by Matt Richtel
Nanci remembers that Terryl was the one in the family who would dump out her dad’s booze. Not Kathie, because she knew what Danny would do if he found an empty bottle or cup. “The you-know-what would hit the fan,” Nanci said Kathie would tell her.
Nanci believes Kathie didn’t leave Danny because he did provide for the family financially. When Danny was sober, things were pretty good, Nanci remembers. “They never went without.” Besides, “Kathie was good people but she didn’t have much education to fall back on.” It was a different time; wives just didn’t up and leave husbands. Plus, Danny generally would never abuse anyone in public, not physically, at least, making it his word against the families’. The cheerleading incident was the rare time when he lashed out while people were watching. “He was very shrewd that way,” Nanci says.
Others saw only mean. Another family friend, Patricia Dian Hauser, says Danny would be drunk by ten in the morning, yelling, threatening violence. “Kathie was a mess so many times at my house,” Patricia recounts, and she remembers Danny using Mitchell as a pawn, threatening to take the boy, or refusing to let Kathie take him when she sought escape.
Michael, Terryl’s older brother, had trouble going against Danny, Patricia recollects. Less so for Terryl. “Terryl fought back,” Patricia says. “She was the fiercest little person.”
For his part, Mitchell, Terryl’s younger brother, remembers things differently, although he was a baby at the time. Looking back years later, he recalls his dad as a great guy. “My hero,” he says of Danny. Yes, Mitchell says looking back, “there were problems,” but he remembers them stemming from marital strife and tension between Kathie and his dad, not any cruelty on the part of his father.
In her senior year in high school, Terryl wound up making the cheerleading squad and got two rewards: a royal blue, gold, and white outfit, and, along with the library books she voraciously consumed, another escape route. She went to practices in the morning and after school. She was out of the house. She cheered for football and basketball players. She tried to be bubbly.
MIDWAY THROUGH TERRYL’S SENIOR year, she says her mom had finally had enough of Danny and went to Norwalk Superior Court to officially get a divorce. She took Terryl with her. Terryl dressed nicely, with a white blouse and a Peter Pan–type collar. She was proud of and pleasantly surprised by her mom’s courage. But there was a much bigger surprise waiting in the courtroom.
Partway through the hearing, Terryl remembers, the judge asked Kathie: “Does the biological father pay child support for the minor daughter?”
He meant Terryl.
She says she looked at her mother: “What biological father? What biological father?!”
That was how she found out that Danny wasn’t her real dad.
Terryl pestered her mother for details but got few. Terryl wasn’t told her father’s name. She learned only that he’d been a high school sweetheart who was long gone.
“He doesn’t want you, and he’s not interested in being a father,” Terryl says Kathie told her.
Terryl felt relief that Danny wasn’t her blood. He didn’t totally define her. But she was angry, too. There was another man out there who was her father “who didn’t care about me.”
FOR ALL THAT, IT wasn’t until high school graduation that something happened that hadn’t occurred in years: Terryl cried. Sitting in her cap and gown, a sunny day, she let it go. It wasn’t sadness, exactly. It was determination.
“I knew I never wanted to see any of those people again,” she says, looking back. “It was one of the only times in my life that I’ve cried.”
THE TRASH CAN HELD a pile of refuse, and a woman, upside down. Dead. Her blood-slick feet stuck out of the top of the garbage.
“What is this doing in an advertisement for shoes?” demanded Terryl.
She stood on a small stage at Cypress College, her second year there. On the screen behind her was the image of the dead woman. Not a crime scene, a shoe ad. Terryl was doing a command performance for her debate team, arguing about the deleterious impact of violence in advertising.
Terryl’s high school guidance counselor didn’t consider college an option, urging the young woman to go to a trade school. But Terryl found a community college, feeding off encouragement from the Mandels, the family she worked for at the accounting firm, and her own raw faith that she could change her circumstances.
