Authors: Robert Kolker
The social worker never forgot the day she met Megan: She stood a few feet from the breakfast table and watched as Megan and Greg got into a fistfight right in front of her over a piece of toast. Megan was nine and Greg was ten, but they were evenly matched. They raged at each other, no holds barred, hitting, pulling hair, screeching.
Jo Moser had come to 16 Avon Place as a parenting coach. She saw how worried Muriel was about the children. Their volatility was rattling her: children who would scream “Fuck you!” to anyone they wanted, even running out on the street and yelling it to the whole neighborhood. Muriel knew she was in over her head. Doug had heart trouble and couldn’t work as many hours driving a truck, and Muriel, now in her fifties, was a softie, hard on Megan and Greg one minute and then giving them anything the next. Moser remembered a lot of chaos in the house—friends, family, and acquaintances filing in and out. She remembered a household in a constant state of anxiety over money, a family living from check to check. When Moser started taking Greg and Megan to the all-you-can-eat buffet at the China Wall, near the Maine Mall in Portland, the kids couldn’t stop eating.
In the first few years, she saw the children two or three times a week, for a few hours each time. Megan resisted until Moser told her that if she didn’t want to meet, she might not get to live with Nana. Megan agreed, and over the course of a decade, Moser came to adore Megan, even if she was hell on wheels, or maybe because of it. Greg mouthed off, ditched school, got into fights, stole money. The social workers saw kids like him all week long. But Megan was one of a kind. She always felt that she ruled the house, and she did. She could talk her grandfather into pretty much anything, and she ran hot and cold on Muriel—from “I don’t care anything about her” to crying about how much she needed her. What Megan wanted most of all was freedom, and Muriel lacked the resolve to contain her. The word Moser wrote in her notebook over and over was
defiance
.
At Reiche Elementary School in Portland, Megan was more hostile and threatening than her brother. Four or five boys would gang up on Greg after school, down at the bottom of the ramp, and when Megan started down the ramp, they took off. She had the police called on her for the first time in first grade. There was a bridge connecting the buildings, thirty feet above the sidewalk, and she climbed over the railing and wouldn’t come back. By second grade, there was, courtesy of the McGeachey Hall Mental Health Center in Portland, a diagnosis: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She lasted at Reiche Elementary until fifth grade, when she was transferred to a school for troubled kids called Prep, where some of the students were afraid of her. She was finally removed from public school when she tried to dunk a kid’s head underwater in the school’s swimming pool. She wasn’t trying to drown him—just trying to get a reaction, to make people laugh. What scared the school was that Megan didn’t seem to realize how dangerous it was.
Even when she was at her most extreme, watching Megan could be exhilarating. “Megan was what I called honestly stupid,” said an old friend, Lashonda Gregory. “I say that in the most loving way, because it was the best thing I loved about her. She was so carefree. It wasn’t that she sought out dangerous stuff. It was more like she was an adventure seeker.” In summertime, Megan and her friends would swim at a hotel pool behind McDonald’s, not far from their house. Megan would do everything the other kids wished they had the nerve to do—dives, cannonballs, flips—then jump out of the water and dare the others to do it, too, until she was running laps around the edge of the pool, imploring the others: “Come on! Just run around with me!” Once, Megan’s bathing suit strap kept sliding, and a man sitting on the edge of the pool made a crack about it: “She might as well be naked!” Megan looked at the man and took off her suit, then jumped in the pool, completely naked. She was twelve.
The vulnerable side of Megan was hard to notice. Jo Moser believed that Megan’s bravado was a façade, but she saw how the girl could seem threatening. The cousins and friends who spent the most time with Megan all knew what she was capable of. What provoked her the most was hearing the word
no
. The refrain of Megan’s teenage years was pretty consistent: “I don’t care, I’m going anyway” or “You can’t make me” or “I’m going to go back to school and beat the shit out of so-and-so.” By the time she reached her teens, many people believed Muriel was simply too frightened to rein her in. Everyone heard the threats: “I’ll kill you in your sleep! I’ll stab you to death!”
