The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  Every news program in Lima aired a story on Ruth Thalía, but ATV had the family. By the sixth day, Leoncio recalled, “ATV was here all the time. They even slept here. They wouldn’t leave us alone.”

  Leoncio and Vilma got up each morning to ask for help. This task—knocking on doors, hoping someone might listen—constituted the entirety of their lives in those days. They traveled in a car provided by ATV, filmed by ATV cameramen. They went to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, to police headquarters, to the hospitals, to the morgue. They knocked on the door of the presidential palace in central Lima and managed to get an audience with an adviser to the first lady. A phone call from the palace got some movement out of the police. Things were happening, and to be fair, for people like Leoncio and Vilma, much of this would’ve been impossible without the help of a station like ATV. Leoncio was uneasy with the situation, but he knew there was no other way.

  Leoncio didn’t eat; Vilma didn’t sleep. They received all kinds of terrifying phone calls, including extortion attempts traced to police officers in towns outside Lima, claiming they had a lead but needed money to investigate. One day, Leoncio recounted, “a mototaxi driver came and said, ‘You know what? I found your daughter.’” According to this stranger, Ruth Thalía was being held in a hotel not far from their home. He would take Leoncio there, for the right price. They negotiated and agreed on 2,000 soles, half upfront. Leoncio felt he had no choice, but he was afraid. He climbed onto the man’s mototaxi, and they headed toward an area called Carapongo. When they arrived at the hotel, the man told him to wait, and Leoncio was left alone. “I called Channel 9. I just let it ring a couple of times. In case I disappeared, too, my last call would be from there.”

  A few minutes later, the mototaxi driver brought down a young woman, but it wasn’t Ruth Thalía, just another girl, a runaway, who looked like her. Leoncio was crushed. “Go home,” he told the girl, and she started crying. “Those were desperate days,” he later recalled. “I felt like I was floating. There were moments where I couldn’t tell if I was asleep or awake.”

  By then it had been a week since Ruth Thalía had disappeared. The police and, crucially, the media knew that Bryan had been the last one to speak to her. On the morning of September 22, he was interviewed by Alejandra Puente, a reporter from ATV. When asked if he’d seen Ruth Thalía on the night in question, Bryan said he couldn’t remember. He’d been drunk.

  The reporter pushed him: “If you were me, would you believe yourself?”

  “Like I said, I don’t remember that day.”

  “But your conscience is clean?”

  “Yes,” Bryan said.

  That same afternoon, eleven days after Ruth Thalía’s disappearance, Leoncio got a call from someone at Channel 9. The police, he was told, had found the body of a young woman, buried in a well and covered by rocks and concrete, on a piece of land on the outskirts of Lima. The land belonged to Redy Leiva, Bryan’s uncle, and they suspected it was Ruth Thalía.

  Leoncio and Eva went to the scene and found themselves confronted with cameras and microphones and photographers from every media outlet in Lima. “The newspapers were desperate, the radio was desperate, and I was desperate,” Leoncio said. “It was all desperation.” For more than an hour, the police wouldn’t let Leoncio and Eva on the property, so they waited, surrounded by reporters. When it was confirmed that the woman at the bottom of the well was Ruth Thalía, the cameras filmed Leoncio and Eva sobbing, bent over, embracing.

  Eventually Bryan was brought to the scene, and Leoncio pressed the police to let him see the young man. He was told he had to control himself, and Leoncio assured the officer he would, but he grabbed a rock and put it in his pocket. “And then Bryan started talking about my daughter . . . I just reacted.” Leoncio took out the rock and surged toward Bryan, swinging at his head. The police managed to hold Leoncio back.

  Across town, in Huachipa, the reporter Maribel Toledo arrived at Leoncio and Vilma’s house. She had been at home when she got a call from her producer at Dia D, a news magazine on ATV, where she worked at the time. “He says to me, they found Ruth Thalía,” Toledo recalled. “Go to the family’s house as quick as you can.”

  Toledo and her cameraman were the first journalists to arrive. Vilma and some neighbors were holding candles and signs. Toledo went up to Vilma. “I think I gave her my condolences,” Toledo said later, “and I asked her something, assuming she knew her daughter was dead. And I realized she didn’t understand what I was saying. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand me; she didn’t know.