She recalls she got further encouragement at Cypress from a communications professor named Pat Ganer. She was heavyset, dowdy, strict, seemingly old to Terryl, though she was only in her thirties, and a caring talent scout.
“Terryl, what would you think about joining the debate team?”
She posed the question not long after Terryl arrived at Cypress, a few months after high school graduation. The professor saw drive and strength in the young woman, the voracious reader with the discipline, Terryl recounts.
Terryl, starved for such encouragement, lapped it up. She stayed for hours in Dr. Ganer’s office, getting help with homework. She spent even more time with the debate team and at tournaments, once arguing in the persuasive category in favor of child support. For the first time, she drew power from her personal experiences; she’d hidden and run from her home life. Now it was also serving as a source of drive, even inspiration.
She told Dr. Ganer a bit about Danny. The next year, the professor suggested Terryl do her persuasive address on violence in advertising. She leapt into it, finding numerous examples she’d show on the screen during her talks, like the one where the husband led the wife around by a leash, she on all fours like a dog. It was an ad for a department store.
TERRYL HAD TAKEN A job at Disneyland as a ride operator. She worked on Space Mountain, proudly wearing the uniform, a red, white, and turquoise polyester jumpsuit. She met lots of young people, many attending college at nearby USC. They joked in the break room, they laughed. As advertised, Disneyland, to Terryl, was the happiest place on earth.
Encouraged by Dr. Ganer and the young people she met from USC, Terryl applied after two years at Cypress to a bunch of colleges: George Washington and Georgetown, the University of Kentucky, UCLA, and USC. She got into every one of them, which, still highly uncertain of herself, she silently attributed to the fact that she was poor and filling someone’s quota. But she was still elated, particularly when the envelope arrived from USC, which was attended by all those happy, privileged kids from Disneyland.
At USC, she took a class in criminal psychology, which she thought would fulfill a credit but wound up touching her deeply. She knew well how “bad men” acted, after years of living with Danny. She started thinking about becoming a prosecutor. She took classes at the university’s Annenberg School for Communication. It was interesting stuff, but it also felt practical. She might not be able to afford law school, she thought, but she could always make a living doing public relations. She liked having a glass-half-full outlook and was adept at putting a good face on things.
She got scholarship money to live in the dorm. Her roommate was a music major, which meant Terryl got to attend music events. She joined the “Helenes,” the smiling, effervescent greeters at USC sporting events. She told no one about her past, her home life, and they didn’t seem to care. She felt safe. The dorm had a guard. She could sleep without keeping one eye open, as she had to do at home.
Danny, though, would not let her go. Far from it.
One late afternoon in the summer after her first year at USC—her junior year, given all her Cypress credits—she took Mitchell to the movies at the Cerritos mall. Mitchell was now six, and a sweet little guy. The pair left the theater through the back doors. By now it was dark. In a vivid recounting, Terryl says she didn’t see Danny until it was too late: He was standing right next to them, wearing the familiar blue work pants and shirt, literally stinking drunk.
“Terryl, say good-bye to your little brother,” she recollects him saying.
She looked at him. What did he mean?
“You’re nev
er going to see him again!” Danny grabbed Mitchell by the arm.
“No! No! No! Help! Help!” Terryl screamed.
She grasped Mitchell by the other arm. She pulled, and Danny pulled. And then Danny, so much bigger than Terryl, swung Mitchell away.
“That’s when I lost him. I didn’t have a grip on him anymore. Danny grabbed him and ran away and threw him in the truck and they drove off.”
Terryl remembers running to her Pinto after the confrontation with Danny. She climbed in. She became paralyzed. Tears poured from her, hysteria. It was the days before cell phones—she couldn’t call her mom. She didn’t know if she should call the police. What could they do? What had they ever done?
She sat in the car for a long time. Still hysterical, crying the way she hadn’t in many years, maybe since high school graduation. In that state, she drove home, blind with anger and helplessness. It nearly cost her dearly. She was so consumed that, driving on the highway, too fast, she rounded a curve and the Pinto swerved; she lost control, and then, at the last second, recovered.
