woodworth’s father, alleging fraud, didn’t you?”

“No. I don’t remember,” Deister replied. “I don’t even remember much about the civil suit.”

“Are you telling me that you never discussed with Mr. Robertson that there was a lawsuit filed by Mark Woodworth’s father against him?”

“I didn’t say that. I said I don’t remember.”

After more than an hour of interrogation, Oxenhandler had a few questions of his own. The judge remarked on Deister’s unfettered access to the case files. “You’ve been in law enforcement since the sixties,” Oxenhandler said. “You know that in the course of an investigation, police files are not open to anyone.”

“Yes,” Deister said.

Oxenhandler then asked about conflicts of interest and a seeming failure to challenge Brandon’s alibi before inquiring, as a general matter, “Are you having second thoughts with regards to the investigation?”

Deister said no.

At the end of each day of the hearing, Mark changed into his prison uniform and rode back to Crossroads Correctional. Most Chillicothe residents went home for the night, too, but the Woodworths stayed in a local hotel. So did Ramsey and Williams, who worked around the clock in a war room outfitted with portable printers and a conference table littered with documents and boxes of Chinese takeout. Once, when the legal team ran into the Woodworths in the lobby, the family asked what Oxenhandler had said when he called Ramsey to the bench during Deister’s testimony.

“I think you’ve made your point about this man’s integrity,” the judge had said. “You can’t beat a dead horse. Let’s move on.”

“I think you’ve made your point about this man’s integrity. You can’t beat a dead horse.”

Kenny Hulshof flew in for his testimony. He now worked as a lawyer at the firm Polsinelli, which had offices in Missouri and Washington, D.C. After serving six terms in the House of Representatives and losing the 2008 Missouri gubernatorial race, Hulshof had faced scrutiny for his time as a state prosecutor. Investigations into his record would lead to several murder convictions being overturned or thrown out, including that of Josh Kezer, a teenager at the time of his alleged crime. The judge who reversed the conviction found that Hulshof had withheld evidence from Kezer’s defense and misled the jury. “We now know that none of what Mr. Hulshof said in [his] final summary was true,” the judge wrote.

On the stand in Oxenhandler’s court, Hulshof looked poised in a crisp white shirt, dark navy suit, and Windsor-knotted tie. His straw-blond hair was parted over his tanned face. He assured the room that the Lewis letters had been provided to Mark’s defense team during the first trial.

“Do you recall what your process was for making sure that you complied with your obligations?” prosecutor Ted Bruce asked, referring to the sharing of potentially exculpatory evidence.

“My investigator or I, usually my investigator, would hand-number every single page that we received,” Hulshof said, “and then we would make a copy of those investigative reports and tender them to counsel for the defendant.”

Williams felt a jolt of recognition. She grabbed a pen and scribbled a note as fast as she could on a piece of paper. Then she reached over Mark, seated between the two members of his legal team, and jabbed Ramsey in the arm. Williams gestured for her boss to look down at what she’d written in all caps.

“NO NUMBERS!”

Williams then turned to a filing box next to the defense table and flipped through pages until she found copies of the Lewis letters. She yanked them out and handed them to Ramsey. “There were never any numbers. They never stamped these,” she said under her breath.

Ramsey stood to question the witness. “You said, I believe, earlier that it was your practice to put numbers on all the documents that you produced to the defense. Correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Hulshof said.

Ramsey handed him the copies of the letters that Williams had retrieved. “There’s no numbers on those pages, are there?” Ramsey asked.

Hulshof studied the letters. Ramsey swore he saw the color drain from the former prosecutor’s face. There was a long pause.

“There are no numbers,” Hulshof said finally.

At the defense table, Williams beamed. “I knew it,” she whispered to Mark. She’d just showed the court that there was no proof that the Lewis letters had ever made it into the hands of Mark’s defense attorneys, which meant conclusively that they were new evidence. “I thought he was going to have a bowel movement on the witness stand,” Ramsey said of Hulshof.

Ramsey wasn’t done with the witness. “You also stated that this is the only case that you’ve ever prosecuted in which the victim had hired a private investigator to work with law enforcement,” Ramsey said.

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it?”

“It was.”

“From a prosecutor’s standpoint, can that raise issues as to a conflict of interest of the private investigator?”

“There are a host of issues. Conflict of interest is one of them.”

“Especially where that investigator is representing the client who is the victim on a civil suit in which one of the parties’ father sued him for defrauding him, correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Hulshof said, adding that he “wasn’t very conversant” about the civil case.

“And what did you do to resolve the doubts that you had … about Mr. Deister’s potential divided loyalty?” Ramsey asked.

“As far as putting on our case in the first trial, I tried to not have to use Mr. Deister.”

Hulshof, in other words, seemed to have known that questioning Deister on the stand wouldn’t have been smart. Still, he’d used the private investigator’s evidence to build his case against Mark.

Dana Williams, the Chillicothe resident who’d admired Hulshof’s performance at the first trial, was once again in the courtroom. The former prosecutor, she decided, was outmatched. “Ramsey had the facts down, and he was throwing questions at him like he’d done it for a hundred years,” she said. “Hulshof had tried to cover his tracks, and it didn’t go real well.”

Lyndel took the stand wearing a blue dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar, with an eyeglasses case protruding from the breast pocket. Like other witnesses, he said he couldn’t remember many details from the murder investigation, describing his memory as “a big blur.” He’d once said under oath that he was never aware that Roberts didn’t want to charge Mark. Now, with the Lewis letters in evidence, he acknowledged that he’d probably known that the prosecutor “wasn’t aggressive.” (Roberts testified at the hearing, too, noting, “If you allow the victim or alleged victim of a crime to remove the prosecutor every time the prosecutor disagrees with him, then you’re opening a door up to that happening any time the prosecutor doesn’t think there is sufficient evidence to prosecute a case or [that] a particular person should be prosecuted.”)

Ramsey had questions that went well beyond the Lewis letters—ones he knew were likely to provoke the prosecution. He asked Lyndel about Brandon’s violations of Rochelle’s protective order, and Ted Bruce immediately objected. “I don’t see how it’s relevant for any issue that this court has to decide,” the prosecutor said.

“This goes to the man’s motivation,” Ramsey replied. “It goes to the credibility of not only him but … of his daughter.”

Oxenhandler overruled the objection.

“Yeah, I think I did [know] at the time,” Lyndel said of Rochelle’s reports against Brandon, including that he’d harassed her new boyfriend, who later became her husband. “But it’s kind of foggy now. I don’t remember.”

“Did you talk to your daughter at all about all of that?”

“She didn’t really relay it to me that much.”

“So she went over to the sheriff’s department to complain about being threatened, but she didn’t tell you about it?”

“She probably didn’t want to bother me.”

Ramsey methodically presented other evidence casting suspicion on Brandon: the witnesses’ contradictions of his alibi, his threats against Cathy Robertson, and the confession he’d allegedly made to Aaron Duncan. For some of the people from Chillicothe who’d come to watch the hearing, what Ramsey revealed was news—but it matched their understanding of who Brandon was. “That fit right into Brandon’s personality,” Kathy Smith said.

Finally, Ramsey called Brandon himself to the stand. Brandon honored the subpoena, showing up on the appointed day with a clean-shaven face and gel-spiked hair. He wore a gray suit that looked to be a size too big. His ears were cauliflowered from years on wrestling mats.

Brandon came with his attorney, John Waltz, who approached the bench before his client was called to the stand. “Your honor, I represent Brandon Hagan,” Waltz said. “Because he is being targeted by the current sheriff of Livingston County and in the news media, I’ve instructed him to take the Fifth.” Once he was sworn in, Brandon dutifully followed his lawyer’s advice.

“Were you the boyfriend of Rochelle Robertson at one point?” Ramsey asked.

Brandon declined to answer.

“Did you tell the police when you were interviewed that you left Independence, Missouri, at ten minutes to seven the morning after the murder?” Ramsey asked.

Brandon again pleaded the Fifth.

“I don’t have anything further, your honor,” Ramsey said.

Before Brandon was dismissed, Oxenhandler waved Waltz back up to the bench. The judge turned off his microphone. He had some information that the lawyer and his client hadn’t expected. “As an officer of the court, I want you to be aware that there is a warrant for your client’s arrest out of another county,” Oxenhandler said. “When he leaves the courtroom, he is going to be arrested.”

“I’ll accompany him, of course,” Waltz replied.

Outside the room’s doors, officers detained Brandon for writing a bad check. They read him his rights, patted him down for weapons, and emptied the contents of his pockets. Among the items, according to Ramsey, Williams, and Steve Cox, was an index card on which Waltz had written, “If you forget, shut the fuck up.”

Oxenhandler told Ramsey and Bruce to prepare written briefs of their arguments, after which he’d bring them back into his court in November 2011 for a concluding session. At that hearing, Bruce tried to counter Ramsey’s witnesses, particularly those who’d testified against Brandon. “I have no idea whether or not they are intentionally lying, whether or not they are just completely wrong,” Bruce said. Wasn’t it telling, he continued, that the surviving witness didn’t think Brandon did it? “If Mr. Lyndel Robertson wanted to make this case an easy one, all he had to do is say, ‘I saw who did it,’” Bruce said. “I have been troubled all along at the willingness to assume misconduct on the part of people, and not just the police, not just the prosecutor, not just the judges. The victims as well.” Ramsey’s rebuttal hinged on the existence of the Lewis letters and on Deister and Calvert’s work on the case, which Ramsey said “immediately calls into question the integrity of the investigation.”

It would be several months before Oxenhandler issued his recommendation to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, Mark remained in prison. The Woodworths, the Robertsons, and their respective supporters fell back into the uncomfortable habits of life as neighbors in Chillicothe. Williams and Ramsey returned to Bilbrey’s, where each time they logged on to the Missouri courts’ website, they hoped for an alert that Oxenhandler’s findings were available.

Finally, in May 2012, Ramsey received an email from the judge’s office. It said that the report would arrive in a few minutes, after which there would be a public release. Oxenhandler was ruling in Mark’s favor.