  “The only thing I could bring myself to say was, ‘Ma’am, they’ve found a girl.’” Vilma went inside the house, up to the second floor, and locked herself in her room. For the next few minutes, Toledo watched as people, friends of the family, she supposed, came and went from the second floor. She was so disconcerted that she called her producer again, just to confirm that it was true, that the police had found Ruth Thalía. Her producer assured her it was. Bryan had confessed.

  “I decided to do the most uncomfortable and perhaps the most morbid thing possible in that situation,” Toledo recalled. She summoned her cameraman and headed up the stairs. “And just as I went up and was about to knock on the door, I hear this cry, something like, ‘No, it can’t be her.’” Toledo’s cameraman urged her to knock anyway, but she refused. “Another reporter might have insisted on an interview with the mother right then and there, but I felt I couldn’t do anything more.”

  In the segment that aired on ATV, you can hear a dog barking and Vilma’s anguished screams, muffled from behind the door. Toledo stands there, with a microphone in her hands, seemingly unsure of what to do next.

  Not long afterward, Toledo quit working in television news.

  That night, Peruvian television viewers saw the alleged murderer, Bryan Romero Leiva, being led away in handcuffs, surrounded by police in riot gear. The death of Ruth Thalía was the lead story on the evening news on every channel in Peru—except Frecuencia Latina. It was a Saturday, and Frecuencia Latina stayed with its regularly scheduled programming: El Valor de la Verdad.

  In his videotaped confession, Bryan wore the same clothes he had worn in his interview with Alejandra Puente from ATV: a black-and-turquoise hooded jacket and acid-washed jeans. He spoke firmly and told investigators a simple story. He called Ruth Thalía as she was leaving the university, and they made plans to meet. “I waited for her by the bridge,” he told police. “She got into my mototaxi. I said, let’s go have some wine, and she said, OK.” They rode to the house where he rented a room. Once there, he and Ruth Thalía drank a $3 bottle of red wine in the street and eventually went upstairs. They had sex and, afterward, started to fight. “She tells me, I don’t know what I’m doing talking to a poor mototaxi driver,” Bryan said. “And that’s when I grabbed her by the throat.” Bryan admitted to police that he choked her for thirty seconds or more. “I thought she had passed out,” he told police. “I listened to her heart. I didn’t hear anything. I grabbed her and shook her hard. But nothing. I got scared.”

  The following day, Bryan took police to the scene of the crime, where the murder had occurred. He toured them around the small, unfurnished room and simulated carrying a woman’s body down the stairs.

  The difference between a crime of passion and premeditated homicide is the difference between spending a decade in prison or one’s entire life. This question, then, became central to the case: Bryan had confessed to killing Ruth Thalía, but had he planned it? No, his lawyer, Felipe Ramos, would argue. Bryan had snapped under the pressure of his national humiliation. The crime could be traced directly to the show. “The format couldn’t have existed without Bryan,” Ramos said. “That’s the truth. The program had impact so long as you had a cuckold sitting up there, call him Bryan, Juan, Pedro. They needed a victim for Ruth Thalía’s lies.”

  In a matter of hours, the story was all over the front pages. Every last detail of the murder was reported again and again on tele
vision. Beto’s rivals saw an opportunity to link Peru’s most powerful journalist to a scandal, and many called for Frecuencia Latina to cancel his show. The station refused. Fernando Vivas, the influential critic, described Ruth Thalía’s death as “an extraordinary case of televicide” and called on the trade group of television advertisers to withdraw its support for the program.

  That evening, Sunday, the day after Ruth Thalía’s body had been found, Beto called a group of friends to his apartment to discuss his options. The guests were mostly journalists and television veterans of Beto’s generation, trusted confidants. One proposal was that Beto and the production team go to the Sayas Sánchez house and give their condolences. All dressed in black, very formal, very serious. A few of Beto’s closest friends supported the idea, but Beto wasn’t convinced. According to producer David Novoa, who was present at the meeting, Beto feared for his safety. “He thought they might attack him,” Novoa said.

