Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
On September 11, he wrote himself a memo indicating he’d spoken with Briana Bishop. She’d told him about her two interviews, the first one at the law enforcement offices, but the second time at her work. He writes: “The second time one of them came to her work, (and) embarrassed . . . her.”
In addition to these smaller things, there was one huge issue on the investigative front. It was a question of whether Rindlisbacher had mishandled his initial contact with Reggie. Bunderson wondered whether Rindlisbacher’s testimony could be tossed out because he hadn’t read Reggie his Miranda rights, the warning that informs a criminal suspect in custody that he or she has a right to remain silent and has a right to an attorney.
There was no disputing that Rindlisbacher had not said this to Reggie. But, to Bunderson, he should have. When the trooper took Reggie to the hospital, “I thought that Reggie was in custody and interrogated,” Bunderson says, even though at the time Reggie had not been arrested or charged with a crime.
If he could show Reggie should’ve been given such a warning, then he could have Rindlisbacher’s testimony tossed. But that wasn’t really Bunderson’s aim. He had a larger goal. He wanted to keep Reggie from having to testify.
Since the only statements Reggie had given were to Rindlisbacher on that day, they would be the only statements that Reggie would have to personally address to the jury. Without Rindlisbacher, there would be no Reggie. And that meant no tough examination of what he remembered from the accident, no asking him to explain the phone records, no asking him what he knew about the risks of texting and driving, and no asking him to reveal why he’d left his first mission. Reggie, nice and quiet though Bunderson thought he was, wasn’t someone the lawyer wanted to see testify in his own defense.
The sum of all these strategies that Bunderson was thinking through added up to one more tactic: stalling. The longer they could draw this case out, the more it might find its way to the bottom of the pile of prosecutorial priorities, and the more the public concern about two dead rocket scientists could ebb. Bunderson made no bones about it in talking to Reggie and his family.
“It’s rarely in a defendant’s advantage to hurry things up,” he said. “The longer you give for the steam to go out of a situation, especially this one—the deaths got a lot of press, folks were reading the newspapers—the more they would tend to forget all about it.”
He told the Shaws: “Let’s not be in a big hurry.”
Each passing day seemed to fuel the other side, anxious for closure. This was particularly true of Terryl, who kept digging and digging, seeing a great injustice that stretched beyond Valley View Highway on the morning of September 22, 2006.
ON NOVEMBER 19, AMID
the back-and-forth motions and delayed trial dates, there was a testy interview that symbolized not just the antagonistic tenor of a case that would drag on for well more than a year but also highlighted the ways in which society at large was struggling with how to think about our relationship to technology. What is okay? What can be proved? What steps are we willing to take to protect ourselves and our own from truth and consequences?
Singleton and Rindlisbacher were interviewing Mary Jane Shaw. It was 9:31 in the morning. Mary Jane was joined by Bunderson and her son, Phill Shaw. Both sides came in with guards up; the family thinking Rindlisbacher overzealous. Separately, there was civil liability, with Phill worrying “they could take everything,” if the Furfaros and O’Dells successfully sued the Shaws.
The investigators, meantime, saw the Shaws as meddling liars.
Not only were the sides confronting each other, the person at the center of the whole thing was Mary Jane, Reggie’s mom. His fierce protector.
That was the context going into the interview, which Singleton would later describe as “the most contentious I’ve ever had in twenty-four years in law enforcement.”
IT STARTED POLITELY ENOUGH
. It took place in a small conference room on the top floor of the county attorney’s office. Singleton recalled that, before the official interview took place, Mary Jane had mentioned to Rindlisbacher, “I saw you at the temple the other day.” Singleton took it as light code for “We’re pals, and I’m a good upright LDS person.” Singleton was LDS, too. Mrs. Shaw answered Rindlisbacher’s questions about the weather, saying it was “horrible.” She talked about finding Reggie at the scene, how she hugged him and asked if he was okay. Toward the end of Rindlisbacher’s questioning, things began to get testy as the trooper asked whether Mary Jane had told Reggie not to cooperate with the police. She said no, she hadn’t done that.