Ramsey and Williams yelled out, startling other staff in the office. In between tears, hugs, and jumping up and down, they read aloud lines from the report: “Woodworth had the burden to prove that he was entitled to habeas corpus relief, and he proved it, clearly and convincingly.” The Lewis letters and “all of the subsequently uncovered evidence … should have been disclosed years and years before.” Oxenhandler found Deister “not to be credible.” Calvert’s office “inexcusably” let Deister take the reins of the investigation. Lewis displayed “inappropriateness” and “lost sight of his judicial sense of fairness.” Lyndel’s employment of Deister in two conflicting legal matters was “problematic.” Hulshof’s prosecution was “as flawed [as] the investigation.”

Oxenhandler criticized the focus on Mark as a suspect when there was “an open and obvious ‘other’ person who may have committed the crimes”—namely, Brandon. The judge also criticized an “apparent pattern of not following up on witnesses and investigative leads which tended to contradict [Brandon’s] alibi.” Of Rochelle he wrote that she “was not being candid” about Brandon’s threats. “This demonstrated, at the very least, Rochelle’s intention to protect her boyfriend … from prosecution,” Oxenhandler said. “Either Rochelle was dishonest with the investigators or the investigators were not reporting what they really knew.”

In a fervent section, the judge said that he was “hard-pressed to come up with a word or phrase in the English language that fairly describes the conflicts that existed with regard to Woodworth’s judicial process: They could be the lyrics to a country and western song.”

Ramsey and Williams dialed the number for Crossroads Correctional to tell Mark the news. True to form, he thanked them calmly and politely. Williams, though, sensed a spark of excitement.

The Missouri Supreme Court still had to decide whether or not to take Oxenhandler’s recommendation. At a hearing in June 2012, the seven black-robed justices sat in a room paneled with dark oak and heard Ramsey and Bruce speak one last time. They also asked questions. Of particular interest to the court were the ballistics and their chain of custody.

“The evidence at the hearing was that [Deister] was given physical possession, without supervision, of the bullet?” a judge asked.

“That’s correct,” Ramsey said.

“The conflicts that existed with regard to Woodworth’s judicial process … could be the lyrics to a country and western song.”

The Supreme Court released its decision six months later. The language was unequivocal: The court supported Oxenhandler’s findings and ordered the vacating of Mark’s conviction. He would be released on bond pending a new trial, which the attorney general’s office vowed to mount with the Robertsons’ support. “If seeking justice for the murder of Cathy Robertson takes a third trial and 100 years,” the family said in a statement after the decision came down, “we will do what it takes to hold Mark Woodworth accountable for his actions.”

On February 15, 2013, Mark was transferred from Crossroads Correctional to the Livingston County sheriff’s office. His family was waiting for him, along with Williams and Ramsey. Mark changed into a blue shirt and slacks, and he shook hands with various deputies who wished him congratulations. Mark hesitated when he got to the office’s glass doors. There were hundreds of people in the streets, some holding posters with messages welcoming him home. Media cameras lined the sidewalks. Mark looked around, expecting someone to lead him out. Instead he heard voices urge, “Go on.” Out he walked into the cheering crowd.

Elsewhere supporters of the Robertson family were furious. “I’m ashamed of this town that celebrates a murderer’s homecoming like he is a hero,” one woman wrote on the Facebook page Peace and Justice for Cathy Robertson. “How a two-time convicted murderer can be let free and a welcome-home parade given in his honor is just plain sick,” another wrote. “[That] this ‘person,’ and I use the term very lightly … has the gall to stay in this town and walk free is a little gutsy, don’t you think?”

After a barrage of hugs and questions, Mark was ready to go home, but he didn’t know how. What kinds of cars did his family drive now? Where had they parked? His sister led him to his brother’s truck, with the crowd trailing behind. Once they loaded inside, the siblings began the short trip to Claude and Jackie’s house. The last time Mark had taken the route was in the late 1990s. Back then he could practically drive it with his eyes closed. Now it felt like everything had changed. The roads were wider, and there was a new hospital in town. Outside his parents’ house, Mark couldn’t believe how tall the pine trees had grown.

The next day, Mark’s mom, grandmother, and aunt took him shopping. They went to Orscheln Farm and Home for jeans and to the Bootery for shoes. At an electronics store, his aunt got him an iPhone. “What do you want me to do with this?” he asked. The last time he’d been free, cell phones were only just starting to become everyday items. At the Hy-Vee, he ogled the self-checkout machine. He was surprised to learn at a gas station that he didn’t have to go inside to pay. “Now you use your credit card,” he said. “That was an experience.”

Other things were just as Mark had left them. He moved back into his childhood bedroom and started working with Claude in the fields. “My dream was to farm,” Mark said that fall. “By now I should have my own land, my own equipment, and I don’t have any of it.” If he had to make up for lost time, so be it.

The anticipation of a third trial, however, made it difficult to get started.    

Part VI


2014

A few months after the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling, a judge threw out the key ballistics evidence that allegedly implicated Mark in the shooting, citing “egregious, flagrant, cavalier disregard for evidentiary procedures and process.” The following year, he removed the attorney general’s office from the prosecution of the Robertson shooting and sent the matter back to Livingston County. “From the inception of the ‘secret investigation’ in 1991 through two trials,” the judge wrote, “the concept of ‘due process of law’ for defendant Woodworth took flight and did not reappear until approximately 2009.” The Robertson family questioned the impartiality of the sitting county prosecutor, so the judge appointed a special prosecutor. Finally, in July 2014, the state dismissed all charges against Mark. “The wrong person was charged in the first place,” the special prosecutor told the press. There would be no third trial.

The call came from Ramsey when Mark was in his father’s workshop. “It’s over,” Ramsey said. “You’re not going to have to worry about this anymore.” Mark went into the house to tell his mother, who began to weep. “I felt like my life had been on hold, waiting for the third trial,” Mark said. “I didn’t want to jump out there until it was over.” Now he was ready to live.

The next month, Ramsey filed a civil lawsuit on Mark’s behalf against numerous defendants, including Deister, Calvert, Lewis, Hulshof, Lyndel and Rochelle Robertson, Brandon Hagan, the Livingston County Sheriff’s Department, the Chillicothe police, and other municipal authorities. The suit alleged:

Officials of the criminal justice system … conspired with civilians, who were acting under color of state law, to cruelly and cold-bloodedly frame Mark Woodworth for crimes he was innocent of. The conspirators accomplished their goals by conducting a sham investigation, fabricating false evidence, suppressing exculpatory evidence, and concealing their conspiratorial acts.

To Mark’s supporters in Chillicothe, it seemed obvious that he should get restitution for his time in prison. Other residents, however, saw the lawsuit as a fresh injustice. A professional spokesperson for the Robertson family, hired during the collapse of the case against Mark, said that the narrative of the shooting had tipped into lies and exaggeration. The people who believed the lawsuit’s accusations, she insisted, were like “children taking drugs from a dealer.”

Lyndel and other members of the Robertson family declined to speak for this story. But Rochelle, Rhonda, and Roxanne, the youngest sibling, agreed to meet in the dining room of Chillicothe’s Comfort Inn. When hotel staff fluttered near the table where the brown-haired sisters sat with water bottles, the women would pause their conversation, hoping to ward off any eavesdropping.

“When you go into town, it feels like you’re going into the mob,” Roxanne said.

“We vent to each other a lot,” Rhonda chimed in.

The sisters were frustrated that the town seemed to be forgetting what haunted them the most. “My mother is dead,” said Rhonda, herself a parent of three kids. “Mark has gained so much support. It seems like he has the whole town’s support. People get so wrapped up in this as a big story, and then they can close the book, throw away the newspaper, and turn off the TV. But my mom is still gone, and it’s something we have to live with every day.”

“They didn’t have to bury Mark,” Roxanne added.

“In the beginning here, it was us and the Woodworths,” Rhonda said. “They were our family. We thought of Jackie as a second mother, as much as we were with them.” Now if she saw one of the Woodworths at the Hy-Vee or at Walmart, she felt the urge to leave her cart half-filled and walk out of the store. Lyndel still owned the farmland adjacent to Claude’s, and he drove there every day for work, but he hadn’t spoken to his old business partner in many years. At a local preschool, Mark’s sisters avoided Rochelle, who worked as an aide in a classroom with some of their daughters.

“I would love to move,” Rhonda said, “but we’re anchored here with our farms. And, you know, part of me is like, ‘By God, we’re not going to let them run us off.’”

That finding justice for Cathy first required letting Mark go was an untenable notion for the Robertson sisters. They didn’t believe that someone could concurrently support Mark’s freedom and vindication for their mother’s death. It was an irreconcilable position.

Rochelle talked less than her sisters. Now and then, she cracked her knuckles under the table. “I just really want people to know that my mom was so much more than November 13, 1990,” she said. “She was the epitome of the perfect mom, in my mind anyway.” Rochelle talked about some of her earliest memories, when her siblings hadn’t yet been born and her mom took her on walks. “We’d go out in the creeks and collect these big ugly rocks, and then my dad would open them with a sledgehammer, and there’d be crystals,” she said. “They were the prettiest things inside. I always thought the crystals were diamonds.”

“I just really want people to know that my mom was so much more than November 13, 1990. She was the epitome of the perfect mom.”

The sisters denied that there had been serious tensions between Rochelle and their mother. “It wasn’t this tumultuous thing,” Rhonda said. “Sure, there were a couple of fights, but they got along—they just disagreed about Brandon.” The sisters said the notion that Rochelle might have been involved in the shooting, which Mark’s lawsuit explicitly suggested, was baseless.

“If I found out that she had something to do with this, it’d be no problem for me to tell the world that,” Rhonda said. “Because that’s someone’s life that was taken, and that’s way more important to me than saving my sister.”

At another point, Rhonda said wearily, “I wish the shooter had been Brandon. My life would be a hell of a lot easier. I wouldn’t be going through this agony.”

“I’m sure Dad wishes it was Brandon,” Roxanne added.

Sheriff Cox, who took over the reopened investigation into the Robertson shooting, believed Brandon was likely responsible for Cathy’s murder. “If we were in Las Vegas and the line was you put your money down on who you think did it, all my money would go on Brandon,” Cox said in a deposition. The sheriff grew even more confident after the Oxenhandler hearing, when additional circumstantial evidence came to light.

