Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
He almost immediately started thinking about the case not just from the victims’ perspectives but, as he puts it, from the “perpetrator’s perspective.” And also from the position of other possible perpetrators, including kids like Libby. “I was thinking about my daughter and her life and how it would change” if something like this happened to her.
Linton glanced at the memo Terryl had handed him and could see now that it was a set of facts and assertions mirroring what Terryl was telling him—an outline of the case.
As Terryl concluded, she said: “George isn’t interested,” referring to Daines.
Terryl finished by saying: “I’ll do all the work, but you have to do this for me.” Of course, that wasn’t realistic, the victim’s advocate couldn’t do all the work.
Linton didn’t commit. He told Terryl he’d do a little research. But she had piqued his interest, in a way he says likely wouldn’t have happened, absent her intervention. In fact, he recalls, it was this conversation that set fate on its course. “When she came into my office,” Linton says, “that was the spark that ignited the whole thing.”
It is a sentiment echoed by Singleton, who says his efforts and conviction fell on deaf ears with the prosecutors until Terryl started pushing. “If it hadn’t been for her, no one would ever have heard of this,” he says. “It would’ve been a few months out of my life and a stack of paperwork that would’ve gone into the shredder.
“When you meet her, she’s a very nice woman. She doesn’t seem like a hard-core person,” he says. “But if you want someone to go to bat for you, she’s the one.”
She was just getting started, and now so was Linton.
LINTON, LIKE THE OTHERS
in his office, didn’t know much about the subject of texting and driving. He considered the concept “a mysterious bog.” He was fifty-two years old, a different generation, the last child of eight, who spent his first twelve years on an orchard farm where his family raised sheep and chickens.
Still, even as he admitted that he might not be in the mainstream technologically, he was surprised at how little he could find on the subject of texting and driving and the law. He wasn’t the only one who hadn’t heard much about it. It just wasn’t out there. There was one case out of New York that was vaguely related. He went to Terryl’s office, and he told her he was coming up empty; the two nearly laughed about it, as if to say: Well, that shouldn’t stop us.
But still, Linton needed more than he had in order to make a decision. He returned to his office. As he was searching online, he kept coming across one name: Dr. David Strayer. He was this local guy, a professor at the University of Utah, who seemed to be an authority on the risks of texting while driving and talking on the phone while driving. This fascinated Linton on two levels: A guy merely eighty miles away knew as much about this as anything else, and, more substantively, Dr. Strayer’s research had showed that using a phone behind the wheel was as risky as driving drunk.
The thing that struck Linton as he reviewed Strayer’s research was what was happening inside the brain. He thought:
I had no idea how much attention the mobile phone took from driving.
“We were wondering if this was like driving while drinking a Coke, until Dr. Strayer came along,” Linton reflects. “Then I realized it wasn’t like drinking a Coke, it was like driving drunk, really drunk.”
“The precedent that tipped it for me was not legal; it wasn’t a precedent of what was going on in other states. It was a scientific precedent,” he says.
Since 1990, when Dr. Strayer had begun digging into the issue of driving and attention/distraction, he’d studied the subject from numerous angles, amassing a host of papers on various nuances. For instance, in 2001 he published a paper in
Psychological Science
showing how motorists got distracted just talking on a phone; in the
Journal of Experimental Psychology
in 2003 he showed that such cell phone–using drivers don’t see as much of their surroundings as drivers not on the phone. Even if they’re looking at the road, he’d found, their visual acuity was impaired by the cognitive demand of the phone.
Also in 2003, he made a presentation at the International Symposium on Human Factors showing that cell phone use impaired drivers to the same level as .08 blood alcohol content, the level of legal intoxication in most states. At another conference, a year later, he showed that cell phone–using drivers are less focused on the road than drivers talking to a passenger in the car; the reason is because the passenger acts as a second set of eyes, modulating his or her conversation based on roadway conditions. Not so the person on the other end of the cell phone, who can’t see what is going on. In 2007, Dr. Strayer showed that motorists using cell phones do not get better with practice.
