by Glenn Stout
Ashwaubenon High School is a hamlet of red brick buildings with a brutalist concrete gym on its southern edge. More than 1,000 children study under its fluttering American flag, mainly from the surrounding suburban neighborhoods. Brown arrived feeling nervous and excited. Nearly 20 years ago at her high school in Illinois, cheerleading tryouts lasted three grueling weeks. Some schools require a tumbling certification, proving that aspiring cheerleaders can perform such maneuvers as the “standing back handspring” and “round-off back tuck.” Hazing is not uncommon for cheerleaders at other schools. New recruits can get smothered with food or drenched by a water hose.
In the last weeks of summer before the new semester began, the cheerleading team held tryouts at the Jaguars’ football stadium. It was the first season also for award-winning coach Mary Lee Boyd Johnson. Johnson (who did not respond to interview requests) has 21 years of cheer experience. She coached at rival De Pere High School from 1987 to 1992, taking the cheer team to first-place honors at both the Universal Cheerleading Association and the National Cheerleading Association camps. “I set my goals high,” Johnson told the Green Bay Press Gazette in 2012, “to make Ashwaubenon cheer a competitive program.” Her daughter, Bailee Wautlet, was captain.
Brown arrived at tryouts in a pair of workout shorts and a T-shirt. “I was talking to the girls, they said the tryouts were easy,” Brown says. But first, there were rules. The girls sat on the floor and waited for the coach to speak. “She said . . . we were supposed to represent the school, have respect for people, for each other, and for everybody else. We had to be nice, you know, watch our mouths, no chewing gum during practice because you’d get demerits for that.” Brown says the coach explained that the team also had an “honest system,” requiring the cheerleaders to be honest with one another.
At Ashwaubenon High, there was both a dance team and a cheer squad, and they were fierce rivals. The dance team required gymnastic maneuvers and strict dance training. Though both teams waved pom-poms, the cheer squad was much less challenging. The established cheerleaders taught the new girls the official cheer of the Jaguars. The routines at tryouts were simple, which was a relief to Brown. “I couldn’t do cartwheels,” she says, “I couldn’t do flips. I couldn’t do any of that.”
It didn’t matter. There were no football players, and the bleachers were empty, but their chants filled the stadium. Brown fell into the hypnotic routine, with the hand claps and chanting. There was just one nagging feeling. Unlike the other girls, afterwards she would return home to her miserable apartment. “I was living two different lives,” she says, “two different people.” But for now, she had a new, intoxicating mantra: “Go! Go! Go! Fight! Fight! Fight! Win! Win! Win! Go! Fight! Win!”
On August 8, 2008, Johnson invited the cheerleaders to a pool party at her home. Brown was a ball of nerves. It had been 19 years since she was first a sophomore. Katy Perry now dominated the Hot 100. When she arrived, the cheerleaders were catching rays in tiny two-piece suits, enjoying the fading Wisconsin summer. Brown, anxious about the stretch marks from her pregnancies, wore a one-piece underneath a T-shirt, an outfit that she says puzzled the other girls.
“I told [them] the reason I had the T-shirt on, you know, was that I used to be really fat. I lost all the weight,” she says.
“She’s just shy, leave her alone,” Brown recalls a cheerleader saying.
Then she jumped in the pool. Brown tried her best to fit in, playing volleyball, and copying how the other girls nibbled at the cheese, pepperoni, and sausage pizzas.
“I just remember eating it how my daughter would eat it,” Brown says, “little bites.” Music thumped from a stereo. The games segued into cheer routines, and Brown began to enjoy herself. “We had the first home game to practice for,” says Brown, still hoping to be chosen for the squad. From the stereo the sound of fiddling violins soared across the backyard. The girls lined up and waited for the song to kick in:
If it hadn’t been for Cotton-Eye Joe,
I’d been married a long time ago.
Brown danced to “Cotton-Eye Joe”—the 1995 record by the novelty country band Rednex—more times than any 33-year-old woman should ever have to. The routine was a series of hops and twirls. “It wasn’t rocket science,” Brown says. But spinning around in circles for an hour made the girls dizzy. They collapsed with laughter. The way she tells it, Brown hadn’t been that happy in years.
