The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (9 page)

In private, feeling alone and desperate, he wrote out a suicide note. “Nothing ever seems to work for me. And I know that nobody will ever really understand. I am always in debt, and I probably always will be. I’m not going to lie and say I’m not afraid. But whatever happens I know it can’t be too bad when you die.” Then he closed by begging whoever found his body to hide his suicide from Kaci. “Just please, I don’t want Kaci or her family to know what I’ve done.”

But instead of acting on the note, he shoved it in a bookcase in his bedroom at the Marucas, where it would not be found until two weeks after the shooting.

Then things got even worse. A few days earlier, he had gone on a date with a co-worker at McDonald’s, where he was working the night shift. The date set in motion a chain of events that pushed Rob over the edge. When Kaci found out that he had
taken the girl home, she confronted him. At first he acted guilty and distraught, but he was soon alternating between begging her forgiveness and angrily demanding that she understand his need to spread his wings. When he went to his mother for advice, saying he felt horrible for cheating on Kaci, she counseled him not to take it so seriously.

“I don’t view it as cheating,” she told him. “You’re not really expected to be monogamous when you’re 19. You’re young—things are forgivable.”

Emboldened by his mother’s words, Rob called Kaci and told her that he was going to keep fucking the new girl. “She’s a nasty bitch,” he bragged. “I fuck her all over the place, and she’s good to me.”

Kaci burst into tears. “How can you be so mean to me?” she sobbed. Rob apologized. “This is a weird time in my life,” he told her. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around.” He explained that he planned to kill himself.

It was not the first time he’d said that, and Kaci was especially sensitive to the threat, since her last boyfriend had hung himself over a staircase one day after school. As it happened, this boyfriend had been the third friend of hers who’d taken his own life; suburban communities like Bellevue are the hardest-hit by teen suicides in Nebraska. But instead of confronting Rob, as she always had, she let it go. “I always used to talk him out of killing himself,” she recalls. “But this time, I just didn’t. I was so mad at him for breaking my heart.”

That was on Tuesday afternoon, December 4th. A few hours later, as the sun was setting on the Nebraska plains and workers at Von Maur were turning on the Christmas lights at the mall, Rob drove to his mother’s for dinner.

H
E WAS LATE
, as usual, and dressed like crap, but Molly was too overjoyed to see him to comment. So great was the gulf
between them, and so thorough was her misunderstanding of his condition, that she couldn’t see he was depressed when he shuffled through the front door that evening. In fact, she thought he was “doing pretty well.”

Molly was in a good mood that night. She had just finished writing her autobiography, a strangely graphic confession of her sexual adventures, and she felt like celebrating. But as the dinner wound down, the conversation turned to Rob’s breakup with Kaci. When he said he felt guilty about the whole affair, Molly replied, “Well, if you feel bad about it, maybe you shouldn’t have done it.”

Rob said he guessed she was right and returned to his food as the talk turned to other subjects. Then, toward the end of the meal, he abruptly said that he had been fired from McDonald’s a few days before. The cash-register count was short on Rob’s shift. “The manager made me empty my pockets,” Rob complained. “He took $12 from me.”

“He can’t do that,” Molly said. “Do you want me to go down there and get your money back?”

“No,” Rob said. “It’s not worth it, Mom.”

After dinner, they sat in front of the computer and found a couple of online applications for low-wage job openings, including one at a nursing home. Molly tried to encourage him. Sometimes in life you have to be poor for a very long time, she told him, but you always get by. “Look at me,” she said. “I think I’ve done pretty well for myself.”

“Yeah. I guess you’re right,” he told her.

Then Molly went shopping, leaving Rob alone in the house. He went upstairs to the master bedroom, went into the closet, took his stepfather’s AK-47 and put it in the Jeep. Then he went back inside and sat on the couch listening to his iPod. His favorite song was Judas Priest’s “Hell Bent for Leather”:
Screams! From a streak of fire as he strikes.
Molly had loaded the songs for him, because he couldn’t figure out iTunes. When she came home half an hour later, Rob was still there, lost in his own world.

“He just got up, hugged me really tight, and left,” Molly says. “He didn’t say much of anything.”

That evening, when he got back to the Maruca residence, Rob proudly showed the rifle to Will, saying that it was on loan from his stepfather. He invited Will to take it target-shooting the next day. The two boys often went to a homemade target range they had set up in the woods nearby, where Rob had honed his skill. But they rarely got their hands on an AK-47, and now they snapped a picture of the weapon with a cellphone and e-mailed it to a few friends. Around 11 p.m., Rob smoked a few Camels, tossing the empty butts in a bucket by his bed, and went to sleep, stone-cold sober.

