by Matt Richtel
Among the benefits of his wealth, he purchased two three-bedroom condominiums in Puerta Peñasco. Terryl said she wanted to take the children there for Christmas, to work at the orphanage, to teach them to give back.
“My kids need to see there are people who have less than them,” she says. “They need to learn empathy at a young age.”
On the outside, the Warners seemed like they’d developed into a perfect family. The children were excelling in school. They attended church. Neal looked at Terryl with some wonder, given her childhood. How could she turn out so different, given her upbringing? Would it come back to haunt her? “It’s a question I end up asking myself quite often,” he says. “Think about all the things she had going against her.”
It helped that the Warners had moved to Utah. But not completely. There were parts of Terryl’s journey the decade prior to the crash that showed how haunted she remained by her youth.
IN THE FALL OF 1998, eight years before Reggie hit the rocket scientists, Terryl stood in a Mervyns at a mall in Orem, Utah, about forty-five miles south of Salt Lake City, not far from Provo. She was glancing at the women’s clothes, passing time. She and Alan had driven down to visit his family. They’d, of course, brought with them Jayme, their firstborn, and Taylor, the newest addition to their family, who had been born two years earlier, on October 18, 1996.
As Terryl was glancing at the dresses in Mervyns, she suddenly realized that Taylor had disappeared.
“Taylor?”
No response.
She was searching frantically.
“Taylor!”
No response.
“Alan! Alan!”
Her boy was missing. It felt just like Danny had snatched Mitchell. Just like in her nightmares. Was Danny there?
Alan ran over. “What’s going on?”
Terryl was in a full-blown panic. And then Taylor appeared. Her little guy peeked out from between two dresses in a circular rack. She scooped him up. She was beyond crying, nearly hysterical, which was not at all Terryl’s style.
“We’re going home. We’re going home.”
They never made it to the family gathering.
It was, Terryl said, PTSD. Danny had taken Mitchell from her; she had willed herself away from that place, she’d moved far away. But she learned the limits of geographic distance; she carried with her the ghosts of Danny’s abuse.
THEY’D MOVED TO LOGAN three years before that Mervyns incident, in 1995. Alan attended Utah State. After living in a condo, they’d found a house for sale in 1997 for $94,000. It was that cheap because it was infested with hornets, had no toilets, and was ill-configured. Of the three thousand square feet of livable space, fully half of it was the living room.
Weirdly, the house’s lack of perfection appealed to Terryl. It let her feel like she was distancing herself from her mother, who Terryl always felt put on airs that everything was okay. Even though it was a big fat lie.
She decided to take a deliberately different approach. “I don’t care if the house is perfect all the time.” That would be superficial, she thought. It didn’t mean she wanted a hornet-infested mess. They fixed it up, made it livable, just another long-term improvement project for Terryl.
She was taking these steps, making declarations, trying to rebuild herself just as she was remaking the house with the hornet’s nests the size of basketballs.
During this period, she had another key rebuilding project on her hands. She was getting to know her real father.
That whole thing unfolded a few years earlier, when Jayme was eight months old and the family still lived in Southern California. Terryl and the baby were walking in a mall in Palm Springs with Kathie. A woman came up to Terryl’s mom and said: “Are you Kathie Hartman?”
The woman was from Kathie’s high school days. The woman asked Kathie how Woody was doing and whether Woody still worked at Kodak.
In an instant, it all came together for Terryl. Someone named Woody had been her actual father, and Michael’s father, too. She’d never known her dad’s name. Now she did.
At the urging of her friend Neal, Terryl contacted the Department of Motor Vehicles and managed to find this guy named Woody Hartman. She made contact with him and he told her that Kathie had told him that she was happy and had started another family. He says Kathie urged him to let her and the children move on with their lives, explaining his eventual absence, something he says he regrets. Sometimes, early on, Woody would call to see how the children were doing. When Terryl learned this, she thought she’d solved one of the mysteries of her childhood: Why she was told not to answer the phone.
