A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention

by Matt Richtel

  As Van stood there waiting for the fifth-period kids to finish filing in, he flashed on a moment from nearly two Januaries earlier. It was a day that had started with such high hopes: the varsity hoops team busing to Salt Lake for the state tournament. The team had reason for optimism. They were stacked with talent—big, tough players, like Jason Zundel and Dallas Miller, and they had in Reggie a tenacious defender and supporting player. He was the guard who preferred passing to shooting, rebounding to glory, was best friends with the studs, a bit in their shadow; plus, Van thought, Reggie lacked the confidence to equal his talent and hard work.

  For all the team’s talent, the state tournament did not go well. The team lost a heartbreaker in an early round and returned home the same day. Hours later, after it seemed everyone else had cleared out, Van walked into the locker room and heard the crying.

  Reggie sat with his elbows on his knees and his face down. He looked up.

  “I can’t believe it’s over.”

  “That’s why I love you, Reggie. You’re so passionate about basketball.”

  But Van knew Reggie’s reaction was about more than a game—the season-ending loss meant the end of relationships and feeling connected, something the young man seemed to crave. Looking back on that day, Van thought of Reggie: “He was almost as broke as you’d see with someone who lost a loved one.”

  On the day of the accident, Van couldn’t get the idea out of his mind that something bad had happened to Reggie. When he got home after school, he called the Shaws. He got Mary Jane. She said Reggie was okay. She said there had been “fatalities.” It was a word that, for some reason, Van picked up on. She didn’t say “dead,” she said “fatalities.”

  Reggie was upstairs. He’d not come down all day. Hadn’t eaten. Had entertained just two visitors: his brother Jack and his dad. There wasn’t much to say.

  Van had a final question: “Was there anyone else in the accident from around here?”

  “No,” Mary Jane answered. “They were from Cache Valley.”

  THAT NIGHT, SHE AND Ed talked about the questions Rindlisbacher was asking—suggesting Reggie somehow was at fault—and they were worried sick. Ed didn’t express it like his wife. But there was a story he’d heard about, maybe read about in the paper, that was running around his head—making him nuts.

  It was this story about a kid in Idaho—two hours away, and in so many ways Utah’s cultural and political sibling. Not too many months before, Ed remembered that there had been this young man, eighteen years old or something like that, who had been arrested. He hadn’t committed a big crime, just some silly misdemeanor. But the cops had picked him up. Then they called the kid’s dad to come get him. The dad said: “Let him spend the night in jail; it’ll be a good learning experience for him.”

  “In jail that night, some guys beat the kid to death,” says Ed. As he recalls his thinking at the time, his eyes mist. Then a tear rolls down his cheek and he clenches his teeth. “All I could think was: ‘I cannot let Reggie spend a single night in jail.’

  “ ‘I will sell the house. I will do whatever it takes. But I will not let him spend a night in jail.’ ”

  JACKIE HAD BEEN NUMB all day at work, knowing the worst was to come. She had to tell the girls what had happened to their dad. After receiving news of the accident, she’d stayed at work until three in the afternoon. Then she went to school to pick up her oldest daughter, Stephanie, a real daddy’s girl. Jackie’s colleague Roy drove her in her own car over to Thomas Edison Charter School.

  Jackie gave the news to the principal and to Stephanie’s teacher. Then she walked with Stephanie to her Saturn—just like Jim’s, a practical car, navy blue. Stephanie had on her school uniform, the khaki slacks and polo shirt, her blond hair in a protective braid because it was gymnastics day.

  Stephanie saw Roy, her mommy’s work friend, and asked: “Are we going to gymnastics?”

  “Sweetie, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  Jackie sat down in the front seat and pulled her seven-year-old onto her lap. She realized Stephanie didn’t have too much understanding about death, or, at least, she didn’t have much experience with it, except for when they’d put Sandy, their chocolate point Siamese cat, to sleep two years earlier.

  “Daddy was in a car accident.”

  Stephanie looked at her with those deep blue eyes. She never thought she’d have a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl.

  “He didn’t make it.”

  Stephanie started to cry and now Jackie did, too. Stephanie curled up in her mother’s arms. “I was holding her, and I was hiding her.” From the world, everything.

