An important DISCLAIMER: Thess stories have references to sexual violence, violence, and strong language throughout. If these issues are upsetting or triggering, please consider skipping!
Part 1: The Witness
One
Judge Charles Brown is called into the court room. He sits behind the large, antique judge’s bench in the Central County Courthouse in Ringport, PA. A preliminary hearing is being held for sexual battery and felony rape charges against the defendant, a professor of English at the State College. The attorneys and defendant take their seat as Judge Brown sits down.
“Ok, lets start the business of State vs. James Wright. We’re now on the record. State: how many witnesses do you intend to call?”, says Judge Brown.
“One, your honor”, says Assistant District Attorney Martha Knapp.
“Ok. You can call your witness.”
Assistant DA Knapp stands and says into the microphone on the prosecution table, “State calls Officer Judith Wycross.”
A short female police officer in uniform stands and walks to a podium with a microphone in front of the judge’s bench.
“Officer Wycross, would you raise your right hand please?”, says Judge Brown. “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, under pain and penalty of perjury?”
Raising her right hand, Officer Wycross says, “I do.”
“Please be seated.” The officer walks to a chair next to the judge’s bench that faces the prosecutor’s table.
From her seat, the Assistant Attorney asks, “Officer Wycross, could you tell me where you are employed?”.
“Ringport Borough Police Department, ma’am.”
“How long have you been employed with the Department?”
“Three and a half years.”
“What are your duties with the Department?”
“Criminal investigation and patrol.”
“Ok. And have you been performing those duties for all three and a half years?”
“No, ma’am. I’ve been detective for two years, patrol for three and a half years at Ringport and patrol for almost two years in Philadelphia.”
“Thank you. I want to now ask you about the events of November 3rd, 2018. Please tell the court how you became involved in this case.”
“Yes, ma’am. I am the victim’s advocate for the Department. I’m often called to the hospital to take a report from a victim. The victim in this case requested an advocate while completing a medical evaluation and evidence collection at Mount Ringport Medical Hospital. The victim provided a report of the incident. She started by stating that the perpetrator was known to her. She named Mr. Wright as the perpetrator. She provided a description and pictures of Mr. Wright.”
“Objection. Speculation that the description was my client.”, says the defense attorney.
“Sustained. Officer Wycross, you can continue.”, says the judge.
“Next the victim recounted the incident. She was invited to a bar by Mr. Wright to discuss a research project. The victim said they drank more than she expected. She said she remembers leaving the bar with Mr. Wright. He offered to drive her back to her house. The victim said she blacked out during the ride to the house. She regained consciousness in her room with Mr. Wright on top of her. Her pants had been removed and Mr. Wright was vaginally penetrating her with his penis.”
“Objection. This is the alleged report by the victim and the officer is stating it in a way that states the details as fact.”, says the defense attorney.
“The witness will be directed to use the term alleged when describing details of the matter in question.”, says the judge. “The witness may continue.”
“Ok.”, says Wycross. “The victim says she told him to get off of her and yelled for help. She said Mr. Wright left the residence quickly. Her roommate was not home at the time, but returned home about an hour later. The victim had called 911 due to the amount of bleeding. The victim said she was barely able to walk, so she waited for EMT to respond and she said EMT determined she should be transported to the hospital for examination.”
“Has the victim provided additional report after her report in the hospital?”, asks Knapp.
“The victim filed for a restraining order against Mr. Wright, which was granted. She presented evidence of emails and text messages to the magistrate that involved inappropriate conversations with Mr. Wright and…”, says Wycross.
“Objection. It’s not verified whether these emails were in fact my client.”, says the defense attorney.
“Overruled. These emails were accepted as evidence for the restraining order. Please continue Ms. Wycross.”, says the judge.
“Other emails involved propositions to go out to dinner on multiple occasions.”, says Wycross.
“Has the evidence collection kit been processed?”, asks the Assist. DA.
“No. There has not been a request to forward the results to the court by the victim, so the evidence kit is in a queue for routine processing.”
“How long would routine processing normally take?”
“Objection. The officer does not work for the evidence lab.”
“Overruled. The witness can answer the question.”
“Typically, multiple months.”, says Wycross.
“Did you interrogate the defendant yourself?”
“Yes ma’am. I started the interrogation as the investigating officer.”
“Did the defendant answer any questions?”
“No ma’am. The defendant immediately invoked his right to remain silent and asked for an attorney. We were instructed by his public defender that he would not be answering any questions.”
“I have no further questions for the witness at this time.”, says Knapp.
“Defense: do you wish to cross-examine?”
“Yes, your honor.”
“Please proceed.”
Seated in front of the microphone on the defense table, Public Defender Ronald Akers asks, “Officer Wycross: does the victim intend to testify for this hearing?”
“Objection. Speculation.”, states Knapp.
“Overruled. The witness can answer.”
“As far as I know, she has not indicated the intention to testify at this time.”, says Wycross.
“Was the victim’s home investigated for evidence?”
“Yes.”
“Was any evidence found?”
“Yes. The victim’s blood was collected at the scene.”
“Was any physical evidence connected to Mr. Wright found at the scene?”
“No. The victim did not want to press charges, therefore, we weren’t able to open up a more thorough forensics investigation immediately after the assault.”
“No further questions, your honor.”
“State? Redirect?”, asks Judge Brown.
“Yes, your honor. Officer Wycross, what evidence was collected in the evidence collection kit at the hospital?”
“The medical team collected semen, vaginal blood, hair from the victim, hair that was not the victim’s…”
“Objection. Speculation.”
“Sustained. The witness will be directed to state the evidence speculatively when required. The witness may continue.”
“…hair that did not appear to be the victim’s hair, blood scraping from the victim’s finger nails, and blood work. Pictures were also taken of injuries on the victim’s body.”
“No further questions, your honor.”
“Any additional witnesses, State?”, asks the judge.
“Not at this time, your honor.”
“Defense? Do you wish to call witnesses?”
“Not at this time, your honor.”
“Ok. This case will be referred to the Honorable Judge Jonathan Franklin for pre-trial disposition. The court’s clerk will reach out to the victim to request a statement or deposition. Pre-trial disposition is set for January 12th, 2019. The court will enter this preliminary hearing into record.” The judge glances over at the court stenographer. “This hearing is adjourned.”
The court stenographer, Chase Atwell, taps his final keystroke on the stenograph. He is staring at the defendant, James Wright. The middle-aged professor turns to his attorney with a smirk on his face. Wright knows the lack of a witness testimony is likely to lead to dismissed charges. As members start to leave the court, Atwell continues to sit, expressionless, staring at the defendant.
Two
Chase Atwell sits in front of his laptop at a wooden breakfast table. His table looks out a large pane of tall, Victorian windows at the back of his farmhouse. He’s typing in a chat window.As expected, the prosecution dropped charges right before the pre-trial hearing for James Wright. The victim failed to present for the pre-trial or to give a deposition. The defense attorney argued with the prosecutor that the evidence collection kit would only provide circumstantial evidence since the victim and the defendant had a “sexual relationship” prior to the night of the incident. There was not enough evidence to recommend probable cause.
As a stenographer at the county courthouse, Chase Atwell is privy to lots of speculation, hearsay, and gossip among his co-workers. They all sit in on various criminal and civil cases, and in a small town there are some familiar members of the community coming and going on various charges. Atwell heard from some friends at work that Professor James Wright was rumored to have various inappropriate relationships with students.
Atwell had developed a network of people with whom to follow up on details of a case, when a case piqued his interest. He learns from a friend at the state university that Atwell had been investigated two times by the university and that he had been placed on disciplinary probation with Human Resources for allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior. The investigation by the Title IX office for the recent incident is pending. He had been placed on administrative leave during the investigation. Atwell’s friend heard that Wright was being asked to resign quietly, which would apparently end the school investigation. The incident wouldn’t appear on his employee record.
Atwell contacts a hacker that he pays from time to time for information he can’t access. The hacker is tasked with harvesting data from Wright’s cell phone and email addresses, a very amateur task for him. Within an hour, the hacker sends a document with texts and emails from the last three months. Atwell sits and reads through the many pages of text messages and emails. He starts by looking at messages in late August, when the academic semester began. The hacker gave him a list of the people connected to phone numbers and email addresses on the list. In early September, the victim had sent an email to Wright about a question on the first quiz. Wright’s response was:
“I’m glad you’ve come to me for help. I can give you the points on that question. Most of the class got it wrong. You’ve been really great in my class. Keep it up!”
It appeared that Wright also had the victim’s cell phone number because he texted her two days after her email. He said:
“You’re doing great in class. I always try to give extra attention to my top students. Come by office hours and we should talk about your academic plans.”
There weren’t emails or text messages between the two for a few weeks after that. But a text message is sent again from Wright to the victim in mid-October.
“Are we going to get that dinner to talk about your research project? 🙂 ”They texted back and forth and the victim was able to persuade him to meet at a dining hall on campus at lunch instead of dinner off campus. And then one week later:
“How about drinks this Friday night to celebrate the end of mid-terms? You’ve worked hard. You deserve it!”
Her response was:
“Mr. Wright: are you asking me on a date? ;-)”
His response:
“Noooooo! I don’t date students! You’re new to college but professors drink with their star students. It’s no big deal.”
It appeared from the next message early Saturday morning that they had gone out. Wright’s next text to the victim was:
“I told you I don’t date students. Why would you wear something so revealing? You were a fucking tease!”
The victim had answered:
“I’m sorry. I didn’t try to dress like it was a date. I wouldn’t try to mess with you, Mr. Wright.”
And the next day, the victim texted again:
“I’m sorry if I upset you. I didn’t mean to.”
Then it appeared they hadn’t messaged each other for over a week. The next message was a bombshell. It indicated they had met up again.
From the victim:
“Did we have sex last night? I only had a few drinks but I don’t remember the rest of the night.”
From Wright:
“What?!? What kind of question is that? You were pretty drunk and you probably fucked one of those guys at your house.”From the victim:
“I remember you being at my house. Why did we go home to my house?”
From Wright:
“You shouldn’t text about these kinds of things. Are you trying to get me in trouble? >:-o”
From Atwell’s research, the restraining order had been filed by the victim after this incident. There were no messages between them before or after the November 3rd rape. It wasn’t clear how Wright had arranged for the victim to meet up with him again. Atwell looks through Wright’s phone log and emails after the rape. Not surprisingly, there were no text or email messages pertaining to the charge (the professor wasn’t a total idiot). Though, the week after the rape, he had received 21 calls from the chair of his academic department, 12 calls from Human Resources, and 4 calls from the Ringport Police Department.
These text messages are enough of a smoking gun for Atwell. Wright was clearly grooming the victim. He was accused by the victim of having unwanted sexual contact with her before the rape. He had the kind of record indicative of a sexual predator on a college campus. Furthermore, Atwell learned that the victim made a serious suicide attempt a few nights ago.
Atwell has what he needed. And he knows where Professor James Wright is that night.
Three
There is a wide walkway in the middle of Ringport University that students call “The Mall”. It is lined with tall oak and elm trees. In the late fall, the Mall is a beautiful display of vivid oranges, deep maroon, and pale yellows.
Professor James Wright leaves his office in the English building at 1:25am. He still has his keys to the building and has been using his office later in the evenings to work on some scholarly papers. He is currently banned from campus, but he had been entering the building with a student or faculty member so he didn’t have to use his ID card to swipe in (which would have left a record with the University). He is putting in the extra work since he will likely be applying to jobs soon.
As he walks away from the building, his dress shoes are clapping with each step on the sidewalk. There is barely any other noises on campus, or people for that matter. He turns onto a side alley between buildings that would take him to a parking lot. With as many lights as there are on campus, this alleyway is one of the few dark areas. As Wright’s eyes adjust to the dark, he starts to make out the outline of a figure at the end of the alleyway. The person has an unnatural shape. His pace slows for a second and then he returns to a full stride. The figure isn’t moving. Is it some sort of statue or stand-up that has been moved into the alleyway? When the figure doesn’t move even as Wright approaches within 25 feet of him/it, Wright slows to a stop.
“Hello?”, says Wright.
He can now make out a person standing about 6 feet tall and wearing heavy armor, like police tactical gear. They’re wearing a gas mask with wide eye frames and a mouth piece that almost looks like diving equipment, though with a large round respirator positioned on the side of the mouth piece. Wright hears the person breathing and sees their shoulders moving up and down with each breath.
“Who are you? Are you university police?”, asks Wright.
“James Wright.”, says the man. “This is a citizen legal action.”
The dark figure raises an aerosol cannister and sprays a mist at Wright’s face. Wright fell to the ground instantly.
Four
James Wright drowsily wakes in a dark, cold building. He smells grass and dirt. As his vision starts to make out his surroundings, he can tell he is looking up, lying on his back, strapped to a table, in some sort of barn or shed. A blinding light hits Wright’s eyes. A bright spotlight had been turned on, aimed at the table Wright is lying on.
“What the fuck is this?!?”, Wright asks. “Who’s there?”
“James Wright, you’ve been deemed guilty of rape and sexual battery by a citizen investigation. Since the legal system won’t be sentencing you, your sentence here will be death. Do you have anything to say before your sentence is carried out?”, says a voice from the dark, seemingly about 10 feet away from the table.
“A fucking citizen investigation? Are you fucking kidding me? What is this? Is this some sort of scare tactic?”, asks Wright.
“This is dead serious. You have one more chance to make a statement and then I’ll carry out your sentence.”