“My dad would call and she didn’t want me to pick up.”
Terryl would occasionally burst into fury. “It breaks my heart,” she says. “I had no father at graduations, milestones, my wedding.
“I lost out on a whole relationship in high school, middle school, college, without a father.”
The years she lost with her father had Terryl thinking about being a victim from a different perspective. She developed a particular empathy for people who lost their moms or dads.
The more she learned about the accident on Valley View Drive on September 22, 2006, the more Terryl thought about the other victims—not just Jackie. There was Leila, and this eighteen-year-old girl, Megan, who was growing up without her dad.
ON JANUARY 2, 2006, Megan married her fiancé, Thomas Done. The ceremony took place at a small LDS church near the main downtown area. The bride wore a white gown with a top that bunched up around the middle. She walked down the aisle by herself, not wanting anyone to replace her dad. She finally felt the weight of his absence, after keeping it at a numb distance for many months.
“I couldn’t stand the idea that my dad wasn’t really there. I just didn’t want to believe he was gone,” she says of those months of denial.
At the wedding, on a brown upright piano in the church, she’d put a big picture of her dad. Her mother, she says, was crying hysterically. “It was like my dad’s funeral all over again.”
The marriage didn’t work. Megan had been struggling for a few years—with school grades and swimming injuries, with her relationship with her parents. She hadn’t gotten a job and that was one of several sources of growing tension with her new husband. They fought, really fought. Not a month after the marriage, the cops were called in after she and her husband got into a physical altercation. Megan was arrested. She got probation, a first-offender break.
Her life was getting away from her. She spent hours a day, sometimes all day, playing shooting games on the Xbox, either against her husband, or teaming up with him against other people they’d meet online. They’d fight with myriad virtual heavy weaponry across elaborate virtual terrain, seeing which team could get fifty kills first. She felt good when she was online, like she was skilled, and it was thrilling, the constant, intense interactivity. “I don’t know how to explain it,” she says of her passion for playing. “It’s pretty much all we ever did.”
AT THE START OF 2007, Megan and Leila were struggling to find anything close to closure around Keith’s death. Jackie, with raw determination, was doing a bit better.
Terryl remained at arm’s length—but not for long.
And Trooper Rindlisbacher was about to get a break.
CHAPTER 18
HUNT FOR JUSTICE
ON JANUARY 8, 2007, three and a half months after Reggie hit the Saturn and killed the rocket scientists, trooper Rindlisbacher’s tenacity paid off: He got the okay to go after Reggie’s cell phone records. It came in the form of an application to conduct a criminal investigation. It had been put together by Tony C. Baird, one of the county prosecutors.
On page twelve of the fourteen-page application, the document states that, just following the accident, Trooper Rindlisbacher drove Reggie to the hospital and “observed Shaw using his phone to receive and send text messages. The phone did not make any audible noise, but on several occasions Shaw pulled the phone from his coat po
cket and sent a text message. Shaw held the phone with his right hand and used his right thumb to type and send each message.”
A page later, it says that Trooper Rindlisbacher asked Reggie whether he’d been texting during the accident. “He denied using it. Shaw could not or would not give a reasonable explanation for his driving pattern.”
But if it sounded like the district attorney’s office was circling Reggie, that was far from the case. Baird, the prosecutor, had his skepticism—about what the facts would show and whether there was applicable law. For now, the document was a permission slip to Trooper Rindlisbacher. And the real meat of the document lay in its middle, pages six and seven. It was a subpoena, aimed at Verizon Wireless. The company was ordered to provide to the trooper, as an official of the state, records associated with the number 435-XXX–3739. Reggie’s number.
“Copies of billing statements from September of 2006 until present. These copies should include both incoming and outgoing tolls of both calls and text messages. This should include all incoming and outgoing phone numbers dialed or received.”