  “He’s gone to heaven.”

  They sat there like that for a while, Stephanie not speaking, not even asking questions. She didn’t ask any questions. Jackie and Roy got her into the backseat. They drove to the day care center to get Cassidy, who was just a few months shy of four years old. On the way, Stephanie finally offered up a question: “So are we going to do what we’d planned this weekend?”

  It surprised Roy, the sophisticated implication of the question: Will life go on as usual? A few hours later, people had begun to fill the Furfaro home. The phone rang. Jackie’s mom picked up. It was a reporter from the local paper. Jackie heard her mom say, “How the hell do you think we feel?” and hang up.

  Jackie tried not to make a public show of her grief, trying to eat, not eating, shaking, trying not to shake, and thinking: How am I going to do this alone?

  It was already dark when Jackie carried Cassidy to the living room just inside the front door. A big TV stood in the corner. And there was a massage chair, from Sharper Image. It cost $2,100, but it was worth it to help with Jim’s periodic migraines.

  Jackie and Cassidy curled up on the dark tan fabric couch. The little one was a mamma’s girl, who liked to lie on Jackie’s chest. By then, Cassidy had asked when Daddy was coming home, and Jackie was trying to find the right moment.

  On the couch, she tried to calmly explain that Daddy had had an accident and had gone to heaven. “He isn’t coming home.”

  She wasn’t sure how much Cassidy understood. And, if Jackie was honest with herself, she wasn’t sure whether she even believed it. “A small part of me thought: ‘Maybe it’s a mistake, and he’ll come home anyway.’ ”

  ABOUT THAT TIME, OVER in Logan, a woman named Terryl Warner pulled up in a blue minivan outside a gymnastics center called Air-Bound. The door pulled open and Terryl’s daughter, a sixth grader, chilly from waiting outside for a few minutes, climbed inside.

  “You won’t believe what happened,” the girl, Jayme, started. “Cecily told us that Stephanie’s dad was killed in a car accident.”

  Terryl paused and tried to catch up to the conversation. Cecily was the gymnastics coach.

  “Which one is Stephanie?” she asked.

  Jamie reminded Terryl that Stephanie was on her gymnastics team, the daughter of Jackie and Jim Furfaro. Terryl began to form a picture. She’d had modest interaction with the family but liked them. She remembered, three months earlier, the night before a statewide meet at Air-Bound, when Jim Furfaro and her husband, Alan, had to set up the fiberglass springs under the mat. They’d cut their hands on the fiberglass and had to go out and get gloves to finish the job.

  Meantime, Terryl had been trying to make some posters for the gymnastics meet. The posters had flames on them, but Terryl’s drawings were so bad that they’d never be used. They were so awful, in fact, that Jackie had laughed in a friendly way at them, something Terryl appreciated; she tried not to take herself too seriously.

  Terryl was shocked, of course, by news of the wreck. But she was used to hearing about tragedy. In her daily life, Terryl came across a lot of horrible situations. She was the victim’s advocate in Cache County, which encompassed Logan. It was a particularly low crime area, but it still had its share of particularly gruesome crimes, like rapes and child abuse. In Terryl, the criminals had a particularly ardent and zealous foe
. She had a reputation for relentlessly pushing for justice, even among the prosecutors.

  Terryl connected to people who suffered tragedy, in a very personal way. She spoke from experience. She’d been on her own improbable journey, a victim from a very early age, and she’d learned to fight back—for herself, for others.

  When her daughter told her about the car crash, Terryl didn’t think about it in professional terms. After all, it sounded like it was just an accident. Besides, Terryl assumed it must’ve happened in nearby Box Elder County, which was home to both Tremonton and ATK Systems. Not her jurisdiction.

  Mainly, Terryl thought: Jackie’s going to be a single mom. What a terrible tragedy.

  CHAPTER 5

  TERRYL

  IN JUNE 1980, IN a room with bedsheets tacked up as curtains, a slight high schooler with brown hair was fast asleep when she recalls she was awakened by yelling: “Get out of bed! Get in here! I want you to see this.”