Along the way, Dr. Strayer was doing other research, related to aging and attention, studying some of the impairment associated with Parkinson’s. But the majority was on driving and distraction, and most of it was not well funded. Dr. Strayer was operating on a shoestring budget, eking out grants, and he thought he knew why: In whose interest was it to discover that there was a risk to this thing that everyone loved doing, and that was one of the most culturally celebrated activities, multitasking?
Still, Dr. Strayer had amassed a trove of data, much of it peer-reviewed and published in respectable scientific journals. And some of the most important coming from a researcher in Linton’s backyard. He’d made up his mind.
Now he had to tell Daines. He hoped it would be a simple conversation, but there were layers to this case, political hurdles, just below the surface.
LINTON KNEW THAT DAINES
, as an elected official, must be acutely sensitive to the community. After all, one wrong move, and Daines could face bad press, an angry electorate, and then a motivated opponent. Simple realities. That said, Linton knew that Daines had been fair and put justice first in past dealings.
An added wrinkle had to do with the Church. Reggie was LDS, like three-quarters of the just more than one hundred thousand residents of the county. That didn’t mean that the prosecutors gave breaks to members of the Church. They had plenty of prosecutions to show otherwise. Terryl herself, after all, had gone after a bishop years ago.
At the same time, Reggie wasn’t just a member of the Church, he was a poster child for many of its best-regarded attributes: clean-cut, churchgoing, family-focused, committed to going on a mission. He was an athlete and a decent student, things people in this county wanted their kids to be. He looked nice. He was nice.
As Linton was on his way to go talk to Daines, these things percolated. “This kid was on an LDS mission, and that is highly regarded in this valley. We knew we’d have to pull him off the mission,” he recalls. “The political ramifications were very high.”
Linton felt the science was so clear that it trumped any unstated risk from Reggie’s Church ties. But then, Linton also had a secret reason for looking a bit differently upon the influence of the Church.
BORN ON A FARM
in Utah, Linton came from a family without much education. Initially, they made ends meet in part by selling off plots of their twenty-six acres where they’d raised animals and had some orchards. Dirt poor.
Eventually, they parted with all the land and moved to the outskirts of Salt Lake City, to a poor neighborhood. Linton started to run with a rough crowd. In high school, he had a friend die of a meth overdose, and his best friend was a drug dealer—meth, marijuana, quaaludes, but mostly LSD. He once spiked Don’s drink with LSD, leading to a horrible trip that left Don curled up in the corner of his bedroom, afraid he was going to fall through the floor. This was the late sixties.
Linton didn’t make a habit of it. His dad told him: If you ever start taking drugs, or drinking, don’t come home.
He respected his father; his dad had those big biceps. But he didn’t fear he’d get beaten or anything like that. The family had a heritage of not drinking, and a religious faith. But when it came to the Church, Linton was being told one thing while having a very different kind of experience.
IT HAPPENED THE FIRST
time in the church, in an isolated area. The perpetrator was a well-regarded church member. Linton was seven. He remembers the man putting a hand down his pants, and fondling him. From that point on, for three years, the man used his position and good reputation to groom Linton, isolate him, intensifying the abuse. He manipulated Linton’s family into allowing him to spend private time with the boy, even overnights at the man’s house.
Linton didn’t tell anyone; he felt he shouldn’t. He couldn’t make sense of any of it, this terrible shameful thing being done to him by an authority figure, someone, no less, so well regarded in the church. Linton felt he must’ve done something wrong. “I felt God had deserted me and I couldn’t figure out why because I’d been such a good kid.”
The experience made a profound impression on him that led him to think twice about the difference between spirituality and religion, between faith and the institutions that deliver its message.
At least that’s how he came to terms with all of this later on, in a rational way. At the time, he couldn’t make sense of his life, of the role in it of such a prominent authority that he couldn’t trust. He got depressed. He heard voices. He went on antipsychotic medications.
One thing that helped Linton find his way was music. In the fourth grade, the music instructor told Linton he ought to play the violin. He went home and his dad said: No son of mine is going to play violin. So the family rented him a saxophone, and he took right to it.