IN THE MIDDLE OF January, Leila got a call from Herm Olsen, the lawyer she’d previously contacted. There were two things on his mind. He’d been thinking about the accident and about the scene where it happened. “There’s no shoulder on the road,” he said. “The road isn’t safe. Everybody knows it’s not safe.”
Leila thought back to what she’d seen at the accident site. On either side of the highway were about four inches of pavement, then a sharp drop into the gully. Olsen told Leila that it might be worth getting an engineer. He told her that, depending on what the engineer found, it could be worth suing the state.
“I don’t care about that. I want the road fixed,” Leila told Olsen. “Please, just get them to get the road fixed.”
Leila recalls that Olsen took it in. He had one more thing to bring up with Leila: Had she heard what happened with the investigation? Was it over? Did Reggie get a ticket?
Olsen told Leila the police should have alerted her. But she told him that they hadn’t. She resolved to find out. She hung up with him and placed a call to the county clerk’s office. They hadn’t heard a thing about it. She dug up the business card of one of the officers who had visited her after the accident.
Shortly thereafter, the phone rang. She sat down at the counter in her kitchen and picked up. “This is Bart Rindlisbacher,” the man said. He explained that he’d been looking into what happened at the accident. Then he went into his story, about how he watched Reggie texting on the way to the hospital.
“What?” Leila was shocked. “This is so different from what I’ve been told.”
The trooper told her that, despite getting permission to investigate, he was having trouble getting the cell phone records; in fact, the Shaw family wouldn’t confirm which carrier was Reggie’s, and the investigator was going company to company trying to figure out where to start. Leila had the impression that the trooper was open, and honest, but also dogged. “I really had the impression he was doing a great deal of this on his own.”
She hung up and felt like she needed to do something, too. Texting and driving; could it really have happened? It seemed to her so absolutely absurd, so illogical, so dangerous. She thought back to Herm Olsen’s firm. The first principal, Lyle Hillyard, was a state senator.
A seed was planted in the back of her mind, something tiny and still unrecognizable to her. Yet it would blossom. Leila would eventually need to do something positive with her grief. Maybe the senator could help.
CHAPTER 19
REGGIE
MATCHUP ZONE! MATCHUP ZONE!”
Reggie, in a shirt and tie, standing next to a metal folding chair, shouted defensive instructions to five scrawny-armed sophomores of the Bear River Bears, Reggie’s former high school team. It was winter 2007, during a basketball game against the Grizzlies from Logan High School.
It looked to be trouble. Earlier in the season, the Grizzlies had crushed the Bears. But things were tighter this game. Reggie was feeling the tension, getting lost in it.
Toward the end of the year, before Thanksgiving, he’d taken up an offer from Van Park, the varsity coach, to help coach the sophomores. Reggie was the assistant coach to Greg Madson, who doubled as coach and the publisher of the Leader, the Tremonton newspaper.
Madson couldn’t make this game so Reggie was on his own.
An adage in sports is that “defense wins championships.” It fit into Reggie’s own personality on the court: hustle, do the unheralded jobs, let your teammates score. He was trying to impress this on the sophomores and, in this game, that meant constantly changing the defense to keep the other team off guard; man-to-man, and zone, 1–2–2, 1–3–1.
“Every other time down the court we were in something different,” Reggie says. “It was just constant.”
Bear River lost by six. He was initially disappointed, then felt some measure of moral victory, having kept it so close against the bigger school. Basketball brought momentary relief.
“In all honesty, the basketball was such a great release, an avenue for him to get lost,” says Madson. He knew Reggie well, as a player and as a kid. Nearly in his fifties, Madson was in Reggie’s church ward and had been an assistant to Van Park on Reggie’s own varsity high school teams.
In the 2006–2007 season, just after the accident, Madson felt like Reggie mostly didn’t betray the grief he felt. But then he’d see Reggie “in a quiet moment,” and he’d see a “momentarily blank stare.” Madson felt like Reggie was flashing back to the accident, but he didn’t feel it was his place to pry. “You could tell it was eating him up.”
