A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (20 page)

Leila thought back to what she’d seen at the accident site. On either side of the highway were about four inches of pavement, then a sharp drop into the gully. Olsen told Leila that it might be worth getting an engineer. He told her that, depending on what the engineer found, it could be worth suing the state.

“I don’t care about that. I want the road fixed,” Leila told Olsen. “Please, just get them to get the road fixed.”

Leila recalls that Olsen took it in. He had one more thing to bring up with Leila: Had she heard what happened with the investigation? Was it over? Did Reggie get a ticket?

Olsen told Leila the police should have alerted her. But she told him that they hadn’t. She resolved to find out. She hung up with him and placed a call to the county clerk’s office. They hadn’t heard a thing about it. She dug up the business card of one of the officers who had visited her after the accident.

Shortly thereafter, the phone rang. She sat down at the counter in her kitchen and picked up. “This is Bart Rindlisbacher,” the man said. He explained that he’d been looking into what happened at the accident. Then he went into his story, about how he watched Reggie texting on the way to the hospital.

“What?” Leila was shocked. “This is so different from what I’ve been told.”

The trooper told her that, despite getting permission to investigate, he was having trouble getting the cell phone records; in fact, the Shaw family wouldn’t confirm which carrier was Reggie’s, and the investigator was going company to company trying to figure out where to start. Leila had the impression that the trooper was open, and honest, but also dogged. “I really had the impression he was doing a great deal of this on his own.”

She hung up and felt like she needed to do something, too. Texting and driving; could it really have happened? It seemed to her so absolutely absurd, so illogical, so dangerous. She thought back to Herm Olsen’s firm. The first principal, Lyle Hillyard, was a state senator.

A seed was planted in the back of her mind, something tiny and still unrecognizable to her. Yet it would blossom. Leila would eventually need to do something positive with her grief. Maybe the senator could help.

CHAPTER 19

REGGIE

M
ATCHUP ZONE! MATCHUP ZONE!”

Reggie, in a shirt and tie, standing next to a metal folding chair, shouted defensive instructions to five scrawny-armed sophomores of the Bear River Bears, Reggie’s former high school team. It was winter 2007, during a basketball game against the Grizzlies from Logan High School.

It looked to be trouble. Earlier in the season, the Grizzlies had crushed the Bears. But things were tighter this game. Reggie was feeling the tension, getting lost in it.

Toward the end of the year, before Thanksgiving, he’d taken up an offer from Van Park, the varsity coach, to help coach the sophomores. Reggie was the assistant coach to Greg Madson, who doubled as coach and the publisher of the
Leader
, the Tremonton newspaper.

Madson couldn’t make this game so Reggie was on his own.

An adage in sports is that “defense wins championships.” It fit into Reggie’s own personality on the court: hustle, do the unheralded jobs, let your teammates score. He was trying to impress this on the sophomores and, in this game, that meant constantly changing the defense to keep the other team off guard; man-to-man, and zone, 1–2–2, 1–3–1.

“Every other time down the court we were in something different,” Reggie says. “It was just constant.”

Bear River lost by six. He was initially disappointed, then felt some measure of moral victory, having kept it so close against the bigger school. Basketball brought momentary relief.

“In all honesty, the basketball was such a great release, an avenue for him to get lost,” says Madson. He knew Reggie well, as a player and as a kid. Nearly in his fifties, Madson was in Reggie’s church ward and had been an assistant to Van Park on Reggie’s own varsity high school teams.

In the 2006–2007 season, just after the accident, Madson felt like Reggie mostly didn’t betray the grief he felt. But then he’d see Reggie “in a quiet moment,” and he’d see a “momentarily blank stare.” Madson felt like Reggie was flashing back to the accident, but he didn’t feel it was his place to pry. “You could tell it was eating him up.”

Madson decided a good therapy might be to give Reggie more responsibility. And so the coach allowed Reggie more latitude to coach on his own, say, to take the guards for part of practice or the big men, responsibilities that he might not otherwise give to a first timer.

“When he spoke, they listened,” and not just in the way that younger kids in that community did when coaches talked. “He’d had some real-world experiences. He’d been through some really tough stuff.”