Rob may have intended to use the rifle for target practice. But in the morning, he got a rude awakening. Molly had discovered the theft, and she was pissed. She called the Marucas and left a message: “Tell Rob to call his mother right away.” When Will gave Rob the message, he recoiled. “Oh, man—she found out I took the gun,” he told Will, who admonished him for swiping it. Rob promised to return it. But rather than face his mother, he sat down and wrote another suicide note.

“I’ve been a piece of shit my entire life,” he wrote. “It seems this is my only option. I know everyone will remember me as some sort of monster, but please understand that I just don’t want to be a burden on the ones that I care for my entire life. I just want to take a few pieces of shit with me.”

Rob left the note next to his bed and drove over to see his friend Dallas. When he arrived, he slumped down on the big leather couch, flicked on the Xbox and began to play in wordless concentration. But before long, he tossed the controller on the couch and started talking, then crying.

Tears ran down his face. Everything was wrong—everything. The Marucas were going to kick him out and he’d be homeless. He’d fucked up with Kaci, the one girl he could see marrying. She hated him, and maybe rightly so. He was looking at jail
time—over Christmas—for drinking beer in the Jeep, and he didn’t even have the money to pay the fine, let alone a lawyer.

When his mother found out about the gun, she was likely to take back the Jeep, and then how the hell was he going to get around? Where was he going to sleep? What were they going to do to him in prison? Through tearstained eyes, he looked up at his old friend. “I’m fucked, dude.”

“Dude, I love you. I’m here for you.”

“I know,” Rob said, getting up off the couch. “Can I borrow your phone?”

He called Will and said he was sorry for everything. Will could tell by his voice that he was on edge. “You haven’t done anything yet, Rob,” Will told him. “Just chill out, OK?” Putting his hand over the phone, he called out to his mom, who was getting ready for work.

“I think Rob’s going to kill himself,” Will said. “Can you talk to him?”

His mother got on the phone. Whatever it is, she said, it’s no big deal.

“I just want to thank you for all the stuff you’ve done for me,” Rob told her. “I’m sorry.”

Rob hung up and called his mother. When Molly didn’t answer, he left a message. He sent a text message to Kaci, telling her that he loved her and was sorry for everything and that he was going to go have a “standoff.” Then he sent the exact same message to his new girlfriend.

Rob told Dallas he was going to take off. Standing at the door, the two friends hugged. Dallas felt like Rob wasn’t really there, “like he wasn’t in his body.” After Rob left, Dallas grew worried. He switched on the TV. “I was thinking if Rob was going to do something, like get in a shootout, it would be on the news.”

Molly, meanwhile, was looking for Rob. She thought he was going to “sell the gun to one of his druggie ex-con friends, prob
ably as barter for some tattoo work.” She was going to seriously kick his ass. She called Dallas to see if he was there. “If you see Rob, don’t let him out of your sight—just tackle him,” she said. Dallas was like, OK, whatever. When they hung up, he went back to the TV.

By the time Molly was on her way to the police station, Rob was in the green Jeep she had given him, going in the opposite direction, toward the mall. He was so broke that even the clothes on his back were on loan: He had scrounged a winter jacket from Will because the morning was cold.

As she raced to find her son, Molly looked down at her cell-phone and noticed that there was a missed call. When she pressed the phone to her ear, she heard Rob’s high-pitched, reedy voice.

“Hi, Mom,” he said. “It’s me. I just wanted to let you know that I love you. I’m sorry for everything. See you later.”

M
ARK
B
OAL
is a producer, screenwriter, and journalist. Born and raised in New York City, he graduated with honors in philosophy from Oberlin College before beginning a career as an investigative reporter and writer of long-form nonfiction. An acclaimed series for the
Village Voice
on the rise of surveillance in America led to a position at the alternative weekly writing a weekly column, “The Monitor,” when he was twenty-three. Boal subsequently covered politics, technology, crime, youth culture, and drug culture for
Rolling Stone, Brill’s Content, Mother Jones,
and
Playboy.
He is currently a writer-at-large for
Playboy
and a contributor to
Rolling Stone.

Boal’s 2003 article “Jailbait,” about an undercover drug agent, was adapted for Fox television’s
The Inside,
and his piece “Death and Dishonor,” the true story of a military veteran murdered by his own platoon mates, became the basis for the film
In the Valley of Elah,
for which Boal shares a story credit with Paul Haggis. Boal wrote and produced the film
The Hurt Locker,
an award-winning, critically acclaimed war thriller di
rected by Kathryn Bigelow and inspired by his firsthand observations of a bomb squad in Baghdad.