  Beto made no comment until Monday, on his morning news program, Abre los Ojos. He sat alone at a desk, wearing a black suit, a black dress shirt, a black tie, and black-framed glasses; Beto extended his condolences to Ruth Thalía’s family. Then he shot back at his critics: “Unfortunately, this case, which is all over the news, which happened to a person who was on television, has been used by some people for sinister purposes.” El Valor de la Verdad played no role whatsoever in the death of Ruth Thalía, he argued. “The murderer of Ruth Thalía Sayas Sánchez is Bryan Romero Leiva.”

  Which is true, of course. But when asked if he thought Ruth Thalía would be alive if she hadn’t appeared on El Valor de la Verdad, Novoa didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” he said. Then he paused for a moment. “Well, I don’t know if she would be alive. Maybe she’d have died some other way.”

  In court, Bryan’s lawyer was determined to tie Beto Ortiz and El Valor de la Verdad to the crime. A few days before the trial began, Ramos read a handwritten letter to the press, in which Bryan asked Ruth Thalía’s parents to forgive him. “I want to confront Mr. Beto Ortiz and take off his mask,” Bryan said in the letter, “so that the people can understand his manipulative and frivolous attitude in the face of the harm he caused in our lives.”

  Ramos petitioned to call Beto to testify, and the judge agreed, and so, on January 21, 2014, Peru’s most famous television journalist appeared in a courtroom inside the country’s largest penitentiary, on the outskirts of Lima. He wore a dark-gray suit, a blue dress shirt, and no tie. He spent most of his testimony standing, while Bryan and his uncle sat on the other side of a glass barrier.

  Bryan accused Beto of peddling fake reality to his audience and attempting to buy his silence about the show’s manipulation with a job offer, then later going back on his word. He described the job, as Beto had allegedly explained it to him. “All you’ll have to do is get me water,” Bryan told the court.

  Beto raised his eyebrows. “Get me water?” he asked incredulously.

  “Tell the truth,” Bryan said. “Tell the truth.”

  Beto denied it all.

  When it was over, Beto was all smiles and asked the judge for permission to add one more thing. The judge agreed. Beto pointed out that Ramos had been the lawyer for another famous murderer. The animosity between them predated Ruth Thalía’s death. “I was very harsh with him,” Beto explained, “and now he’s trying to get back at me.”

  On February 27, 2014, the court declared Bryan Romero Leiva guilty of the murder of Ruth Thalía. The vast majority of Bryan’s confession was found to be false. The police had tracked down a witness, an adolescent boy from the neighborhood, who said that the night Ruth Thalía disappeared, Bryan had paid him fifty soles to let him know when Ruth Thalía got off the bus. The boy claimed to have seen Bryan and another man force her into his mototaxi. The court determined that Bryan’s accomplice was his uncle, Redy Leiva, the owner of the property where her body was found. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment. The motive for the crime was robbery. They had attempted to get Ruth Thalía’s bank security code. They wanted her winnings from El Valor de la Verdad.

  Vilma, Leoncio, and Eva were in court on the day of the sentencing. Afterward, they gave statements to the media, saying that justice had been served. Vilma, her voice cracking, told the press: “When I die, that’s when I will stop crying. That’s when I will stop suffering.” She visits her daughter’s tomb once a week to wash the gravestone and pray. A few months after Ruth Thalía’s murder, Eva was invited to audition for a talent show called Rojo, broadcast on Frecuencia Latina. She accepted, and dedicated her performance to her sister, dancing to a mix of traditional music from Huancavelica and pop. The judges said Eva’s rhythm was “imprecise,” and she didn’t make it past the first round.

  The second season of El Valor de la Verdad was produced with only celebrity contestants: politicians, showbiz folks, the kind of people who are used to dealing with the media. It was a hit. One highly placed source at Frecuencia Latina stated that this decision, to use only celebrities, was in direct response to the murder of Ruth Thalía, but Beto Ortiz denied it. “The show is entertainment, and I don’t lose sight of that. We need contestants whose stories are interesting enough that people will watch.”

