Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
Not that she wasn’t bewildered and furious. She just continued to express her grief in private. Sobbing while no one else looked.
But someone
was
looking, quietly paying attention.
After gymnastics practice that day, she approached Jackie in the parking lot. Jackie knew the bubbly blond woman whose daughter went to gymnastics with Stephanie.
“Hi, Terryl,” said Jackie.
“Jackie. I’m so sorry.”
Terryl had come a long way. She was Terryl Warner now, married, with kids, and a track record for taking on tough cases as a victim’s advocate. In this casual exchange with Jackie, she was on the cusp of taking on a case that would test her willingness to push through obstacles, setbacks, authority figures.
AFTER SHE GRADUATED FROM
USC, Terryl was in an LDS church group in Irvine when she met April, a gorgeous, charismatic woman, tall and slender with long brunette hair. The pair started chatting. Within days, even within hours, something clicked. April was a recent graduate of BYU who modeled for a local diet center where she worked. Terryl felt very comfortable with April, so much so that Terryl felt she had a best friend for the first time in her life.
But something was bothering April, too—she was tired, had dark circles under her eyes. In September, April called Terryl.
“Something’s wrong with my blood.”
Within days, April was admitted to the hospital with leukemia. Terryl dropped out of the Bank of America management training program so she could spend time at the hospital. She found temp work at legal agencies, keeping alive that distant dream of going to law school. She spent many hours at the hospital, St. Joseph’s, in the cancer ward, climbing into bed with April, talking about life and its purpose, and religion. April had dreamed of going on an LDS mission. Terryl had never really thought about it, but was starting to.
After her diagnosis, April had gotten engaged to Neal Harris, a BYU grad who worked hard and was intensely devoted to his friends. Terryl watched how April was treated by Neal—the way he climbed into bed with his bald, bone-thin fiancée—and rubbed the parts of her body that ached from chemo. Neal brushed April’s teeth with the little spongy pink toothbrush that was too soft to cut into her fragile gums.
It made a big impression on Terryl. “He taught me: It’s okay. Not every guy is bad.”
The respect was mutual. To Neal, Terryl seemed so full of life, unfazed, really, even fearless. She spoke her mind. She wasn’t put off by April’s beauty or presence, the kind of thing that made some women uncomfortable.
“She wasn’t intimidated by anything,” says Neal.
TERRYL, AFTER MUCH CONSULTATION
with April, decided to go on an LDS mission, to Costa Rica, in July 1989. Her eyes were wide open with awareness. She knew she was helping fulfill April’s dream. And Terryl felt she was taking a step toward making her own destiny. Yet she also knew she was escaping. She wouldn’t be there when April died. But that seemed to be okay with April, who implored Terryl to go.
Terryl also knew she’d likely miss the deaths of her maternal grandparents, who’d been among the handful of people to look out for her when things were really at their worst. When she went on the mission, she recalls, “it was a realization for me that God loved me and wanted something good for me and it was okay to have a good life and to want to help others.” But “it was also something of a protector for me. I had this best friend, and she was going to die. And these other people in my life I was close with, and they were going to die.”
All three passed away while Terryl was gone.
She came home from her mission on January 2, 1991. She had enough distance now from her upbringing that she felt it wouldn’t define her for the rest of her life. Maybe she could even use her upbringing to her advantage.
THE WOMAN LOOKED TO
be in her thirties, with dark hair and dark skin. A feral, terrified look in her dark eyes, wet with tears. No wonder. She had holes burned in her face, like someone had taken a cigarette to her. Except much worse, if it’s possible to imagine: a strange pattern of dark, round burn marks all along her cheek.
Terryl sat at her desk in the small offices of the community services victim’s advocate program located in the Orange County courthouse. It was 1992, and this victim didn’t want to be here. Behind sobs, she, and the friend who dragged her in to see Terryl, explained what had happened.
The woman had four children all under the age of twelve, and a jealous, controlling husband. He didn’t like her leaving the house, certainly not using the car. He didn’t even like her driving to her job at Taco Bell, even on a rainy night. So sometimes, when it rained, the woman would ask for a ride home from a colleague.