Coda

After it was published, the article hit a nerve, especially in Nebraska.
Rolling Stone’
s website was slammed by angry readers who wrote that Hawkins was a monster who didn’t deserve the attention of the national press. Many Omaha natives posted that their hometown had been unfairly portrayed as a wasteland for unemployed teenagers. Still, not all the write-in comments were negative, and quite a few readers praised the magazine for daring to treat the life of a mass murderer in such exacting detail.

Then, a year later, the
Omaha World-Herald
confirmed the discovery of a cluster of nine teen suicides in Sarpy County from 2005 to 2007, and the newspaper subsequently called for an official investigation into the state’s handling of mentally ill youth.

At the time of this book’s publication, no official action had taken place.

FROM
Rolling Stone

S
HE TOLD EVERYONE
her boobs were real, which was a laugh: They were immobile and perfectly round, and looked airbrushed, even in person. She credited her violet eyes to Lithuanian genes, rather than the purple contact lenses she wore. And on this afternoon last November, sitting in a Philadelphia hair salon with a college textbook open on her lap, she told the stylist she was a University of Pennsylvania student named Morgan Greenhouse. The name was as fake as the hair now being glued onto her head.

“I love this,” Jocelyn Kirsch declared, fingering her new $2,200 auburn hair extensions. “Don’t you love it?”

Her boyfriend, Ed Anderton, looked on adoringly. “I love it,” he echoed. The two of them returned to their murmured conversation, discussing the $400 room they planned to rent at the W hotel, once Jocelyn finished taking her final exams. After that, they planned to spend winter break vacationing in Morocco.

Jocelyn and Ed made performance art out of their extravagance.
They posted photos on Facebook of their constant travels: smooching under the Eiffel Tower, riding horses along Hawaiian beaches, sunning themselves on Caribbean sand. They lived in one of Philadelphia’s most expensive neighborhoods, Rittenhouse Square, where they dined in pricey restaurants and danced on tables in the trendiest bars. Friends figured Ed must have been pulling in a big salary as a financial analyst, which seemed plausible; he was a bright recent Penn grad who’d majored in economics. Plus, Jocelyn held herself out as some kind of trust-fund baby, with a closet full of expensive clothes—for today’s hair appointment, tight True Religion jeans, a navy cashmere hoodie and white Juicy Couture flats—and bore the expectant, impatient manner of the rich.

“Oh, money’s not an issue,” she told the Giovanni & Pileggi stylist at her consultation a week earlier. She’d put down a $500 deposit, using a credit-card number phoned in by “Mr. Greenhouse,” her remarkably young-sounding father.

It was all a big, gleeful sham. Ed had actually been canned from his job four months before, and twenty-two-year-old Jocelyn was a senior at nearby Drexel University, a big step down from Penn. When Philadelphia police busted into the couple’s apartment a few days later, they found an extensive identity-theft operation, complete with a professional ID maker, computer spyware, lock-picking tools and a crisp North Carolina driver’s license soaking in a bowl of bleach. Though the investigation is still unfolding, this much is apparent: The lovebirds stand accused of using other people’s names and Social Security numbers to scam at least $100,000, sometimes buying merchandise and selling it online to raise more cash.

What’s striking about the two grifters is how determined they were to flaunt their ill-gotten gains. They acted not like furtive thieves but like two kids on a joy ride, utterly delighted by their own cleverness—as in the invitation Jocelyn e-mailed to friends not long before their arrests, announcing a surprise twenty-fifth-
birthday party for Ed at an upscale tapas bar. “My treat, of course!” she’d written. Steeped in narcissism and privilege, fueled by entitlement and set in an age of consumer culture run amok, theirs is truly an outlaw romance for the twenty-first century. The
Philadelphia Daily News
immediately dubbed the photogenic couple “Bonnie and Clyde.” It’s a name some people take exception to. “Bonnie and Clyde, that’s only because they’re young and good-looking,” scoffs Detective Terry Sweeney of the Philadelphia police. “These two were complete idiots. If this was two fat fucks from South Philly, it would have been Turner and Hooch.”

J
OCELYN
K
IRSCH MADE AN IMPRESSION
in the fall of 2003 when she strolled onto Drexel University’s campus showing off her legs in a denim miniskirt and tan Uggs, in full makeup—with a bunny rabbit named Frisbee peeking from her oversize Coach handbag.

