The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 Read online

  Molly, meanwhile, was looking for Rob. She thought he was going to “sell the gun to one of his druggie ex-con friends, probably 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.”

  MARK BOAL 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 directed 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.

  Sabrina Rubin Erdely

  THE FABULOUS FRAUDULENT LIFE OF JOCELYN AND ED

  FROM Rolling Stone

  SHE 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.”

  JOCELYN KIRSCH 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,” s
ays 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.

  WHILE JOCELYN 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.

  IN 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.)

  Jocelyn told Verdibello nothing about her brushes with the law, or of her other boyfriend. They made an odd couple—Verdibello was a sensitive punk who lived in his Minor Threat T-shirt—but she had a knack for snaring guys so grateful for her attention they’d let her get away with anything. “She has this magnetism,” Verdibello explains. “She can make you feel like the brightest star in the sky. But she can also make you feel like nothing at all.” He was convinced they were soulmates—Jocelyn proved it with each love note she wrote him in her beautiful script. And when one day Verdibello discovered her sobbing, she confided in him about her brother, a soldier who had just been hurt by an IED—her brother, Thomas, whose framed photo hung on her apartment wall.

  It was a testament to Jocelyn’s powerful allure that Verdibello stayed in the picture. He figured out that Thomas wasn’t really her brother, but Jocelyn managed to talk her way out of it, explaining that she had both a brother and an ex-boyfriend in the Army, both named Thomas—but that the flower deliveries really were from her brother. (“Whaddya want?” says Verdibello. “She could make me believe anything.”) Then one evening in the fall of 2006, spooning Jocelyn in bed, Verdibello nuzzled the plush fabric of her Juicy Couture sweatsuit, breathing in her scent. Jocelyn was distracted—busy texting someone. Verdibello looked over her shoulder in time to read her message: “My cute capitalist;-)” He knew it could be only one person: Jocelyn’s new “econ tutor,” Ed Anderton.