“Do you know who your mother’s first husband was?” he asked innocently.
Elizabeth said a name.
“Where is he?”
Elizabeth laughed. “If he’s not in jail, he’s probably in England.”
That statement launched Elizabeth on one of the most improbable tales Gardner had ever heard. The story she was about to tell—and Gardner had no way of checking its veracity—was remarkable not only for its sheer implausibility but for its horror. What Elizabeth was trying to do, Gardner soon decided, was send investigators off on a wild goose chase by inventing a whopper so large they could not afford to ignore it. But he couldn’t turn back. He had to hear what she had to say. He had to know to what lengths she would go to lay down false trails.
“Why would he be in jail?” he asked.
“He was mixed up in some very big fraud things. Kind of like going along with little old ladies and saying, ‘Give me your pension, and we’ll go to your apartment.’”
“Where did he and your mother meet?”
“They met in South Africa.”
“What kind of problems was he giving her?”
As her story continued, it became increasingly hard to believe.
“Bad. Very bad. He beat her. He had homosexual lovers.
He did a couple of real unpleasant things to the children. Really disgusting things.”
“You say he had homosexual tendencies?”
“Uh huh. He was supposed to be an extremely good-looking man. Very charming. Debonair. He swept my mother off her feet. She was very young, about eighteen or nineteen. Her parents were dead set against the marriage. Her father refused to go to the wedding, and I think her mother did, too. It was very strange.”
Gardner asked her when the trouble began.
“Maybe even while Mummie was pregnant. He started beating her. And he started bringing home guys.”
“So he was bisexual?”
“Yeah, I guess so. He wanted children, but other than that he wasn’t particularly interested in my mother. Later, he started doing fairly unpleasant things to the kids.”
“Homosexual things?”
“Well, I don’t know quite how you describe it.” At this point, Elizabeth’s unlikely account began to resemble some horrific fantasy. “My mother said the first time it happened she thought a rat had been at the kid. They took him to the hospital, and the hospital said they couldn’t figure out what was going on. It wasn’t an animal that had taken chunks of flesh out of the baby. Not once but several times. Four or five times. You know, we’re talking about a three-month-old baby. It was so bad that the child had to go into intensive care. Because, you know, it had been eaten.”
Gardner was stupefied. “Like a cannibal?” he asked incredulously.
“Yeah. It turned out that he was doing it, and my mother caught him. Then he tried to do the same thing to her.”
“He was biting her?”
“Yeah. He was eating chunks out of them. You know, it’s so gross that one can hardly comprehend why someone would do that.”
“My first question is, you don’t think this guy came back and retaliated, do you?”
“I know so little about him except for these few instances
that it’s hard to know if he’s in jail, or if he’s an alcoholic or whether he has become some sort of obsessive monster or something.”
Then Elizabeth got to the point she had been trying to establish in her incredible anecdote.
“It might be worthwhile to try to locate him and find out what he’s been doing,” she said. “Anything is possible. I mean, if someone could do that to children at that age I guess he could go to better things like murder.”
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT WHEN ELIZABETH’S TALE ended, but Gardner still had one more question. “How hard would it be to get hold of Jens?” he asked.
It was Elizabeth’s turn to look rattled. “I don’t know what his schedule is,” she stammered.
AT FIRST, RICKY GARDNER HAD TROUBLE WRAPPING HIS tongue around the strange name. He pronounced it
Jinz,
sounding they
j
as he would for
Jim or John.
But the German
“j”
is pronounced more like a
y
and in
Jens
the final
s
is slurred. The result is
Yence
, rhyming roughly with
prince
. The surname, too, is not what it appears to the American eye. In the United States, it may be pronounced
soaring
, but in German, the s becomes a soft
z
and the
oe
, which has no English equivalent, is almost a
u.
Therefore,
Soering
becomes
Zuring
. Or thereabouts.
But the pronunciation of his name was one of the least interesting details about Jens Soering.
BORN IN BANGKOK ON AUGUST 1, 1966, JENS WAS THE first child of Klaus, a thirty-year-old junior officer at the German Consulate in the Thai capital, and Anne-Claire, scion of a wealthy and respected family from the northern German city of Bremen.
Klaus’s family migrated to West Germany from the East in the disruptive days following World War II, and there was little stability during his early years. He joined the foreign service out of high school and used his ambition and innate talent as an administrator to work his way up the ladder. Typical of a German foreign service officer on the way up, Klaus was extremely conservative, hard-working, and demanding—a man not given to overt displays of affection. He insisted upon excellence, obedience, and efficiency. To many, he seemed callous and unfeeling, but those who knew him well said he was, at heart, a warm and compassionate man.