REGGIE WAS DATING AGAIN
, his interest in women, if not at its full measure, returning. Her name was Trisha Haber. She was a year younger than Reggie and a good friend of Briana Bishop, the woman who Reggie had been seeing at the time of the wreck.

“Our relationship wasn’t the best before the accident. And after, it was kind of too much and it didn’t work out,” Reggie says of dating Briana.

Briana was from Kaysville, about forty-five minutes away. Reggie had met her through Dallas, his gregarious buddy. Trisha was one of the girls in the group they hung out with. She had curly hair and a dark tint to her skin, her dad being from Israel. Trisha worked in a T-Mobile store. She and Reggie went on dates, taking turns making the forty-five-minute drive.

She knew about the accident, seemed supportive, though they didn’t talk much about it. They did discuss a future.

Marriage talk, not sex talk. They made out a couple of times. That was it. Reggie had learned his lesson, and he had a focused, overriding goal. He still would go on a mission. “It’s what I wanted more than anything.”

Maybe he’d be able to go in June, just pick up where he’d left off.

This is how it went in the spring of 2007: a kind of collective life-as-it-used-to-be with an unspoken feeling it could all burst apart. Leila O’Dell and her daughter, Jackie Furfaro and her daughters, and Reggie and his family began trying to reclaim their lives. There were fits and starts of normality, but always a specter loomed. Somewhere, out there, some machinery, embodied by the stubborn Trooper Rindlisbacher, was following a trail.

Occasionally, the Shaws would check in with Jon Bunderson. He had a stock cliché: No news is good news. And for his part, he wasn’t about to contact Cache County officials. “Don’t kick a sleeping dog,” he described as his philosophy. He fielded some questions about insurance, from the Shaws and the insurance companies.

On the criminal front, there was a sense, in Reggie’s camp, that maybe it would all go away.

Far from it. With the legal force of the Cache County Attorney’s Office, Rindlisbacher had been faxing Verizon in late January and early February. The fax asked for phone records associated with Reggie’s number. And the document included a copy of obituaries for Keith and Jim published in the
Herald Journal
, Logan’s local newspaper, on September 25, three days after the accident.

It took at least five requests to get the records. And then, the trouble was, the information didn’t make sense.

Rindlisbacher needed reinforcements.

A MEETING TOOK PLACE
in the highway patrol office in Cache County, the same second-floor office where Rindlisbacher had come immediately after the accident. Sergeant Tony Hudson, who’d been working with him on the case, was there, along with a new guy, Scott Singleton. It was March 15, a Thursday, at 10:30 in the morning.

Scott was the new local agent for the Utah State Bureau of Investigation, assigned to the northernmost counties. Scott didn’t much like his job’s chief responsibility: hang out at bars and, as Singleton put it, “enforce Utah’s crazy alcohol laws.” A byzantine labyrinth of rules and regulations, he said, that he was supposed to enforce “sitting in a bar all night long, which I hated.”

When he had time, though, there was a part of the job he loved. He was supposed to help pursue cases for the highway patrol that were taking a lot of time, that the individual troopers didn’t have resources to pursue. Not cold cases, exactly, but complex ones.

The job suited Singleton after a long period wandering. Born in 1964 in the tiny farm town of Benjamin, Utah, the son of a plumber, Singleton was a nice kid but a poor student, shy, a follower, a practical joker. At Spanish Fork High School, where his grade point average didn’t reach past 3.0, he was a reasonable class clown; once, when the National Guard came out to celebrate the school’s newly renovated football field, Scott joined a few friends hoisting signs that read:
MAKE
FOOTBALL
FIELDS
,
NOT
WAR
.

He kicked around at college or, rather, colleges: Southern Utah University, Utah Technical College, Weber State, Utah Valley. He didn’t last more than a few semesters at any of these schools, finding himself driving with regularity to Arizona, where the booze laws were looser, partying regularly.

In the back of his mind, he started to wonder if he had a learning disability.