Danny returned Mitchell unharmed, but another scar was left on Terryl, the seeds of a recurring nightmare. Whenever she slept at home, she’d have it: her dad taking Mitchell, threatening that Terryl would never see the boy again. And, in the nightmare, she never did see her brother again.
Mitchell, looking back, remembers the incident differently. He says his dad came to get him because Terryl had him out too late. His dad, Mitchell recalls, never got out of the car, and only got upset when Terryl wouldn’t hand him over and resisted. “She was always mouthie,” Mitchell recalls, suggesting Terryl provoked Danny. And he says his dad took him right home that day to Kathie. His memory underscores some differences in how the children saw their parents, and the strife. But Mitchell does concede there were family problems, to the point that he says that when he was in third or fourth grade, after his parents split, he asked to live for a year with his babysitter “because of the drama.”
“I kind of threw down the gauntlet as much as a little kid can, and told them ‘I don’t want to live with either one of you,’ ” he recalls.
For his part, Michael, Terryl’s older brother, remembers the violence starting when he was five and Terryl was four. Danny “beat on me until I was eighteen, and then one night at the wrecking yard, he was drunk and started to get violent with me and I pushed him hard (I was a bit bigger by then) . . . he said he was going to get his gun . . . I could not allow that,” Mitchell wrote in an email to Terryl, reflecting on their childhood. He wrote that he and Danny got into a terrible fight at the wrecking yard. In another email, he wrote of how Danny would tell him and Terryl he wasn’t their father. “When he was saying these things he usually had me slammed up against a wall yelling in my face with his putrid booze breath.”
ON THANKSGIVING DAY OF Terryl’s senior year in college, she recalls that she and Kathie went for a walk on the beach. Kathie had news. Terryl’s real father had made contact, along with his new wife. The pair and Kathie had dinner. Kathie showed them pictures of Terryl and Michael. Terryl says Kathie told her that the man was curious about how the kids turned out but didn’t want to be a father to them.
Terryl was furious at her mother for showing her picture to a man who didn’t want anything to do with her.
HOW WAS SHE GOING to escape this life? It followed her, even in her dreams. Was there a way for the bubbly and optimistic to overcome the terror and loneliness?
One thing was for sure: There would be no family for Terryl, no marriage. Earlier in her life, she’d told her diary that she was going to have a family and get married in the Mormon temple. But she’d changed her mind. She couldn’t risk putting a child through what she had experienced. There was just too much she couldn’t control.
CHAPTER 9
REGGIE
TROOPER RINDLISBACHER MADE PLANS to do follow-up interviews with Kaiserman the farrier, and with Reggie.
A few days after the accident, he called Mary Jane to set something up. It was around nine in the morning, right before she was going to go out and deliver the day’s mail.
“I don’t feel good about doing this without a lawyer,” she told Rindlisbacher.
She remembers the conversation went sharply south. “He started to accuse me about knowing something,” she says, looking back.
He asked if Reggie was texting at the time of the accident.
Mary Jane says she was offended by the substance of the accusation—and by the tone. Trooper Rindlisbacher was “awful,” she says. “I’ve never been treated so nasty in my life.”
She sensed a chip on his shoulder. What’s with this guy? It rankled Mary Jane because she had such respect for law enforcement.
As to substance, she truly believed that the accident had been caused by the weather, hydroplaning. She got off the phone in tears, “scared to death.”
Still, the two of them had managed to set a tentative plan for a follow-up interview with Reggie.
A few days later, Rindlisbacher drove to the Tremonton City offices and met with Kaiserman. The farrier went through detailed drawings of what had happened. He was upset, pained at having been part of the tragedy.
Then it was time to meet with Reggie. Rindlisbacher’s phone rang. It was an attorney hired by the Shaw family. The lawyer told him that Reggie wouldn’t be coming for an interview and that he, the lawyer, would answer all questions.