In 2011, Caleb Carter saw coverage of the hearing and reached out to Ramsey’s office. Caleb’s sister, Casey, had dated Brandon around the time of Mark’s second trial. She’d since passed away, but Caleb remembered a disturbing encounter he’d had with his sister’s boyfriend, before Brandon became so physically abusive toward Casey that her father told him to stop seeing her.

In 1998, Caleb went with Casey, Brandon, and some friends to spend a few nights at a condominium near a lake. One afternoon the group went to Old Time Photos, a portrait studio that sold sepia-toned pictures of patrons dressed in period costumes. Brandon dressed up as a gangster in a saloon. He wore a vest and a hat, an unlit cigar dangled from his mouth, and he gripped a fake pistol. A few hours after the photo was taken, the friends were drinking heavily at the condo when, according to Caleb in a deposition, Brandon “got angry about something and said, ‘I don’t mind shooting somebody or doing what I have to do.’” Caleb said that Brandon then “went into detail about how he had shot a couple of people in Chillicothe because they didn’t want him to date their daughter,” who was pregnant at the time. Caleb remembered Brandon’s saying that “he went to the house and went inside and shot the mom and dad and then he left. They were trying to take the baby away or make her not have a baby.”

Caleb pointed out that, back in 1998, it wasn’t as if someone at the condo could look up Brandon or the Chillicothe shooting on the internet as easily as they could in 2011. “I just thought he was full of it,” Caleb said. “The last thing I remember was him mentioning that he never got caught for it.”

When Cox heard Caleb’s story, he was angry. How many confessions does this guy have to make? the sheriff wondered. The number, however, wasn’t the issue—and it still isn’t.


2018

More than a quarter-century, two trials, and tens of thousands of pages of legal documents after Cathy’s murder, with the Robertsons still sure that Mark committed the crime, it’s likely that only a signed confession or murder weapon will lead to charges against anyone. And because virtually no one involved in the case has ever admitted wrongdoing and the mandate in Mark’s appeal was to prove his innocence, not convict someone else, the answers to several critical questions remain just out of reach.

If, as Ramsey has argued, Calvert, Deister, Lyndel, and others framed Mark, what was their motive? A frank if misguided desire to finish the case and bring closure to the Robertsons? A financial agreement benefiting certain individuals at Mark’s existential expense, and that of his family, too? Something more sinister, like a cover-up to protect the real killer?

If Brandon was the shooter, why has there never been any physical evidence found to implicate him? How likely is it, really, that a 16-year-old, no matter how volatile, could get away with murder, particularly after being the first suspect named by the surviving victim? Through legal representation, Brandon declined to comment for this story. “The claim that he was the true killer” and that he’d conspired with other people is “a bunch of bullshit,” attorney Ken McClain said.

Finally, what if someone else was responsible for Cathy’s murder, a suspect whom investigators missed completely? In a case so riddled with error, it’s not out of the question.

In Chillicothe, the shooting remains a tense, emotional issue. Cathy’s murder was an attack on a Christian matriarch, a cherished local archetype. Similarly, Mark’s conviction represented the denial of an eldest son’s right to live and work on his father’s land. A complete reckoning of the wrongs done seems impossible so long as Cathy’s killer isn’t brought to justice. Until then, as surely as farmers plant and harvest their crops each year, so too will the memory of a violent death and the pain it wrought be perennial.

Cathy’s murder was an attack on a Christian matriarch, a cherished local archetype. Similarly, Mark’s conviction represented the denial of an eldest son’s right to live and work on his father’s land.

On an unseasonably warm winter day, Mark walked across a quiet piece of land stretching toward a stand of poplar trees. The sun was starting to set. Here, a few miles outside Chillicothe, was the construction site of his new house. Once it was completed, he would share it with his wife, Katy, whom he’d met when his sisters orchestrated a lunch to introduce them. They have a son, Miles, who is two.

The house, situated on a 365-acre farm, was funded by a confidential insurance settlement from Mark’s civil suit. The number of defendants had been whittled down as the courts weighed who was responsible for his pain and suffering. The Robertsons and Brandon Hagan were dismissed, for instance, but Calvert, Livingston County, and Chillicothe law enforcement were found liable for tens of millions of dollars in damages. When that legal action ended, another cropped up in its wake: From an eighth-floor office overlooking the Mississippi, where he now has a small firm with his daughter, Ramsey is fighting a lawsuit brought by Brandon against him and Mark. Brandon alleges that being named as a coconspirator in Mark’s civil suit degraded his ability to obtain gainful employment. “He’s been fired from jobs because they found out about the case,” his mother, Renee Thomure, said. The first hearing is scheduled for July 2019.

Brandon, Ramsey, accusations, and court hearings didn’t seem to be on Mark’s mind as he walked through his home’s unfinished rooms. He described the colors he and Katy wanted to paint each wall: a soft green, a warm brown. The place felt as humble as it did idyllic.

Kelly Williams walked beside Mark, looking on the work in progress with satisfaction. She’d gotten married recently, to an insurance adjustor. After finishing Mark’s case, she’d worked at a courthouse for a while and eventually landed an administration job with more manageable hours at the University of Missouri. She stayed in close touch with the Woodworths, coming to Chillicothe as often as she could.

“I told Mark that he’s got to deal with me for the rest of his life,” she said.

“I’m stuck with her,” Mark echoed.

From her purse, Williams took out a photo laminated with clear tape. It shows the moment Mark walked out of the sheriff’s office in Chillicothe, in February 2013, and encountered a throng of supporters. In the middle of the swarm, Williams is behind Mark, smiling proudly as he melts into the crowd’s embrace.

Katy and Miles arrived at the construction site. The redheaded toddler dashed up to Williams to give her a hug. Mark bent down to adjust the Velcro straps on his son’s shoes. The group walked out of the house, to the area where Mark and Katy planned to build a back porch. “We wanted plenty of room,” Mark said of the acreage before him. There wasn’t a neighbor in sight.

Mark meandered back inside, to a room with tall windows facing east and south. This was where Katy would grow plants. “Succulents, those kinds of things,” Mark explained. “The sun comes in and warms the room.”

The moment echoed one from a few months after Mark first got out on bond in 2013, when he still didn’t know if he’d face another trial. One summer day, he drove in a truck—his truck—over a bumpy road on his father’s property, past a vast field of chest-high soybean stalks. He parked on a ridge and got out, then made his way down the slope to examine some of the plants. Harvest was nearing; he wondered how the crops were doing.

Soybeans are tough. In dry air, their leaves curl inward and toward the ground. “It’s how they survive against the summer sun while they wait for more rain,” Mark explained. “That’s their mechanism to defend themselves. That’s them doing what they can to fight.”

If you have any information regarding the murder of Cathy Robertson, please contact the Livingston County Sheriff’s Department at 660-646-0515 or via email at this link.

The Improbable Life of Paula Zoe Helfrich

She was the daughter of a U.S. spy, an exile from Burma, a flight attendant in a war zone, and half of an epic love story. But how much of that was true?

By Julia Cooke

The Atavist Magazine, No. 67


Julia Cooke’s essays and reporting have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, SalonThe New York Times, and Tin House. They have been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing 2014. She is the recipient of a 2016 New York Press Club award and the author of The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba, which features reporting on youth culture in Havana. 


Editor: Seyward Darby
Designer: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Jake Scobey-Thal
Photos: Courtesy of Rebecca Sprecher and Mary Uyeda

Published in May 2017. Design updated in 2021.

One

The four Burmese officers who came to the apartment that morning in 1963 didn’t break down the door. They pounded hard, though, very hard. When Paula Zoe Helfrich answered, they told her in no uncertain terms that she would board an evening flight out of Rangoon. She would not be allowed to return.

A steely new regime in Burma was causing outsiders to scatter. Indian merchants were gathering what earnings could be salvaged from their teak and rice mills before heading west. White expatriates weighed England versus Australia. Deportations of foreigners grew increasingly common. Still, Paula had assumed that her father’s stature would ensure her immunity. He had worked with the highest powers of Burma’s postcolonial government; surely his 17-year-old daughter would skim above any discord like fat on milk.

Besides, she was a native. Her parents were from Illinois, but she had been born in Rangoon. She spoke Burmese. She reflexively knew the differences in climate, language, and culture between the country’s highlands and ports. She had ridden elephants in the jungle and wore longyis, traditional wrap skirts. She had a job at a tourism desk in Rangoon’s stately Strand Hotel and a room in the apartment of a family friend. After work she and her boyfriend, a handsome Burmese student with revolutionary leanings, walked along the shores of Kandawgyi Lake, where dense foliage furnished private nooks. She loved how the pink evening light reflected off the nearby gilded Shwedagon Pagoda onto the lake’s flat water.

Disorder, the result of World War II’s aftermath and simmering interethnic conflict, had afflicted Burma for as long as Paula could remember. Consequences were visible: People displaced from the countryside lived in shantytowns along Rangoon’s fringes. In 1962, the situation took a dramatic turn. The military staged a coup and expelled international organizations, including the Ford Foundation and the Asia Foundation. It banned Western-style dancing, horse racing, and nightclubs. That summer, troops stormed a Rangoon University meeting on democracy, killing dozens of people, according to human-rights groups. The next day, the regime blew up the campus’s student union. The situation became progressively dire as the months wore on.

The following September was when the officers came for Paula. She was ordered to leave because she had spent time with questionable people, namely her boyfriend. Her father didn’t put up a fight. She had less than 24 hours to pack her possessions, bid farewell to the love of her life, and stop for a bowl of mohinga, perfumed fish and noodle soup, on her way to the airport. When Paula told me this story, she described her deportation so vividly that I all but saw the officers’ broad shoulders in her doorway, the rutted roads jolting the car that ferried her to the plane, and her hands nervously gripping her knees as she rode.

She was heading to a place she’d never been and a family she’d never met: grandparents, an aunt and uncle, and cousins in Chicago. She would find the Windy City smelly and orderly, sometimes beautiful but too often cold. She had never experienced the sting of a Midwestern winter. She didn’t even own a coat.  