That’s what had happened two nights earlier. She’d finished her Taco Bell shift. It was pouring. The manager offered to give her a ride home when his shift ended, a half hour later. In a downpour, he dropped her off in front of her house. Her husband, angry she was late, went into a rage upon seeing another man drop her off.
He ripped her hair, he tied her up. He said: “I’ll make it so no man will ever want to look at you again.”
He held the clothes iron to the side of her face.
She didn’t call the police. She said she didn’t want to be there, talking to Terryl, dealing with it, confronting her husband. Terryl recalls the woman imploring: “I’m a religious woman, and my husband, he’s an important man.” She explained: He’s the bishop of the local Mormon church, an LDS lay leader.
“Nobody has a right to hurt you. Nobody,” Terryl says she told the woman. “You deserve to live a normal life.”
Inside, Terryl seethed. She tried to keep her wits about her. The woman wouldn’t relent. Finally, Terryl came to the rationale she felt inside so personally, so deeply, the reason that, if nothing else, was her best bet at swaying women to act.
“If you don’t do something, eventually your kids will be the punching bags.”
The woman agreed to go ahead. They served a protective order so the man couldn’t go in the house, and a restraining order to keep him a safe distance away from her. Eventually, she got a divorce. It was one of the victories, weighed against plenty of losses. To Neal Harris, now one of Terryl’s close friends, it was a powerful example of the leather skin underneath her bubbly exterior.
“It was one of the most awful things I’d ever heard about,” he says, looking back. Not just the act, the actor. “He was a Mormon bishop, an ecclesiastical leader in her faith. It didn’t matter,” he says, not that it should have. “She comes in with the attitude that we are going to cut his nuts off—basically, this isn’t a time for crying, this is a time to make sure he’s punished for what he did.”
ONE NIGHT A FEW
years earlier, in Norwalk—a tough Los Angeles–area city checkered with Locos and Primos and five or six other rival, mostly Latino, gangs—a high school party broke out, and a fight along with it. Words were exchanged, egos bruised, reputations challenged. Seventeen-year-old Alan Warner threw a big roundhouse. He crumpled the other boy, breaking his jaw.
Alan had had his share of scuffles and could handle himself okay. He felt he had to, given the neighborhood he grew up in. But it wasn’t just that. He wasn’t much into toeing the line. He was drunk the night of that fight, and plenty of other nights, too. He tried pretty much every drug.
He never looked twice at a girl like Terryl.
“She was straitlaced and I was on the other end of the spectrum,” he says.
He knew her through the Cerritos church. And he knew her family a bit. She was short and kind of attractive.
“I was looking for someone who could keep up on the weekends.”
BEFORE TERRYL’S MISSION, HER
mother suggested she go on a date with the same Alan Warner. “Remember him?” her mom had said. “He used to help us move furniture when we moved. Dad is a roofer, one of six kids, nice Mormon family.” Yeah, Terryl knew him. He was rough around the edges, a football player, the guy who’d made fun of her car in the church parking lot after she’d gotten in a fender bender.
But he was going on a mission, too, his to Alaska. He’d gone through a repentance process so he could cleanse himself of the behavior that would preclude him from going on a mission. While on it, he and Terryl wrote a few letters to each other.
When he came home, he asked Terryl on a date. She invited him over for a home-cooked dinner. He loved it. Only later did he learn the cooking was actually done by Terryl’s roommate. But he was hooked, not on the food so much, but on this strong-willed, determined young woman. She could push him in the right direction, he thought. Plus, he wanted a family.
So did Terryl. She’d reached a kind of peace about it. She could will it. She could make everything right.
Two months later, on Labor Day 1992, they were engaged. And seven and a half months later, they got married at Los Angeles’s Mormon temple, like Terryl had dreamed about as a little girl. At the wedding reception, held at the Los Coyotes Country Club, Danny showed up belligerent, but a handful of men were at the door, waiting for him, and turned him away.
As determined as Terryl had become to not be weighed down by her childhood, Danny remained a daunting and unpredictable figure; and her brother was sliding, disappearing into the maw of addiction; bad luck seemed to follow her, the death of April included.