  REBECCA CURTIS

  The Christmas Miracle

  FROM The New Yorker

  CATS WERE DYING. This happens, of course. But in this case they were dying in a gory way, one after another, and my nieces, who were six and seven years old, were witnessing the deaths, and it was Christmas, the most magical, horrible, spiritual, dark, and stressful time of the year, so we—my older sister and her husband, my younger twin brothers, my sister’s in-laws, our mother and our uncle, and the other relatives who were gathered at my sister’s house in Revelstoke for the holiday—were trying to prevent more cat deaths. My sister had had five cats. She’d adopted them from the pound, because they were going to be killed. She wanted every living being to be happy. I am telling this story to you, K, even though you are a Russian Communist and a Jewish person who doesn’t believe Jesus was the son of God, and even though Christmas is an obnoxious holiday when millions of people decapitate pine trees and watch them slowly die in their living rooms, because miracles can happen on any day, and as long as man has existed he’s celebrated this weirdest time of year, the shortest stretch of sunlight, the winter solstice, as a time of fear, change, courage, and passion. I’m going to tell you the story of a miracle that happened at Christmas.

  I was not at a great point in my life leading up to the miracle. I was teaching creative-writing classes, but I hadn’t managed to think clearly enough to write and publish anything in years. I had Lyme disease and some co-infections that I was treating with intravenous antibiotics: babesiosis, a malaria-like virus that drains red blood cells and causes fatigue; and bartonellosis, a bacterial infection common among homeless men, which causes vascular inflammation in the brain and bouts of madness, fantastical visions, and frank or rude speech, usually set off by eating carbohydrates. I’d completed my degree in nutrition, and had luck helping clients overcome ailments, especially infertile women who wanted to conceive, so I knew which foods I should eat and which I shouldn’t. But if cake was nearby I wasn’t always able to prevent myself from having one bite; then the sugar fed the Bartonella bacteria, which commanded me to eat more, and I would, and then I’d go insane.

  With this in mind, I’d asked my sister to cancel the traditions of: 1) baking, frosting, and decorating forty dozen sugar cookies; 2) constructing a ginger-bread mansion; 3) baking eight pecan pies; 4) stuffing everyone’s stocking full of milk chocolate. My sister had replied that these traditions were integral to the joy of Christmas. I knew that her response was reasonable. But I was literally unable to control myself around sugar, and I worried about containing my fits of madness. I was also concerned about our family’s ability to prevent the remaining cats from dying, though my sister assured me she’d implemented a system to achieve this; I was worried, too, that no one would like the che
ap, ugly Christmas presents I’d got them; I’d also become aware of my strong urge to inform my sister’s sister-in-law Kunda, a shy, forty-four-year-old neurosurgeon and Canadian Medical Officer of Health, that I knew she’d been trying to get pregnant, and that if she’d accept my help I could make it happen, despite my sister’s warning that no one was supposed to know Kunda was “trying” and that I must not accost her; finally, I was concerned, as always during family visits, about the safety and comfort of my nieces around our uncle, who was a pedophile, especially since the previous Christmas, when my sister and I weren’t vigilant enough, I’d caught him rubbing the butt of the elder girl, then six years old, in a dark, empty room. That, too, my sister assured me, was under control: the girls would never be left alone with him, and at night they’d sleep on cots in her room. Everyone in our family meant well and wanted to be a family.

  I know too, K, that you cringe whenever I mention the pedophile thing, and feel that it should not be placed in any story, because it overwhelms it and is too terrible for words. But I’d like to point out that my nieces are two beautiful, talented, and privileged girls, who see their grand-uncle only a few days a year; and that our uncle is not a bad man, just a sick one. So please quell any squeamishness or horror and bear in mind that it could be worse.

  I’d also like to say—regarding the Christmas miracle—that it was my elder niece who instigated the Kamikaze Cat Training, not me. I have two nieces but only one goddaughter. And though I’ve abandoned Catholicism, the cult that I was born into, and am one of about eight godmothers, I take my duty seriously. Perhaps I can be forgiven at least one mistake I made that holiday.