Madson decided a good therapy might be to give Reggie more responsibility. And so the coach allowed Reggie more latitude to coach on his own, say, to take the guards for part of practice or the big men, responsibilities that he might not otherwise give to a first timer.
“When he spoke, they listened,” and not just in the way that younger kids in that community did when coaches talked. “He’d had some real-world experiences. He’d been through some really tough stuff.”
REGGIE WAS DATING AGAIN, his interest in women, if not at its full measure, returning. Her name was Trisha Haber. She was a year younger than Reggie and a good friend of Briana Bishop, the woman who Reggie had been seeing at the time of the wreck.
“Our relationship wasn’t the best before the accident. And after, it was kind of too much and it didn’t work out,” Reggie says of dating Briana.
Briana was from Kaysville, about forty-five minutes away. Reggie had met her through Dallas, his gregarious buddy. Trisha was one of the girls in the group they hung out with. She had curly hair and a dark tint to her skin, her dad being from Israel. Trisha worked in a T-Mobile store. She and Reggie went on dates, taking turns making the forty-five-minute drive.
She knew about the accident, seemed supportive, though they didn’t talk much about it. They did discuss a future.
Marriage talk, not sex talk. They made out a couple of times. That was it. Reggie had learned his lesson, and he had a focused, overriding goal. He still would go on a mission. “It’s what I wanted more than anything.”
Maybe he’d be able to go in June, just pick up where he’d left off.
This is how it went in the spring of 2007: a kind of collective life-as-it-used-to-be with an unspoken feeling it could all burst apart. Leila O’Dell and her daughter, Jackie Furfaro and her daughters, and Reggie and his family began trying to reclaim their lives. There were fits and starts of normality, but always a specter loomed. Somewhere, out there, some machinery, embodied by the stubborn Trooper Rindlisbacher, was following a trail.
Occasionally, the Shaws would check in with Jon Bunderson. He had a stock cliché: No news is good news. And for his part, he wasn’t about to contact Cache County officials. “Don’t kick a sleeping dog,” he described as his philosophy. He fielded some questions about insurance, from the Shaws and the insurance companies.
On the criminal front, there was a sense, in Reggie’s camp, that maybe it would all go away.
Far from it. With the legal force of the Cache County Attorney’s Office, Rindlisbacher had been faxing Verizon in late January and early February. The fax asked for phone records associated with Reggie’s number. And the document included a copy of obituaries for Keith and Jim published in the Herald Journal, Logan’s local newspaper, on September 25, three days after the accident.
It took at least five requests to get the records. And then, the trouble was, the information didn’t make sense.
Rindlisbacher needed reinforcements.
A MEETING TOOK PLACE in the highway patrol office in Cache County, the same second-floor office where Rindlisbacher had come immediately after the accident. Sergeant Tony Hudson, who’d been working with him on the case, was there, along with a new guy, Scott Singleton. It was March 15, a Thursday, at 10:30 in the morning.
Scott was the new local agent for the Utah State Bureau of Investigation, assigned to the northernmost counties. Scott didn’t much like his job’s chief responsibility: hang out at bars and, as Singleton put it, “enforce Utah’s crazy alcohol laws.” A byzantine labyrinth of rules and regulations, he said, that he was supposed to enforce “sitting in a bar all night long, which I hated.”
When he had time, though, there was a part of the job he loved. He was supposed to help pursue cases for the highway patrol that were taking a lot of time, that the individual troopers didn’t have resources to pursue. Not cold cases, exactly, but complex ones.
The job suited Singleton after a long period wandering. Born in 1964 in the tiny farm town of Benjamin, Utah, the son of a plumber, Singleton was a nice kid but a poor student, shy, a follower, a practical joker. At Spanish Fork High School, where his grade point average didn’t reach past 3.0, he was a reasonable class clown; once, when the National Guard came out to celebrate the school’s newly renovated football field, Scott joined a few friends hoisting signs that read: MAKE FOOTBALL FIELDS, NOT WAR.