“Wait! Who are you? I deserve to face my accuser.”
“You deserve to die. But, I’ll tell you what’s happening.”
Chase Atwell walks into the spotlight. He had placed a black ski mask over his head where he had worn the gas mask, and he still wears the tactical gear on his body.
“I saw you at your preliminary hearing with a smirk on your face after being accused of raping an 18 year old college student. You were unwilling to confess to police or the court. You not only prey on vulnerable young adults, but, when accused, you chose to be a selfish coward. The criminal justice system isn’t equipped to regularly prosecute sexual violence. Our communities and families – our citizens – are left to provide protection for their own. Tribes kill predators that threaten them.”
Wright spits back, “This is murder. How do you know I did anything? People are falsely accused all the time. I have money if that’s what you want. I can get you tens of thousands of dollars tonight.”
“I’m going to place this cloth bag over your head. When its secured around your neck, I’m going to turn on the gas. It will take a few seconds to render you unconscious. You’ll be dead in a few minutes.”, says Atwell. “Any final words?”
“What if I confess? What if I turn myself in?”, asks Wright. The barn is silent for a few seconds.
“I have pen and paper. You can write a signed affidavit, confessing all crimes in which there was harm against a victim. Bear in mind that I know more about you than you would expect. You have to confess it all. You’ll write the same exact signed statement at the police department later this morning. ”
“Fuck! Ok! I’ll write it.”
Wright sits (with his legs tied to a chair) and writes ten pages of a confession. He confesses to repeatedly raping three female college students and sexual harrassment with two co-workers. He signs the confession and Atwell notarizes the affidavit. He hancuffs Wright’s hands behind his back and places him in the back of a car. Atwell drives for a few miles down a narrow, country route. The sky is bright on the horizon; the sun is about to rise. Atwell turns onto a gravel road off of the country route. He drives for a few mintues until the gravel road dead ends at a series of dumpsters. A Ringport Police Department car is parked at the end of the road. Atwell stops and turns off the engine. He doesn’t immediately get out of the car.
“This is your last chance. You’ll plead guilty and serve your time, or the next time you won’t see me or hear me before I carry out your sentence. Understand?”, says Atwell.
“Ok.”, says Wright with a hoarse voice.
Atwell helps Wright out of the back seat and walks him over to the police cruiser. Officer Judith Wycross stands outside the driver’s door. Atwell removes his handcuffs and Wycross uses hers. He hands her the signed statement.
“James Wright. You have the right to remain silent.”, says Wycross, and then under her breath, “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Five
Judith Wycross sits at Chase Atwell’s kitchen table with a coffee cup in her hands. She is off-duty and in civilian clothes.
“It worked again, I suppose.”, says Wycross. “I’m worried there were times it’s gone the other way that I don’t know about.”
“You know all the cases. I can let you know if it goes the other way. I’m not hiding anything.”
“I’ve been clear from the beginning.”, replies Wycross. “Scare these guys. Get them to confess. Give them a beating for all I care. But your rationale for execution doesn’t stop it from being an immoral act.”
“Are we supposed to act within the law? Is that what we’re doing? Why is it okay to beat a man in this situation – which happens in the legal system all the time -, but not okay for citizens to protect themselves by killing a predator?”
“Stop! You know the fucking argument. We’re supposed to be civilized people. If we allow a father to kill their child’s killer, or a husband to tear their wife’s rapist apart, we’d devolve into chaos. You know the theory behind all of this.”
“You can stop helping me. I’m thankful for all you’ve done.”
“I stop when you don’t return with a suspect in handcuffs. And I’ll arrest you if that happens.”
“It’s going to happen, Judith. One of these animals won’t be a coward. They’ll refuse to confess.”
“Well, speaking of animals, I have a bigger fish to fry. We’ve charged this man”, Wycross puts a picture on the table, “with various drug offenses. He serves three or four months at a time on a guilty plea. The charges haven’t qualified for mandatory minimums. But the bigger issue is that he’s a known sex trafficker in the trailer parks and at the malls. His girls are well trained and he doesn’t deal with them directly. Some of the girls are underage, as young as 13. There are other members of the drug gang, so this one might be more than one case. If it feels right, have your people do their research; see if we can connect him to the trafficking.”
“If there isn’t enough evidence to arrest him, I deal with this my way. Agreed?”
“Let’s discuss that if we get there.”
“Either you agree, or I investigate and handle this myself.”
“Fine.”
Six
Connecting Lawrence Welk, the new suspect, to sex trafficking is the most challenging search Atwell put his sources through. Through police records and court documents, Atwell is able to chart a disorganized drug network. With a large university nearby, the dealers are a shifting, rotating group of college-age students or hometown drop-outs. It’s easy to trace their activity all around town, but the low-level dealers are the only evidence to be found through Atwell’s typical investigation process. The higher-level distributors that are replenishing the dealer’s supply must be arranging a drop off for the lower level dealers to pick up in a hard-to-trace pattern. Even Atwell’s hacking guy isn’t able to determine a pattern or where the drugs are coming from after looking into bank documents, bank activity, spending locations, email and phone records. His hacking guy even works overtime to track all the sources of the phone numbers for a number of dealers. Their text messages all use an indecipherable code and whatever numbers they’re calling for the higher level distributors (if they even used phone calls) must be with a burner cell phone. There are no repeat calls to anyone in the organization.
Atwell has to proceed with more traditional surveillance. He’s eventually able to set up a tracking device on a few of the dealer’s cars. The idea is to monitor the dealers travel around town for a few weeks to catch a few drug pickups. Once it becomes clearer when the dealers need to resupply and the kinds of locations they use to pick-up the delivery, he starts to try to anticipate where a dealer might be driving and see if he can catch any suspicious people leaving the area where the package is picked up. He follows patiently for a few more weeks, but doesn’t notice anything at the scenes of the pickups. Until, two and a half weeks into the surveillance, Atwell finally identifies a suspicious person at a pickup site. The suspected supplier watches the dealer pick up his package and then nods at the dealer and drives off.
Atwell follows the supplier for the rest of the afternoon. He texts the license plate number to his hacker. He sends addresses that the supplier visits that afternoon that are not common stores or shops. He tails the supplier through another drop with a dealer. As he’s tracking and sending information to his hacker, the hacker identifies the supplier, pulls their phone and criminal records, connects to various individuals in the organization that the supplier deals with, including Welk, and creates a list of names for gang members that deal with sex trafficking. It’s easy work from there to identify a group of suppliers that report directly to Welk, as well as a network of sex traffickers that do the same. Lawrence Welk keeps himself pretty well insulated. But Atwell had him. Now it was time for the courts to show if they could bury him.
Seven
Atwell presents all of the evidence to Wycross. The police need to take the contact information and start to make reports of drug deals and sex trafficking that would lead to arrests.
Wycross responds to all the information in front of her when Atwell comes to her office to brief her on his information.
After digesting the information, Wycross says:
“This is great, but just so you know this will take multiple years to build a case on Welk. We have various ways to cut his legs out from under him, but he’ll be in business for a while before we actually make an arrest. I’m telling you this because you need to be patient. Move on to the next issue and let us work this for a while.”
“Shut down the trafficking quickly and I’ll be fine”, says Atwell.
“Listen, you realize these things don’t shut down, right? We’ll eventually get to this organization, but there will always be young girls looking to make money, and the next guy will step up to run them. We chip away at this stuff. We make it harder in a particular area. But this stuff always finds a way to go underground in a place we’re not looking, and there will always be bad men to profit from this.”
“Well, we’ll see how they do when you’re cutting their legs out from under them and I’m cutting whatever I can get my hands on.”
And Atwell actively starts cutting. He confronts two very active traffickers the next weekend at a fraternity party. They spend the rest of the weekend in his barn, give additional information on Welk, and board a bus out of town with a good reason to never return to town (except as State witnesses). Atwell takes a half dozen prostitutes to a treatment center with the promise to pay their bills. He has a conversation with the women’s resource center in town. The women will have housing and support when they’re discharged.
The next weekend, Atwell talks his way into a private casino night at an off-campus apartment. Multiple suppliers and traffickers along with some dealers attend the event. Atwell is cocky and obnoxious the entire night. He also wins a lot of money from the group. In normal circumstances, this is an easy way to be beaten and robbed on the walk home, as well as disinvited to future gatherings. Atwell sees the men starting to give each other significant looks. The noise in the room becomes quieter. There’s a palpable tension in the air. Atwell breaks the silence:
“Hey! Question for you guys: do you guys realize you’re all a bunch of pigs? Is each of you fully aware of how disgusting you are?”
The room was silent. The suppliers, traffickers, and dealers all look at each other with incorrigible expressions. The other men in the room that are not a part of the organization look really confused and uncomfortable. Atwell takes out a mask from under the back of his suit jacket. He stretches the material and wraps the mask around his face. It has a small respirator sown into the mouth area.
“Also, do you guys like my mask?”, asks Atwell.
A trafficker barely has time to respond with, “Someone shoot this mother…….”.
At that moment, Atwell holds two very large cannisters with large, hard-plastic openings at the top. He immediately begins spraying both cans, with a combination of mist and a solid liquid spray filling the room and splattering on each member’s face as Atwell aims from person to person. People immediately drop to the floor or slump over the table where they were playing.
Atwell ties the guilty men up and places them each in a breathable bag. He carts them out of the building in two deep laundry bins. His barn is a site to see that night. He interrogates each man, tells them their fate if they return to the area (other than planned courtroom testimony), and takes each man separately for a train or bus ride out of town over the next two days.
Atwell gives all information about Welk to Wycross. They have enough to make an arrest after four and a half weeks. And Atwell waits for his moment to take him on, as the legal system fails to bring up serious verdicts against Welk. The State even has a dozen or so witnesses to testify against him. He is sentenced to 6 months in prison, with the potential for parole in 45 days. The witnesses receive harsher penalties in their plea deals.
So, Atwell waits forty-five days.
Eight
Atwell has a month and a half to learn anything and everything about Welk’s routines, places of interest, places of legit business, and his residences. He is updated on Welk’s release and tracks him from the time he leaves prison. The second night after his release, Atwell watches Welk from the shadows. Welk hires a driver most nights, but on a particularly unseasonably mild night in late January he decides to only take a driver into town and chooses to walk around town at the end of the night. It appears he himself partied at fraternity houses to round up more dealers and managers of prostitutes when needed.
After a party, Welk walks to a convenience store to pick up cigars and walks toward a hotel on the Ringport University campus. Convenient for Atwell, the hotel has a number of darker walkways around the building. Atwell doesn’t plan for intimidation or confrontation with Welk. He walks up behind him and deploys a series of taser wires that attached to Welk’s back through his shirt. He pulls the trigger of the device to the fullest blast of electricity. Welk is barely weakened by the electric surge. Something is wrong here.
Welk grabs at his back and pulls some of the wires off his shirt and skin. He turns around with a disturbed look on his face. He appeares half-conscious. He might be high on PCP or crack. Welk walks determinedly toward Atwell, who delivers two solid punches to Welk’s rib section. He thinks he hears a slight crack, but Welk grabs his left arm and delivers a strong kick to Atwell’s chest. Atwell is thrown backward and Welk quickly steps forward and lands various hard kicks to Atwell’s side, face, and head while he’s on the ground. Though the armor protects the brunt of the kicks, Atwell feels his neck snapping backward and forward and starts to feel some tenderness in his ribs. He quickly reaches for a jack knife in a sheath strapped around his ankle. He opens the knife with a flick of the wrist in one hand and plunges the blade into the meat of Welk’s left leg.
The injury stops Welk momentarily and he bends over and holds the knife, still inside his leg. Atwell rises, rips the respirator and mask off his face, and delivers a downward blow with both fists onto the back of Welk’s neck. Welk is knocked further forward and falls to his knees. Atwell takes a canister of chloroform from his belt. As he aims to spray toward Welk, Welk quickly tackles him with the crown of his head pounding into Atwell’s mid-torso. The canister flies from Atwell’s hand and he falls onto his back, with the air knocked out of his lungs. Welk jumps on top of Atwell and pins him down. He rips the helmet off Atwell’s head and starts pounding into Atwell’s head and face. Two hits land hard and Atwell knows he could only take a few of these punches before he’s knocked unconscious. He feels for Welk’s upper leg with his left hand and feels the knife handle still sticking out of Welk’s leg. He rips the knife out. He knows he had only a few more seconds to act. He firms his grip around the knife handle and, with a rapid hook, he plunges the knife into Welk’s neck. Just as quickly, he removes the knife and buries it into Welk’s neck again. Blood pours down onto Atwell from the first stab wound. He had hit an artery. Welk grabs for his neck, stunned. He sits backward, still on Atwell. Atwell grabs Welk’s shoulders and throws him off of him. Welk is unable to get up. He has already weakened to a limp, lifeless form. Welk stares off into the distance, still stunned by his pending death. Blood starts to run out of his mouth onto the sidewalk. Atwell can hear a few wet breaths go in and out of Welk’s throat, and then a final, long exhale.
Nine
After clearing the scene (Atwell stages a scene of vandalism, with the grounds covered in damaged trees and dirt followed by a small fire; the body is still in a bag in Atwell’s trunk), Atwell goes to Wycross’ house. He hides in the shadows until Wycross returns home. As she is getting out of her car, he texts her:
“Behind the bushes.”
Wycross walks around to the side of the house and says loudly:
“Ok you fucking creeper. Get out of the shadows.”