  It was the summer after Terryl Danielson’s ninth-grade year in Downey, California, a town near Compton, not far from Los Angeles. A tough neighborhood, but no tougher than what happened inside the walls of the three-bedroom house with overgrown ivy in the front yard that Terryl, her mom, Kathie, and older brother, Michael, had given up trying to groom.

  “Get in here!” Terryl remembers her father yelling as she fought to get her bearings. She could see the .357 Magnum in his hand.

  “I’m going to blow your mother’s fucking head off.”

  THINGS HAD BEEN LEADING to this moment for a long time, a slow-motion wreck starting in August 1962 when Kathie, who was chunky and adorable with short blond hair and had just graduated from high school, gave birth to Michael. He was a big kid but passive. Less than a year later, Kathie delivered again, this time with twins, Terryl and her sister, Kerryl.

  Several months after she was born, Kerryl died. They chalked it up to pneumonia.

  Dad was Byron Lloyd Danielson. He built driveshafts at a local garage. He was big, six-foot-two and 220 pounds. He was clean-shaven and kept his brown hair cut short. He was good-looking. He could be really sweet. There was this one time that he and Kathie and a bunch of their friends went to an Elvis concert in Long Beach. There weren’t enough tickets for everyone, but he managed to score a really great one for one of Kathie’s best friends, a better seat than anyone else’s in the group. Then things began to change for Danny—as the family called him—when he hurt his back at work. He started taking painkillers. And he drank. His personality changed. When he was drinking or popping pills, he’d go from “Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde, from Joe-Mr.-Nice-Guy to a real a-hole. You couldn’t believe it was the same guy,” recollects Nanci Smith, a close family friend. She remembers Danny always having guns, keeping one stored beneath the driver’s seat of his car.

  TERRYL’S MEMORIES OF TERROR start early. In the year before she started kindergarten, she was asleep in the family’s previous house in nearby Lynwood, in a room with yellow walls that she shared with Michael, when she was yanked out of bed in the middle of the night. “My mom’s face was bloody.” They ran across the street to a neighbor’s house. “It was my first memory of violence.”

  The family called Byron “Danny” after his last name, Danielson. Sometimes Dad, but often Danny. They stayed as far away from him as they could, as their tiny house would permit.

  There wasn’t much of anywhere else to go, given the gangs and toughs who roamed the streets. Terryl retreated into books. Anything she could get her hands on. She loved the Bobbsey Twins.

  Kathie was a Mormon, and she would sometimes take the kids to a nearby LDS church. But Danny, not a Mormon, wasn’t a fan of the activity. Terryl remembers that Danny, to make sure church wasn’t an option, would sometimes take the distributor cap off of Kathie’s long, chocolate brown Cadillac, disabling the aging sedan.

  Kathie tried to keep up outward appearances at the Lynwood house. She would borrow a lawn mower from a neighbor, and she and Terryl and Michael would groom the front yard.

  One afternoon when Terryl was in the fourth grade, she remembers finding a cup of orange juice in the kitchen. She took a sip and discovered it wasn’t orange juice, or, rather, not just orange juice. It was what her dad called a screwdriver. Orange juice mixed with the vodka that made him crazy and violent. She dumped out his bottle of vodka. Come what may for Terryl, the smallest girl in her class.

  “He came in screaming, and he grabbed me by the arm. He dragged me to my room, and he spanked me with a belt. He was in a rage,” she recalls. It hurt, a lot. It didn’t stop her.

  “Every time I could throw out his vodka, I did.”

  She learned very early on to disassociate herself, to lock out the emotions. She says she didn’t cry when he beat her. Her brother Michael cried, but not Terryl.

  Each morning and night, Terryl knelt beside her bed. Every night, the same prayers: Why couldn’t I have been born into a family where my parents loved each other and were happy for their kids?

  She begged God to help her mother leave her dad.

  Terryl recalls that Kathie had a different plan. She decided there was a way to make things better: relocate to a new place. So when Terryl was nearing the end of elementary school they moved to a three-bedroom apartment in Whittier, another tough city, and they lived in the rough part of it. And now the liquor store wasn’t a few blocks away, it was directly across the street.