I once spent half an evening as Paula’s daughter. We met at a 2014 conference in Bangkok of former Pan Am flight attendants; she was the keynote speaker and I was researching a book. In her speech, she talked about growing up in Southeast Asia and feeling out of place in the United States when she was plopped there in the 1960s. She’d lived a series of interlocking adventures: traveling the world with Pan Am, helping evacuate refugees during the Vietnam War, running for office in Hawaii, self-publishing a novel based on her life, returning alone to live in Burma, now called Myanmar, as a middle-aged woman. Paula’s voice was silvery, musical, and rich with laughter. She was in her sixties, she told the group, but she felt like she was thirty. Her two daughters still asked her what she planned to do when she grew up.

The conference’s final dinner involved a river cruise. We drifted past the Thai capital’s skyscrapers, drinking wine and listening to the wafting music of a sequin-clad Elvis impersonator under a sky that threatened rain. At one point, I found myself sitting next to Paula on a crusty vinyl stool bolted to the boat’s aft. I was younger than everyone in the crowd by three decades and had grown weary of explaining my provenance. Paula noticed.

Paula and her daughters.
Paula and her daughters.

“Wanna be my daughter?” she asked conspiratorially, leaning toward me in a quiet moment. Her smiling face, eyebrows raised, was an invitation. “Sure,” I answered.

For the next hour, as people swirled by to talk to Paula, she introduced me as her offspring. It wasn’t an impossible sell—we both wore our curly hair loose and natural; we both had strong opinions and loud laughs. I watched as she explained who I was with zero doubt or hesitation ruffling her features. The other women nodded in understanding. I caved when I ran out of platitudes based on my thin knowledge of her. I finally admitted that we were not, in fact, related, and everyone was amused. No one asked who I really was.   

Paula struck me as magnetic and the rare person who, with no loss of kindness, acts first and considers how people might feel afterward. She seemed in full possession of herself, and what I felt that night was akin to envy, staring upward from my relative youth at this woman of boundless energy and verve. She captivated listeners with the details of life events that seemed stolen from fairy tales. Most striking was an epic love story: When she moved back to Myanmar, Paula told me, she found the teenage boyfriend that the deportation had cost her and married him.

What a magnificent coincidence, I thought, to anchor Paula’s story. The contours and formative incidents of her life, in Paula’s sweeping, confident telling of it, conformed with cookie-cutter precision to the grand currents of history in Southeast Asia. Burma’s independence coincided with her birth and imbued her upbringing with adventure. Its slide into authoritarianism displaced her physically but couldn’t uproot her identity or her affections. Decades later, the country’s reopening drew her into its ebullient orbit and engineered an improbable reunion with a man she’d thought she would never see again. The arc of a life, punctuated by remarkable love, loss, and deliverance—it was a saga that I wanted to write.

The contours and formative incidents of her life, in Paula’s sweeping, confident telling of it, conformed with cookie-cutter precision to the grand currents of history in Southeast Asia.

I also wished to be as curious and bold as Paula when I eventually married and, I hoped, became a mother. She became more than a potential interview subject; she was a candidate for some personal pantheon of spirited women I could locate in my mind on demand, perhaps even call on from time to time. Paula spoke of my coming to visit her in Myanmar as inevitable.

She was right: After a year of occasional correspondence, I flew to Yangon, as Rangoon is now known. It was September 2015. “Aaaaah! Julia, yes!” came the cry from her bedroom when her husband announced that I was at their front door. Paula gripped my arm when she saw me. She’d lost weight since I’d met her, and her hair was less curly. Even so, her gaze possessed startling immediacy. She was impatient and impetuous by nature, but when she looked at you, she seemed to scan everything she found and settle on something—the piece of you that interested her most.

Paula still embodied the dichotomies that had initially drawn me to her: international and American, feminist and feminine, strident and warm, independent yet deeply connected to others. As I talked with her, interviewed friends and family, and explored documents pertaining to her past, another contradiction revealed itself, this one between fact and fiction. Put simply, not every detail of the stories Paula told me about herself was true. In some cases, veracity was less splendid, while in others it was more poignant. “Paula was a creative person,” her younger sister Mary Uyeda told me, “and there were times when that creativity exceeded reality.” Why was the truth of her objectively extraordinary life not enough for Paula, I wondered. Why did she need more?

Somerset Maugham, one of many writers to use Burma as a backdrop, once described it as having “a beauty not of nature, but of the theater.” When I met Paula, the country had become her stage for reclaiming the junctures of a life often shaped against her will. I didn’t know it yet, but I was part of her farewell performance.

Two

In the archives of the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, a samurai sword sits in storage, never before displayed to the public. It is believed to have belonged to Shojiro Iida, commanding general of the Japanese 15th Army in Burma during World War II. Aung San, the architect of Burmese democracy, gave it to Truman in 1946.

Memorandums between Truman’s office and the War Department reveal some hesitation over the president’s acceptance of the sword. To not take it risked alienating the man very likely to claim power in an independent Burma. To receive it would be to recognize his legitimacy while England still technically ruled the gangly country stretched alongside China and Thailand. In the end, Truman’s top military aide accepted the sword on his behalf.

Lieutenant Colonel Baird Helfrich was the emissary dispatched to gift the blade to the president. A lawyer by training, he had arrived in Burma in 1944, to lead a secret wing of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. He was tasked with infiltrating various groups of anti-English revolutionaries to identify those allied with the Japanese and cultivate others deemed susceptible to American influence. He fell in with Aung San, then a leader of Burma’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, and “displayed outstanding acumen, diligence, and daring in obtaining information vital to the United States Government,” according to his OSS personnel file.

After the war, Baird returned home to Illinois, where he married a woman named Patricia “Pat” King who’d been a code breaker in the Navy. They honeymooned in China, then returned to the Midwest, where Baird continued his law career. In Rangoon, Aung San was assassinated in July 1947, six months before Burma achieved the freedom for which he’d struggled. The Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League vaulted into power nonetheless, with U Nu, an ally of Aung San’s, as prime minister. The new government quickly found itself navigating conflicts with ethnic minorities and political rivals fighting for their say in the country’s future.

The Helfrich family.
The Helfrich family.

By the early 1950s, civil war had ebbed. Burma had a lively media and a growing educational system. U Nu aligned himself with anti-communists on state visits, and under General Ne Win, the army became professional and unified, able to squelch border skirmishes with the Chinese. Foreign interest in the country swelled. Burma was rich in natural resources and strategically located amid the Cold War dominoes of Indochina.

Baird sensed opportunity: A few years in Burma investing in various businesses and his family could return to the United States with the funds and connections to launch his political career. (If he still worked for covert services, Baird slid under such deep cover that today the CIA will “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence” of records on his postwar activities.) His wife found Illinois “much too quiet to suit,” anyway. So they decamped. “It all sounds just a bit monumental an endeavor,” Pat Helfrich wrote in her first letter to her skeptical parents, describing various projects and plans that she and Baird would undertake in their new home.


Paula told everyone she knew, even her children, that she was born in Burma. For some listeners, she added a dash of intrigue: Pat delivered the Helfriches’ first child in Rangoon, but Baird wanted the infant to have a passport indicating that she’d been born on American soil. Not long after her birth, he walked a few blocks from his downtown office, where he represented John Deere and other American businesses seeking a foothold in Burma, to a warren of townhouses and department stores. There, in a small, discreet office, he had Paula’s first passport forged. It said she was born in Peoria, Illinois.

This is the first fable to fall away from the scaffolding of Paula’s life. Her mother’s letters, which Paula collected and intended to publish, reveal that she was born in the United States: in Peoria, on August 15, 1946, one year to the day after the Japanese surrendered in World War II. The Helfriches’ next three children—Ellie, Stuart, and Mary—were also born in Illinois. Paula was five when the family moved to Burma. “Paula has come through the whole thing as casually as though she were just crossing the road,” Pat wrote to her parents.

On the other side of that road lay Technicolor longyis, gleaming pagodas, spicy curries, and more than 135 ethnic groups that testily comprised the country. It’s plausible that Paula’s early memories of the Midwest faded quickly and forever. Or perhaps she claimed Burma as her point of origin, knowing it was not, because it felt truer than fact.


A family of six stands in front of a wood-gabled, Tudor-style white house with that colonial incongruity between European architecture and surrounding tropical foliage. It’s April 1952; the Helfriches have arrived on an ocean liner from California to learn that their new home at 26 Park Road in Rangoon is occupied by another family, the result of a miscommunication with a Burmese friend of Baird’s who rented the house to them from overseas.

The knowledge that her family would be sharing a house with the Nicholses, Americans who were leaving for Madras (now Chennai) in India that September, startled but didn’t displease Pat. She had people to introduce her to life as an expat housewife. In letters home, she wrote of new activities and routines. The children gaped at the snake charmer at the Rangoon Zoo, splashed around at the Kokine Swimming Club, and admired a cream-colored Packard owned by a friend of Baird’s, with a horn that tooted “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The humidity prematurely sealed Pat’s letters; bugs ate her books. Paula called the abundant lizards that flitted through the house “baby alligators.” Pat and Baird sat through daily Burmese lessons, but the words never stuck. The children took almost immediately to the language.

Paula attended classes for a time at a school called Methodist English, where her classmates included Aung San Suu Kyi, Aung San’s daughter. I spoke with the now famous politician’s schoolmate and former personal assistant, writer Ma Thanegi, who told me that though she’d known of Paula, they weren’t friends. The foreign children socialized less with the native Burmese than they did with their own.

Paula (left) and younger siblings.
Paula (left) and younger siblings.

Pat claimed to hate segregation, the backbone tenet of colonial life holding that Western children should grow up free of the polluting influence of locals. In her letters, she wrote of her own unlearning of American-ness. Though a Burmese servant could have gone to the outdoor markets for her, Pat shopped for her family’s groceries herself, learning how the religious affiliations of the vendors—Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim—dictated who sold what and when. She had a strapless gown made by a local tailor who used rattan cane in place of whalebone for the stays. Pat fancied herself a trendsetter.