Just days after the pool party, Brown was at home when her cell phone jingled. It was a local number. She answered: “Who is this?”
It was the coach, she says, asking for Jaimi.
“Yes, hold on a second,” Brown said.
She held the phone away from her mouth for a moment.
“Hello!” she said, adopting her teenaged-girl voice.
Brown listened for a minute, then let out a scream.
“Oh my God!” she squealed. “That’s amazing!”
Even today, Wendy Brown’s face lights up when she talks of making the cheer team. When she walked into her first day at Ashwaubenon High on September 2, she had a spring in her step. She was thrilled when she received her locker, number 19.
In homeroom, Brown remembers, the teacher had to call “Jaimi” three times before she remembered to say she was present.
“You’re daydreaming, huh?” Brown recalls the teacher saying. “That’s okay. It’s your first day? And you’re new here?”
Brown nodded. One of the cheerleaders from the pool party was in the same homeroom and greeted her enthusiastically. “She said, ‘Oh my God, we have the same schedule! Oh my God, we’re in the same classes!’ ”
During choir, Brown says she did not try to conceal her singing talents. She says the teacher told her that her voice was “very mature,’ ” to which Brown replied, “I’ve been singing a long time.” Brown was immediately drafted for the senior choir. Court documents also confirm Brown’s academic ambitions: she reportedly told Demeny that she had “already covered the material in the integrated science course and could be successful in a high level.”
At lunchtime, Brown lined up with the rest of the students in the cafeteria. Brown says that she noticed some students making fun of a girl sitting on her own. “I just told her, ‘Just ignore them . . . they’re just jealous, you must have something that they don’t have.’ ” And then Brown says, she gave the girl a piece of advice: “Be who you are.”
That afternoon, Brown tried on her cheerleading uniform in the Jaguars locker room for the first time. It was deep green with white sleeves, accented with glistening gold piping. The pom-poms were green in one hand, gold in the other. On her chest was the giant gold “A” for Ashwaubenon, and “JAGUARS” in a felt, athletic font. “Pretty cool,” she remembers thinking. “I was like, ‘Wow, I’m in a cheerleader uniform.’ . . . It was like a trophy or award, like, ‘This is mine?’ ”
On September 8, a week into the school year, Associate Principal Dirk Ribbens reviewed the first round of truancy reports. A stickler for attendance, Ribbens noticed that one student had not returned after her first day. He contacted Don Penza, the police liaison officer for the high school. Penza and Ribbens did not respond to interview requests, but according to the criminal complaint, Penza marched straight over to the student’s home address. When no one answered, Ribbens contacted the student’s previous high school in Nevada. What they told him was confusing: Jaimi was there, taking classes. When school officials called the student’s home, they spoke to Judith, Brown’s mother. Judith told Ribbens that her daughter “has a history of identity-theft type crimes.”
Wendy Brown had already become undone by another deception, according to court documents. At her apartment building, police alleged that Brown had posed as the building manager and relieved a potential tenant, Teryn Cox, 21, of a $765.00 deposit. Today, Brown insists this wasn’t her. Either way, records show that Brown was inside the county jail when school investigators caught up with her.
Under questioning, Brown
admitted that she “wanted to get her high school degree and be a cheerleader because she had no childhood and was trying to regain a part of her life she missed.” News of her confession spread through the school at roughly 300 times the speed of regular high school gossip. “[I’m] still kinda like in shock,” wrote cheerleader Kelci Ashton on Facebook, on September 18, the day Wendy Brown first appeared in court. The press had a field day. “Pom-Pom Mom Goes to Extreme,” read a CBS headline. “Mom, that’s my cheerleading outfit!” joked the New York Daily News. Newspapers as far away as England ran with the story. “Everything was just done,” Brown says, tearfully. “It was devastating. I just wanted to get in a hole and die.” She would never cheer at a competitive game.