Wycross has an annoyed look on her face, an expression that quickly changes to concern when she sees the bruising on Atwell’s eyes and jaw, the faint shading of blood around Atwell’s mouth and neck. She notices how gingerly he was moving toward her.
“What the fuck did you do?”, she asks.
“I had a problem. I confronted Welk and it turned south. He’s dead.”
“You fucking killed him?”
“I ended his life in self-defense.”
“Self-defense has legal guidelines, Chase! Self-defense doesn’t apply when you confront a man in tactical gear with the intent to kidnap them.”
“Fuck the legal guidelines!”
Atwell’s voice is weak; he is only able to draw so much air with his tender ribs. He coughs a few times.
“Does a sex trafficker have legal rights in this world? In your world?”
“We don’t decide those fucking things. I know you think you have these extra-legal citizen rights. But we don’t live in your world or my world.”
Wycross stops and holds her forehead for a few moments, as if a major headache has already onset. She continues:
“I told you what happens if we get to this place. This is it for me. I’m not going to arrest you. Let the fucking pedophile burn in hell. But there’s no more contact between us going forward and you better not fucking leave any traces back to me. If I hear about any of this vigilante shit in the future, I’ll put your ass in jail and open up a fucking task force to convict you.”
“Ok, Judy. You’ve done a good thing here. Thank you.”
Atwell walks gingerly to his car. Later that night, as Atwell is destroying the last of the evidence, he receives a text from Wycross. It read:
“I’ll always know what you did here for the rest of my life. You saved women and children. You put an end to some horrible shit. I’m proud of the work we did. You made them proud, too.”
Ten
After the unintended death of Lawrence Welk (or at least the way he died was unintended), Atwell changes his mode of operating for a while. He isn’t sure if he should proceed with this line of justice or, at the very least, he needs to rethink his methods. Atwell knows he runs the risk of being caught now. But his reason for stopping isn’t entirely self-preservation. After Atwell stabbed Lawrence Walk to death, he experienced a scary shift in his consciousness. As he cleared the scene where Welk died, he felt like he was watching himself act. His body and mind were on auto-pilot the rest of the night and he felt like he was floating above himself watching. He watched the conversation between himself and Wycross. He watched himself dig a deep grave and burn Welk’s body in a pool of diesel fuel. He was numb like that on-and-off for a few weeks after the failed plan. He had nightmares and flashbacks most days. He couldn’t rely on himself to carry out justice in a controlled way if he couldn’t control his mind. There was also one other reason to stop for now. He liked plunging that knife into Welk’s neck. It was the most alive he’d felt his entire life.
Atwell continues his day job at the courthouse, watching various offenders receive watered-down justice in many cases. Atwell also devotes some time to something he’d neglected for too long: a social life. He starts dating a reporter from the Ringport Times. It has been almost a decade since he’s let himself become serious with a partner, and he has stronger feelings for the reporter than expected. Atwell shares some details of his recent night job, an enormous indication of trust. He and the reporter decide to write a series of articles from an anonymous source. While there are plenty of criminals that require justice, there’s also political and social systems that tolerate the sexual violence and predatory behavior. There are college administrators, politicians, and lawyers, to name a few, that brush issues under the rug or ignore repeated reports of violence. Atwell and the reporter name a half dozen people in only a few months through these news stories. Legitimate investigations are underway.
While lying in bed late one night, Janelle, the reporter, says she wants the next story to explain why the anonymous source is involved in this kind of justice.
Atwell responds:
“People like a good backstory, right? They want to know how my life traumas led to this action, right? They want to know what my code is. What if the why is something as simple as events right in front of us every day? What if it’s as simple as this?: there are victims that are too afraid to come forward in a legal system and social system that dismisses their trauma and their horror and that doesn’t protect them. There are victims that die alone, at the hands of the worst of our society. Wild animals we see in plain sight. There are victims that deserve a Witness.”
Part 2: Dissociation
One
Janelle Lindwood, reporter for the Ringport Times, drives down a two-lane country road between two massive, flat farm fields in the late afternoon. She is driving back from an interview in a rural area 15 miles outside Ringport, PA. Following the success of her series of reports about societal failings around sexual violence in Central County, PA, Lindwood has been assigned a permanent crime reporter for the Times. She wrote her series of reports with inside information shared by an anonymous source, a source that is also her boyfriend, Chase Atwell.
Lindwood’s current interview involves a high school student that had accused a local police officer of inappropriate sexual harassment and inappropriate sexual touching. Charges had not yet been filed, but the Police Department stated they were reviewing information. They did not have enough information to place the officer on leave. He was assigned to desk work during the investigation. The victim told Lindwood a disturbing story of grooming by the officer, who had been assigned as the school resource officer. Lindwood intends to report the full details in her next article.
Lindwood drives with no music in the car, with the windows down. She is developing the writing of the interview in her mind as she drives. She is so lost in thought, she is surprised to see a police cruiser with its lights on directly behind her. She puts on her hazard lights and pulls over. She’s unsure how fast she was going.
Lindwood can’t make out the police car’s department in her side mirror. She sees an officer step out of the car. He walks slowly toward her car, with a strange, cocky look on his face. Lindwood is startled when she hears and feels a crash on the back of the car. She can see the officer’s night stick in his right hand in the side mirror. When he arrives at her window,
“Miss, it looks like you have a brake light out on your left side. Did you know the brake light was out?,” asks the officer. He leans down onto the edge of Lindwood’s window. He appears to be an older man in his mid or late 60s.
“No, sir. I didn’t realize my brake light was out. Must have happened during the drive,” says Lindwood. She’s aware that she’s breathing heavily.
“Gonna have to write you a ticket. Someone could get hurt if you’re careless like this.”
“Ok, sir.”
“Where are you headed?”
“Ringport.”
“Alright. Wait here.”
The officer walks back to his cruiser and takes a few minutes to write the ticket. Lindwood texts Chase Atwell:
Pulled over by officer from Shale Grove. He knows about the interview today with the victim. If I call, stay on the phone with me.
The officer walks back to Lindwood’s window.
“Ok. That’s a citation for a malfunctioning brake light. You have two weeks to pay this. And you’ll need to send proof that the taillight is fixed before you drive again. Now, if I were you, I’d fucking think twice about coming back to this area. Do you understand? There’s no business for you to worry about here,” says the officer calmly.
“Ok, sir.”
“You’re free to go. Drive slow with that busted taillight.”
Two
Janelle Lindwood sits at the dining room table at Chase Atwell’s farmhouse next to Atwell and across from Officer Judy Wycross from the Ringport Police Department. Lindwood tells Wycross about the encounter with the Shale Grove police officer in detail.
Wycross responds, “That’s Jason Elmer. He’s a notoriously dirty cop. He harasses female officers at the department and does lazy administrative work. He’s bungled a number of cases with a poor chain of evidence. A few of the bungled cases have helped friends of his. He’s not a cop to worry about too much. He doesn’t have a lot of power in the county and has mostly made enemies across departments.
“His threat isn’t the concern here, though I’m sure it was upsetting for you Ms. Lindwood. The concern is that you’re on their radar. This department 15 miles away knew enough about your news reports. We’re going to have to be careful.”
“We?,” says Atwell.
Wycross had washed her hands of Atwell’s crusade three months ago after Atwell killed a sex trafficker in self-defense.
“You called me here today. I’m not necessarily going to help you anymore, Chase. But I could have refused your invitation, couldn’t I?,” responds Wycross, with an incredulous look on her face. “Beside, this little Dustin Hoffman/Robert Redford routine you have going the last couple months is a movement in the right direction for you, Chase.” Wycross flashes a quick, teasing smile.
“If we’re on their radar, what do we need to watch out for, officer?,” asks Lindwood.
“Judges and prosecutors work closely with the police. We run the risk now of any investigation having our fingerprints on them. These cases are hard enough to prosecute. We don’t need more reasons for a prosecutor to decide not to press charges or for a judge to throw a charge out.
“You have to be more selective with your stories going forward. And we can’t focus on anyone in the justice system unless its huge,” says Wycross.
“But if I don’t go forward with the story from Shale Grove, the police will be empowered to use intimidation,” responds Lindwood.
“Honey, the police will do whatever they want. You’re not going to empower them any more or less unless you have something real good to hold over them.”
Atwell interrupts, “So what’s our play here? We’ve been chipping away without direction for months. The articles started to take down some bigger players, but we’ve gone as far as we can with that. When this started, the idea was to address the gaps in the legal system with violent offenders. We’re not only not doing that anymore, but we’re shooting blanks with the larger system.” Atwell looks at both Wycross and Lindwood. “I need to be done with this for now. Thank you for your help, both of you.”
Atwell swiftly walks out of the room.
Three
Atwell drives his car, a black Dodge Charger, up the long farm driveway. He’s decided to drive east for as long as he needs. A long drive has always helped Atwell calm down, focus, and organize his thoughts. But this drive provided none of these comforts. Atwell’s thoughts are rapidly shifting between anxious thoughts; he feels his heart beating more heavily and rapidly in his chest. He feels trapped in the confinement of his car and left with nothing but his thoughts. Nevertheless, he drives on. He needs to keep moving at least.
Atwell gets lost in painful memories during the drive. He also has flashes of the images of his deadly encounter with Lawrence Welk. He’s not disturbed by his actions; he feels confident in his right to defend himself in that fight. Instead, he’s disturbed by the sense of satisfaction that washes over himself when imagining the knife going into Welk’s neck.
In what feels like no time, Atwell reaches the state line at New Hope, Pennsylvania. He’s taken an unconventional route east. He crosses central New Jersey and drives all the way to the Atlantic Ocean to the Point Pleasant Beach. It’s late October; hardly beach weather. But he decides to walk onto the beach and sit down while the sun is setting. It should be a beautiful scene, but Atwell’s unable to take in any of its beauty. His mind is still racing.
As Atwell watches the waves hit the shore and watches ocean liners far off the coast, he starts to gain the ability to organize his thoughts a little. When did he decide he was going to physically confront violent offenders? Did he have any idea of what the purpose or end game was for this role? He had spent so much time preparing to confront these criminals, but he never stopped and wondered why? It was like an impulse he needed to act on.
And, so, where did that leave him now? He’s burdened now; disempowered. He is wracked with anxiety and confusion. There’s no impulse now; there’s only a painful, frightened need to figure out the next step in this whole process. He’ll be killed by this feeling if he doesn’t sort it out.
Atwell eventually gets up and walks down the beach, toward a small boardwalk with some restaurants and shops. He exits the beach onto the boardwalk and walks into an open-air restaurant looking out onto the beach. The bar is located in the front with restaurant seating in the back. Atwell sits at a high-top table and a waitress asks what he wants to drink. He orders a double shot of tequila on the rocks with a lime. As the waitress walks away, he notices two men that have been talking behind him and hears one man say, “Man! Look at that ass!”
Atwell then hears the first man talk about an encounter with a young woman the night before. He brags about his conquest, saying he wasn’t sure if she was even an adult. He recalls her reluctance to engage in the sexual acts he describes. He peppers the description with words like “bitch”, “twat”, and “cunt”. The other man seems a little less comfortable with the conversation, but laughs along half-heartedly.
Atwell has just started to feel the throbbing pressure in his temples subside with a few long pulls of his drink. However, the conversation behind him is starting to grind at his nerves. He turns casually and, in a low voice, says, “Hey guys. There are families walking in and out. Watch the language. Ok?”
“Fuck off!”, says the first man.
Atwell stairs the man in the eye for a few seconds and then sits back down. He’s giving himself time to stay calm. He decides he won’t say anything unless the man starts up again. The waitress returns to the other men’s table and asks if they need a new drink.
“Yea. I’ll have another gin and tonic. When do you get off work, honey?”
The waitress returns a disarming laugh. “Depends on how busy it is tonight,” she says.
As the waitress walks away, the first man says, “Fuck that cunt.” The other man nervously laughs.
Atwell stands and turns around. He looks the first man in the eye. He says, “She probably heard you. I told you to watch your mouth. You need to apologize to her and then leave.”
The first man stands up. He’s wobbling a little from the amount he drank. “I told you to FUCK OFF?!?” With the words ‘fuck off’, the man pokes Atwell in the chest with each word for aggressive emphasis.
Atwell grabs the man’s wrist and twists his arm in a flash. The man is immediately bent over. The other man gets up and pushes Atwell backward, giving the first man enough space to get out of the arm hold and to take a swing at Atwell. The first man hits Atwell on the shoulder, hard. He seemed to be aiming for Atwell’s face and missed. Atwell is able to quickly grab the first man around the throat and throw him backward onto the high top table. Without thinking, Atwell grabs a steak knife and holds his arm cocked over above the man on the table. His hand is clenched tightly over the knife handle. It takes Atwell a second to register what he’s doing. The second man is starting to pull at his arm, without much effect. Atwell releases the first man’s neck. He quickly walks toward the exit of the restaurant and drops the knife at the exit. He hears the men yelling behind him.
Atwell looks down each direction on the boardwalk. There are hardly any people walking the boardwalk and no police or security officers in view. Atwell walks quickly to a set of stairs off the boardwalk and onto the dark beach. He walks under the boardwalk and moves down the beach out of sight. Atwell’s blood is pumping and his mind is racing through images of a knife plunging into the soft skin of the neck, a person tied down to a table with a bag over their head, a bloody skirt on the floor of a subway car.