Then things really intensified when Singleton took over the questions.
“Walk me through the events of September 22, 2006. Start from—”
Phill cut her off. “Objection. Asked and answered. She only has to answer these questions one time, Singleton, and you’ve already tried to ask her by going over them. Ask—”
Singleton: “You can either butt out—”
Mary Jane: “It’s okay.”
Phill: “Don’t give your opinion here.”
Singleton: “I’m not here to talk to you.”
Phill: “Don’t ask questions that she’s already answered or she will walk.”
AS THE INTERVIEW CONTINUED
, there emerged all the contours of the battle, the idea that Reggie’s the victim of zealous prosecutors, a veritable witch hunt. The suggestion he’d been a liar, with his family as co-conspirators, egging him on with his deception and denial. But it’s a bit later that, with equal intensity, the conversation turned more directly to texting and driving, and whether Reggie was doing it and whether, regardless, it could be proved he was doing it at the time of the wreck, and had caused the wreck.
These exchanges are important because they frame a debate that was never so succinctly argued in the courtroom, given the long and drawn-out legal process. This was, in a way, a proxy for some of the reasoning in a jury trial that kept getting delayed and delayed, and a proxy, too, for the larger policy issues that allowed society to keep at bay the simmering legal and policy conflicts and challenges.
Singleton: “The cell phone records indicate, through the investigation, that Reggie was text messaging at the time of the crash.”
Phill: “Objection. Do not answer this question. Speculation. They don’t know the exact time of the crash. They do not have phone records to show if he was text messaging at the exact time of the crash because they do not know the exact precise second of the crash. Do not answer this question.”
Singleton: “I’m asking if cell phone records show the crash happened at that time—”
Phill: “Objection. No foundation. Don’t answer this question.”
A little later in the interview, the subject came up again, this time with the question being, again, what Reggie had told his mother about texting and driving. The questions now were coming from Rindlisbacher who, curiously enough, had taken on a bit of the good-cop routine, with Singleton asking the more pointed questions. In answer to Rindlisbacher, Mary Jane said Reggie had always maintained he was not texting.
“He’s never, ever, in a year and how many months, said anything different.”
And a bit later she said: “He said no, he was not, at the time of the crash.”
“At any time?” Rindlisbacher asked.
“I didn’t ask him at any time. I asked him, when the crash happened, were you on the phone? He said no.”
For Phill, there was no lingering doubt, not exactly. But he was vaguely aware of the complicated psychology at work. Reggie maintained he hadn’t been texting. Phill also didn’t personally look at the texting records. And, looking back, he felt that, for all of Reggie’s assurances that he hadn’t been texting, Reggie might have been taking cues, too, from the family. The intensity with which the family undertook the defense had a self-perpetuating and escalating force: Reggie denied texting, the family backed him up, and Reggie, never someone to let others down, dug in deeper.
“He was kind of quiet, and then everyone took over. Me, my mom and dad, all in his defense, and he just went with it,” he said.
January 18, 2008
Dear Ms. O’Dell,
I felt sad to read your letter and recalled the tragic incident that took the life of your husband and coworker. I have only followed the case in the news and I think the filing to the charges under these circumstances was somewhat new.
Thus began a letter to Leila from Utah state senator Lyle Hillyard, a Logan lawyer and one of the most powerful state senators in Utah. He was writing in response to a letter Leila had written to him a few weeks earlier, asking the senator to take on texting and driving.
In his reply, Senator Hillyard wrote that the January session was coming up in only three days and therefore he wouldn’t be able to do anything about the issue this session. But he said he would refer it to his staff for study to see if it was worth undertaking a year from then.
You raised a legitimate issue that I think the legislature needs to look at seriously. We all need to remember that when we drive a car very serious consequences can occur if we are not paying our full attention to what we are doing.