“I honestly think they were scared of her,” her cousin Jessica Small said. “If she wanted something, she’d be like, ‘I want this,’ and they’d hand it right to her.” Muriel would hear Megan pitching a fit and try to put her foot put down, but Megan would get really mad and throw something at her, and then Muriel would say, “Megan, I don’t have the money, but take my last five dollars!” What appalled her aunts and cousins the most was how Megan was rewarded for bad behavior. No matter what, she always got an allowance. Megan’s aunt Ella remembers asking Muriel, “Why do you pay her to be bad?”
It wasn’t hard to draw a line from Megan’s recklessness to the pain she might have felt about Lorraine. Moser didn’t think so at first—she thought Muriel was well ensconced in the mother role, and Megan almost never brought up Lorraine when they talked. But after close to ten years, Moser reconsidered. What struck her was how little the girl had changed. Megan was an unfulfilled child, still angry, still wounded, still feeling like she wasn’t getting what she deserved in life. She grew up to become a romantic, looking for love—somebody who accepted her with all her flaws—and her grandparents weren’t enough. Indulging her only made her more insecure, more needy. “In some ways, she had both inferiority and grandiosity going at the same time,” Moser said. “Those were the two elements:
I can do anything I want,
and
I’m a piece of shit.
”
Scarborough, Maine, is about two square miles, with a population of just under twenty thousand people. Along the ocean, east of Route 1, are the million-dollar homes in spots like Prouts Neck, where the Bushes and Oprah and Billy Joel and Paul Newman have spent their summers. To the west is farmland that, over the last few decades, has been developed into lots of McMansions. That’s the allure of Scarborough: The newly rich can build their dream homes in the woods and still be nestled right in between everything they would ever want, a half-hour drive from Portland, the ocean, and Sebago Lake.
At about the time Megan was finishing junior high school, Muriel and Doug moved the family from downtown Portland to Scarborough. Greg didn’t make the move; he went on to a series of group homes and relatives before living on his own. Muriel and Doug had a trailer on the western border of town, as far from the ocean as you can get without leaving Scarborough—a single-wide mobile home, fourteen by seventy feet, with three bedrooms, an open kitchen, a small living room, putty-gray siding, and a little brown deck with room for a couple of chairs. The Crystal Springs trailer park housed only ten trailers on this road, and woods surrounded them on all sides.
Scarborough is a commuter town, a bedroom community. But for Megan, compared to Avon Place, it was the middle of nowhere. She thought most of the people in Scarborough were snobs, and most people in the Crystal Springs trailer park shared that opinion. Almost the second she walked into Scarborough Middle School, Megan was marked as white trash. She started in regular classrooms but soon was sent to special ed. When she started Scarborough High the following year, she was placed in the alternative part of the school for troubled kids, a place the students called the Basement. It was an open campus for troubled kids; Megan could come and go as she wanted. But she had her share of envy: She saw other kids walking around Scarborough High in designer sneakers and backpacks that weren’t in her family’s price range.
The police in Scarborough know all about Crystal Springs. They get domestic calls there a lot, as well as some drug cases: dealers, people with outstanding warrants, people trying to blend in, to fade away. On various occasions, they caught Megan in town, shoplifting from Walmart—cosmetics, usually—and she ended up in the Youth Center, a jail for young offenders. Though the kids were rowdy there, it wasn’t designed to feel like a grown-up jail; more like a group home where you happened to be locked up. Greg called it Kiddie Camp. When Megan was sent there, Muriel’s first reaction was relief, and then leniency kicked in; she went from “Yes, Megan should be there” to “Well, maybe she deserves another chance.”
Her arresting officer, much of the time, was Doug Weed, a married father of five who had grown up in Scarborough. He first met the girl when she was fourteen, in October 2002, when he got two calls from a girl accusing Megan of stalking her. The two had been feuding, as he remembered it, and the matter fizzled in time. But he would see Megan again. For a few years, you couldn’t be on the Scarborough police force without running into Megan. There was the neighbor she tangled with in 2004 who asked for a restraining order. Then there was the time in June 2005 when she got caught carrying drug paraphernalia, most likely a marijuana pipe, which forced her into juvenile rehab. There was the time, the following November, when she dashed out of the rehab and back to Muriel’s place. Muriel called the police to come collect her.
Weed was conservative politically, and before he had kids, he had a tendency to write off as drains on society some of the people in town whom he was supposed to be serving and protecting—to just say,
You’re a waste, you’re a piece of shit, I don’t care.
