Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
A FEW DAYS LATER
, Jackie took Stephanie and Cassidy to her mother’s house in Nevada for the Christmas holiday. That meant driving on Valley View Drive.
As they left home, she tried to avoid the thought that within ten minutes she’d be at the spot where Jim had died. She put on the radio and, for the girls, started a Disney movie, which showed on monitors that attached to the back of the front seats, absorbing Stephanie and Cassidy. The aftermarket DVD player had initially been a sore spot between her and Jim.
“Why do they need this?” Jim had asked.
She told him sternly: “You’re not always with us on the drive; you don’t know how hard it is to go six hours without entertainment.”
Altogether, they were at least a nine-screen household at the time of Jim’s death. There were the computers downstairs and a third on the dining room table that the girls sometimes used. The movie screens in the backseat of her Saturn. Each parent had phones. There were two televisions. Not included are the various GPS and other devices Jim played around with.
Soon after the accident, Stephanie, the older of the girls, had begun to play World of Warcraft, using her father’s account and his computer and desk, peering into his hefty NEC monitor. Jim and Jackie had decided that she could use World of Warcraft when she turned six.
After Jim’s death, Jackie and the girls also got lost in films, holding movie nights. In particular, they’d gather around and watch
The Sound of Music
, or another classic, and eat a take-out pizza. For a while, Stephanie suspended her playing of Dance Dance Revolution because it reminded her of her father. A few days after Jim died, at the viewing of body, Jackie had asked the girls to look at their father so they could know and understand that this was a real thing. As Stephanie would later recall in a school essay, her mother came up to her afterward and said: “I am so sorry this happened, and I know you can be strong and get through it.”
Media seemed to help.
As Jackie drove that morning on their Christmas journey, the girls watching Disney, she tried to lose herself in the radio. She thought:
If I get teary, my vision gets bleary and then it’ll be hard to drive and then I’ll have to explain to the kids why I’m stopping.
For Christmas that year, she felt she overdid it a bit with the presents. “I got the girls too many books.”
FOR CHRISTMAS, JACKIE WAS
in Nevada, Leila was at home, Terryl was in Mexico—at an orphanage.
On that Sunday before Christmas, Terryl and Alan surprised the family with the trip to Mexico. But it wasn’t exactly a vacation, Terryl told the kids. She brought out a bunch of seemingly random supplies: toothbrushes, combs, little deodorant sticks. They were the makings of “hygiene” kits to be handed out, along with puzzles, books, and sun hats, at an orphanage in Puerta Peñasco.
The next day, they piled back into the Ford Windstar van and drove south, stopping for the night in Searchlight, Nevada.
Puerta Peñasco is about a hundred miles south of the Arizona border on a strip of land that connects the Baja Peninsula to the rest of Mexico. The Warners stayed free in a condo that belonged to Neal Harris, Terryl’s old friend from Southern California who had been engaged to April before she died of cancer.
Neal had hit it big in the technology field, really big. He held top sales jobs at four different technology companies that were ultimately sold or went public for more than a billion dollars each. There was SynOptics Communications, which was among the pioneers in creating technology to allow for faster, more efficient delivery of data over Ethernet lines. It merged in 1994 with another company in a 2.4-billion-dollar deal, a precursor to the dot-com boom.
Neal moved to Ascend Communications, which built little boxes to terminate Internet signals and was acquired by Lucent Technologies in 1999 for $24 billion, one of the largest acquisitions in history. And, after that, Neal went to Foundry Networks, which made routers and switches—essential pieces of technology to deliver Internet traffic. It would be acquired by Brocade for $3 billion in July 2008.
He was, like so many fortunate Americans, a big beneficiary of Metcalfe’s law. More connections, faster connections, more efficient connections—Neal and others in the booming tech industry serving a seemingly insatiable drive to communicate with one another and trade at ever-increasing rates. They were creating the most powerful robots and conduits the world had ever seen, things that each year were making the tools of the previous year seem slow by comparison. They were creating wealth. This was another side of the technology revolution, big, big money. Neal had amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune.