She was a freshman but had already acquired a boyfriend on campus: a strapping ROTC senior we’ll call Thomas, whose dorm suitemates would never forget the first time he brought her by. They were all lazing around watching television when Thomas led her in. Jocelyn looked different back then: ordinary pretty, with mousy-brown curls, and for a few moments she just stood there awkwardly. But in an instant, her manner became so outrageously flirtatious that no one was watching TV anymore. Jocelyn proceeded to tell them a little about herself: that she was the daughter of two high-profile plastic surgeons with homes in California and North Carolina; that she was fluent in Russian, which she’d learned while growing up in Lithuania; later, she’d tell classmates she spoke eleven languages, including Turkish, Czech and Afrikaans. She also mentioned that she was an athlete who had qualified for the 2004 U.S. Olympic team. In pole-vaulting.

“That’s surprising,” said Penn student Emily Heffernan, who was there visiting her boyfriend, Jason. “Drexel doesn’t have a track team.”

“I train with Penn,” Jocelyn replied. Then with a wink at Emily, she sat on Jason’s lap.

No one at Drexel knew what to make of Jocelyn. Men found her mesmerizing. Her relationships with women were another story. “She was like Regina George in
Mean Girls,”
says a classmate. Jocelyn had a way of eyeing other girls—“as if you had, like, spaghetti sauce all over you”—then choosing a careful compliment. “I like your bag,” she’d say, and then add, “Mine’s Marc Jacobs. It cost $1,500.” Still, women found themselves captivated too. “She wasn’t a healthy person,” says Heffernan. “But she was entertaining. We were always waiting to see what she’d say next.”

The truth about Jocelyn wasn’t as exciting as she advertised. She was a child of privilege and divorce, raised in affluent Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her father, Lee, was a plastic surgeon with a standoffish demeanor but known for his community service: He gave to charity, volunteered as a doctor for the high school athletic department and hosted a Lithuanian exchange student, whom Jocelyn took to her prom. By then, Jocelyn was living with her mother, Jessica, a nurse completing her doctorate in public health. Jocelyn also had a brother, Aaron, one year older, whom she shut out so completely that friends were unaware he even existed. Few realized how the Kirschs’ divorce had fractured their family: When Jocelyn went to live with their mother, Aaron stayed behind in their father’s Tudor-style manse.

“I always got the sense that her home life wasn’t very happy,” says high school friend Kate Agnelli. Jocelyn was closemouthed about the acrimony within her family and rarely brought friends home. But her anger bled into her public life. Classmates remember their sunglasses and cellphones disappearing in her wake. She was always hungry for male attention; she’d tell a later lover that she’d cheated on every boyfriend she ever had. Each year, Jocelyn
also reinvented herself, trading old friends for new ones, transforming from goth girl to Abercrombie prep to outdoorsy rock climber to frisky cheerleader wanna-be. As her high school career progressed, and Jocelyn’s parents bitterly finalized their split, her behavior grew worse. Previously a good student, according to a friend, she was suspended twice for cheating. Jocelyn lied about her absences, telling friends she’d been visiting her dying grandparents (who were alive and well). Another time, she said she was battling ovarian cancer.

“This girl has been crying out for help forever,” says Agnelli. “She doesn’t like who she is, so she invents something she thinks is better.” In college, Jocelyn leapt at the chance to create herself anew. Once in Philadelphia, she rarely went back to North Carolina, especially after her mother swiftly remarried and moved to California.

At Drexel, classmates noticed that when Jocelyn wasn’t running her mouth, she didn’t know what to say. But then she’d blurt out some outrageous lie—like when she returned from shopping at Urban Outfitters saying they’d asked her to be a model—and suddenly she’d seem comfortable again. But, again, little things started to disappear from friends’ rooms: art supplies, kitchen utensils. Her boyfriend Thomas’ suitemates started spotting Jocelyn’s name in their dorm’s guest log when she was nowhere to be found—only to discover she’d been visiting the brawny swimmer next door. Not that Thomas listened to his friends’ warnings.

“I loved her,” says Thomas now. “I thought we had a future.” They made a curious pair, the glamour girl and the clean-cut ROTC engineering major. But he was graduating and heading for life in the Army, so he wanted to savor what little time they had left. He knew Jocelyn was in for a rough transition without him.

“She didn’t like being alone,” says Thomas.

She didn’t intend to stay that way for long. That fall, Jocelyn returned to campus transformed, with bleached-blond hair, a perma-tan and a set of new breasts, all of which she insisted were
natural. Her face had changed too: Her nose and cheeks were somehow more sculpted. She had reinvented herself yet again, this time as a centerfold-quality beauty with a savvier, brasher personality to match, a new, more perfect Jocelyn, ready to take on the world. Or, at least, its men.