In court, the judge realized that Wendy Brown was not a master criminal, but suffering from a serious mental breakdown. A court-appointed psychiatrist who evaluated Brown, Dr. Ralph Baker, agreed, diagnosing her with bipolar II disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and two personality disorders. According to an attorney in court, Baker concluded, “She really convinced herself that she could make all this better by enrolling in high school and starting her life over again as her 15-year-old daughter . . . Her fantasy of finishing high school and becoming a cheerleader became a delusion.”
Court transcripts reveal an unusual courtroom exchange, in which the defense and prosecution team up to get Brown the help that she needed. “I think [a prison sentence] would be very, very detrimental to her,” conceded Deputy District Attorney John Luetscher. “Hopefully with treatment . . . she will be able to function in society without committing crimes.” Apart from the bounced check, no real harm was done, other than a deep embarrassment to the school that seems to last to this day; Ashwaubenon High School refused to comment for this story. Brown was found not guilty “by reason of mental disease or defect” to a charge of identity theft, and committed to the Winnebago mental health facility in Wisconsin for three years.
Wendy Brown became an urban legend at Ashwaubenon High School. “[The] buzz around school was just that it was hilarious that it even happened,” former student Hope Edelbeck tells me. She says a powderpuff football team named themselves “Wendy Brown,” and played in prison orange uniforms. But as that team of girls pretended to be Ashwaubenon High’s infamous jailbird, the real Wendy Brown sat in jail, waiting three months for her transfer to Winnebago.
“I started getting mad when I was in there,” Brown says. She decided to study for her GED course behind bars. This would be hard, said her tutor, without regular classes or teachers. Brown took the four-hour test six weeks after her arrest. Her tutor delivered her results to her jail cell. When Brown found out she passed, tears rolled down her cheeks.
While she was in the care of the mental institution, Brown was diagnosed with breast cancer. She went through chemotherapy under lockup, alone. On December 27, 2010, records confirm she had two serious operations to keep her alive. Slowly she recovered. She went to daily group therapy, climbed rocks, and learned to make peace with her past. She separated from her husband (“he should have been locked up, not me”) and three years later, she walked free.
Today, Brown says she has come to terms with being an outcast. Away from the bustling coffee shop, she comes alive, speaking louder, laughing, and joking. She says she likes to wear a Vikings shirt around Green Bay, a city where bankers, bums, and babies all wear Packers shirts on game day. People still whisper when she is recognized, but the only ones she hides from are the former cheerleaders. Wistfully, Brown says that she has no relationship with her daughter, Jaimi, now 23. Brown says that about two years ago, Jaimi had a child too, making her a grandmother. She hopes for reconciliation, but feels that the ball is in her daughter’s court.
Coach Johnson and the cheer team went on to win first- and second-place finishes in area cheer competitions, taking top honors in the 2009–10 Northern Regionals. Though Wendy passed her GED exam in jail in 2008, she had to wait to be released from the mental health institution to pick up her certificate. In 2013, she walked across the stage at a college in Wisconsin, wearing a gown, hat, and tassel. “It felt awesome,” she says.
Watching in the crowd, her father snapped photographs. At their celebration dinner, Joe Mueller gave her a graduation gift, a Keurig coffeemaker. “It was just something that I always wanted to see happen . . . It makes you feel good, right? Your kid finally made it.” He chuckles, and says: “It only took her 30 years.”
DAN BARRY
Hit Man
from the New York Times
The Buick sedan crawled the Providence streets. The April sky was baby blue, the air pleasant and cool. Perfect baseball weather. The man hunched in the backseat once lived for days like this.
When the maroon car stopped outside Pannone’s Market on Pocasset Avenue, its backseat passenger leapt out with uncommon grace, a mask over his handsome face, a shotgun in his large hands. An armed and disguised accomplice followed close behind.
The mom-and-pop employees ducked as the nimble gunman found his target, a bookmaker who had defied Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the coal-eyed head of New England organized crime. The wayward bookie caught it from three feet away, his unused gun clattering to rest a few inches from his outstretched hand. His sidekick was dropped near a shelf of canned tomatoes, his face rearranged by buckshot.
Neighborhood children were soon pressing their noses against the storefront window as investigators examined the two bodies splayed on the blood-slick floor. The Buick was already a memory.