Paula once described her mother’s letters as “chirpy,” but I sense tension in them, especially the ones from that first year: a bold young wife and mother in a far-off place writing home to her staid, well-to-do, disapproving “Mother and Daddy.” Pat described the dignitaries and business groups the Helfriches entertained; she effused about the government’s eagerness to adopt mechanized farming, which had helped Baird secure his John Deere contract. She wrote indignantly that clips her father sent her penned by a Chicago Tribune reporter—articles from that time describe Burma as a “land of sham” that “claims to be just about everything it isn’t,” where “officials can’t speak [their] own language”—didn’t match her observations. She’d met the reporter in the mere three weeks he’d spent in the country and found him chinless and haughty, like a British overlord. He couldn’t be trusted, Pat told her father. Still, she requested, please keep sending such “interesting—if ill-informed” articles.

Through all her writing ran two consistent threads: a commitment to adventure and unconventionality, and an acute awareness of how to shape the way other people viewed her life. Paula would inherit both qualities.

Three

“By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea, There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me”

The first lines of “Mandalay,” Rudyard Kipling’s famous 1892 ode to colonialism, introduce readers to Moulmein, a port city in Burma some 200 miles overland from Rangoon. Moulmein is also the setting for George Orwell’s iconic anti-imperialist essay “Shooting an Elephant,” in which a British officer, who may or may not be Orwell himself, reluctantly kills an elephant that has rampaged a local market. “When the white man turns tyrant,” Orwell writes, “it is his own freedom that he destroys.”

By the mid 20th century, the city had bloomed into more than an object of literary appeal. It was an industrial hub, a signal of independent Burma’s economic rise. Workers floated felled logs down the Thanlwin River for the timber industry, and rice mills clustered along the waterfront. The Helfriches and their children—there were five by then—moved to Moulmein in 1956. Baird had business interests there and wanted to monitor them closely.

Riding an elephant at the Moulmein mill.
Riding an elephant at the Moulmein mill.

At his wood mill, two trained elephants worked from seven to four each day, scooping logs from the river and dragging them up the shore. The workday ended with the blaring of a horn. The elephants, accustomed to the sound, would stop lugging and stand still. In the evening humidity, which settled like a blanket around the shoulders, Paula and her siblings visited the animals. They’d touch them and giggle. Sometimes, Paula rode one and gave it orders to pick up planks of teak between its trunk and tusks. In her memory, “Moulmein was elephants,” she later told me. It was also the scent of fresh bread and coconut pancakes from an Indian bakery, and the Helfriches’ dark-wood longhouse on stilts. The children rode to school, which was run by Catholic nuns, in a rickshaw pulled by a donkey. Among some 2,000 students, they were the only Westerners.

Pat had invited her parents to visit Burma, at one point offering first-class passage on a luxury ship and sightseeing “from Moulmein to Mandalay to the Shan Hills.” Mother and Daddy’s rejection was not included in the cache of letters that Paula later collected. Another letter, though, indicates that the Helfriches booked passage back to the United States in 1957. They spent the summer visiting family and friends, road-tripping from Illinois to Virginia. They stopped in Europe on their way back across the globe. Pat was pregnant with her sixth child by then. En route to Rangoon, she suddenly went into labor. After an emergency landing in Iraq, baby Tommy was born at the American hospital in Baghdad.    

Before reading the letters, I had asked Paula whether she’d been to the United States before her deportation. “Never,” she’d told me, firmly shaking her head. “We had been on one trip to Europe, we’d gone through Rome and to different places in the European continent, and Paris.”

Her cousin John Miller remembers meeting her in Virginia on the trip she claimed she didn’t take. Paula would have been 10 or 11. Miller told me that he was disconcerted at how much of the chicken served at one dinner the young Helfriches devoured—gristle and sinew, pieces and parts that American kids discarded—and how their eating habits contrasted with their prim British accents.


Back in Burma, the post-independence government began to fracture. “It had always been a hodgepodge of competing interests, ambitions and loyalties, held together by the partnerships at the very peak, between U Nu and his chief lieutenants,” writes scholar Thant Myint-U in his history of Burma, The River of Lost Footsteps. “There was no clear ideological divide or really even differences over policy. It was more the story of friends and colleagues who after twenty years living and working at close quarters, through war and peace, were getting tired of one another.” In 1958, a weakened U Nu ceded power to the military; he would reclaim control two years later through a popular vote. The U.S. embassy began warning Americans when it was prudent to stay indoors. Burma in the late 1950s was firm but wobbly, “like a bowl of Jell-O,” Rhoda Linton, an American woman who taught at a missionary school back then, told me. “You never knew what to expect. Things changed very fast or not at all.”

Burma in the late 1950s was firm but wobbly, “like a bowl of Jell-O,” said Rhoda Linton, an American woman who taught at a missionary school back then. “You never knew what to expect. Things changed very fast or not at all.”

By then, the Helfriches had quit Moulmein for a farm up north in Burma’s hilly Shan State. Baird had overseen a rollout of John Deere tractors there some years earlier. Pat, intent on securing a good education for her eldest child, sent Paula to high school in Darjeeling, India, the summer resort of the British Raj. At Loreto Convent, a school where Mother Teresa had trained and Vivien Leigh had attended classes, Paula’s classmates included Nepali royalty and the scions of aristocratic families from Thailand and Bhutan. She learned to play field hockey and ride horses. She ranked among the top three students in her class, argued on the debate team, and acted in plays; she stepped into Bela Lugosi’s shoes to play the lead in Dracula and sang as Cousin Hebe in HMS Pinafore.

On vacations, Paula returned to Shan State. It felt prosaic beside Loreto, all farmland and a tangle of younger siblings. Cosmopolitan Rangoon, though, tugged at her, even as the political havoc there worsened. In 1962, a final coup entrenched Ne Win in power and landed U Nu, his ministers, and 30 ethnic chiefs in custody. The new military-run government abolished the constitution, disbanded parliament, and introduced the Burmese Way to Socialism, an ideology that prioritized state-run institutions and rejected outside influence. The government nationalized major industries, including rice farming, mining, and logging. Production quickly plummeted, and foreigners began leaving the country by the thousands, then tens of thousands, every month.

As a teenager in Burma.
As a teenager in Burma.

When she finished high school, Paula moved to the capital. Despite its tumult—or perhaps because of it—she loved the city. She enrolled in a typing course, where she sat at a small, flat desk amid rows of Burmese classmates, her wavy light-brown hair deflated by the tropical air. She learned shorthand and the feel of onionskin beneath her fingers. At night, wearing lipstick purchased at Bogyoke Market, she attended dances at the Strand under high ceilings with polished wood rafters and lilting fans. One day she met a charismatic young man, the life of every party. He waited for her outside her typing class on his motorcycle. The force of what she felt for him came as a surprise, and they hoped to elope, revising their plans on an almost daily basis in the constantly changing political climate.  

Paula felt alive: loved and in love. She also felt invincible—until the day those four officers knocked on her apartment’s door.

Four

Seventeen-year-old Paula continued wearing longyis after arriving in Chicago against her will. She eventually began to dress in Western styles, but she couldn’t kick her foreign accent. Social codes mystified her: wearing shoes on shag carpeting; the way people said “come over anytime,” then looked at her funny if she actually did stop by. She missed eating rice at every meal. Paula had an American passport, but she play-acted at being an American.

She lived at her grandmother’s house, the two-story brick manse in Winnetka where Pat had grown up and where certain doors remained closed at all times. Grammy, as Paula called her, was convinced that the ghost of her recently deceased husband flickered through the house, lingering in rooms that she forbade her granddaughter from entering. “I expect that the effort to make Grammy understand about Burma is a hopeless pursuit,” Pat commiserated in a letter.

Adulthood was thrust upon Paula. She found work as a Pan Am receptionist; she had flown the airline to and from India during her school days. By the summer of 1964, when Chicago was rocked by race riots in the suburb of Dixmoor, Paula had secured a job as a travel agent and discovered that she could eat rice and curries at an Indian restaurant in the city. Not the same as in Burma, but not terrible.

Letters from her parents grew melancholy. Pat and Baird urged their eldest child to be forbearing; they certainly had to be. The industries in which Baird had invested were decimated by nationalization. His missives to Paula included requests to borrow money from her small salary to help the family stay in Burma, even as everyone they knew was leaving. The demonetization of currency in 1964 wiped out savings across the country.

The same year, all remaining ethnic Indians, including those whose families had been in Burma for generations, were expelled. Hundreds of thousands boarded boats and planes with nothing but the clothing on their bodies. By 1965, the Burma Socialist Program Party stood as the country’s only legal political entity; dissent was not tolerated. “This Ne Win bunch,” Baird noted in a letter, “are surpassing even our wildest thoughts on irresponsibility and goodies for one’s friends—and jail for thine enemies.”

Paula traveled to Maryland that year to welcome her younger brother Stuart to America; he would live with family friends in order to attend high school while the rest of the Helfriches prepared to return. Baird flew in a few months later to procure a job in Washington, D.C., and a house in the suburbs. In 1966 came Pat and the younger children, including a new baby named Cathy. They arrived in New York on a coal steamer after a month at sea. One particularly gruesome ocean swell had sent Cathy rolling across the deck in her lifejacket.

Paula, Baird, and Stuart converged on Manhattan to meet the remaining Helfriches at the harbor. They were thin and shabbily dressed. All the possessions they’d packed into their Burmese baskets fit with them in two taxis, which Paula told me carried them to the Waldorf Astoria. A friend had lent them an apartment for a few days.

In one of the final letters Pat wrote to Paula before the Helfriches moved, she described traveling from the Shan State farm to catch a train to Rangoon for a wedding. There was rain and a bus headed for the wrong destination. She finally found a potato truck and hopped in the back with five Burmese passengers. Clunking through the rain, after small talk established who they all were and where they were going, after the sharing of fruit and snacks, the Burmese began to sing. “As I watched … beautiful scenery pass and flash by, listened to the music, and realized that I was riding on a potato truck,” Pat wrote, “I had a funny and weird feeling. I was perfectly at home.”

Now the Helfriches’ Burmese experiment, all 14 years of it, was over.