After becoming a father, he noticed how a lot of his childless colleagues couldn’t stand teenagers. If they saw a group of them hanging out, they’d walk the other way. Officers like Weed were more likely to give the kids a mulligan, thinking,
Okay, you’re sixteen years old. You’re an idiot
. Sometimes, as he did with Megan, Weed went a little further. He saw they didn’t have what his kids had. They didn’t have a father there to keep them in line—to tell them what to do, to help them when they had those questions all kids have. Weed decided that it depended. If kids were receptive to what he was trying to do and how he was trying to help, then he would go out of his way ten thousand times to do anything he could. If kids weren’t receptive—if they weren’t willing to help themselves—then he wouldn’t bother.
Weed found he was one of the few cops who could actually talk to Megan, because he’d given her breaks now and then. He would catch her with cigarettes: “Megan, come on, seriously, you’re sixteen years old. You know you can’t do that. Put them away. Let’s go home.” Or he’d find her out late at night: “Let’s go back to Muriel’s house, Megan.” He’d drop her off himself. He gained her trust. And he liked her. He noticed she was angry a lot. Weed wasn’t sure where that anger came from. He didn’t know who her mother and father were. But when he met Muriel and saw a sixty-year-old woman struggling to control a fifteen-year-old girl, that was all he needed to know.
When Megan was seventeen, she stopped going to school. She continued to live at home with Muriel and work odd jobs. She was picked up more often, usually for shoplifting or alcohol; once, her cousin Desiree said, she blew a 1.25. She and her friend Lashonda Gregory got arrested when they picked up a credit card a customer left behind at Mr. Bagel, where Megan worked briefly, and went shopping for Lashonda’s baby shower.
Despite everything, Officer Weed decided to be optimistic about Megan. He saw someone who didn’t have the support that he’d had as a child, and he felt he could help her. At the very least, letting Megan know she could come to him with any problem would be better than doing what everyone else seemed to do—write a summons and then kick a kid loose. Why not take a chance on people? Otherwise, he figured, he was just a robot who locked people up. She had his phone number and called all the time, leaving long voice mails. He heard from her when she needed to vent, even to say her grandmother was in the hospital. The fact that she reached out led him to believe that Megan knew she needed stability, someone to rely on other than Muriel, someone to whom she felt comfortable talking. Even if his return calls were five minutes—“I got your message, tell your grandmother I’m thinking of her. You doing good? You staying out of trouble?”—Weed felt the conversations calmed Megan down, made her feel a little more secure.
She never brought up boyfriends with him, and he never asked. But Megan did tell him when she found out she was pregnant. The father was a DJ, about thirty-two, with one child already in New Hampshire. Megan met him at a club in Portland—a bathroom hookup, nothing more. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said softly.
Officer Weed told her it was a blessing. He had five children of his own. Children, he told Megan, helped you understand why you were here—and help you start living for someone other than yourself.
With Muriel’s consent, a judge in the youth court that had sent Megan to rehab ordered Megan to stay in St. Andre’s, a home for unwed mothers, for the length of her pregnancy. Megan spent her time there in a panic, watching the state take away other new mothers’ babies as soon as they delivered. When Muriel tried to convince Megan that they wouldn’t take her baby—that every mother’s situation was different—Megan was too angry with Muriel to listen. The staff couldn’t convince her, either. Megan couldn’t get away from the sense that history was repeating itself. She thought about how her own mother had lost her and what it had done to her. She couldn’t let that happen to her child.
When Lorraine heard that Megan was expecting a baby, she tried harder than usual to stay in touch. Since losing custody of Megan and Greg, Lorraine had drifted in and out of the family’s orbit, sometimes falling out of contact for years at a time. She quit drinking for almost a year, then married, then divorced, then started drinking again. When she had three more children—Allie a year after Megan, and twins named Bethany and Stephanie a few years after that—the state took them away from her, too, arguing that her living conditions weren’t acceptable. Lorraine had relinquished those children rather than allow the state to move them all into a state-run family shelter—something she vowed never to do to her kids. That never ceased to appall Megan. “She couldn’t even take care of us,” Megan would say. “How come she had more kids?”