I drove to the dealership to find Mario again at his desk. I told him I had brought him the article, and he looked at me as though he had never seen me before in his life. He told me I could get my paperwork at the front desk. I left him the article, certain that by the end of the day it would be in the trash. And when I read my lease, the rate was not what Mario had quoted, or maybe it was; I had not been paying close attention. I felt humiliated, though here also was proof: you can write about sociopaths, you can read all about them, and chances are you will not recognize one when he is taking you in. And while it is the case that my husband is harder to fool than most people, Mario did not that day target him. Also, there is no online edition of The Economist in German.
I wondered, after being taken in by Mario, if sociopaths played long games or only short ones, where they got a quick hit off your shame. I knew about the superficial charm of the sociopath, the stories that rarely checked out, the unwillingness to admit wrongdoing. Not every sociopath is a killer—most are not—but they are all to a degree out to con others, taking genuine pleasure in getting one over on the rest of us dupes, saddled as we are by emotions and a conscience.
“Psychopaths take great personal pride in their deceptions and extract tremendous joy from them,” Dave Cullen wrote in Columbine, his exploration of the Columbine massacre and shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the latter a textbook sociopath. “He’s not just conning you with a scheme, he’s conning you with his life. His entire personality is a fabrication, with the purpose of deceiving suckers like you.”
We become grist for the sociopath’s mill, in other words; we become his fuel. Dr. Hervey Cleckley, in his seminal work on the psychopathic personality, The Mask of Sanity, posited that what sociopaths lack is “soul quality.” Another work I came across called sociopaths “soul eaters or Psychophagic.” Reading this, I pictured Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son and considered the idea that sociopaths must feed on others because they lack souls of their own.
“Psychopaths tend to see any social exchange as a ‘feeding opportunity,’ a contest or a test of wills in which there can be only one winner,” wrote Robert D. Hare, PhD, in Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. “Their motives are to manipulate and take, ruthlessly and without remorse.”
Contrary to a crop of recent books that claimed such qualities make for successful CEOs, consuming the faith, time, love, and money of others, however essential to the sociopath, proves thin gruel.
“Why are all sociopaths not in positions of great power?” Dr. Martha Stout asks in her bestselling book, The Sociopath Next Door. “Why do they not win all the time? For they do not. Instead, most of them are obscure people, and limited to dominating their young children, or a depressed spouse, or perhaps a few employees or coworkers. Not an insignificant number of them are in jail. . . . They can rob and torment us temporarily, yes, but they are, in effect, failed lives.”
I had started out determined to learn about Amanda, but as more people contacted me wanting to talk, it was Jason they wished to talk about.
Isaac had denied interview requests from the press immediately after the kids were dropped from the bridge. He had been a solid friend of Jason’s for eight years, and he was not going to go blabbing just because someone wanted to stick a microphone in his face. It had also been a confusing time. There was no playbook that tells a person how to act when your best friend’s wife murders their child, and so Isaac figured he would take Jason’s lead. Whatever Jason needed to get through this awful time, and whatever would be best for Trinity, Isaac would do. But he never heard from Jason after Eldon’s murder, and now, fifteen months later, questions had rushed into the void.
Three days after our initial conversation, Isaac and I sat in my backyard on what would prove to be the hottest day of the year in Portland. Isaac had a dome-shaped head he kept shaved, small ears, eyes with half-moon lids, and a wide gap between his front teeth. He was heavyset and borderline diabetic, and he’d brought his own Diet Pepsis to drink. He drank a lot of them as we sweated through the afternoon.
“He’s the only person to this day that I’ve ever been with that can pull the wool over my eyes, you know?” he said of Jason. “I still don’t see how he did it. I was so mad at myself. I was like, man, how can you be that stupid?”
Isaac should not have been an easy person to fool. Raised mostly by his grandmother in a rough section of northeast Portland, he had grown up around gang activity and drugs but had never been in any real trouble himself. He was thirty-five now and had spent his entire career at Ricoh, where he’d started not long before Jason in 2001.
“One of the first things he told me was, ‘You gotta see my wife; she’s beautiful. She’s Filipino, blah, blah, blah,’” Isaac said.
Jason almost immediately invited Isaac to the couple’s home for dinner. Isaac was impressed with Amanda’s cooking. She made Thai food, tacos, and the best biscuits and gravy he had ever eaten. He appreciated the homemade meals. He appreciated, too, Jason’s honesty about some troubles he’d had.
“He told me that he blew through the money,” Isaac said of the stock Jason had inherited. “He told me, ‘Man, I used to have [drug] problems, really potent,’ but he never went into specifics.”
Isaac noticed small elisions, like Jason claiming he’d be late for work because he had a meeting when Isaac had Jason’s schedule on his computer and knew there was no meeting. But friends cover for each other. Isaac understood how Jason might need to cut corners after Trinity and then Eldon were born, considering Amanda’s chronic overdrawing of their bank account.
“He would have to borrow money from me to get the account caught up—and then she would do it again,” Isaac said. Her spending and her refusal to get a job, Jason said, were the reasons they could never catch up financially. Jason mentioned, too, how this was putting a strain on his relationship with his mother. She was always loaning them money and had also bought the family a minivan, a Honda Odyssey.