Back in Chicago, Paula told me, she enrolled at Northwestern University. Her attention, though, was elsewhere. In her novel Flying, which Paula described as a thinly veiled memoir, the protagonist, Zoe (Paula’s middle name), writes a brokenhearted letter every day to her Burmese boyfriend. He is a guerrilla, fighting the new regime. Eventually, the missives are delivered through a sequence of shadowy messengers, winding up in either Burma or Vietnam. She never knows for sure where her boyfriend is hiding, and she never gets a letter back.

Around her neck, Zoe wears a silver coin on a tattered string, a gift from her boyfriend. An anthropology professor identifies the coin as a pendant. He points to its Buddhist iconography and asks how she came by the piece. Zoe “kept the details to herself,” the book reads. “Who would believe it?”

When they met again many decades later, Paula discovered that her long-lost love still enjoyed dancing, as they’d once done together at the Strand. Now, though, he preferred to wear a longyi and nothing else. Her husband the warrior, she said, “who I can’t for the life of me get to wear a shirt.”

Five

Marriage to someone else, someone not concealed in a jungle, must not have seemed like the worst idea. It offered a new beginning, a dive into an adult life of her own making. Paula met a man, a Chicagoan of Polish descent, and they soon wed.

The marriage didn’t go well, and it didn’t last long. He was abusive. She didn’t speak of him much to anyone, not then and not later, I was told in interview after interview with friends and family; she never mentioned him to me. I imagine the unhappiness of that marriage falling around her like a veil. The turmoil, the feeling of powerlessness, must have been at once familiar and new. It fell to her to get out. So she did.

Paula divorced and, within a few years, started working at Pan Am again, this time as a stewardess. She met every requirement for female employees in the airline’s golden age: fluency in English and another language, at least two years of college, height over five foot two, trim, beautiful, extroverted, quick on her feet. Also: able to walk down an aisle in heels without wobbling, culturally aware, flexible yet bossy, witty, and afflicted by wanderlust. Paula wanted to return to Southeast Asia and visit other faraway destinations.

Who spoke Burmese? The stewardesses didn’t expect to see this white woman, “cute as a bug on a pistol, obviously a very strong personality,” as one friend from that time described Paula.

Most of the women who signed up for Pan Am’s stewardess program had predictable language proficiencies: French, German, Spanish. Paula Zoe Helfrich, from Maryland, as she was listed in the training class of March 1970—all traces of Chicago and the Midwest erased—spoke Burmese. Later, on flight sign-in sheets where the women listed their languages before takeoff, those who came after Paula would glance up and look around in confusion. Who spoke Burmese? They didn’t expect to see this white woman, “cute as a bug on a pistol, obviously a very strong personality,” as one friend from that time described Paula to me.

During a Pan Am layover in Tahiti.
During a Pan Am layover in Tahiti.

The itinerant lifestyle suited Paula. A crew flew together for a week or a few, passing days in Paris and Monrovia and Singapore and Sydney, then splintered apart for time off. On vacations, Paula went to the Amazon, where she trawled caves thick with monkeys. She went to Timbuktu, just because she could. Pan Am kept strict rules for its stewardesses’ appearance, and in company photos Paula’s hair is neatly tied under a prim hat. She cocks her head and wears an arranged smile. In personal photos, though, her long hair is parted down the center and cascades down her chest. The more implausible the setting or action, the more comfortable she appears. At a zoo, she grins with her arms slung around a snake a foot wide and several times as long, curled across her neck and shoulders. Wearing a bikini, she leans against the post of a thatched hut in Guam, legs crossed, sipping a mixed drink. Atop a curved rock with the sand houses of Timbuktu clustered in the background, her hands pick at desert grasses.

The Vietnam War was in its fifth year when Paula started working as a stewardess. Pan Am contracted critical support to the U.S. military, blurring the line—as it had during World War II—between private, profit-seeking business and government entity. At one point, providing services for the war effort in Saigon was Pan Am’s largest global operation. A stewardess had to be able to relate, as more than one who’d worked for the airline told me, to celebrities and CEOs, but also to refugees and immigrants boarding a plane for the first time, and to servicemen on their way into combat, holding in their chests the sharp knowledge of what they’d been drafted to do. The women carried identification cards designating them as second lieutenants in the armed forces; in the event of capture, they were to be treated according to the terms of the Geneva Conventions. After meal service, they would listen to tales of combat or play cards with soldiers heading for a stint of R&R. Sometimes, disembarking from a flight, they would glimpse bullet holes in the plane’s fuselage.

The early 1970s was also an era of skyjackings and political bombings; a stewardess had to remain composed on the knife’s edge of danger. All were trained in emergency procedures and casual diplomacy, taught to conduct themselves as surrogate ambassadors to the United States. In Flying, Zoe, who becomes a stewardess like Paula, knows how to tell a passenger to fuck off with “a ten-dollar sentence,” so long as she adheres to protocol and smiles.

When she had enough seniority to choose, Paula requested Pan Am’s Honolulu base as her home. She lived near the beach, and when she wasn’t flying, she spent time with surfers and musicians and Army vets. Then a tragedy took her to the very edge of the war.


Operation Babylift was supposed to be a series of flights paid for by the U.S. government to evacuate orphans from Saigon as North Vietnamese troops threatened the city in early 1975. Various humanitarian and adoption agencies would help place the infants and young children in homes across America. Similar missions had brought children from Germany and Japan at the end of World War II, from Korea in the 1950s, and from Cuba after the Bay of Pigs.

On April 4, minutes after an Air Force cargo plane carrying the first group of orphans took off from a base in Saigon, the flight crashed, killing dozens of children and adults. It would be over a week, the Pentagon reported, before another flight could depart. Horrified by the disaster, American businessman and philanthropist Robert Macauley mortgaged his New Canaan, Connecticut, house to cover the fee of chartering a Pan Am 747 to get the survivors and a few hundred additional orphans out of the country. A second plane, paid for by an adoption agency, would follow.

In Hong Kong, several stewardesses were informed that their plane would be departing for Vietnam, not continuing on its scheduled route. They were all offered the chance to stay behind rather than fly into a war zone; a few quietly took their leave. The night before the flight, the remaining women slept at a Hyatt hotel—or didn’t sleep at all, as one told me. On the bus to the airport they were silent. Among them was Paula.

In the air on the way to Saigon the next day, Paula mixed formula and set up cardboard cribs. The plane must have seemed cavernous: the cold, canned air with so few bodies to warm it, the rows of metal and fabric seats, the sense of a clock ticking toward inevitable pandemonium.

As it neared Saigon, the plane dove steeply to avoid possible mortar fire, causing the women’s stomachs to plunge. On the runway, the plane taxied past the wreckage of the Air Force C-5A. The stewardesses had been told to keep away from the windows, not to look at the charred gray metal set against waving palms and rice paddies.

On Operation Babylift.
On Operation Babylift.

The plane stopped. The doors were opened, and a blast of heat entered. Then people were rushing up the stairs. Children’s limbs were bare, their faces streaming. Soon the women who held the orphans had damp faces, too. “You didn’t know if it was sweat or tears,” Tori Werner, the plane’s purser, told me. The stewardesses helped pat the infants down to check for bombs and converted the upstairs cabin of the 747—where they usually served lobster thermidor and cherries jubilee to first-class passengers—into a makeshift sick bay. The children wore bracelets with their names and those of their prospective adoptive parents on one wrist, medical bracelets on the other. The Pan Am women read off diseases: polio, hepatitis, tuberculosis, chicken pox. Doctors from a Seventh Day Adventist hospital in Saigon who had been enlisted to fly with the children wanted to bring their nurses, but the women hadn’t been granted permission to leave the country. “We strip-searched the nurses and stowed them in the lavatory until after takeoff,” Werner told me.

The stewardesses loaded infants into cardboard bassinets and pushed them under the seats. They strapped in whomever they could. With some 400 children packed in, the pilot took off. The scent of vomit and loosened bowels filled the plane’s air. “That’s the smell of freedom,” Paula would remember crowing as the flight ascended, banking high in the sky.


After delivering the children to the United States, the flight’s crew was given two weeks off. Paula rested in Honolulu. Just one day later, though, she received a phone call. “Would you like to fly another babylift?” the voice on the other end asked. A flight had been chartered again.

This time the crew didn’t make it to Vietnam. Controversy had sprouted around the mission; children with living parents had been discovered among the rescues. Within a month, a federal class-action lawsuit would be filed alleging that many of them hadn’t been orphans. Years later some of the children would seek out birth mothers in Vietnam. Others would call the Pan Am stewardesses, by then retired, on Mother’s Day.

Paula signed on for other potential evacuations from Saigon in the waning days before the city’s fall. For two weeks, according to one fellow stewardess, Paula and a Pan Am crew waited at a base in Guam for assignments. Flights had to make it in and out of Saigon before nightfall; if they didn’t leave by 3 p.m., they wouldn’t leave at all. At three, the pilots and stewardesses could start drinking the tension away, before reliving the same anticipation the next day.

During those two weeks, on a flight to evacuate some Americans, Paula told me, she smuggled Vietnamese refugees on board. Because it was unofficial, you’d be hard-pressed to find their names in a passenger manifest. In Flying, she writes about a U.S.-chartered flight for a dozen aid workers; Zoe, enraged at the waste of so many empty seats, marches “in cold fury” to the Vietnamese Pan Am agent and invites him to put refugees on the plane. The plane returns to Guam with 100-odd Vietnamese bar girls and their half-American children. “A different kind of Babylift,” Paula writes. “They were all survivors, hard-edged and glittery, beautiful and absolutely fierce in their determination to make a new life—it did not much matter where.”

No one from Pan Am with whom I spoke remembered young Vietnamese women being evacuated on such a flight. Werner, though, recalled Paula getting off a plane in the Guam heat one day “just so upset. The crew had taken out only 22 people. They could have taken 150. People were desperate to get out. She thought it was very selfish.” In her fiction, it seemed, Paula had righted the wrong she’d been unable to prevent in real life.