Anne-Claire was a product of different circumstances
than her husband. A half-dozen years older than Klaus, she had grown up amid considerable wealth. Her father died when she was very young, but her mother, a strong-willed, dominating woman, quickly remarried. Her second husband was the founder of a powerful and profitable German electronics company. The family money gave Anne-Claire opportunities that had been denied to her husband. As a teenager she came to the United States and attended a prestigious prep school in the Midwest before enrolling at an American university. After she graduated, she returned to Europe and worked in a Dutch consulate, when she met Klaus. They were married in 1958, two years before Derek and Nancy Haysom. Klaus was twenty-two; Anne-Claire was closer to thirty.
In 1967, when Jens was one year old, the family moved to Cyprus. A year later Klaus and Anne-Claire had another son, Kai. The four of them remained on Cyprus until 1972, when Klaus was transferred to Bonn so he could work more closely with officials at the foreign service headquarters.
From the first the children were the focus of Klaus’s and Anne-Claire’s lives. They doted on them and did without to buy them fine clothes, pay for elaborate birthday parties, and send them to good schools. The younger boy, Kai, was cheerful and easy-going; he made friends easily. The older son, Jens, was an intense youth, who tended to be sharp and sarcastic with his peers. He was respected for his intelligence, but he had few friends.
In 1977, when Jens was eleven and Kai nine, Klaus was transferred to his first job in the United States, in the West German consulate in Atlanta. An administrator rather than a diplomat, Klaus became the office manager. Productivity soared, but morale dropped. Klaus pushed the staff hard, occasionally driving the women in the office to tears with his demands. Whenever that happened, however, he unfailingly apologized and for a few days afterwards the workload would be lighter.
The Soerings came to Atlanta at an opportune time. Although the Georgia capital was a backwater as far as foreign
postings went, the city had definite benefits. The economy was just beginning to boom, and real estate was incredibly inexpensive. Klaus and Anne-Claire bought a comfortable, two-story brick home on Cochise Drive in a suburb called Vinings in the city’s prosperous northwest quadrant, practically on the banks of the beautiful Chattahoochee River. Fortuitously, the house also was close to Lovett School, a private institution with a reputation for excellence. Unknown to Klaus and Anne-Claire, the school was pretentious to the point of caricature; its reputation was inflated. But in their determination to provide quality education for their children, they enrolled Jens in the fifth grade, Kai in the third. They lived close enough to walk to class.
Physically, Lovett School is not a lot different from Wycombe Abbey, at least in the sense that both campuses are composed of attractive buildings surrounded by pleasant grounds. While Wycombe Abbey’s buildings reek of history and its campus is mainly broad, open greensward, Lovett’s property is densely forested, and the physical structures—the split-level classrooms, the sleek, modern gymnasium, the football stadium, complete with lights, and the tennis courts —look as though they are only temporarily inhabiting clearings carved out of the trees, spaces that could revert to woodland overnight if the caretakers aren’t careful. Wycombe Abbey resembles a rambling British estate; Lovett School looks like a well-endowed Midwestern junior college.
Intellectually, there is little room for comparison. Wycombe Abbey girls, for the most part, go off to Cambridge and Oxford, while Lovett grads are more likely to go to the University of Georgia. This is a bit of a sore spot for Lovett enthusiasts, who like to think of the institution as a first-rank prep school, a sort of Choate on the Chattahoochee.
Lovett was founded in 1926 by Eva Edwards Lovett, who is described in the school catalogue as “a Christian woman of remarkable capacities.” Presumably that included a capacity for hard work since she ran the school herself for twenty-nine years, placing great emphasis on religious instruction.
After 1955 the curriculum changed, and the school broadened its instructional base. Despite the efforts of successive headmasters, however, Lovett, at least up until the time Jens graduated in 1984, had never achieved the academic recognition of most of Atlanta’s other private schools. Even some of those whose children went there snigger quietly about the school’s affectations. The father of one of Jens’s classmates said he always thought of Lovett as a “little Southern girls’ school which just happened to let some boys in.”
WHATEVER THE ACADEMIC VALUE OF LOVETT ITSELF, there is no doubt that Jens Soering had a first-class intellect. “He was very, very smart,” said one of his former teachers, an instructor who is no longer affiliated with Lovett. “His mind was very quick, and he was very sure of himself.”
Exactly how smart he was is hard to say. Lovett officials refuse to disclose any details about Jens’s academic standing, and teachers have been forbidden to discuss him under threat of losing their jobs. Almost certainly, however, he was very near the top of his class. He had to be. He was on the Headmaster’s List every year from the ninth grade on, and he was a member of both the National Honor Society and the Cum Laude Society for his last two years. In his senior year he was a semifinalist in the National Merit Scholarship competition.
When he applied to the University of Virginia, he was selected as one of only 150 freshmen to be included in the Echols Scholars program. Another Echols Scholar in the same class was Elizabeth Haysom.
In addition to being an Echols Scholar, Jens also was named a Jefferson Scholar, which had a not inconsequential additional benefit: a full four-year scholarship. The two honors definitely placed Jens among the university’s intellectual top rank. Jefferson Scholars are the only group at UVA whose members have perfect SAT scorers.