Atwell eventually sits in the sand at a pillar under the boardwalk. He isn’t entirely sure where he is and what he’s doing. He looks at his hands in the semi-dark; they’re blurry. Suddenly, the ring of his cell phone brings Atwell back to reality. It takes a few rings for Atwell to find his phone in his pocket. He sees that its Wycross calling him.
“Judy. What is it?”
“There’s a problem, Chase. You need to meet me at your house. Where did you go?”
“I took a drive. I can be there in a little over two hours. Is Janelle okay?”
“Yea. Its me. I fucked up.”
Four
Atwell covers the return trip at dangerous speeds. He’s happy to have something to focus his mind during the ride back. When he arrives at the farm, he drives down his long driveway to the turnaround next to the farmhouse. He can see that Wycross decided to stay in her police cruiser rather than going into the house. When Atwell steps out of his car, Wycross steps out with a stricken look on her face.
“What is it?,” says Atwell.
“Can we go inside?”
Atwell leads Wycross into the house and into the dining room. The lights are on but it doesn’t look like Janelle is home. Atwell tells Wycross to sit down at the table. He returns with two glasses half-full with bourbon and the bottle. He sits across from Wycross and waits for her to talk.
“A young woman was killed tonight. Katie Burns. There’s evidence of rape, torture, and murder by asphyxiation. The attacker’s a real sick son of a bitch. And I know who killed her,” Wycross pauses. She slowly drinks all the bourbon in her glass. She takes the liquor bottle and fills her glass nearly to the top. “Katie Burns filed a protection from abuse order for Patrick Bridgewell. She was granted a temporary order, but there was no evidence to open a hearing for an extended protective order. She begged us to press some sort of evidence, but Bridgewell was very careful. He didn’t leave anything on email, phone, video camera. He didn’t have a record. We talked to him. He was polite, but you could see the deadness behind his eyes. We left her to die.”
Atwell looks at Wycross with concern and strain. “What would the protective order have done? Did he beat her again or scare her again? Did she report anything else?”
“No. It was three days after the protective order expired that he held her captive. It looks like she was held for a few days.”
Atwell took a deep breath and then quickly continued, “You know I did what I did because the system isn’t set up to address these things. What could you have done?”
“We could have scared him. Roughed him up a little. I could have planted evidence.”
“You always held me in check when I was confronting predators. You knew that process would unravel if I didn’t have solid evidence and if I got out of line. You’ve always been a good cop that cares about people, Judy. Its not on you to break the rules in a broken system.”
“I could have encouraged you to keep fighting these monsters. You could have found evidence on him and stopped him.”
Atwell sits for a minute. He’s weighing some thoughts. “Judy, I’m not sure what I could have done recently. My mind hasn’t been straight since I ended Welk’s life. I’m unstable. I wouldn’t have been any use to you.”
Wycross appears present in the room for the first time, looking at Atwell concernedly. She looks like she’s going to address his issue, but her expression changes and she pushes on. “There will be a trial. We should start by making the evidence air tight. It shouldn’t be a problem in this case, but I don’t want to take any chances. Can you get your guy on this?”
“Is Bridgewell in custody?,” asks Atwell.
“Yea. The sherriff’s office found the body this morning in a rural trash area. Once the body was identified, our office went and brought Bridgewell in for questioning. When we searched her house, there was blood in the basement. We easily found hair, prints, and saliva that should be his. There will probably be his blood, too. He was read his rights at the police department.”
“That might make it hard for my guy to find anything. If he has been careful with any records my guy could find, and he’s not still leaving a trail, it might take some extra measures to do some deeper digging,” says Atwell.
“Dig as deep as you can. This one will have to be won in the courts. It will take months, or maybe years to try his case. Even if we need to clean this up after an acquittal, it will be a long time until we get our hands on him.”
Five
As Wycross had indicated, Patrick Bridgewell left a very sparse paper trail. Atwell’s hacker (an anonymous acquaintance for hire that breaks into personal information for Atwell) is only able to make perfunctory connections between Bridgewell and Katie Burns. There are two phone records of calls from Bridgewell to Burns that only lasted 12 seconds and 14 seconds. He finds that Bridgewell made friend requests on various social media sites with both his pages and some pseudonym accounts, though Burns had been very careful with social media and hadn’t friended him. The only evidence to mine is Bridgewell’s online presence itself. The hacker finds enough evidence to launch other charges of internet stalking against Bridgewell, with minors in some cases. That could be used as circumstantial evidence by the State’s attorney during the trial and/or additional charges by the DA’s office. Furthermore, the hacker discovers that Bridgewell is very involved in a white supremacy group. The group poses as a local Lodge. The hacker is also able to identify, by name, five police officers in the area that participate in the supremacist group.
Atwell passes the main information to Wycross, but decides to pursue the white supremacy connection himself. His hacker friend has given him a list of names in the organization and Atwell decides to track the current president of the group, Franklin Werth. Werth is a manager of truck drivers out of Millerstown, PA, and after only a little surveillance by Atwell he also finds Werth sets up his drivers to make drug deals on the road. Werth appears to spend a lot of his time in a strip club next to a trucker stop; it probably serves as an office for his illicit affairs.
Atwell chooses a night to go to the bar and try to engage Werth. When he enters the strip club, he sees Werth sitting with a drink next to another patron (or partner). Atwell sits two seats down from Werth and orders a beer and a shot of whiskey. Werth and the other man seem to be having casual chitchat at first. He also keeps hearing Werth ask when another person (by the name of “Bud”) is going to arrive. Werth looks restless. Atwell decides this is the moment to try to inject himself into their conversation:
“Hey, do you guys know Bud?” Atwell is rolling the dice heavily here.
“Yea,” says Werth in a deep voice. He appears uninterested in engaging further.
Atwell has to take a bigger risk. “Bud got fucked up the other day. Didn’t you hear that?”
“What? I saw him yesterday,” replies Werth.
“Oh…yea…I guess it was last night. We were fucked up.”
“How’d he get fucked up?”
“He told me he had to go at one point in the night. Saw someone he knew. Then, a couple hours later, I heard from some guys that Bud and the guy were yellin’ outside the bar and Bud got stabbed a couple times. He’s in the hospital, I suppose.”
Under his breath, Werth mutters, “Fuck me!” Then to Atwell, “How do you know Bud?”
“My brother’s worked on his bike a few times. Him and my brother met me at a bar one day and Bud has hooked me up with some stuff since then. How do you guys know him?”
Werth looks at the man sitting next to him and then says, “He works for me. Thanks for lettin’ us know.”
“Yea. No problem.”
Now that he’s broken the ice, Atwell needs to either establish an ongoing connection with these guys or get some information from them.
“You guys hear about that Bridgewell guy? I heard he was unlucky to get caught. Right?”
Werth shows annoyance more clearly now. “Yea. I don’t know.” And he immediately turns back to the other man.
Atwell’s worn out his welcome. He gets up from the bar and walks past the two men. “I’ll probably see you men around. If I can help you with anything, let me know. I need to find a new hookup. Know what I mean? Here. The next round is on me.” Atwell places a $20 bill between the men. He doesn’t linger and walks straight out of the bar. He’ll need more time to develop a rapport with Werth, if its going to be possible at all. He sill has a lot of time for the trial to progress.
After leaving the bar, Atwell stands in the dark asking each patron entering the bar if they’re Bud. He has to cover his tracks now. After asking three other men, he asks the fourth patron if they’re Bud and the man says ‘yea’.
“Hey. I’m Brad. You’re supposed to do the thing with me tonight. The guy said not to go into this bar, but let’s hit the bar down the street for a drink and then go.”
“You got this from Werth?,” asks Bud.
“Yep. Frank said we’re going to meet some guys in Milroy. I’ll drive us out there after a drink.”
Atwell and Bud enter a smokey, dark dive-bar down the street. After a few drinks at the bar, Atwell confronts a tough-looking man standing next to Bud.
“Hey! Prick! I saw you eye my pocket! Don’t think about picking my pocket!”
The man turns to him with a confused and incensed look. “What the fuck are you talking about?,” says the man.
Bud gives Atwell a suspicious look, too, like he’s realizing Atwell’s a loose cannon. After a few minutes, Atwell swiftly moves behind Bud and the man, grabs Bud’s hand, which is holding the neck of a beer bottle, and raises and crashes the bottle into the side of the man’s head next to Bud. He then swiftly walks toward the exit. As he’s walking out the door, he quickly peers back and sees two other men and the man hit with the bottle grabbing Bud and starting to beat him.
Six
Four months after the murder of Katie Burns, the case comes to trial. Coincidentally, Atwell is assigned to the trial as the stenographer. The first 8 days of the trial play out as expected. The State builds a damning case. Bridgewell made various efforts to contact Burns, he’s identified by witnesses approaching Burns’ residence multiple times before the day of the murder, his DNA is found on her body, and his DNA is all over her basement where the crime was committed. The planful, calculated manner of the crime easily suggests premeditation. The State also seized Bridgewell’s computer and social media accounts and presents circumstantial evidence of grooming other women and children (courtesy of Atwell’s hacker).
On day seven, the Defense laid out a case for entrapment, saying the police were already aware of his online presence and had used Katie Burns as a target and allowed her to die. They presented evidence of police surveillance of Bridgewell’s account, but they had no evidence of the police working with (or even having contact with) Katie Burns. On day eight, the Defense also presented an argument that the police had planted DNA evidence at the scene of the crime. The Defense called various police officers to the stand, though they all told the same consistent story. The chain of evidence in the police department was impeccable.
It is on day nine of the trial that unexpected occurrences begin. The judge begins the day:
“Please be seated. Please call the jury into the room.” After the jury sits, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re ready to proceed.”
A defense attorney walks from behind the desk and walks to a podium with a microphone. “If it please the court, we call Officer Orden Vell back to the stand.” Vell is the lead detective for the case.
The judge replies, “The court will swear Officer Vell back in.”
After the officer is sworn back in, the defense attorney begins, “Officer Vell, can you restate your roll in the case?”
Vell reponds, “I am the lead investigator.”
“Thank you, officer. Can you walk us through the decision to seize the defendant’s computer?”
“Examination of a suspect’s computer accounts and hard drive are routine in a homicide investigation,” says Vell.
“Did you have reasonable cause to seize the computer?”
The State’s attorney interjects, “Objection. The witness answered the issue behind seizing the defendant’s computer. Further, the defendant was in custody and charged for murder when the computer was seized. Reasonable cause was not needed at the time.”
“Sustained. Move on to your next question counsel,” says the judge.
“Officer, did you receive information that made the seizure of the computer important to your investigation?”
“Objection! We’ve moved past this issue.”
“Overruled,” says the judge. “This is a different question altogether. The witness will answer the question.”
Officer Vell leans forward to the microphone on the witness stand, “We would have seized the computer regardless. But, yes. A confidential informant provided information suggesting the defendant had tried to contact the victim over social media.”
“Thank you, Officer Vell. No further questions, your honor.”
“State?,” says the judge. “Redirect?”
“No, your honor,” says the State’s attorney.
“The witness is excused,” says the judge.
The State’s attorneys exchanged nervous looks with each other. They knew the defense was going to push for any indication of entrapment, but they were secure with the entire investigation. They also knew the defense planned to bring a technical expert to try to make the information from Bridgewell’s computer seem inaccurate. However, this direction the defense attorney was taking was cryptic and unexpected.
“If it please the court, we call Mr. Mark Fond,” announces the defense attorney.
“The court will swear Mr. Fond in,” says the judge.
After the witness is sworn in, the defense begins, “Mr. Fond, can you tell us your profession and years of experience.”
“Yes. I’m a computer technician for the Justice Department. I started with 5 years of experience in the private sector and 6 years of experience in the Justice Department.”
“Can you explain what you do for the State Department, Mr. Fond?,” asks the defense.
“I examine various computer devices that are used in an investigation. I determine whether a device was infiltrated with any software or user that may have changed the information on the device. I certify that the information on the device is admissible as evidence.”
“Thank you. Could you now explain what you found when we gave you access to the defendant’s computer?”
“Yes. I examined the defendant’s device and social media accounts. The defendant installed security software that would identify whether a hostile actor had attempted to infiltrate the device on April 11th, 2017. The software registered a few instances of unremarkable malware between April and October of that year. However, it registered an unauthorized user on November 13th, 2017. This person entered into the defendant’s hardware files and used password software to get into the defendant’s social media accounts.”
“Would you refer to this kind of unauthorized user as a hacker?,” asks the defense.
“Yes. This would be a hacker by definition.”
“Would the software or a technician be able to indicate the identity of the hacker after the fact?”
“Not the name. But an IP address, which is a signature for the device being used by the hacker.”
“Thank you. No further questions.”
The lead attorney for the state now had her head in her hands. After the witness walked out of the court room, the defense attorney asks,
“Your honor, may we approach the bench?”
“The court will ask the jury to leave the room. Bailiff, escort them to their conference room,” says the judge.
After the jury walks out, the judge motions for the defense and state attorneys to approach the bench.
The defense attorney starts, “Your honor, we move for a mistrial. The evidence presented by the state’s attorneys regarding the defendant’s online behavior is inadmissible.”
The judge responds, “Does the state have an argument against mistrial?”
“Your honor, the defense has not established that this so-called hacker provided any information to the investigators. As the lead investigator suggested, the computer was going to be evidence regardless.”
The judge rubs his head. “But the device should have been certified as admissible before submitting to evidence. Does the state disagree that this evidence is no longer admissible?”