W
HILE
J
OCELYN WAS FAST
becoming Drexel’s answer to Paris Hilton, a few blocks away at the University of Pennsylvania, Edward Kyle Anderton was winding down his college career in obscurity. Most people considered Ed a good guy, if only because he had no discernible personality to dislike. Even his good looks failed to distinguish him: With dark hair atop a heart-shaped face, a disarming smile and ears that stuck out a few degrees too far, he was handsome but not overly so. Strolling the well-tended campus, Ed Anderton blended into the background, utterly forgettable.

He hadn’t always been so anonymous. He grew up in Everett, Washington, where at Snohomish High School his achievements set him apart. He was a straight-A striver and a standout swimmer whom
The Seattle Times
once named “Star of the Month.” Though Ed was too busy for parties, people knew who he was; he was friendly but never outgoing. “He was a little shy,” says friend Danielle Newton. “But at home with his family, he’d open up.”

Unlike Jocelyn’s, Ed’s background was middle-class. His father, Kyle, worked in circulation for
The Seattle Times
and took a second job driving for UPS to pay for his children’s college tuition. His mother, Lori, was a doting stay-at-home mom. They were a wholesome clan that got silly playing board games and seemed to enjoy one another’s company. When Ed was admitted to Penn on scholarship, his family couldn’t have been prouder.

But at Penn, Ed was just one bright undergrad among 10,000 others. Intimidated, Ed tried assuming the confident airs of his Ivy League peers. But if he made any sort of impression, it was for the way he feigned cheer to mask something else. “His niceness
didn’t seem all that genuine,” says a former classmate. “When you talked to him, there was a feeling of disconnect. He was a bit fake.” And when Ed wasn’t making the effort to be pleasant, he revealed a very different side, one that was brusque and impatient. “If you weren’t on his good side, he’d make that clear,” says a fraternity brother. “He just always seemed like a dick.”

Still, Ed got by just fine. He studied hard, made the swim team, majored in economics and joined the frat Alpha Chi Rho. “He seemed to have his life together,” recalls former housemate Joe Pahl. After graduating in 2005, Ed went to work for Johnson & Johnson and then as an analyst for the giant real estate equity firm Lubert-Adler. His hard work had come to fruition. He was twenty-four years old, working in a glass skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia, commanding a comfortable five-figure salary. All Ed needed was someone to share it with.

I
N THE SEDUCTION DEPARTMENT,
Jocelyn had become a steamroller. One night, at a Drexel house party, a skinny indie-rock guy, Jayson Verdibello, caught her eye. So she ran after him as he was leaving the party, pushed him against the wall and made out with him, holding him by the collar to keep him from running away.

By that time, Jocelyn had developed a fearsome dramatic streak. “What did I do?” Verdibello begged throughout their ten-month relationship. “The fact that you don’t know just shows how fucked-up you are!” she’d scream back. She was forever berating him in public, and when he tried to walk away from her tantrums, she’d flail at him with her bony arms. “I was a little scared of her,” admits Verdibello. “I just let her have her way.” He wasn’t alone. Everyone gave Jocelyn lots of leeway, because she seemed to exist in a world apart—a world of plenty. Her friends lived in dorms, but Jocelyn lived in a $1,600-a-month loft apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and a rooftop pool. Jocelyn would take
her friend Sallie Cook on her shopping sprees, using her father’s credit card to blow $5,000 at, say, Neiman Marcus. “My dad’s gonna be
sooo
mad,” she’d say coquettishly, rearranging her oversize bags while pointedly eyeing Cook’s own tiny purchase.

“Jocelyn is extremely confident,” says Cook. “There’s no cap to how strong she is or how arrogant she is. She wants what she wants. And she feels she’s entitled to it.” Even Jocelyn’s own father seemed cowed. When Lee Kirsch flew to Philly to take his daughter to Cirque du Soleil—bearing $190-a-pop VIP tickets—Jocelyn treated him with utter contempt. “Dad, shut up,” she kept telling him in the VIP tent, putting as much distance between them as possible, except to hand her father an armload of merchandise to buy for her.

Jocelyn tried hard to appear unflappable, but her life was unraveling. On the side, she was still dating Thomas, visiting him at Army bases all over the country. Then in March 2006—the month after she seduced Verdibello—Thomas was deployed to Afghanistan where he was injured by an IED. Jocelyn told him in their phone conversations that she was beside herself with worry. And in her moments alone, she sought comfort in old habits. In the span of a year she was arrested three times for shoplifting. When she got caught, her tough-gal act fell apart. Previously busted in a CVS and Lord & Taylor, she broke down and wept when she was arrested in a Douglas Cosmetics store with a purse full of makeup. (Two of the three charges were dropped; she pleaded guilty to the department-store theft.)