Among the benefits of his wealth, he purchased two three-bedroom condominiums in Puerta Peñasco. Terryl said she wanted to take the children there for Christmas, to work at the orphanage, to teach them to give back.
“My kids need to see there are people who have less than them,” she says. “They need to learn empathy at a young age.”
On the outside, the Warners seemed like they’d developed into a perfect family. The children were excelling in school. They attended church. Neal looked at Terryl with some wonder, given her childhood. How could she turn out so different, given her upbringing? Would it come back to haunt her? “It’s a question I end up asking myself quite often,” he says. “Think about all the things she had going against her.”
It helped that the Warners had moved to Utah. But not completely. There were parts of Terryl’s journey the decade prior to the crash that showed how haunted she remained by her youth.
IN THE FALL OF
1998, eight years before Reggie hit the rocket scientists, Terryl stood in a Mervyns at a mall in Orem, Utah, about forty-five miles south of Salt Lake City, not far from Provo. She was glancing at the women’s clothes, passing time. She and Alan had driven down to visit his family. They’d, of course, brought with them Jayme, their firstborn, and Taylor, the newest addition to their family, who had been born two years earlier, on October 18, 1996.
As Terryl was glancing at the dresses in Mervyns, she suddenly realized that Taylor had disappeared.
“Taylor?”
No response.
She was searching frantically.
“Taylor!”
No response.
“Alan! Alan!”
Her boy was missing. It felt just like Danny had snatched Mitchell. Just like in her nightmares. Was Danny there?
Alan ran over. “What’s going on?”
Terryl was in a full-blown panic. And then Taylor appeared. Her little guy peeked out from between two dresses in a circular rack. She scooped him up. She was beyond crying, nearly hysterical, which was not at all Terryl’s style.
“We’re going home. We’re going home.”
They never made it to the family gathering.
It was, Terryl said, PTSD. Danny had taken Mitchell from her; she had willed herself away from that place, she’d moved far away. But she learned the limits of geographic distance; she carried with her the ghosts of Danny’s abuse.
THEY’D MOVED TO LOGAN
three years before that Mervyns incident, in 1995. Alan attended Utah State. After living in a condo, they’d found a house for sale in 1997 for $94,000. It was that cheap because it was infested with hornets, had no toilets, and was ill-configured. Of the three thousand square feet of livable space, fully half of it was the living room.
Weirdly, the house’s lack of perfection appealed to Terryl. It let her feel like she was distancing herself from her mother, who Terryl always felt put on airs that everything was okay. Even though it was a big fat lie.
She decided to take a deliberately different approach. “I don’t care if the house is perfect all the time.” That would be superficial, she thought. It didn’t mean she wanted a hornet-infested mess. They fixed it up, made it livable, just another long-term improvement project for Terryl.
She was taking these steps, making declarations, trying to rebuild herself just as she was remaking the house with the hornet’s nests the size of basketballs.
During this period, she had another key rebuilding project on her hands. She was getting to know her real father.
That whole thing unfolded a few years earlier, when Jayme was eight months old and the family still lived in Southern California. Terryl and the baby were walking in a mall in Palm Springs with Kathie. A woman came up to Terryl’s mom and said: “Are you Kathie Hartman?”
The woman was from Kathie’s high school days. The woman asked Kathie how Woody was doing and whether Woody still worked at Kodak.
In an instant, it all came together for Terryl. Someone named Woody had been her actual father, and Michael’s father, too. She’d never known her dad’s name. Now she did.
At the urging of her friend Neal, Terryl contacted the Department of Motor Vehicles and managed to find this guy named Woody Hartman. She made contact with him and he told her that Kathie had told him that she was happy and had started another family. He says Kathie urged him to let her and the children move on with their lives, explaining his eventual absence, something he says he regrets. Sometimes, early on, Woody would call to see how the children were doing. When Terryl learned this, she thought she’d solved one of the mysteries of her childhood: Why she was told not to answer the phone.
“My dad would call and she didn’t want me to pick up.”