What did Isaac know about the cost of raising kids? Nothing, so he believed his friend, though he did not see how Jason’s own spending habits were helping.
“You’d think people with financial problems would do things to make them better. He was doing the opposite,” Isaac said, recalling Jason’s obsession with expensive food, how he would only buy “the freshest cuts of beef.”
Isaac was cool with things not quite adding up. He believed in having his buddy’s back. Jason had a friendly wife and fun little kids who liked having Isaac around. Isaac was at the Smith home for dinner, he reminded me, “at least twice a week, with the whole family.”
“I love Trinity; that was my buddy,” he said. Isaac loved the way Eldon spoke, mispronouncing words the way three- and four-year-olds will, including the name of the Nerds candies Isaac used to bring him, asking as soon as Isaac came through the door, “Do you have any nuuuwhds?”
“Yup, that was my boy,” Isaac said. “Every time I come over, he’d run to the door, ‘Uncle Isaac’s here!’ Then we’d go to the store and run off from Jason. I’d push him in the cart through the store. Jason’s like, ‘Dude, what are you guys doing?’ We’d kind of ignore him. It was really weird, but I never got the . . .”
Sweat was running down Isaac’s head. “I just never got that father-son relationship, that ‘I’m glad to have a son,’” he said. “He was always like, ‘Eldon, don’t do this’ and ‘Eldon, don’t do that. You’re not listening! Go to your room!’ . . . Once Eldon was gone, he spoke passionately about him, but he never did when he was around. I mean, I’d be stoked to have a son, but he wasn’t.”
I mentioned that in court Jason had said of Eldon, “I would whisper in his ear, he was my favorite person in the world.”
“That is not true. That’s not true at all,” Isaac said. “I think that’s what he really feels guilty about, that he didn’t use his time wisely with Eldon.”
While Isaac liked being made to feel part of the Smit
h family, there were times when he felt uncomfortable, or as though he had misread situations. For instance, Jason would make Gavin eat hot peppers, telling Isaac it was “a running joke” he had with the boy, who to Isaac looked “afraid of [Jason], kind of jumpy.” Jason told Isaac that Amanda was not disciplining the kids and this was why he needed to be hard on them.
“He even had me snowballed,” Isaac said. “Like, if he didn’t rule with an iron fist, there was chaos in his house.”
Isaac attributed Amanda’s attempts to be an obedient wife to what he saw of her parents.
“I don’t want to say brainwashed, but then, I do want to; some religious people are brainwashed,” he said. “Her dad didn’t even know me and says, ‘Isaac, you need the Lord in your life.’ My dad’s a pastor, and I go, ‘Yeah, I’m a Bible child. I know all about religion and right now I’m not choosing to go that route.’ So that’s how he was. And the mom, ironically, the one time I met her, her and Jason was having a fight because Jason wouldn’t let her see Gavin. He said that she was butting in their business all the time, so they got into a shouting match, ‘I’m going to see my grandchild and you can’t stop me!’ What I thought was really weird was, if I am telling you that you can’t see your grandchild, and you’re not the parent, that’s the first bullet that’s coming out of my gun. She didn’t! Which I thought was really weird. You’re a stepparent? I go over your head. . . . But she didn’t. She accepted that [the decision would be Jason’s].”
Isaac knew of one time Amanda went over Jason’s head. Isaac graduated from Portland State University in 2005, after taking classes on and off for twelve years. When Amanda congratulated him, he told her getting the degree had been a struggle.
“I’m not the smartest guy around. Like Jason, who did it in four years,” he said. “She goes, ‘Isaac, Jason didn’t graduate from college—and if your job knew that, he’d be in a lot of trouble.’ I said, ‘Yeah, he would.’ He told me he graduated in 1997.”
This lie ate at Isaac. He sought out a University of Oregon 1997 graduation program. Jason was not on it. Isaac asked me in the backyard if I knew whether Jason graduated from the school in 1997, or any year. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, which provides degree verifications for most postsecondary institutions in the United States, Jason Frederick Smith did not graduate from the University of Oregon, nor is there record of his having attended classes there.
In March 2005, Ricoh transferred Jason to Hawaii in order to oversee the mail room needs of the Kamehameha School District. Isaac did not know much about what happened to the Smith family on Oahu, other than that Jason continued to occasionally borrow money from Isaac and, despite his sometimes-spotty work attendance, proved to be a prized employee.
“We lost a major account when he was no longer around,” said Isaac. “They preferred to work with him.”
When the family returned to Portland, Isaac was again a frequent dinner guest. The kids, he said, were “always well behaved.” Jason and Amanda, not so much.
“He was cussing at her, like, ‘You’re being a bitch. You’re being a dumb bitch,’” he said, and that by this time, Amanda had changed. “That’s when the drinking really increased. I never knew it was that bad. It was more like she went from more being herself to trying to please, you know what I mean?”
The memory, the way it was now rearranging, looked to pain Isaac. “I just felt like she was going out of her way, like walking on eggshells,” he said, and, later, “On Law & Order, they would say, this is abused woman syndrome. Because she was. I witnessed it with my own eyes. I never witnessed no physical violence, but it was mental abuse.”