Six

Here is fact verifiable by the existence of her two daughters: In Hawaii, Paula married a fellow Pan Am employee. She stopped flying in 1976 and shifted to a position in management, then hopscotched to catering and, finally, to operations. Her husband tried to convince her to move to California, and she gave it a shot, but the mainland never stopped feeling foreign. They returned to Hawaii, a sort of middle ground between the country on her passport and the one she considered home. In 1980, Baird and Pat moved to Hawaii, too; most of the Helfriches would eventually converge there. Pat cooked Burmese food in her kitchen. When the menu included curry, her children would descend on her house.

Baird died in 1981. Paula told me she took some of his ashes and scattered them in Moulmein, though how and when is unclear. In the 1980s and 1990s, Myanmar was one of the most isolated countries in the world. Agitation and crackdowns were common. Aung San Suu Kyi led the National League for Democracy (NLD), which won elections handily in 1990, but the military nullified the results and put Suu Kyi under house arrest for much of the next two decades.

With one of her daughters in Hawaii.
With one of her daughters in Hawaii.

To Paula’s two daughters, born in the early 1980s, Myanmar was a far-off place of wondrous tales whispered to them at night before bed. The elephants at the teak mill; lions that lived under the house in Moulmein; their uncles hunting deer or boar in Shan State. They also heard stories of the boarding school in Darjeeling, where the prince of Nepal had given their mother a rose. In winter, Paula told them, she would steal out of her dorm bedroom when she heard jackals howling at the moon, her feet light on the sharp chill of stone floors, her hands pushing a high window open. The windowsill was wide and sturdy, and she’d sit on it. The big, bright full moon hung above her. She would howl with the jackals.  


Paula and her husband divorced when she was about 50. She went back to school for anthropology and took her daughters to visit the convent in Darjeeling. Inspired by her involvement in the Transport Worker’s Union in her Pan Am days, she began to work for senator Daniel Inouye and soon became executive director of the Hawaii Island Economic Development Board. She had a knack for fundraising, event planning, and public advocacy. After a decade in politics, Paula decided to run for local office in Hilo. Her bid for county council was rebuffed; she lost to a lawyer after, as her daughter Laurien Helfrich Nuss put it, “being kicked around a bit” by the old boys’ club.

In Darjeeling, Paula told her daughters, she would steal out of her dorm bedroom at night and sit on a wide, sturdy windowsill. A bright full moon hung above her, and she would howl with the jackals.  

She retreated into daily life in Hilo. She had a boyfriend, daughters in and just out of college who visited regularly, and correspondence with Rebecca Sprecher, an old stewardess friend, with whom she jointly wrote chapters of what would become Flying. Still, the world beckoned.

In Myanmar, a series of 2007 protests incited a violent crackdown but also persistent rumors of infighting within the junta. Meetings held with United Nations officials and Suu Kyi presaged an opening. That year, Paula and Mary, her younger sister, signed up for a volunteer medical mission to the country: Mary was a nurse, and Paula served as a translator. On the plane, Paula stood up at one point and walked to the bathroom. When she returned, Mary told me, Paula announced that she was going to stay in Yangon after the mission.

She’d met someone in the back of the plane in line for the restroom who had offered her a job teaching English at an international school. He could help her get a visa. The long-ago deportation, apparently, wouldn’t pose a problem. She’d finished the heavy work of parenting, Pat had passed away in 2000, and she was no longer married. Why not go?

After the plane landed, Paula composed emails to her daughters: “Hey what do you think, your mom’s gonna move to Burma.” Laurien told me that she wasn’t surprised.


Some things from Paula’s childhood were familiar: the smells of burning wood and diesel fuel, of mohinga stalls on the streets; the multitude of ethnic groups sharing the same space. New, though, were the government minders who tracked Paula’s whereabouts. Whenever she saw them outside her apartment, she invited them in for tea. They never accepted.

Her first few years in the country coincided with increased sanctions and mass incarcerations of dissidents. Then, as though the bubble of strain hanging over the country had become so large that it could not help but quiver and burst, change began to happen. In 2010, Myanmar held its first elections in 20 years, leading to a shift from military rule to military-backed civilian rule. Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest. In 2011, the government released thousands of prisoners and signed a law allowing unions and strikes. The next year, the NLD won 43 legislative seats—by the numbers not much power, but recognition of legitimacy nonetheless. The new president introduced economic reforms, liberalizing foreign investment and reducing state control over a swath of industries. International sanctions began to dissolve.

Paula’s 2011 wedding to Saw Phillip.
Paula’s 2011 wedding to Saw Phillip.

Paula taught English to children and translated for monks. She helped to reinstate a local Rotary Club and attended biannual reunions with Loreto Convent alumni. Occasionally, she wrote articles for a Burmese business magazine. She was involved in the Pan Am network through which I met her and gave a weekly talk at the posh Governor’s Residence Hotel, lecturing about Burmese history to guests sipping gin and tonics. She always wore a flower in her hair.

And then there was love. Paula had not moved back to Myanmar with the intent of finding it, but she did. She told Sprecher, her Pan Am friend, that she encountered the object of her affection—the man she told me was her teenage boyfriend—at a horse race in Bagan, an ancient town known for its temples rising like a toothy crown into the sky. Their relationship bloomed around a campfire. It was comfortable and new, daunting and exciting.

Her father had often referred to Myanmar as a “missed opportunity.” Paula didn’t want the same to be said of her own life. “She was going to fulfill that dream of marrying a Burmese man,” her sister Mary told me, “which she could not have when she was 16.”

Seven

In July 2015, Paula wrote me an email. “Hurry! I will return to Hawaii Dec with husband… this may be it as I have health issues. Nothing fatal but serious and $$$ challenges, dammit.” For several months, we’d been talking of meeting again; this would be my only chance.

I quickly booked my ticket and flew to Myanmar. I knew I would be chasing Paula’s past down streets renamed by the regime that kicked her out, looking for her childhood in crumbling buildings. I would also be tracing the blurry line between truth and fabrication in a mind given to embellishment.

After landing, I rode into Yangon watching its famous round pagodas glint above the trees. I saw glass and steel buildings that had been constructed in just the past few years, since the loosening of trade sanctions. On traffic medians, clusters of children played soccer, their limbs flashing under the streetlights.

The next morning, I hired a driver to take me on a tour of the city, a haphazard combination of nationally relevant locations and places Paula had frequented: the Strand Hotel and the sprawling university complex where she’d canoodled with her husband way back when; Suu Kyi’s house and her father’s enormous red tomb. The driver, Than Lwin, sketched out stories of student protests, like those in 1988 that percolated from the university out to monks, housewives, taxi drivers—seemingly everyone. He didn’t tell me about the thousands of people the government killed when it retaliated. At Suu Kyi’s home on Inle Lake, Than Lwin explained how an American man—“Fifty! He was fifty!”—swam across to meet the Nobel Peace Prize winner while she was detained. There was no sensationalism in his telling of history, just action and reaction plainly related, with human idiosyncrasy sprinkled in.

In Yangon’s endless, messy traffic, cars were plastered with campaign bumper stickers and flags. Privately owned vehicles, which had more than doubled since the loosening of import laws, offered the opportunity to mount an opinion.

I had arrived in the lead-up to a general election, and Suu Kyi, still leader of the NLD, was running. I saw few campaign posters, but in Yangon’s endless, messy traffic, cars were plastered with NLD bumper stickers and flags. Privately owned vehicles, which had more than doubled since the loosening of import laws in 2011, offered the opportunity to mount an opinion.

After moving back to Myanmar.
After moving back to Myanmar.

Paula wasn’t answering her phone or email. She hadn’t come to meet me at my hotel as we’d planned. When I went to the Governor’s Residence to try to get her address, I was told that she hadn’t given her usual talk in weeks. I knew she lived in Thanlyin, a city of just under 200,000 people across the Bago River from Yangon. Than Lwin picked me up on my second day to go find her. As we sat in traffic on a bridge, he pointed out condo towers rising on the far bank; the 135-acre complex was financed mostly by a Singaporean firm. According to legend, he added, shifting easily to the ancient past, this was the same spot where Prince Min Nandar had been swallowed by a crocodile.

In Thanlyin, we went to the market, the municipal water office, two Buddhist complexes, and the local immigration office searching for signs of Paula. Than Lwin translated or spoke on my behalf. Finally, a pink-lipsticked immigration bureaucrat, one of 12 uniformed women in a room thick with wobbly stacks of manila folders, thumbed through a list of foreigners in Thanlyin—all on business, social, or meditation visas—and found Paula’s address.


My palms were sweaty when we pulled up to a concrete house with high white walls and metal gates. Her husband answered the door. So this was him, the stuff of romantic legend. He was tall, fit, and shirtless, just as Paula had described him. He chewed betel nut impassively as Than Lwin introduced us, and he spoke very little English. I saw behind him two suitcases splayed open on the floor at the edge of the nearly empty living room. Their departure from Myanmar was imminent.

Paula’s husband retreated into the house and waved me in. I stood in the living room with Than Lwin for a moment, then heard Paula’s high, loud voice as she walked in unsteadily to greet me. “We were just saying, When is Julia coming to visit?” she exclaimed. She was much sicker than she had let on in her email. Her legs had slimmed enough that, without the cane she used, they appeared unable to support her.

Her husband dusted off what little furniture remained in the living roomthey’d sold or given away the rest in preparation for their departure—and we sat down to talk. “I don’t know that I know,” I said, turning on my recorder, “how you two first met?” Finally, I would learn the full arc of their love story, of rekindled infatuation and the improbability of entering into a marriage they’d plotted as lusty teenagers.

In an instant, the myth crumbled. Paula said they’d met for the first time not long after she arrived in Myanmar. He was head of security at the school where she first taught English. Paula interrupted herself to speak in Burmese to her husband, who disappeared and reemerged with a glass of water and a pillow for her feet. “He’s Karen,” she continued, referring to an ethnic minority that has been fighting the government since the 1940s. He had once been a soldier in the Karen National Liberation Army.

I wanted to press her—I also wanted to do anything but press her. Paula was so ill, her home so bare, her husband so attentive, and my arrival so hasty. Our conversation drifted. Then, as if it could suffice, I returned to the topic of her marriage and kept my approach simple: So she hadn’t wed her teenage sweetheart, I clarified.