There had to be a way out, for good.
One day, not long after Terryl and Alan were married, he came home hurting after one of those long, rough days roofing. He’d thrown up over the side of one of the houses, sick.
“She said: ‘You’re not going to do this anymore. You’re going to go to college and we’re going to get you into another profession.’ ”
They found the right college: Utah State in Logan. Alan had family in the area. Both were Mormon. It was beautiful country. Alan thought maybe he’d become an electrical engineer.
Before moving, Terryl faced her biggest challenge yet, the one that most terrified her. She and Alan had a baby, a little girl, Jayme, born on September 15, 1994. That meant Terryl, the little girl from the broken home, would be the mom trying to keep the pattern from reproducing itself. She had a new husband who sometimes needed pushing; Danny was still hovering out there; and Michael, his own drug use intensifying, was becoming a bigger challenge in her life, a wild card. How could she break the cycle?
SHE FELT A LITTLE
more solid on the work front. Within a few months of moving to Logan, Terryl found a job. She became the victim’s advocate with Cache County, in the prosecutor’s office. Several years into the job, a story worked its way into the prosecutor’s office about police exploring allegations that a dad from a nearby small town had raped his teen daughter. The evidence wasn’t clear in part because the mother was telling the daughter to let the thing drop, according to the county attorney at the time, Scott Wyatt.
Wyatt had hired Terryl and had watched her become a tenacious victim’s advocate. She took on a role, Wyatt said, that wasn’t typical of victim’s advocates. Terryl didn’t just offer advice to the victims going through the system; she got involved in the case and pushed investigators and prosecutors. Wyatt says she was right so often that he and others listened carefully to her.
“She was never overzealous, but sometimes it was like: ‘Oh my gosh, can you give me a break? We’ve got a big job to do, can’t we just move on?’ ”
In the case of the rape allegation, Wyatt says, Terryl began looking into it, almost taking on an investigator’s role. Wyatt recalls she was “convinced there are much bigger problems” with the family. The dad got arrested, and eventually convicted. “The case would’ve been dropped without Terryl,” Wyatt says, adding: “Terryl was the only person who supported this girl.” And there was more: Once the man was imprisoned, it came out that he’d raped his other children, too.
“It happened again and again,” Wyatt says of Terryl’s involvement in cases. In another instance, a mother reported that her daughter had been sexually abused by a man in the community. The police couldn’t nail it down. The prosecutor’s office, following Terryl’s instinct, used wiretap evidence to secure a conviction.
Wyatt said Terryl also helped organize community meetings with religious leaders, the bishops, who often were the first people contacted when a problem cropped up. Terryl was trying to take the stigma out of family abuse, and show it’s not, among other things, something a family can just take care of itself. Wyatt says of her: “She thinks: Why spend all of our time fixing problems when we can perhaps devote a little time preventing them in the first place?”
Here’s how Terryl put it of her hopes and passions: “I’m not going to be like Erin Brockovich, someone who is going to do amazing things. But I’m going to do something. I’m going to do something even if I’m told no.”
TERRYL HAD, OF COURSE
, read and heard about what happened to Keith O’Dell and Jim Furfaro. She wasn’t sure there was anything she could do professionally, because at the time she assumed the accident took place in Box Elder County, where Tremonton was located. In fact, however, the accident had taken place across the Cache County line, within Terryl’s area of jurisdiction.
Regardless, she thought she might extend herself to a fellow victim, a friend. On that night in the late fall, after their daughter’s gymnastics practice, she approached Jackie and made an overture that set in motion a cascade.
“I’m sorry,” Terryl said to Jackie. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
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O
UTSIDE LAWRENCE, KANSAS, TWO
dogs and a man walk along a gravel road surrounded by open fields. The sky is vast, unblocked by buildings, even the modest ranch-style homes are separated by many acres. Elm, ash, oak, and other trees dot the landscape in clumps. The two dogs are Lupin, a Boston terrier, and BeBop, a tricolor Welsh corgi. The man with their leads stuffed in the pockets of his orange fleece is Dr. Atchley, the Kansas University psychologist, an introspective former army captain turned scholar.