JUST A FEW DAYS
later, state representative Stephen Clark was driving up I-15, the big highway that runs through Utah. He was heading from Provo to Salt Lake City, the very drive, in fact, that Reggie had made with his parents after his first mission came to an abrupt end.
Traffic was bad and Clark was rushing. He was chair of the appropriations committee in the Utah House of Representatives, where he’d been first elected in 2000. A contractor by trade, he focused on commercial infrastructure projects, like plumbing and heating; he was a Republican, like most of the legislators, but a moderate one. Meaning: He was dyed-in-the-wool on issues like abortion, and was a fiscal conservative, of course, but he was willing to consider less strict rules on things like immigration. He’d tried, without success, to get a law passed to allow immigrant workers to get permits to work in the state.
As he drove up I-15 in his 2002 gold Lexus, he shook his head with frustration. He was going to be late for the legislative session. He pulled out his phone and texted his secretary.
“I was late and traveling fast and the traffic started backing up,” he says. He finished his text. When he looked up, he discovered the car in front of him had come to a stop. And he was about to slam into it. “I slammed on my brakes and just barely missed ramming him.”
He was mortified by his own behavior. He felt an almost immediate sense of resolve. Despite his history of fighting government regulations, he decided he wanted to do something about texting and driving. “This has got to stop,” he decided. “It’s got to stop not only with me but with those who are going to be behind me, texting.”
Something else, he said, flashed through his head or, rather, someone else. He thought about this kid he’d heard about, Reggie Shaw. He’d read about Reggie when the accident happened, and he thought about that accident now and again as he’d watched his own behavior and that of others on the road. As he continued his drive to the statehouse, he says: “I thought to myself: I could be another Reggie. I could be in a situation like that, or I could be like those rocket scientists.”
But there were some realities to contend with. One was that it was too late to introduce legislation for the 2008 session. More worrisome over the long run was the reality of Utah politics. This was a place where a conservative like Clark could be seen as moderate, in a deeply red place, where “government interference” were fighting words. “The Utah legislature is very conservative,” Clark says. “They don’t like the government telling them what to do.”
O
N THE LEGAL FRONT
, the late winter and spring brought a flurry of motions and countermotions that spoke to the specifics of Reggie’s case, but also to broader issues as the legal system wrestled with technology, law, and the brain.
On January 24, 2008, Bunderson filed a motion to prohibit the prosecution from introducing diagrams of the crash site, excluding any diagram “prepared by Mr. Kaiserman, the only eyewitness.”
The motion asserted that “there was no debris found, there were no skid marks, scuff marks, or gouge marks, and no evidence which could support the preparation of a diagram.”
The essential point Bunderson was arguing was that there was no way to show precisely where the accident had taken place, on which side of the yellow divider, and, if Reggie had swerved into the oncoming lane, it could not be proven how far he’d swerved.
JUST TWO WEEKS LATER
, on February 8, Bunderson asked the judge to rule that he would advise the jury to question the reliability of the farrier. “Mr. Kaiserman had only a fleeting moment, if not just a split second, to observe the situation, and he was involved in a major collision himself,” Bunderson wrote in his motion.
That day, Bunderson filed a handful of motions, the sum of which constituted the essential pieces of his case. One motion went to the heart of what everyone saw as a key issue, Reggie’s character. It was just one page, promising supporting documentation to follow, that referred to Reggie’s history with the LDS mission. It said that the discovery in the trial “vaguely references” the fact Reggie had gone to the Mission Training Center and then returned. That fact, Bunderson argued, had no bearing on the accident and, borrowing from the legal vernacular, was too “probative,” meaning it could carry more weight in the eyes of the jury than was relevant to the case.
Another February 8 motion was aimed at disallowing the prosecution from using anything in the trial that Reggie had said to Rindlisbacher at the scene of the accident, and en route to the hospital. This had to do with Bunderson’s assertion that Rindlisbacher failed to and was required to read Reggie his Miranda rights.