“Ah no,” she said brightly, as if she’d forgotten having said otherwise. “That was Allan.” He was Chinese-Burmese and had moved to Australia years before. She’d seen him once or twice when he’d come to visit Myanmar; he had five children of his own.

Her third husband’s name was Saw Phillip. He was a few years younger than her and handsome, with a broad, open smile. He was a fan of American country music, an avid cook of local delicacies like snake and eel, and a horse trainer. They spent four years circling one another, attracted but not interacting much, until they found themselves together at the horse race in Bagan. After they began to date, Saw Phillip didn’t wait long to suggest marriage; as a Christian, he didn’t approve of cohabitation before marriage. We’re too old to mess around, he told Paula as he proposed. In photos from their 2011 wedding, they wear velvety flower leis, stitched together by Paula’s daughters.

Paula and I spoke for an hour and made plans for interviews over the coming days. As Than Lwin and I drove back across the river, my mind felt thin and reedy. I tried to wrap it around the details of her life that Paula had shared and the fractures running through them. Perhaps, I thought, I could find mooring in Myanmar itself, something physical and true. Than Lwin and I headed back to Yangon, to 26 Naut Mauk Street, which used to be 26 Park Road, Paula’s first house in Myanmar.

It looked nothing like the photos I’d seen. A high fence had been erected around the house, and fancy cars sat in the driveway. Nearby, the occasional well-preserved colonial-era home faced others with walls so deteriorated that they resembled latticework. During the bad decades, I learned, the elite had allowed their houses to rot. An unpainted exterior let them live comfortably inside while seeming to remain equal with the population outside: a true facade. Now they were shells.

The remnants of Paula’s past were equally gutted in Mawlamyine, as Moulmein is now called, where Than Lwin and I drove on a sunny afternoon a few days later. We found Baird Helfrich’s teak mill, or what remained of it. The languishing structure had sat empty for years before it was finally bulldozed not long before we arrived. A towering smokestack, lumpy earth, and hunks of gray stone remained. Two stray dogs nosed the dirt. None of the neighbors knew what was going to be built on the empty land, but fresh orange bricks stacked in a pile augured some new structure.

I wondered what had happened to the elephants Paula so loved. As the economy worsened, I learned, elephants working at mills were sent into the wild to fend for themselves. But they’d lived so long in captivity that they starved. Supposedly, mossy hunks of elephant bones still litter the jungle around Mawlamyine.

Eight

There is another version of how Paula left Burma in 1963, less dramatic but no less devastating. The Chinese invasion of northern India the year before had put a stop to her classes in Darjeeling ahead of a holiday break; students had descended from the mountains on a train line clogged with munitions for the Indian army. When classes resumed in the new year, Burma’s government had tightened restrictions on foreigners’ movement across the country’s borders. Paula never graduated from Loreto Convent. She moved to Rangoon, took a typing course, and worked at the travel desk at the Strand—that’s all true. She was in love with Allan and she wanted to stay in Burma, even as it was falling apart around her.

In this version, the real one, triangulated from letters, the memories of family and friends, and her own contradictions, Paula was sent away—simple as that. Pat and Baird made the decision. Her parents needed permission from the government; any foreigner trying to leave the country would have had to fill out the proper paperwork. They did so, and then they put her on a plane to Illinois. Her younger siblings were told that she needed to expand her opportunities. She also needed to meet, as her sister Mary put it, other fish in the sea.

“We knew America was going to be a big change for you and that all of us are going to have to do some adjusting to get back into the swing of American life,” Baird wrote in a November 1963 letter to Paula, just a few weeks after she’d left. “We also think that some of your initial impressions will modify slightly, and hope that things are gradually settling down for you,” chimed Pat in the next missive.

As I read these letters, sitting on my couch in New York on spring mornings that were longer and brighter every week, I considered how something as objective as the sun in Chicago must have betrayed Paula. She’d never experienced seasons, other than dry and rainy. She wouldn’t have been used to the way daylight up north gets thinner as September moves to November, and how the sun races across the sky in December. The loss of light, along with the cold, would have felt foreign, perhaps like an alternate reality.


Autobiographical memory is among the trickiest of all psychological materials. The emotional content of an experience affects the way it becomes imprinted in the mind, which then erodes with age. Research also shows that the emotions we feel when looking back on an experience, along with the reasons we want to remember it, shape which details surface and which are forgotten. There’s other sculpting that occurs between an experience and its recollection. “Knowledge acquired after an event, and changes in our feelings toward and appraisals about an event, can lead to biases in how we recall emotional details,” psychologists Alisha C. Holland and Elizabeth A. Kensinger wrote in a 2010 study. Memory, then, can be factually inaccurate but also the truest window into how a person perceives her life.

The stories people believe about themselves depend on audience reception, too. Storytelling, as an evolutionary mechanism, is how humans transmit facts, using sticky emotional content to amplify instructive potential. In Paula’s narration of her life, I discerned call and response: People’s fascination with specific details, their evident desire for shock and awe relieved by romance and justness, influenced the tales she spun. I was one of these people who, with a needy ear, unwittingly encouraged her. “Mom knew so much about the world, fact-wise,” her daughter Laurien said. “She had this ability to tell stories and embellish or create them in such a way that they became these legends.”

Pain also played a part. “Coping mechanisms in dealing with emotional disappointment … can also influence memory,” Holland and Kensinger wrote. Laurien noted that her mother “found comfort in being able to almost psychologically reframe her trauma through telling a truth that felt right to her versus what was literally fact.” When I compare the facts of Paula’s life that I discovered with the version she told me, where there are inconsistencies there is also survival instinct, a need to persevere through chaos, to rationalize mistakes made, love sacrificed, and stability lost. Each creative retelling of her past enabled Paula to take a step forward, bridging gaps in official narratives she did not write. Stories allowed her to generate fissures in the flat surfaces of power structures that she could not control.

In Vietnam.
In Vietnam.

One of those structures was Myanmar itself, whose government all but erased the first decade of her life. The regime didn’t talk about or teach the history of the 1950s, except to say that the civilian authorities of the day didn’t care about nationalism and were risking the country’s future. State propaganda still paints the fleeting decade between colonialism and military rule with the same black brush; it is sometimes called the “time of trouble.” Than Lwin told me that he wanted to study history, but the university in Yangon was closed for much of the 1990s, when he was of student age, for fear of an uprising.

Only recently have efforts to preserve memories and revive open discussion emerged. Last year a collection of Burmese and Western academics relaunched the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship. Christina Fink of George Washington University told me about an oral-history project conducted in 2010 for the NGO Internews: Several dozen elderly Burmese were interviewed about the postcolonial era. Their testimonies varied, but they spoke overwhelmingly of freedom of speech, vibrant media, and the aftermath of civil war. Each interviewee put different conditions on the publication of his or her interview: “not to be released until I die,” for instance, or “not to be published until full democracy is achieved.” The interviews have not been released.

Paula’s idea of home was plastic out of necessity. She remembered it one way, experienced it another, and lived, in her mind, somewhere in between.

Nine

“I’m making a list!” Paula exclaimed when I walked into her house for lunch on my last day in Yangon. At that point, I’d spent hours listening to stories in which dates shifted and anecdotes played out first in one setting, then in another. I had resolved to ask no more questions, only to be present. “A list of all the places I’ve been for you,” she continued. “I loved anything to do with weird places and blood and guts and gore.”

She numbered the list in shaky block letters. She started with the Yucatán, where she’d climbed pyramids and thought of Burma’s jungles, and then the Amazon. The Marquesas, Nepal, Huahine in French Polynesia, Syria. Just as she wrote “East Africa” next to number nine, her pen ran out of ink. I told her not to worry about it. She was writing on the back of an undecipherable lab report from Pun Hlaing Siloam Hospitals. It was stained with soy sauce from a feast Saw Phillip had prepared for us, which we had just devoured.

Each creative retelling of her past enabled Paula to take a step forward, bridging gaps in official narratives she did not write. Stories allowed her to generate fissures in the flat surfaces of power structures that she could not control.

I left Yangon two days before Paula and Saw Phillip were scheduled to depart for Hawaii. I spent my last sunset in Yangon walking its crooked sidewalks, sidestepping rusty splotches of betel-juice spit. Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party would win the election the following month, smiled down on me from posters that had finally sprung up during my stay. I ate a bowl of mohinga at a restaurant downtown. When he drove me to the airport that night, Than Lwin gave me a fossilized hunk of wood from his native village as a parting gift. “Maybe I am a reporter, too,” he said gravely as he shook my hand.

My arms had started to itch at dinner, and by the time I landed for a layover in Hong Kong, my entire face had swollen into a fair, if unpurpled, approximation of someone who’d lost a fistfight. I found a doctor, got a few shots, and remained in Hong Kong for 24 hours, until the swelling went down. The allergic reaction was minor, an entirely solvable bit of bodily treason, and yet the symmetry struck me—the taste of what Paula must have felt many times in her life: isolation, fear, and throbbing unreality, and then, when order was restored, a chasing sense of luck, confidence, even fearlessness.

Less than a day after I arrived home in New York, Paula landed in Hawaii with Saw Phillip. Her daughters met her at the airport and took her straight to the hospital. Within a day and a half, she had died. Liver disease was the cause. Rebecca Sprecher, her Pan Am friend, called and told me. The news struck me as both unbelievable and fitting: Paula’s death was sudden and tragic to those who knew her, but she had hurdled into it telling her own story.

The impact of a story—its spell—is unique to every listener. Different people were drawn to different aspects of Paula’s life. “She was an actress and a politician, too,” her sister Mary told me. “She was truly passionate.” Sprecher admired the combination of intellect and daring, how Paula read T. E. Lawrence and “had me reading the Raj Quartet long before Masterpiece Theater [adapted it]. She went everywhere, she had read everything, she knew everything…. I was in awe of her.” As perhaps the last person to hear Paula tell her story in full, I was rapt by the Herculean effort of remaining a woman who moved through the world with daring and panache even when outside forces threatened to disable those impulses.

“There is no Myanmar word for goodbye,” Paula wrote in the prologue she’d planned to publish with her parents’ letters. “One simply announces a departure.”