“Your honor, we’d like to do our own check on whether the computer has been hacked,” says the state’s attorney.
“Very well. An independent check on the computer as admissible evidence will be conducted by the state. The State will remember that this process will be watched very carefully, so be sure to pick the right technician and to follow the rules thoroughly. We’ll recess until the check is completed. Move quickly State. We’re dismissed.”
“Thank you, your honor.”
“Thank you, your honor.”
Seven
The judge called the court to order three days later. The computer showed the indications of being hacked and the judge declared a mistrial. In a surprise move, the State prosecutors entered into discussion of a plea deal with Bridgewell. They felt the case was high profile and it appeared the police had acted improperly during collection of evidence. They felt Bridgewell had a real chance to be acquitted with a defense of police tampering.
The State minimum plea deal for first degree murder in Pennsylvania is 25 years to life without the possibility for parole for the first 25 years. The defense attorneys, with newly found confidence in their case, are unwilling to listen to a plea deal at first. They believe they could actually win the case. However, after a few rounds of reviewing the evidence against Bridgewell by the State, the defense accept a plea deal of 25 years to life. In Pennsylvania, Bridgewell would have certainly faced the death penalty if the State had held a more conservative, straight-forward retrial.
Wycross is livid. Not only is this monster getting an extremely light punishment for torturing, raping, and killing a young woman, but the police department has been slandered in the process.
Atwell and Wycross meet at his house after learning about the plea deal. They sit mostly silently for the first 15 minutes, with only a few expletives and angry rants shared intermittently. Finally, Wycross takes a deep breath and asks:
“Is your hacker guy going to be in trouble?”
“No. He said he covers his tracks. The IP address the software registered on Bridgewell’s computer isn’t connected to him.”
“We should fucking find someone inside the state prison to kill this pig,” spits Wycross.
“That’s not how this works. He’s in prison for 25 years. There’s nothing we need to do unless he gets parole. On that day, if it happens, we’ll both be standing outside the penitentiary.”
Wycross changes the subject. “There’s some things the police haven’t released to the public. There’s DNA of an unidentified third person in the victim’s basement. The neighbors provided a description of a man and we have a man walking toward the house from down the street on a camera that fits the description. We haven’t ID’d a suspect yet but we’re looking at known associates of Bridgewell. The unidentified third person apparently raped the victim before she was killed.”
Wycross had been looking down at the table, but with this detail she looks up at Atwell. He looks back at her with a blank expression, but she knows him well enough to see the fury in his eyes.
Wycross continues, “He let his friends rape her while he was killing her.”
Atwell sits silently for a few moments. “Can you show me the picture of the man from the video?,” says Atwell.
“Would your guy be able to ID the man?,” asks Wycross.
“Remember the white supremacist group I’ve been looking into?”
Wycross nods.
“I’ve been continuing to look into them, and I’ve made some inroads. They have me doing a few small time tasks for them: delivering drug shipments to truck stops and booking some bets. It’s clear they’re sex trafficking in addition to drug trafficking. I know most of the players in the local group. I might be able to ID the other man.”
Wycross texts the lead investigator, Officer Vell. They’re lucky; he’s at the department. He’s willing to text a picture of the man in the video. Atwell immediately recognizes the man as Marcus Ritch. He had been the man sitting next to Franklin Werth at the strip club when Atwell had first encountered them. Ritch is involved in the sex trafficking aspect of the group and was by far the scummiest guy in a group of scumbags.
Atwell looks intently at Wycross. “I’ll have him in my barn by the end of the night. I’ll text you if I get a confession. Be ready.”
Eight
Marcus Ritch slowly wakes in a dark room. His body is aching from lying on a hard table and he feels his hands and legs are tied down. A light switches on in the far corner of the barn. Marcus can turn his head enough to see a dark figure in the far edges of the light. The figure silently moves toward him. Atwell wears a black ski mask and black clothing, boots and gloves. He turns a light on over the table. Ritch is blinded for a few moments.
“What the fuck are you doing?”, Ritch says. His voice is raspy. He’s a little panicked, but calmer than the other men that have been strapped to this table.
“Marcus Ritch, you’ve been deemed guilty of rape, conspiracy kidnapping, conspiracy torture, and conspiracy murder by a citizen investigation. Since the legal system will not be charging you, these are your charges and your sentence is death. Do you have anything to say before your sentence is carried out?”
Atwell immediately starts placing the burlap bag over Ritch’s head. Atwell starts breathing heavily and sweating under his mask. Ritch starts laughing hysterically. He says,
“You’re going to execute me?” He laughs again from inside the bag. “Man, you don’t fuck around, do you?”
Atwell says, “This bag will fill with gas in a few seconds and it will take less than ten seconds to render you unconscious. You’ll stop breathing after three minutes.” As he starts to fasten a cord around the bottom of the bag and around Ritch’s neck, Atwell’s vision begins to blur. His hands are shaking. He connects the gas line to an attachment on the bag.
“Ok,” Ritch says. “I have a final statement.” He waits a few seconds and doesn’t get a response from Atwell. “Can you take this bag off? I just have one statement?”
Atwell peels the bag back to expose Ritch’s face. Ritch looks into Atwell’s eyes confidently.
“Do you feel it when you kill someone?,” asks Ritch.
Atwell tries to keep a steady stare from behind the ski mask, but he starts flashing to the blank look on Lawrence Welk’s face as Welk realized he was going to die.
“You do? Don’t you?,” says Ritch. “You like it.”
Atwell starts to lose consciousness. He stumbles and puts his hand on the table to hold himself. The room is spinning. Ritch laughs on the table.
Slowly, out of some part of the barn, another figure walks out of the darkness. The figure is also dressed in black from head to toe. The figure takes their mask off. Office Judy Wycross stares down at Marcus Ritch.
“I’d prefer to execute you and your friend. But I’ll settle for you.”
She rips the bag down over his face. She quickly fastens the bag around Ritch’s neck, with some extra force put into it to strangle him a little. The gas line is still connected to the bag and Wycross turns the knob on a gas canister until there is a steady hiss from the canister into the bag. She steadies Chase Atwell and walks him back into the darkness of the barn.
Nine
Judy Wycross and Chase Atwell sit on a bench in a garden a few thousand feet behind Atwell’s farmhouse. It’s a few weeks after the execution of Marcus Ritch. Since that time, Atwell had started therapy. He learned he’d been suffering a Dissociative Disorder – a detachment of consciousness from oneself and the environment due to a trauma response. He created some distance from his vigilante identity, though, he continued to infiltrate the white supremacist group.
Judy Wycross quit the police department. She was applying to work as a victim advocate at a Womens’ Resource Center. In addition to helping victims, she could keep a list of perpetrators to follow through the justice system. She was picking up where Chase left off.
This was the first time Atwell and Wycross had sat down since the execution. They had been busy.
“Are you doing okay after what happened?,” asks Atwell.
“Honestly, I’ve slept better since that night and since I quit the force than I have for years.” Wycross pauses for a few beats. “You told me that tribes will kill a predator without hesitation. I fought that idea with all my rules the first time you told me. But I didn’t feel any hesitation when I left Marcus Ritch for dead and I haven’t felt any guilt. Tribes sleep well when they protect their people from predators.”
“Still,” says Atwell. “I feel like I’ve dragged you into something unhealthy; maybe immoral. We’ve seen how this business has affected me. I don’t want you to get confused and lost in this.”
“I’m fine, Chase. Maybe I’m better built for this.” She turns and flashes a smile at Atwell. “I’ll tell you what was unhealthy for me as a police officer. I get the futility and corruption in the justice system. Institutions of power are always going to sputter along. What I can’t stand is the way we tolerate these things in our community. Normal people just ignoring it. Janelle wrote in her article that victims need a real witness. That can’t be one man or one woman. If you’ve gotten me to act, maybe I can get the next person to act. Everyone has to make their own moral decision. We all witness this horror. I wonder if a day will come when more people won’t tolerate it.”
Part 3: Therapy
Session 1: Therapist Point of View
Dr. Benjamin States turns the corner to the waiting area to find a muscular, middle-aged man sitting on the couch.
“Chase?,” announces Dr. States.
“Yes.”
“Hi, I’m Dr. States and please call me ‘Ben’. Come on upstairs with me.”
Dr. States walks Atwell to the second floor of the house and, at the top of the stairs, goes straight into an open door that leads into his therapy office. The office is comfortable with warm lighting. A well worn leather couch is centered on the back wall, just below a large window. A large, leather chair touches the side wall and is angled toward the couch. On the near end of the side wall, there is a bookshelf filled with books from floor to ceiling. On the other side wall, there is a small desk with papers scattered over the top. States gestures toward the coach for Atwell to take a seat. He registers that Atwell seems like a very tense man.
“I’m good friends with Judy Wycross. I’m sure you spoke with her about starting therapy with me. She was really concerned about you one night last week and she filled me in on a lot of information the next day. Can I take a look at the papers you filled out?”
“Sure.”
After scanning the paperwork, “Why don’t we start with what you want to get out of our therapy work?”
“Um. I’m curious how much Judy told you about our recent work together. I’m hesitant about what we can get into given the ethical or legal implications for you,” starts Atwell.
States says, “Judy and I have talked for years about her sexual assault cases. We – and I gather you – share a pretty aggressive taste for justice in that area. She told me you’ve worked together to imprison some of the offenders, using the threat of death. And she told me some of the offenders were hurt in self-defense situations.
“Now, if you told me you planned to directly hurt or imprison an offender and shared specific details, I’d be bound to warn that individual. As far as past behaviors, I’m not in a law enforcement role. So I don’t need to report past behavior. But it does mean that I need to ask questions about past and possible future behavior and I need you to be honest with me for us to have a helping relationship.”
“Fair enough,” says Atwell. There were a few beats of silence. “So you want me to start with what I want to talk about?”
“Yes.”
“Ok. Um. I’ve been feeling disoriented recently. I had a run-in with an offender that was pretty violent. Since then, I’ll have flashes of memory from the fight. I gather its some sort of post-traumatic anxiety,” says Atwell.
“Can you tell me about the fight?”
“I don’t know. Can I?”
“Yes. Those are the sorts of details you can share without a break in confidentiality,” says States.
“Ok. There was a sex trafficker I’d been investigating. He had just come out of three months of jail and I chose to confront him. He was high on something. Before I could subdue him he placed me in a bad position and I had to defend myself. The method was violent and he died.” Atwell pauses for a few seconds. “I keep seeing the moment I ended his life.”
“How’d you feel after the fight? What do you feel when you have flashbacks?,” asks States.
“I feel shaky and confused. I get stuck in my head and in my thoughts. I can’t stop them from racing and circling the same thoughts.”
“Do you feel any emotional responses? Scared? Angry?”
“I’m always angry. My anger doesn’t intensify when I have these episodes. If anything, I feel annoyed that I can’t control my thoughts.”
States is encouraged that Atwell is comfortable to tell him these details. He figures it must be an extension of his relationship with Wycross that Atwell is able to trust him so much. Also, this last statement hit pay ground for States. He has 23 years of experience as a therapist. He isn’t boastful, but he had good training and knows he’s very good at his work. States doesn’t show his excitement on his face, but on the inside he was doing a little dance of excitement. The last statement set up all kinds of material for therapy. They would explore: why is Chase always angry? Does it serve him in some way as a defense mechanism? If he’s always angry, why would these flashbacks about the fight affect him so much more? And, there were questions to ask about needing to control his thoughts.
Which question to ask next is the challenging and creative part of therapy. States could go into any of these areas, but he tries to sense the most impactful area to continue with. He falls back on the most important rule of therapy (especially in the early stages): connect first.
“You say you’re angry all the time. That has to be a tough way to live,” responds States.
There’s silence for a few seconds. Atwell is looking down at his lap.
“Yea,” says Atwell.
“When you say you try to control your thoughts, tell me more about what you experience there.”
“Well, I’ve always been able to calm my thinking and make clear decisions. But the last couple months, my thinking is scattered and rapid,” says Atwell.
“What thoughts does your mind jump between?,” asks States.
“Some of it is the flashbacks. Confrontations with people bring up images of the guy I stabbed. Some of it is questioning what I’m doing.”
“It sounds like you’ve had a clear plan or mindset on what you’re doing. And suddenly you’re questioning it. What questions play out for you?”
“Killing Welk is the first thing that didn’t go to plan with this whole thing. I missed a critical detail. I didn’t expect that he might be high.”
“So, you’re doubting your own instincts? The stakes are high with this sort of confrontation; life or death. It has to be scary to suddenly be doubting your instincts,” says States.
“Yea. That’s a big part of it. What good am I at delivering justice if I can’t even control the environment?”
“That’s a lot of pressure, holding the weight of delivering justice. Why does that weight have to be on you?”
Once he asked this question, States knew it was too much, too fast. He had to be careful about challenging Chase’s whole belief system too quickly.
“It just does.”
States could discuss this misstep with Atwell. Little ruptures in the therapy relationship usually lead to productive conversations. But they didn’t have enough of a connection yet to do that work. Instead States regrouped.
“Ok. So you’re doubting your ability to anticipate all the variables in these confrontations. You’re scared that your state of mind entering this process is affected. What if you went with that fear? What do you think you’re afraid of?”
“I gave myself permission to confront offenders as long as I have a disciplined set of rules. I need to be able to judge their actions fairly. Ending Welk’s life went against that set of rules. I’m doubting whether I can do this in a stable way.”
“If you didn’t continue in a stable way, what are you afraid that would mean?,” asks States.