Linton became good, earning first chair in a jazz ensemble in junior high school and then high school, and winning scholarship opportunities to play music in college. Sure, he listened to Led Zeppelin and Hendrix like everyone else, but he loved Coltrane, too. Music was an escape from it all—the poverty and rough circumstances around him, the proximity of sexual abuse. Maybe he’d be an art teacher someday, he thought.
By nineteen, some of the pain subsided, at least it seemed. Then another trauma: His beloved older sister Kathleen got very ill, first with cancer and then from the radiation treatment. He would read to her at her bedside as her condition worsened, and he prayed, sometimes blaming himself like he’d done when he was abused. “I thought maybe Kathy wasn’t getting better because I’d done something wrong,” he says. “No matter how much I prayed, no matter how much I fasted, she was not getting better.”
“The mind-numbing, bizarre thoughts I’d experienced years earlier started to come back.”
She died when he was twenty-one. At about that time, Linton went on his mission. This was what his family desperately wanted for him, and he supposed he wanted it, too. It was hard to make sense of things.
He was assigned to go to Belgium. But his first stop was Provo, the Mission Training Center, the very place that Reggie had been.
Like Baird, Linton was identifying with Reggie, but for different reasons. While Baird could identify with the clean-cut boy in Reggie, the one who had made a fatal mistake, Linton could empathize with someone who was in the middle of a mission that was about to end abruptly. In Linton’s case, he’d gone to the Mission Training Center and spent three weeks there, learning French. He’d felt deeply unsettled, then depressed. And then, one evening, he got out of bed, put on his clothes, and left. No warning, no explanation. He got home and told his parents he wasn’t feeling right about it. They were mortified.
Linton was taken to talk to an athletic coach at BYU, who told the young man he was a “quitter.” A member of the Church told him he’d regret the decision the rest of his life.
Of Reggie, Linton says he understood: “Pulling him off his mission was going to be incredibly hard.” Linton himself had left one, and knew what it was to be a young man in peril.
But Linton, while he believed in God, had lost his reverence for the Church. It was cover for his abuser. It was not sacred. And so he was free to look differently at Reggie, and the case.
It was another sign of the interesting role Reggie was playing. Depending on a person’s life experience, they saw Reggie and his actions in slightly different lights. Baird saw Reggie’s case one way, Linton another. Such was the razor’s edge of right and wrong that texting and driving played at the time; it seemed possible to view Reggie and his actions through different lenses. Over time, Reggie would become both a lightning rod and a prism through which people in the community, prosecutors, legislators, and others around the country would view themselves and their own behavior.
WHEN LINTON TOLD DAINES
of his decision, they had a decent back-and-forth. Daines expressed some skepticism, but he respected his colleague and appreciated the scientific background that Linton presented.
Linton walked out of the meeting and asked his assistant, Nancy, to put together the paperwork for the charging document.
Linton recalls thinking: “I had a lot of sympathy for Reggie. I knew this was going to be horrible for him.” In the same breath, he thought that this prosecution wasn’t just necessary—in a weird way, it was perfect. The perfect test case, the perfect way to set precedent—not with someone who was malicious, not with a societal outlier. “Reggie Shaw was the perfect person for me to prosecute, not because he was evil, but because he wasn’t evil. I don’t know how to say that. I don’t know how to put that. But I knew it.”
R
EGGIE WAS FEELING HIGH
a month into his mission when it came time for his first missionary conference. This was a gathering of around one hundred missionaries for a pep talk and celebration. It was held in Saskatoon, about 160 miles from Regina, a three-hour drive across the northern Great Plains. Reggie was particularly excited because of the speakers who were going to be in attendance at the retreat. They included Elder Clayton, one of the members of the Quorum of the Seventy. This was a high calling in the Church, one of the elders, figuratively and literally, who would travel to teach congregations. Also, speaking the first morning were two district presidents, and their wives. After the speeches, Reggie felt ebullient, so fired up.