Terryl would occasionally burst into fury. “It breaks my heart,” she says. “I had no father at graduations, milestones, my wedding.
“I lost out on a whole relationship in high school, middle school, college, without a father.”
The years she lost with her father had Terryl thinking about being a victim from a different perspective. She developed a particular empathy for people who lost their moms or dads.
The more she learned about the accident on Valley View Drive on September 22, 2006, the more Terryl thought about the other victims—not just Jackie. There was Leila, and this eighteen-year-old girl, Megan, who was growing up without her dad.
ON JANUARY 2, 2006
, Megan married her fiancé, Thomas Done. The ceremony took place at a small LDS church near the main downtown area. The bride wore a white gown with a top that bunched up around the middle. She walked down the aisle by herself, not wanting anyone to replace her dad. She finally felt the weight of his absence, after keeping it at a numb distance for many months.
“I couldn’t stand the idea that my dad wasn’t really there. I just didn’t want to believe he was gone,” she says of those months of denial.
At the wedding, on a brown upright piano in the church, she’d put a big picture of her dad. Her mother, she says, was crying hysterically. “It was like my dad’s funeral all over again.”
The marriage didn’t work. Megan had been struggling for a few years—with school grades and swimming injuries, with her relationship with her parents. She hadn’t gotten a job and that was one of several sources of growing tension with her new husband. They fought, really fought. Not a month after the marriage, the cops were called in after she and her husband got into a physical altercation. Megan was arrested. She got probation, a first-offender break.
Her life was getting away from her. She spent hours a day, sometimes all day, playing shooting games on the Xbox, either against her husband, or teaming up with him against other people they’d meet online. They’d fight with myriad virtual heavy weaponry across elaborate virtual terrain, seeing which team could get fifty kills first. She felt good when she was online, like she was skilled, and it was thrilling, the constant, intense interactivity. “I don’t know how to explain it,” she says of her passion for playing. “It’s pretty much all we ever did.”
AT THE START OF
2007, Megan and Leila were struggling to find anything close to closure around Keith’s death. Jackie, with raw determination, was doing a bit better.
Terryl remained at arm’s length—but not for long.
And Trooper Rindlisbacher was about to get a break.
O
N JANUARY 8, 2007
, three and a half months after Reggie hit the Saturn and killed the rocket scientists, trooper Rindlisbacher’s tenacity paid off: He got the okay to go after Reggie’s cell phone records. It came in the form of an application to conduct a criminal investigation. It had been put together by Tony C. Baird, one of the county prosecutors.
On page twelve of the fourteen-page application, the document states that, just following the accident, Trooper Rindlisbacher drove Reggie to the hospital and “observed Shaw using his phone to receive and send text messages. The phone did not make any audible noise, but on several occasions Shaw pulled the phone from his coat pocket and sent a text message. Shaw held the phone with his right hand and used his right thumb to type and send each message.”
A page later, it says that Trooper Rindlisbacher asked Reggie whether he’d been texting during the accident. “He denied using it. Shaw could not or would not give a reasonable explanation for his driving pattern.”
But if it sounded like the district attorney’s office was circling Reggie, that was far from the case. Baird, the prosecutor, had his skepticism—about what the facts would show and whether there was applicable law. For now, the document was a permission slip to Trooper Rindlisbacher. And the real meat of the document lay in its middle, pages six and seven. It was a subpoena, aimed at Verizon Wireless. The company was ordered to provide to the trooper, as an official of the state, records associated with the number 435-XXX–3739. Reggie’s number.
“Copies of billing statements from September of 2006 until present. These copies should include both incoming and outgoing tolls of both calls and text messages. This should include all incoming and outgoing phone numbers dialed or received.”
IN THE MIDDLE OF
January, Leila got a call from Herm Olsen, the lawyer she’d previously contacted. There were two things on his mind. He’d been thinking about the accident and about the scene where it happened. “There’s no shoulder on the road,” he said. “The road isn’t safe. Everybody knows it’s not safe.”