The killer and his co-conspirators gathered that evening in a motel a few miles away. One of them later recalled how the athletic shooter, whose apt nickname was Pro, proudly tallied his personal stats. How he was first through the door, the one who hit the bookie, the one who killed the bodyguard trying to slip away.
It figured. The habits of old ballplayers die hard.
Newspapers from Burlington, North Carolina, to Walla Walla, Washington, told the same story: Maury “Pro” Lerner could hit.
“Maury Lerner crashed a triple off the clock and rode home on Jacoby’s single.” “Maury Lerner doubled in two runs Sunday night to lead Boise to a 7-to-5 victory over Pocatello in the Pioneer League play.” Maury Lerner singled, doubled, tripled, homered, won the game.
He could always hit. A six-foot-two prospect out of Brookline, Massachusetts, the scholarly Lerner batted .364 as a high school senior. The brief caption beneath his yearbook portrait conveyed a singular purpose (“Baseball, 2, 3, 4”) and that singular nickname: Pro. It was supposedly derived from his having been called “Little Professor” as a precocious child.
Lerner claimed to have enjoyed a happy childhood, spending part of his youth in a duplex on Verndale Street, about two miles from Fenway Park. But his son, Glen Lerner, disputes this assertion of boyhood happiness. Maury’s father, Glen says, never told Maury he loved him, never went to his ball games.
Maybe this explains things, he says.
Maybe.
Lerner signed with the Washington Senators at 18 and was dispatched to play entry-level ball in Erie, Pennsylvania. He batted a miserable .167 in 13 games and spent the next few years in the Marines.
But he returned in 1957 to join the Milwaukee Braves franchise in Boise, Idaho, where he smacked 158 hits in 127 games and batted an impressive .328 (“Second-sacker Maury Lerner got the vital hit, a double to right-center”). Then, up in Yakima, Washington, he hit .348 (“Lerner’s drive was against the right field fence”). Then, over in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, he hit .372 for the Wilson Tobs in North Carolina (“Lerner popped one over the short center wall”).
Pittsburgh’s front office was watching, just in case Bill Mazeroski at second or Dick Groat at short got injured. This middle infielder coming up, this Lerner kid, seemed respectful, earnest, even erudite. A real gentleman, except when he wasn’t.
Playing in Nicaragua during the 1959–60 winter season, Lerner was hitting close to .400 and having a good time. So good, in fact, tha
t his manager, the major leaguer Earl Torgeson, announced plans to cut him for missed curfews and other transgressions.
But then Torgeson and Lerner teamed up against some Cuban players, after Lerner complained about too many brushback pitches. Torgeson got into a fistfight with a Cuban player and resigned. Lerner attacked a Cuban pitcher and a Cuban umpire but kept on playing. And hitting.
Frank Kostro, a future major leaguer known for his pinch-hitting, competed against Lerner that winter. “I was hitting well over .300,” he says. “But I wasn’t even close to the leading hitter—who was Maury Lerner.”
Lerner returned to the United States with a batting title, a reputation for being a good but uptight teammate—and a baby wildcat he had smuggled out in a satchel, according to the book Memories of Winter Ball, by Lou Hernández.
He also seemed to carry a self-destructive fear of success. Family lore has it that he sabotaged a chance to move up to the Pirates after Mazeroski got hurt—it is true, at least, that Mazeroski, a future Hall of Famer, incurred a couple of injuries at the time—by picking a fight with his manager.
“One of his biggest regrets,” Glen Lerner says. “Whenever he was going to get promoted, he would do something to undermine it. He didn’t know how to explain it.”
Maury Lerner was 24, then 25, then 26—middle-aged in minor league time. A veteran bush leaguer making about $700 a few months of the year. A onetime prospect with no prospects.
He still managed to stand out, though, by reading books, watching his diet, and exercising with weights. This was at a time when almost no one in baseball concentrated on strength conditioning, according to Gene Michael, the former Yankees shortstop and general manager who played three games with Lerner on the Savannah Pirates, in Georgia, in 1960.