“I cannot pay attention for more than a few seconds,” he says. “I’d sit in class, and no matter how hard I’d concentrate—if there’s a window, I don’t care where it is, I’m staring out of it—I’d have the hardest time paying attention.”

He didn’t get a degree, bouncing around jobs (farming, dry walling), got married at twenty-one, and took a job two years later working at the Utah Port of Entry in Wendover, an entry-level law enforcement gig. He worked his way into a job as a road trooper, then a state investigator.

At the meeting that morning, Rindlisbacher handed Singleton two cases. They were Rindlisbacher specials, meaning: cases that he’d gotten personally invested in.

One involved a guy who randomly approached Rindlisbacher at a restaurant and offered to buy the trooper dinner. The guy was dressed as Santa Claus, and struck Rindlisbacher as “creepy,” Singleton recalls. Then later, the same guy had been stopped while driving a taxi with a little boy in the back; Rindlisbacher did some checking and discovered the guy had plead guilty in Washington State to “immoral communication” with a minor.

Rindlisbacher “wanted to see if we could get him registered as a sex offender in Utah,” Singleton explains.

Rindlisbacher handed Singleton the other file, Reggie’s. He told the story to Singleton, who was taken aback.

“I didn’t have a cell phone, I’d never texted. He might as well have been talking about nuclear physics.”

In the file were several compact discs.

Rindlisbacher handed them to Singleton, and said: “I think we’ve got proof.”

THE DISCS CONTAINED RECORDS
from Verizon Wireless, the results of the subpoena.

They were not, on their face, especially helpful.

Two days later, Singleton sat down in a windowless room in Brigham City, his immodest investigator’s surroundings, put one of the discs into the computer, and discovered what looked like nonsense. It was an endless list of calls and texts, intermingled, not organized by day or time. Not organized in any fashion at all—and spanning a period of months.

“It was just jumbled,” Singleton recalls. He started trying to separate the calls from the texts, the long ones from the short ones. Then began organizing the data by date.

It took a few weeks, working on and off, in between patrolling the bars. He didn’t have much contact with Rindlisbacher; there wasn’t much to say.

Then, in mid-March, the data started to crystallize. Singleton was back at the computer, when something stood out.

6:47.

There was a text at 6:47 a.m., on September 22, 2006. The morning of the accident.
Wasn’t that the moment of the accident?

Singleton went back and looked at the crash report. He looked for Kaiserman’s 911 call. When did that happen?

6:48.

And it was only moments later that Rindlisbacher, riding in the Crown Vic, had heard the call. Singleton shifted in his seat, cocked his head, tried to make sense of it.

“Holy cow,” he muttered.

He played with the numbers some more, looked at the order of events, texts, and calls, which he’d finally gotten straight in the database.

Reggie had sent a text at 6:17.

Another at 6:43.

Another at 6:45.

Another at 6:46.

Singleton thought:
He was texting when the crash happened.

He didn’t call Rindlisbacher, not yet. He didn’t want to be wrong. There were too many unknowns. Among them: Who was Reggie texting? All the messages had gone to the same number: 801-XXX–3126.

Singleton considered calling the number. But then he thought,
I’ve got to proceed cautiously. Someone might answer and then just go cold on me, shut me down, or out.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, SINGLETON
got out a piece of paper, and he wrote down the sequence of events from the crash report—when the accident took place, when the 911 calls came in—and he wrote down the times of all of Reggie’s texts.

He climbed in the aging Smurf-blue Ford Taurus that was his state-provided car. It was 10:30 in the morning. He drove to Tremonton, Reggie’s hometown. And then he commenced retracing Reggie’s drive, matching times with texts, which had commenced with the one sent at 6:17.

As he approached the gun range, near the mile marker where the accident took place, Singleton was struck by two things: (1) he was having trouble watching the road and looking down at his piece of paper, a challenge that reinforced his astonishment that someone could simultaneously text and drive; and (2) there was no doubt: “Reggie had been texting the entire way. He had been texting when he caused the crash.”

Questions whirred through Singleton’s mind.

How do we prove this?

Who was Reggie texting?

Who belonged to 801-XXX-3126, the number on the other end of the texts?