“If I’m anointing myself as a protector, I need to operate in a stable way. Otherwise, the whole thing is a mess.”
“So, it sounds like you feel Welk’s death didn’t fall within your rules.”
“Right.” Atwell pauses a few seconds. “I chose a method of execution for the offenders that was painless because it wouldn’t be right for me to impose physical pain on them, no matter how much I would want to. I had a right to defend myself with Welk, but I still created the situation that led to a violent death.”
“You say you would like to physically hurt these offenders if you could act on your own feelings. Maybe its that feeling that you’re trying to control. Chase: what caused you to take this role as a protector?”
“Sorry, doctor. It looks like our time’s up,” says Atwell looking at States with a small smile.
States smiles back. “You stole my line.”
Post-session: Atwell’s Point of View
Atwell drives home from his session on a small stretch of highway between College Junction and Ringport. He feels more comfortable meeting with States than he expected. Since Wycross has talked to him in the past, it feels like States is a third conspirator in their plan. Atwell thinks about how many people talk about how hard the therapy process is. But he found it very easy to share his thoughts. It is a relief to have a private place to discuss such a stressful commitment. Though, Atwell also thought about how there are some questions he wouldn’t be answering in therapy. Dr. States already asked about his past and how he adopted this role. Atwell just wasn’t willing to discuss the past. Sure, therapy stereotypically involved digging up old wounds from the past. But, if anything, Chase wants to gain more control of his feelings, not less.
Session 2: Atwell’s Point of View
As Atwell sat in the waiting area, he wondered why the session needed to start and end right on time. Didn’t doctors usually take you back to their office 20-30 minutes after your appointment time? He could hear States walking down the stairs at exactly 6pm.
“Chase?”
Atwell rose and walked up the stairs with States. When they sat, States asks,
“So, where do we want to start today?”
Atwell wonders if States didn’t remember where they ended their previous meeting. He doesn’t know why he feels a little offended by it.
“Do I start anywhere? Or do you have questions for me?,” asks Atwell.
“Yea, we’ll start wherever would be most important for us to continue.”
This seems strained to Atwell. “Um. Should we talk about controlling my emotions more?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I don’t know what the disoriented feelings are called. Is it just anxiety?”
“Yes. I believe its a form of anxiety related to post-traumatic stress. The out-of-body and disoriented feeling you’ve experienced would be called a Dissociative Episode, which is a possible symptom of post-traumatic stress.”
Atwell thinks about that for a moment.
“So I dissociate from my actions?”
“Sort of. You dissociate from a full state of consciousness in those moments. In more severe cases people can blackout and lose memory in those moments.”
“So, this is a serious problem.”
“Yes, its a serious reaction. I prefer to think of it as a message that is telling you something rather than thinking of it as a problem. But I can see how its a problem related to your functioning.”
“So, what’s the message?”
“That’s what we have to find out.” States shows a small smile.
Atwell stares downward, concentrating. “Well, what we’ve said so far is that my feelings are getting in the way of carrying out fair judgment on the offenders. So the message seems to be saying I should control my feelings better.”
“In my experience, its really hard to control feelings. When they’re present, they just seem to happen. Where do you think you’ve developed the idea, or the pressure, that you need to control these feelings?”
“Well, I want to control them. I thought psychologists are experts at controlling feelings.”
“No. I’d say we’re experts at working with feelings. But I prefer the idea of being free to express feelings rather than controlling them. Do me a favor, say anything that comes to your mind about the idea of controlling your feelings. When was this important? Where did you get the idea of needing to control your feelings? Allow a stream of consciousness. No wrong answers.”
“I guess I don’t have to control mild feelings. But I’ve always thought that intense feelings that stay with you are mentally unhealthy. Aren’t we supposed to avoid negative thoughts and feelings? And think positively?”
“I think those ideas get oversimplified. For example, thinking positively is a part of psychological well-being. But its hard to just think positively during a fit of anxiety, right? Continue with the stream of consciousness.”
“Ok. So, if I didn’t control these flashbacks or feelings of dissociation, what do I do?”
States is silent. Atwell feels uncomfortable in the silence. He continues:
“I…..um……I don’t know. It means I’d be too unstable to do this. How are you supposed to address this sort of thing? The post-traumatic stress and dissociation.”
“Its an experience that changed your thinking and feelings. It may have challenged the way
you see the world, and it definitely leaves an emotional impact. Instead of controlling these thoughts and feelings, we need to work through them.”
“Ok. How do we start?,” asks Atwell.
“What thought or feeling has been most uncomfortable for you?”
“The idea that I can’t do this effectively anymore.”
“Say more about the discomfort of that.”
“Well, I’ve given everything to this. I’m willing to be put in prison or worse for this. I would basically fail if I had to just stop.”
“What about the good you’ve done for people?”
“That’s good but this isn’t about one or two people. This is about changing the way we think about horrible behavior that we allow in our culture.”
States pauses for a second. “Let me try to frame an idea that I’m sitting with. It feels to me like there is the broader aspiration for this plan; the idea of changing the culture. But, it also feels like you’re working through something personal here. Someone doesn’t risk their freedom or life out of nowhere. Where does this come from for you?”
“Wow! Not much of a believer in altruism, are you?”
“Maybe not.” States smiles but shifts his position in his chair.
“I can’t go into that, Dr. States. I know its relevant, but I’ve worked hard on putting certain experiences behind me.”
“I get the sense that you’ve focused your anger from those experiences into your recent actions. I have to say that controlling these past experiences in this way could strengthened the dissociative feelings and post-traumatic stress.”
“I’m sorry. We have to find another way to work on this,” says Atwell. He has brief flashes of memory. A bloodied blouse on a subway train seat.
“Were you afraid you’d have to face this experience again? Is this part of why you’ve been trying to control your feelings?,” asks States.
“Dr. States: I know you have to go into this sort of thing. I know its part of your treatment. But, there are things that can’t be experienced again. My life is enough of a shell of itself as it is. If I played out the feelings related to past experiences more directly, I wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
“We’re at the end of our time for today, but I want you to think this week about the idea that I’d be here for you if you talked about what you experienced. You’d be able to experience it with my support.”
“I appreciate that, doctor. But I won’t be going into that. We’ll have to find another way. Thank you.” Atwell rises and walks out of the office.
Post-Session: State’s
Ben States sits at his desk after his session with Atwell. He’s chewing on the back of a pen, thinking about their impasse. State’s running theory on Atwell’s recent dissociative and post-traumatic stress is connected to these experiences Chase can’t talk about. States believes Chase’s dissociation from his feelings started well before the confrontation with Welk. In a sense, his vigilante identity might be a defensive posture to protect against living with the trauma related to the earlier experience. There would be ways to suppress his current symptoms, but Atwell wouldn’t be changing the core conflict without addressing the trauma.
Session 3: State’s Point of View
At the beginning of their next session, Atwell starts the conversation before they even sit down.
“So. Good doctor. Have you thought of a new direction to attack this from?”
States is a little off balance with Atwell starting the session. He likes to begin meetings from a more open standpoint, to allow his clients to check in with themselves and determine what they want to explore. Direct requests or questions like Atwell’s can stifle the flow of the start of the conversation. Nevertheless, he wants to honor the question.
“There would be a couple ways to manage the symptoms you’re experiencing. We could explore medication to manage the anxiety. We could use some relaxation strategies to reduce the dissociation and lower the anxiety. There may also be some experiences that we could help expose you to in order to increase your comfort coping with the anxiety-provoking moments.”
“You’re not really selling these approaches, doctor,” Atwell says with an amused look on his face.
“Well, I don’t believe it’d address the issue as intensively, but it would help.”
There are a few moments of silence. States had been trained to join a client on their desired goals and approaches to a concern. He feels a little uncomfortable being on a different page than Atwell and doesn’t typically challenge resistance this strongly. He’d have to be careful that he isn’t acting on his own needs here.
States jumps back in. “Lets explore some of the other areas surrounding this difficulty. We talked about how the dissociation has affected your confidence. What areas are you questioning your confidence on?”
“Well, as we were saying last week, I’m worried about my ability to stay steady.”
“What kind of mindset or thought process do you use in the instances where you confront offenders?,” asks States.
“I’m calm and clear. I make sure I’ve collected all the information I need. Sometimes I survey the offender’s common routes. What I say to the offenders is very simple, so that I’m not putting much of myself into the intervention. It also allows my actions to be very clear for the offender. If they choose to give themselves up to law enforcement, it stops. If they accept their sentence, I finish the task.”
“How does that feel, carrying the confrontation out like that?”
“It feels powerful. It feels good in its clarity. There’s a lot of catharsis from carrying out this kind of justice. The prep work also keeps me focused.”
“I know this gets a little tricky to talk about, but let me ask generally if there are any cases you’re working on. I don’t need specifics.”
“I’ve had to take a step back from cases until I get this sorted out.”
“How has it felt to not have that focus and clarity and release?”
“It’s felt messy. My mind wanders if it doesn’t have that focus.”
“What does it wander to?”
“I think about how my girlfriend deserves someone that has more life to live than confronting offenders. I can get pretty moody; I sometimes go to a pretty depressive place. I’ll keep myself busy the rest of the time with work at the courthouse.”
This statement by Atwell could open up a line of conversation about relationships. States would love to learn more about his family and how connected he feels to his girlfriend. But he’s trying to keep the focus on vulnerable feelings.
“What do you make of the depressive feelings? What do you think they’re connected to? And is there a history of depression that goes back into childhood for you?” States is probably a little overeager with his line of questions.
“I’ve had depressive funks since my parents died when I was young. I was 14 when they died.”
“Man, that’s terrible. That must have been overwhelming for you. How did they pass?”
“Car accident. My younger sister and I lived with an aunt and uncle for a while, but I mostly took over raising my sister.”
States thinks for a second that maybe Atwell had opened up the past trauma; his parents’ death. But just as quickly he dismisses the thought. Atwell’s trauma had to be related to his confrontation with offenders in some way.
“You had to mature really fast. Do you still struggle with the loss? Should we spend some time exploring that?,” says States.
“I’ll always feel some grief for my parents. They were good people. But its been so long that it doesn’t affect me much now. I just have some moments where I remember them more and mourn them. I try to keep their memory as a part of my life. I inherited the farm and I’m glad I get to live in the house they built.”
States takes a minute to frame a question in his mind. “Its surprising to me that you’re saying you try to keep their memory present – which I think is really healthy. You’re not afraid to keep that feeling present. However, you’ve also operated under the idea of keeping your feelings under control. What accounts for these competing ideas?”
“Its different. I can handle my parents’ death emotionally. Its very different.”
“Do you still care for your sister? Has she struggled with their death?”
“No, I don’t take care of her anymore.”
States registers some kind of conflict with the sister. Atwell’s tone was short and emotionless answering the question.
“You don’t have contact with her anymore?”
“No.”
States sits with this for a few more seconds. There’s something to explore there, but they’re getting off the path of feelings directly connected with the recent anxiety. They now feel many steps removed from any core conflicts.
“Lets regroup here,” says States. “We were talking about how you experience more depressive moments since your focus is not as clear lately. Are there specific depressive thoughts that play out at that time?”
“I struggle with the idea that I can’t carry out my role any longer. I feel powerless and weak.”
“What if these feelings that you’re going through are a sign of psychological strength? Your mind is telling you to stop and sort things out. You said that you had a clear sense of your role before, but now you have some sort of dissonance about your actions. You said you missed a detail and it could have led to your death and it led to the death of another man. He may have deserved it. But its not the way you intended to carry out your mission. You’re right to take a step back and sort out what you’re doing.”
“I know. It messed me up, stabbing Welk. I hadn’t said this before, but the other problem after I ended Welk’s life was the satisfaction I received from his violent death. These feelings weren’t the clear rules I had set for myself. If this was some sort of personal psychodrama, it wouldn’t be fair or just.”
“But it also seems impossible to not have these feelings. You see victims in the courts and when you research these cases. This has obviously had an impression on you, personally. I imagine this is why they don’t allow leaders of a state or a country to execute people. How can you not have your own feelings in this process?”
Atwell pauses. He’s deep in thought and looking at the floor.
States continues, “We have to stop for now, Chase. I’ll be curious to hear how you reflect on these ideas between our meetings.”
Post Session: States
The next night, Ben States is lying in his downstairs study watching a movie. His wife and kids have taken a weekend trip to see relatives. He is half-watching the movie. When States has a difficult case, it sometimes occupies his mind at free time. Working with Chase Atwell is complicated in every direction. States worries about the ethics of helping a man that is stalking and potentially killing citizens that haven’t been convicted of a crime. Though, States works with a lot of assault victims; victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, rape, horrendous physical abuse. He’s not sure he wouldn’t confront these offenders if he had the balls or if he had nothing to lose.
States thought about that for a moment. Nothing to lose. Did Chase have nothing to lose? He lost his parents. He might be estranged from his sister. He likely doesn’t have many friends, though he does seem to care for his girlfriend from the way he speaks about her. But maybe Chase doesn’t have much to lose.
The movie States is half-watching is a violent action film involving a father that hunts down a group of men that kidnapped his daughter. The main character gives a speech about doing whatever he has to do to protect his family. PROTECTOR. States thinks about Atwell’s chosen role as a protector. FAMILY. It clicks for States like the snap of a finger. The whole room goes silent. States feels like his ears are ringing. Atwell was the caretaker for his sister. States had been holding in the back of his mind, like an unsneezed sneeze, Atwell’s short response when asked about his relationship with his sister.