What Jens possessed in intellectual capability, however, he lacked in personality. He was known as a grind. A nerd.
A geek. A student obsessed with the idea of being perfect even to the point of refusing to be corrected by a teacher.
“He’d argue with the teachers because he always thought he was right,” said one high school classmate. “He was driven.“
“I can hear him now,” said another, five years after last seeing Jens Soering. “He always presented the attitude that he knew a lot more than anyone else, even the teachers. His tone was like, ‘I know it and you don’t.’”
Jens was extremely bright, but he also was arrogant, sarcastic, argumentative, haughty, and patronizing. Needless to say, he was not well liked. The fact that he was on the school Honor Council in his junior year is remarkable; that he was elected vice president of his class in the tenth grade is nothing short of amazing.
“He was real cold,” commented another classmate. “He never went out of his way to be friendly.”
The mother of one of his classmates succinctly summed up the attitude of many of his classmates, teachers, and the other parents: “He was a real little shit.”
WHEN JENS FIRST ENROLLED AT LOVETT, HIS ENGLISH was stilted and heavily accented. As the years went by, his accent became less noticeable, and by the time he graduated, it was distinct but no longer harsh, like a pebble rubbed smooth by an Appalachian stream.
In his sophomore and junior years he was a reporter for the school newspaper. In his senior year faculty advisers appointed him editor in chief. His command of the written language, no matter the flags his speech raised, was superb.
But he had, even at that early age, more than his share of quirks. Despite his having lived in the United States for a number of years, he clung tenaciously and aggressively to his nationality. In the early grades fellow students teased him often about being a Nazi, but as time went on, the joke grew stale and the teasing stopped. That, however, did not prevent Jens from flaunting his German heritage and his nonconformist ideas. One mother vividly remembers a cover
on the student literary magazine when Jens was its editor: It was a photograph of his grandfather’s tombstone.
Jens was aware of his estrangement from his classmates, and he capitalized upon it. Often he would make outrageous statements just to see the effect they would have on others. One of his favorite targets was the American political system, which Jens delighted in attacking, as much for the shock value as to articulate his own beliefs. Such comments did not sit well with the other students, who, for the most part, were budding yuppies and the children of staunch Republicans. His cynicism did not fit the place or the time, which was the height of the Reagan presidency, when patriotism was not only back in favor but, in Lovett circles, mandatory.
Sometimes, though, Jens seemed to want to be one of the gang. Although his early training had been in classical music, he later switched to more mundane uses of his talents: He played guitar in a student band called “Ground Zero.” His favorite rock groups were Talking Heads, the Doors, and a German group called Trio.
For a loner, an iconoclast, and a sharp-tongued foreigner who reveled in his foreignness, he joined an unusual number of school organizations. He was in the Foreign Language Club, the German Chapter (president), the Guitar Club (copresident for three years), the Photography Club, the Science and Math Club, and the Drama Club.
Drama was one of his main interests. He wasn’t enthralled with the possibility of being an actor, but he liked the behind-the-scenes roles: directing, writing, and working on the sets. He sweated with the stage crew in class productions of
Jonathan and Arsenic and Old Lace
, but his real triumph came in his senior year, when he and some classmates decided to make a horror movie. Jens was the director. The set was the backyard of one of his classmates, chosen because it was on the Chattahoochee and when the fog rolled in off the river, it could be quite spooky.
“It was very rudimentary,” said one of those who participated. “We had cardboard tombstones and a fake coffin and
all kind of things. The plot called for one of the actresses to be pregnant, and she was having her baby in the graveyard. It was a
Rosemary’s Baby
kind of thing. It was a hoot.”
But the father of one of the participants saw it differently. “It was macabre,” he said. “What really got to me was how serious Jens was about it. I hadn’t seen the other kids serious about anything.”
FOR ALL HIS BRILLIANCE THERE WERE THREE THINGS Jens did not have. One was a sense of humor. “You might say his humor was dry,” said a classmate. “Very dry. V-e-r-y dry. It was so dry it practically wasn’t there.” The 1984 school annual, the
Leonid
, quoted Jens in what may have been a stroke of high wit for him: “The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.”
The second thing he did not have was physical strength or athletic ability. When asked to describe him physically, many of his classmates used one word:
soft
. At 5
’
7
"
or 5
’
8
"
, he was not tall, and neither was he trim. One classmate remembers him as being almost pear-shaped. As far as any of his classmates can recall, he never took part in sports outside of PE. One classmate recollects Jens telling him he once took fencing lessons, but that undoubtedly was before his family came to the United States.
The third thing he did not have—a very important thing to an American high school student—was a girlfriend. As far as any of his classmates can remember, Jens was never involved romantically with any of his classmates. One mother recalls he had a date for the senior prom only because another mother felt sorry for him and ordered her daughter to be his companion.