  Terryl had her own room and so did Michael. Now they had a little brother, Mitchell. The kids didn’t leave the apartment because they feared the gangs. Terryl didn’t leave her room because she feared her dad. She escaped further into books. Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys.

  There was a mild mystery in the house. Terryl says she was told not to answer the phone. She didn’t think too much about it. It was just a rule. Don’t answer the phone, Terryl, and she didn’t. Better to follow the rules, take them on faith, not upset the delicate balance more than it would get upset on its own.

  During that period, she kept a diary. She had a looping cursive that stood straight up. The entries would juxtapose the mundane thrill and confusion of being a young girl with the terror of living with Danny. On November 16, 1977, a few years before the gun incident, she wrote: “I talked to Greg Hertzberg yesterday, it was so good to talk to him! I really love him! I failed a math test today but hope to get a good grade on the test tomorrow.” And a few sentences later: “Mitchell can walk at nine months now and tonight we took movie films of him walking. Last night, I only got four hours of sleep. Dad got drunk and started playing Michael’s saxophone and would not stop. It was dreadful, he woke everyone and said that the reason he was playing it in the middle of the night was because that was the only thing or person or whatever that understood. Mom said she was glad something did. Tonight, it is hidden under my bed.”

  The months wore on. More fights. In January, she scribbled, “I am writing this in the dark because I’m afraid of what Dad will do if he sees that the light is on.”

  MICHAEL STARTED TO GET into drugs, Terryl explains. Pot, when he could get it. When he couldn’t, Terryl watched him sniff gasoline. After taking a big whiff of the gas, he’d pass out. The cycle of addiction was beginning to take hold. And Terryl felt the other ignominies in her life, such as sometimes showing up at school without a lunch.

  “Do you have anything left over?” Terryl recalls asking classmates in the cafeteria. “Can I have some of your chips?”

  Terryl and Michael sometimes would get silver dollars from their grandparents. When they were flush with a silver coin or two, they’d go to the local convenience store and buy food for breakfast or dinner, often splitting a pack of Hostess donuts.

  One evening, when they were living in the new apartment, Danny came home loaded, in a rage. He threw Kathie and Michael out of the house. Then he came for Terryl.

  “You drunk son of a bitch. You are worthless!” she remembers screaming. He chased after her and grabbed her. She kicked and punched. “You are not getting me
out of this house without a fight!”

  He got the better of her, bloodied her, put her out with the others. Terryl wrote in her diary: “This man cannot be my dad. I can’t have come from someone this evil.”

  She was furious at her brother, too.

  “Go fight back!” she says she implored Michael. He was a big kid. Not Danny’s size, but big for his age. “When he comes after you, fight back.”

  Her impression was that Michael and Kathie were peacemakers who wanted to stay under the radar. And that her mom felt she could change the dynamics by again changing the circumstances and the setting. She had a new plan: move to Downey, a new community. A new start.

  It was the summer after Terryl’s ninth-grade year. Her room with the sheets tacked up for curtains also had a built-in desk, a chest of drawers, and a record player given to her by her grandparents. She had a Steve Miller album, but she wasn’t much into music.

  Now she was an even more voracious reader. In fact, she’d gotten herself into trouble for the first time. The reason: She’d checked out too many books. Her favorites were The Diddakoi, the story of an orphan girl who faces persecution, and The Secret Garden, where a girl and a boy, who is sick, escape to a beautiful garden. She loved mysteries. She hated teen romances. She’d started to get into Stephen King. From the Downey library, she would take out armfuls of books, fifteen or even twenty at a time. She didn’t always return them on time. She got a fine: $300. She couldn’t pay it.

  But for as much of an emotional escape that reading provided, it couldn’t protect her from the physical threats. It was not a sufficient one on that summer night when Danny burst into her room with a gun.

  “GET IN HERE. I want you to see this!”

  She was wearing a nightgown. She and Michael followed Danny’s orders. Michael had come from his room and started to cry. Mitchell, their baby brother, was back in Michael’s room, sleeping through it all, as he’d learned to do. Terryl and Michael followed Danny into their parents’ small bedroom. It had hot-pink walls. Kathie lay on the bed, her face streaked with mascara. Danny walked over to her. Terryl and Michael stood in the doorway. Now Terryl was crying, too.