Something happened to Chase Atwell’s little sister.
Session 4: Atwell’s Point of View
Chase started the session again before they sat down.
“I’ve been thinking about your idea that I should honor these feelings of doubt. I tried to sit with the feelings as much as I could over the past week. I think I’m reaching some clarity. One of my beliefs….”
States interrupts, “Chase, I’m sorry to cut you off. I need to start with something today.”
Atwell is taken aback. He feels like he’s finally cooperating with the therapy process, and now States is cutting him off.
States continues, “I have and will respect your decision to not talk about the trauma you experienced in the past. But its also important to the therapy relationship that we’re on the same page with any important information that I’m holding. I had an insight this past weekend and I spent a lot of time reflecting on whether I should bring it up or not and I decided that it would affect our work if I’m not up front with you.
“I was watching a movie this past weekend and some different pieces of our conversation fit together. I think something happened to your younger sister, Chase. We don’t have to talk about it, but I wanted you to know that it would make a lot of sense of the role you’ve taken on. Let me know how this is sitting with you.”
Atwell’s head bows; his eyes are closed. Then, he looks back up at States. “You can’t fucking let this go, can you?”
Atwell stands up and walks to State’s bookshelf. He stares at the books, not really looking at anything. Staring in the distance. He continues:
“I’ve told you I can’t talk about this. I get that you’re an intuitive man and it was likely you’d put the pieces together. You’re trying to figure out things that I haven’t thought about for a decade. Why couldn’t you just stop yourself when you thought about this?”
States jumps in quickly, “I don’t believe I can control these feelings like you believe you can. I care about whatever you’ve struggled with and I can’t turn my mind off to those curiosities. I don’t choose to think about it; it just happens.”
“That’s a convenient excuse.” Atwell starts to raise his voice. “You said you wrestled with whether to tell me and you decided to. That doesn’t sound like an automatic feeling.”
“You’re right. But after I made this connection, I couldn’t take it back. I had to decide whether I could keep this from you, which immediately felt like it would be a violation of trust.”
“I asked you to let me keep these things buried!” Atwell is yelling at this point.
“Tell me about the anger that’s coming out, Chase. Where does this anger come from?”
“I’m angry with you! You knew I couldn’t handle these feelings!”
“I do think you can handle these feelings!” States is matching Atwell’s volume, though his tone doesn’t sound angry.
“You’re a fool! Who the fuck do you think you are?!? How do you call yourself a therapist?”
Atwell walks out of the room and slams the door. He runs down the stairs and out the front door. He starts to walk quickly down the sidewalk, but he stops and yells, anger pouring out of him. He punches a road sign. He sees a narrow ally between houses and walks down the ally. He sits in the grass on one side. Atwell is breathing heavily. He wraps his arms around his knees. He’s muttering under his breath and hyperventilating.
A few moments later, States has found Atwell sitting in the ally and approaches him.
“Chase, you’re okay. I’m going to sit here with you. I know you’re mad at me but you have to let me sit with you in this anger. You can handle it. Chase, look at me. You can handle it.”
Atwell had turned to States when asked. He’s so scared and overwhelmed, that he’s willing to take in the therapist’s support. He takes a few intentional deep breaths and his breathing starts to slow. A bloody blouse flashes in his mind.
“Fucking shit. Fucking shit. I can’t. I can’t,” Atwell mutters.
“You can, Chase. You’ve carried this with you for years and years. You’ve already proven you can handle it. The worst is past you. Not only can you handle this, but you can make it easier on yourself.”
Atwell looks at his bleeding hand, from punching the sign. He watches the blood trickle down his finger from his knuckle. He watches small drops fall to the road below his feet. For some reason, this calms him. Blood pouring out of Welk’s neck. He tries to stay completely present with the blood running from his hand. After a few minutes, he remembers he’s sitting next to States. He looks over at him.
“I’m okay. I’ll see you next week. Okay?”
“Okay. Do you want to meet sooner?”
“No. I’ll be there next week. I need time. I’ll see you next week.”
Session 5: States Point of View
States is happy to see Chase came for their next meeting. He wasn’t sure what to expect over the week, whether he might hear from Chase earlier than their scheduled time or whether he’d never hear from Atwell again. They’re both quiet walking up the stairs and into the office.
When Atwell sits down, he takes a deep breath and starts the session. “I’ve been thinking about this over and over this week, so I guess it won’t hurt to tell you the full story.”
States doesn’t say anything to give him room to continue.
“My sister was my biggest fan. I took care of her a lot growing up; my parents were busy people. And, as I said before, I took over full parenting when I was 14. My sister had a mild form of cerebral palsy. She was very confident about her differences. She didn’t let people pity her and she was very independent. There would be a few episodes where she was wheelchair bound and would let me or some other family members take care of her.
“My sister was so independent that she wanted to work in New York City after graduating college. I tried to advise against the move, but she was determined. She could request an aid from the county if she needed one, but she also wanted to prove she could take care of herself and she was excited about a publishing internship in the big city.
“One of the things you cope with when you have a condition like cerebral palsy is that certain kinds of people will gravitate toward you and want to help. Its not always a bad thing, but it can be overbearing at times or infantilizing. Celia – her name was Cecelia and I called her Celia – had a male friend at her internship that always wanted to help her. She said she enjoyed having the connection so she’d let him ride home with her and help her into her apartment. At first they seemed like good friends.
“As they got closer, she said he started to ask her to date him and she said he became pretty intense about it. He became controlling of her time and seemed obsessed. She raised these issues when we would talk and I was dismissing at first. I said something like ‘guys are taught to be persistent when they like someone’. I also felt that Celia was closed off to the idea of being able to have a romantic relationship.
“Celia continued to be friends with him because she didn’t have other close friends in the city and she worked closely with the guy at work. She didn’t want to impact her professional reputation. One night, about five months into her internship, she called me crying. The guy had started touching her inappropriately. Celia confronted him right away but the guy pulled all sorts of power moves, saying he’d ruin her reputation at work. I talked her through the next steps: talking to HR at work and reporting any future behavior to the police. We also practiced what she’d say to this guy to set a new boundary, that he wasn’t allowed to talk to her or be in her company outside incidental contact at work. She was really strong. She held all the boundaries and shared everything directly at work.
“A couple weeks later he was waiting at her apartment building for her. Someone had let him in the front door and he was waiting at her apartment door. It was late. No one was around. She started to call the police and he attacked her, dragged her into her apartment, and raped her.”
States is reeling with reactions, but he had to sit back and let Chase get through the story. Chase is telling the story in a matter-of-fact way. The emotion of the event isn’t present yet.
“I drove to New York that night. The police had already been to Celia’s apartment when I arrived. She didn’t need to go to the hospital. She came home with me that night and stayed for a few weeks while we sorted out the D.A.’s timeline. The guy was arrested and charged the night of the rape. His lawyer leaned on the fact that he’d never been charged with a violent crime. They submitted a residential treatment program for sex offenders that the defendant had completed. The prosecution was frankly lukewarm. They treated it like all the other rape cases that passed their desk. Celia made a statement during the disposition hearing. The prosecution accepted a plea deal for an 18 month suspended sentence with probation and the usual sex offender hoops to jump through.
“Celia was so brave. She went back to her internship after 6 weeks. We talked every night. She kept telling me it was painful but she was doing fine. A few weeks later, I received a call from the New York Transit Authority. They cut to the chase and directly told me Celia had died on a subway train. The medical examiner said she had been making cuts on her leg. There were a lot of professionals involved in the emergency response at the train and at the hospital. Some of them told me she was probably cutting on the train since it was a traumatic trigger for her. It was a way of coping. The guy had first touched her inappropriately on the train. It looked like the train jerked her hand when she was cutting and she cut down to an artery.
“I thought about killing the guy with my bare hands. I didn’t really care that I would be the clear suspect. I stalked him for a while. But my friend at the courthouse, Judy Wycross, talked me out of it. She told me I should get actively involved in the system. By the time I made up my mind about what to do, the guy had violated his parole and was sentenced to 6 years. Justice had been served for some time, but not before he hurt another victim. Obviously, I focused my energy on the next offender I could confront.”
States waited a second to make sure Atwell had finished his retelling. “My God, Chase! That’s horrendous. I can’t even begin to imagine.
“You were able to retell that without much emotion. Has any of that emotion come back this week?”
“In a sort of scattered and blunted way. I feel little bits of the sting of my sister going through that and not being here. I go through some of the blind hatred. But its all piled under years of avoidance and the hopelessness of my role with all of this.”
States is overwhelmed with feelings he could explore and directions they could go. But, in these moments, he knows the important feelings need to come from the client, not the therapist. He falls back on a general question.
“When you were retelling it today, what stood out most to you?”
“I’ve been doing all of this work making myself feel better by doing something. And I’m committed to the victims that don’t have a voice. But I couldn’t do anything for her after she was dead. I should have taken her concerns about the guy more seriously. I shouldn’t have let her go back to New York. My parents would have known better. I fucking failed her. I can specifically remember all the times I second guessed whether she should go back. I was too weak to act.”
“So from there you committed to action going forward. Your will to act took you to dangerous places and past the point of your own value system,” says States.
“I guess that’s a problem for me, but the biggest problem is that I can’t even fully honor her memory. I’ve shut down. I can’t do it anymore. It will never be right for me. All these grief counselors talked about accepting reality. I won’t do that. I’ll never accept that one of the lowest members of our society could take away someone so beautiful, in every way. I can’t live with that.”
There’s so much despair behind these statements by Atwell, that States is having difficulty staying with the emotional center. He wants to help and soothe Chase in so many ways. He wants to encourage Chase that he can continue to act and honor her memory in other ways. He wants to walk him through the ways that it isn’t his fault. But there is so much emotional material here that movement forward on these ideas would take time. States fell back on sitting with all of this with Chase.
“She sounds like such a beautiful person, Chase. She sounds like she was a special light in this world. Its so unfair. I can’t understand why we watch these things happen in the world and we just go on with our business, as if it weren’t a travesty.”
“Yea. Thanks, Ben.”
Atwell stands up and shakes State’s hand. “I’ll see you next week,” Atwell says. He looks exhausted. They are ending five minutes early, but its clear Atwell had said all he could for that day.
Session 6: State’s Point of View
After Atwell and States sit down, they start with small talk for the first time in their therapy work. The mood is considerably lighter starting this meeting. After the small talk, States says:
“So, where do we continue with our therapy work today?”
“I’ve been thinking of Celia all week. Its painful, but you were right. I can handle it.”
Atwell pauses for a few beats and then continues.
“I think I needed the anger from her death to stay hot. I needed it to clarify my role confronting offenders. I’m going to continue my role, but I’m going to take time sorting out what I’m doing. I need to talk to our friend, Judy, about her role, too. I dragged her into my mess.”
States responds, “That’s great, Chase. You’re listening to yourself more clearly. As clear as the role may have felt in the past, I think you’ll find you can have a clearer relationship with yourself by being in touch with these feelings. Should we go back through the experience you described last week and process some of the specifics?”
“No. I think I have what I need for now, Dr. States. I think it will be okay to leave that experience as a big emotional mess for right now. I don’t think I need to process through and make it all neat.”
“So, you’re ready to stop therapy for now?,” asks States.
“Yea. I want to leave things open to return when I need to. But I’m clear with my thinking for now.” Atwell pauses for a second. “I want to thank you, Dr. States.”
“You’re welcome, Chase. I should give you the hard sell to continue to process these feelings. We’ve really only begun to process this. But we’ll leave the door open for that in the future. I’m really proud of you for the work you’ve done.”
They rise and shake hands. Atwell walks out of the room quietly. States stands there for a few seconds and takes in the ending of their work for now. Then, he sits at his desk and looks at his schedule for his next appointment.
Epilogue
Chase Atwell sits with Judy Wycross on a bench on the property behind his house. He tells Judy about the therapy work. They also process their most recent case, Marcus Ritch. Atwell had dissociated when he was confronting Ritch and Judy ended up finishing the confrontation by executing him.
Chase says, “I’m going to take a step back from specific cases for now. I’m going to continue the undercover work with the white supremacists. But I’m going to wait to make any moves there until I have things sorted out.”
“That’s great, Chase. We’ll sort out the next steps.” Wycross appears to be juggling thoughts in her mind. “Chase, I’m going to the police department today. I’m going to tell them I executed Ritch.”
“What?!?”
“I have my rules about this stuff, too. I was an officer of the law. I need to live up to my consequences within the law.”
“Judy! You’ll go to prison for half your life. It’ll be a massive scandal. It’ll reach national attention.”
“I don’t know what’ll happen. I have friends in the department and the prosecutor’s office that could keep this quieter. But I need to let it play out. And I can keep you out of it completely.”
Atwell sat there shocked. He couldn’t let this happen. He had to save Judy from this. He dragged her into it. There had to be another way…….
Part 4: The Final Chapter
One
Chase Atwell sits stunned on a bench in the backyard garden of his family’s farmhouse. His friend, Detective Judy Wycross, walks away after just revealing to Chase that she is going to turn herself in to police after killing a perpetrator of a heinous rape, torture, and murder.
Chase jumps up from the bench and chases Judy down before she reaches her police cruiser.
“Judy! I won’t talk you out of this forever, but help me finish what we started. I can make more inroads with the white supremacist group and we could bring down an entire sex trafficking operation. Confessing to Ritch’s death can wait. If you need to turn yourself in later, its not going to change anything to wait.”