Rindlisbacher was irritated. He remembers thinking of Reggie: “He’s lawyered up, and he’s not going to say anything. He’s got something to hide.”
MARY JANE OPENED THE bedroom door. Reggie was right there on the bed, where she had left him, facing the wall, his phone on the bed, behind him.
“Reggie.”
He half turned. It had been another restless night. He kept replaying the accident, thinking about the two dead men and their families, worrying what might happen next. His mom sat on the bed.
“I think you should go talk to someone.”
He knew what she had in mind. A counselor named Gaylyn White had an office just a few blocks away, behind the office of Russell White, Gaylin’s husband, Reggie’s dentist and a local church leader.
“No.”
“Just to get things off your chest, Reg.”
Something was obviously wrong. Two days after the wreck and Reggie had barely left his room; hadn’t left the house at all. And she didn’t know the extent of his emotions. “I felt like I didn’t deserve to go out there and live,” he says. “Not in a suicidal sense. In the sense that I didn’t deserve to enjoy my life.”
Not when those two men in the other car had no life to enjoy.
Mary Jane left. Reggie thought: Crazy people go get help. Not sane people.
Not guys’ guys. Not athletes, not in Tremonton.
“IF YOU’VE SEEN FRIDAY Night Lights, that was us. Same kind of place, same kind of problems,” says Dallas Miller, Reggie’s best friend. The jocks held sway, but the focus on sports, the all-American veneer, had a dark underbelly, at least from Dallas’s perspective. A lot of drinking—weekend nights downing Keystone beer in the foothills—sometimes driving home drunk—a lot of premarital sex and a lot of pregnancy. “Not to put a bad rap on our town, but, more often than not, not everyone on the sports team was living their religion.”
It was far from everyone’s view. In Dallas’s case, he felt he was in a better position to see past the town’s facade. A rebel from his earliest days, he rejected the Church, thinking it a place for hypocrites who didn’t live the life they preached. At odds with his parents, he spent many nights on Reggie’s floor, sometimes passed out from too much drinking.
In fact, there was a decent chance he could’ve been the one who wound up involved in something tragic. But Reggie? When Dallas heard about it, he thought: “He was the last guy I’d have expected this to happen to.
“He was the kid who always made the right choices, who always did the right thing.”
Reggie could cool Dall
as off. In January of their senior year in high school, Dallas, six foot two and 205 pounds, threw the ball in someone’s face during basketball practice, hitting his teammate in the head. The two squared off and a fistfight seemed imminent. “Reggie grabbed me and threw me in the locker room. We had a long talk,” Dallas recalls. He adds: “Reggie was the only person I took advice from.
“He was a listener, and after he did the listening part he would have something to say that was probably in my best interest.”
Certainly not the kind of person who would make a bad decision and kill two men. It must’ve just been a horrible accident, Dallas figured, no one in the wrong, but a tragedy nonetheless.
“I was the wild one. He was the mild one. The good listener.”
REGGIE’S FIRST AND DEEPEST rival was his older brother Nick. People thought Reggie and Nick were twins; Reggie was big for his age, and Nick small. Sometimes they thought Reggie was actually older. They competed at everything, stoked by a culture of competition. “I used to make them fight for crackers when I babysat,” says older brother Phill, mostly joking. “Only the winner got to eat.”
They played basketball and baseball outside and football video games in the house—sitting on the floor or couch, with controllers in their hands.
They got their first console, a Nintendo Entertainment System, for Christmas in the early 1990s. It was a square gray box with rectangular controllers that featured a few simple buttons. They went at it in Tecmo Super Bowl, a football game. Reggie was little more than five years old. Several years later, the brothers moved on to a different console, the Sega Genesis. It used a 16-bit processor, which allowed double the processing capability of the 8-bit Nintendo, an early sign that the power of these machines would soar with each generation. Better graphics and sound, more complex challenges and on-screen data to juggle.