Wycross stands with her hands on her hips. She has a look of annoyance on her face, but Chase can tell she’s in.
Wycross responds, “I don’t want you going alone on this. That’s the only reason I’ll wait. But don’t think my mind is going to change afterward.”
“I need time to get closer to the leaders. Can you recruit some officers to prepare for some undercover work once we find a chance to take them down?,” says Atwell.
“Yea. We already have officers on the drug taskforce that go undercover at times. I’ll brief them on the investigation along the way.”
“These are people you trust to keep it quiet?”
“Yea.”
Two
Three Months Later
Chase Atwell bounces around in the passenger seat of an old pickup truck. He’s wearing a flannel button-down shirt and designer jeans with new boots and an NRA baseball cap. This outfit is “dressed up” for the group Atwell has infiltrated, a white supremacist group involved in drug and sex trafficking from central Pennsylvania to various surrounding states.
The driver, Randy Lee, is a top-level drug distributor in the group and part of the leadership of the organization. After almost a year posing as a member of this group and increasing responsibility with distribution of drugs on various truck routes and managing some gambling books, Chase is finally being initiated into the leadership of the organization. His initiation is a part of a major event at the leader’s mountain house; a man named Franklin Werth.
“You nervous?,” says Lee, the driver.
“No,” says Atwell. “Nothing’s really changing. It just makes my role official.”
“Well, you’ll see what the initiation is like,” says Lee. “You’re in for some surprises.” Lee flashes a smile at Chase.
Chase thinks to himself that there won’t be any surprises since a lot of the planning for the event was unknowingly coordinated with undercover police officers that would be present at the party tonight.
They pull into the gravel driveway and parking lot in front of the mountain house. The building is inconspicuous on the outside. It looks like a modest, large, wood paneled colonial house. However, on this evening, the house is surrounded by tall flood light stands that brightly illuminate the house and surrounding grounds.
As Atwell exits the truck, he see’s his breath in the cool evening air. When Atwell and Lee enter, the inside is surprisingly quiet. A few of the group leaders have gathered in a small study to the side of the house. A fire is roaring in a large fireplace. The men are all drinking and talking quietly. One leader is on his phone giving instructions, likely for a new drug distribution.
“There he is!,” says Franklin Werth. Werth is a tall older man with a deep voice. “The man of the hour.”
Chase flashes a smile at Werth.
“You boys should get a drink. There’s a bar out back by the bonfire,” says Werth.
As Atwell and Lee walk to the backyard, Atwell has a chance to look around the house and determine points of entry and exit and how the floor plan lays out. He pulls his phone out and texts Wycross the details of the house.
Over the next hour, the remaining leaders of the group arrive for the meeting and Chase’s initiation ceremony. They all gather and sit in the small study. Large, comfortable club chairs were set up in the room for each man. A few logistics are addressed during the meeting. In his year infiltrating the group, Atwell has learned that these are educated men running a pretty sophisticated network of drug suppliers, dealers, and users. Their sex trafficking, on the other hand, is less organized and is run by a few loose cannons in the organization.
The final item for the meeting is Atwell’s initiation. He’s hoping this is a fairly quick process. One of the leaders leaves the room and comes back with a kneeling cushion that he places in front of the fire place. Werth steps in front of the kneeling cushion with his back to the fire and begins the ceremony,
“Chase, come kneel up front.”
Atwell rises from his chair and kneels in front of Werth.
“We’re all Christian men here,” says Werth. “Chase, you kneel before God and me, prepared to commit yourself to an important mission. This group fulfills many important functions in our festering society. The demonic agents of perversion and progressivism have made this a more dangerous world. Our kids would be taught this filth in school. Our wives would be told they’re safest in a world that denies their God-given biological rights. The only safeguard in our country is a small group of pure men ready to violently defend God’s natural laws.”
Atwell takes in the hypocrisy of a message that evokes the name of God while espousing hatred toward 80% of the world, though his expression never changes during the conversation.
“Chase Atwell,” Werth continues. “To commit to our mission, you must commit your life to God’s violent providence. If you fail this group, you promise to give your life and the lives of your loved one’s, for a sin against God is an offense punishable only by the death of yourself and your family line.”
Werth takes out a photo of Atwell’s girlfriend, Janelle. Its a picture of her sitting in the backyard of Chase’s farmhouse. Atwell doesn’t change his expression, but internally he’s reeling. How much does the leadership of the group know about his personal background? How long have they been surveiling his life? If they saw him one time with Judy Wycross, he was in mortal danger.
“Do you give your life to our mission?,” asks Werth.
“I do,” Atwell says quickly, without hesitation.
“To seal this vow, you will cut your own hand and place your pure, white blood onto our Bible.”
Atwell is pretty sure there is Native American blood in his family ancestry. He privately enjoys the contradiction. He’s handed a knife by Werth. Chase makes a shallow cut across his left hand. He shows no reaction to the pain. Werth then takes a large Bible from the mantle of the fireplace. He opens the book to the middle, where a smattering of bloody handprints have dried into a large black-red blot, like a vivid image on the Rorschach inkblot test. Chase places his hand on the dried blood.
“Welcome to the family,” says Werth. The other men clap and roar with approbation. Werth shakes Atwell’s uncut hand.
The men in the room all approach Atwell to shake his hand. They share salutations like “you’re one of us!” and “welcome to the family!”. Randy Lee yells out,
“Let’s start the party! When do the girls arrive?”
Three
One of the leaders says the women should be arriving in the next 20 minutes. Of course, Atwell is the only man in the room aware that a team of undercover police officers are riding on that bus. He’s proud of the major crackdown that’s about to occur. The plan is very simple and undramatic. The undercover officers (at this point Ringport police has liaised with nearby sheriff’s and police offices) will arrive and socialize with the leadership posing as high-end escorts. If leaders proceed to another room, presumably to initiate sex, they will be quietly arrested. When a smaller group of leaders are left downstairs, a team of officers will enter with a no-knock warrant and arrest the remaining men. All undercover officers are wearing hidden microphones and cameras, so a command unit of officers will be monitoring the entire operation.
Leaders of the group come and go from the study, grabbing drinks and food or socializing in the backyard. A team of catering staff walk throughout the house with food, wine, and champagne. In a matter of minutes, a large bus pulls up to the front of the house and a group of women dressed in expensive evening gowns walk into the front hallway. Interestingly, the leaders in charge of organizing the party asked for women of all different races and ethnicities.
As the women walk into the room, Atwell recognizes most of the undercover officers but also notices that Judy Wycross is among the group. He quickly flashes a significant look at her. There’s no reason for someone of her rank to participate as an undercover escort. But he also knows that this is personal for her. Atwell’s infiltration of the group began after the brutal torture, rape and murder of a protectee of Wycross’. The victim had filed a protective order against her boyfriend, who was a member of the white supremacist group. After the order expired, the boyfriend kidnapped and killed her. This operation would be a fulfillment of delayed justice for Wycross’ protectee.
The evening progresses as planned. After a few hours, two leaders took undercover officers to another room and had not returned. Most impressively, the officers had been able to arrest the leaders without any commotion. Midway through the night, the partying in the backyard reaches a raucous volume. Chase walked back with Wycross, who was posing as his date for the evening. When they arrive outside, it appeared that a few leaders had encouraged the undercover officers to remove their clothes and make out with each other. Many of the men are heavily intoxicated. Chase walks up to a few men and encourages them to take the women to a private room to “enjoy themselves”. Three men react like this is a brilliant idea and take the naked women by hand back into the house.
There are five leaders remaining in the backyard with their accompanying “dates”. The backyard is a less manageable environment for the command team to arrest the remaining leaders. Chase has to find a way to bring the men back into the house.
“Franklin,” says Atwell. “Can we show my date the Bible from the initiation?”
Werth looks at Randy Lee, as if he’s deciding if this break of protocol would be okay in this instance. “Oh, sure,” says Werth in a long drawl.
The remaining men walk to the front study and Werth takes the Bible down from the fireplace mantel. Werth opens the book to the bloody hand prints.
“Your friend here committed himself to God’s great cause tonight,” says Werth to Wycross. “He’s committed himself to the purity of America against colored animals like you.”
Something is wrong. Werth is being too personal with Wycross. He also put some emphasis on the word “friend”. Werth puts the Bible down and walks behind Wycross and puts his hands around her breasts from behind.
“Does that blood turn you on, honey?,” Werth asks Wycross. Quickly, Werth pulls a knife from his back pocket and holds it firm against the front of Wycross’ neck. The other leaders in the room back up and look at Werth with puzzled expressions.
“Werth!,” says Atwell. “There’s a team of police officers outside the house. You’re going to be arrested for major crimes, but murder is not one of them. If you hurt this woman, things change for you.”
“You mean Detective Judy Wycross?,” says Werth. He stares at Atwell. “Do you want to know when I knew you were a fake?”
CRACK! Atwell’s ears are immediately ringing. He’s unsure if his vision has gone blurry or if there is smoke in the room. As the smoke clears, he can see that Wycross moved out of Werth’s grasp and is pointing a small pistol at him. Werth has fallen to the ground with a large blood stain above his groin. Werth has an expression of shock on his face. Atwell is still making sense of the scene himself. Out of the corner of his eye, Atwell can see one of the leaders move toward Wycross. BANG! Atwell immediately registers that Randy Lee shot Wycross in the back of the head.
Atwell’s tactical training immediately kicks in. Before he can think, he’s darting toward Lee’s outstretched arm and slams the gun against the wall, jarring it out of Lee’s hand. While the gun hits the ground with a heavy thud, Atwell sees the other leader take a knife from his belt line. Atwell grabs Lee by his shirt collar and throws him to the ground. He quickly picks up the gun and aims at the other leader. The leader immediately drops the knife.
The officers from upstairs run into the room with their guns drawn. The front door bursts open with another team of officers in tactical gear. Chase has aimed the gun that killed Judy Wycross at Franklin Werth, lying on the ground.
“GUN DOWN!,” yells one officer. “DOWN! GUN DOWN!,” yell other officers.
As he stares down the gun barrel at Werth, Atwell feels faint. His mind feels fuzzy. He’ knows that he’s starting to dissociate. A flash of the knife landing in Lawrence Welk’s neck. A flash of a bloody blouse on a subway bench.
BANG!
Four
Chase Atwell lies in a hospital bed with his right wrist cuffed to the bed rail. He has a gunshot injury to the upper left arm. A sheriff’s officer is posted at the door.
Before Atwell had acted, an officer shot him in the arm at the mountain house. He learned when he woke up at the hospital that Judy Wycross had died immediately when she was shot in the back of the head and Franklin Werth died in surgery. Wycross shot his femoral artery as she escaped his hold.
Wycross and Atwell’s operation led to the arrest of the 9 leaders of the organization and the death of the boss. Atwell is being charged for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Its likely he’ll receive reduced charges due to the circumstances.
Janelle Lyndwood walks into the hospital room. Its the first time she and Chase have had a chance to talk in private.
“How are you feeling?,” asks Janelle.
“Okay. They have me on a lot of drugs.” He pauses a few seconds. “In fact, I can’t get my mind clear. I keep thinking of Judy, but I can’t keep my thoughts straight. I keep remembering again and again.”
“The undercover officers gave me the rundown of what happened,” says Lindwood. “I don’t blame her, but she became reckless with this and Ritch. She made her choices, Chase.”
Atwell stairs at the ceiling and shakes his head. He rubs his eyes for a few long seconds.
“This is getting national news attention,” says Lindwood. “You know what that means, right?”
“I don’t know. What does it mean?”
“This is the moment you’ve been working for,” says Lindwood. “Up til now, you made an impact on solo predators, local crime and now an interstate criminal organization. But the national news allows us to turn your mission into a story on a much wider scale. This turns the whole operation into something bigger. I’ve already started writing an online article. After an introduction, the next section tells the story of your sister.”
Chase looks at Janelle with an expression that’s hard to interpret. There’s pain and gratitude in it, or at least that’s what Lindwood interprets.
“You have to tell everything,” says Atwell.
Lindwood knew this would be an issue. “What are you going to do with the legal issues?”
“I’ll avail myself of the same broken legal system that I’ve been trying to help. I won’t have to say anything and it won’t be easy to find evidence. But, if I go to prison, I go to prison. I could probably do some good in there, too,” says Atwell with a smirk.
Atwell continues, “Somewhere in the title, you should use the phrase ‘Witness’. That’s what this was about. Inspiring people to bear witness to these travesties. And the main focus should be on Judy, not me.”
Epilogue
“Bearing Witness: The Hunting of Sexual Predators by Judy Wycross and Chase Atwell” by Janelle Lindwood
August 13, 2019
How early before written word did human beings oppose bodily harm – including sexual assault and rape? The earliest moral rules wouldn’t need to be agreed upon or written down. Yet, roughly 200,000 years since the first humans, our current society blurs and obfuscates the rules and enforcement of the absolute violation of rape and sexual assault. And we all bear responsibility for protecting our fellow woman or man from these crimes. If a majority of people bore witness and spoke out/acted out against these crimes (far beyond the limited, heroic groups that exist), a foundational area of human suffering and evil would be lessened and addressed more extensively.
Detective Judy Wycross and private citizen Chase Atwell saw this suffering and evil in their community and they acted. When the justice system failed to offer enough protection in their community, they filled some of the gaps. This is their heroic stories. This is an example for us all.
Dr. Ryan's Writings 