As people who live through the same tragedy need to keep telling the story in order to understand what happened, so sometimes do journalists who walk similar beats. This was the case when I interviewed Walter Kirn about his book Blood Will Out, the true story of how Kirn was taken in by a sociopath and double murderer who’d for years posed as a philanthropist named Clark Rockefeller, of the Rockefeller dynasty. Kirn had his reasons for communicating with Rockefeller, including believing he had lucked into a good story, before learning the person he was dealing with was a con man and killer whose real name was Christian Gerhartsreiter.
Kirn and I spoke in 2014, in the Oregonian newspaper’s offices. The paper was about to sell its iconic building, and all of the furniture on the fourth floor was gone but for two chairs my editor helpfully placed there. Kirn and I sat knee to knee and discussed how sociopaths walk among us, how they have jobs and husbands and wives, but that most of the time their lives end badly.
“They tend to overplay their hands, finally,” he said.
I agreed. John Wayne Gacy had been executed; other sociopaths I’d written about had torpedoed their careers by piling on lie after lie. Still, resentment can have a long life, and even after the sociopath’s death or dishonor, people can remain angry and astonished at their having been taken in, as were some of the people who spoke to me about Amanda and, increasingly, about Jason.
There was not really any way, Kirn and I agreed, to avoid being the target of sociopaths, with their terrible talent to identify and play to whatever is important to a person, to shape-shift into what that person wants to see. We do not assume the motives of others are custom made to fool us, that they will dangle a morsel made of our best morality until we take the bait.
“We project our own humanity onto them,” said Kirn. “We keep on in this fantasy that they have some resemblance to us.”
Having no fixed identity, or none they think will get them what they want, sociopaths try on masks, emulating qualities others seem to find admirable. Clark Rockefeller rescued sick animals, which made him appear selfless. Gacy dressed as a clown and entertained children in the hospital. Nursing others provided cover for the less admirable things they were up to.
“They do like to take care of sick people and to ostensibly seem to be feeling,” Kirn said. “They’ll sit there and tell you how devastated they are, and they’ll use all the right words, and maybe even emote, but it’s overdone or just off in some way. Because emoting is something they are imitating.”
This inability to love and to feel joy struck me as deeply sad. To constantly mirror the emotions of others in order to get by must be exhausting, and lonely. And yet it was difficult to muster sympathy when you were the person who’s had your soul eaten.
The last time Isaac saw the Smith family was Easter 2009. He brought the kids Easter baskets. He never saw Eldon alive again. He found out about his murder on the news and became frantic. He called Jason, who did not answer. He called Ryan Barron, who was with Jason.
“Jason gets on the phone and says, ‘She killed my son.’ That’s all he said: ‘She killed my son,’” said Isaac. “I said, ‘I’m so sorry, man.’ He just hung up.”
Isaac found out about Eldon’s memorial in an email sent through Ricoh’s corporate offices. He rode down to Eugene with a few people from work. Jason shook his hand at the memorial, but that was it. Trinity ran into his arms.
“She said, ‘Don’t cry, Uncle Isaac; it’s okay,’” Isaac said. “She was a stronger person than I was. I was just bawling as soon as I saw her, I was so heartbroken.”
Eldon was laid out in the front of the Eugene Faith Center. Isaac watched Ryan Barron go up and said his final good-byes; Ryan would later say he thought Eldon looked like “a waxed doll.” Isaac could not bring himself to go up to the casket, but he could see Eldon there, in his little suit.
Isaac wanted to stand and say a few words at the memorial. He was not given the chance. Of the several hundred mourners, only Jason was permitted to speak.
“He got up and spoke, and it was like his words came out clearly, like he was giving a presentation,” Isaac said. “‘I’m going to dedicate the rest of my life to my son, blah, blah, blah,’ but it wasn’t heartfelt. It was kind of like, ‘Hey, I’m a Fortune 500 CEO, and this is what we need to do to get our numbers up.’ The people I rode to t
he funeral with, coworkers, were like, ‘How the hell did he do that?’”
Isaac and I had been in my yard three hours and were soaked with sweat. He had been exerting himself all this time, trying to work something to the surface.
“I feel hurt by both parties in this, you know?” he said. “I’m hurt that Amanda did this, and I want to say, I’m more hurt by Jason. . . . If I had money to buy a commercial, I would send one out right now to Jason to tell him how unhappy and upset I am.”
Isaac made a thick sound in his throat, twice. “But he won’t talk to me.”
After Amanda was sentenced, people offered information that both confirmed and countered any ideas of revenge. They’d seen horrible things happen to the children, to Jason, and to Amanda, yet had felt stymied to help or had once believed lies they no longer believed. Five people used the word “toxic” to describe Jason and Amanda’s marriage. It was as though two elements that should never have been mixed were mixed, with predictably volatile results.
Thomas Parrish spent thirty minutes with the couple before needing to get out.
He and Jason had been friends since fifth grade. They lived a block and a half from each other and went through elementary school, middle school, and high school together. Jason’s family was well off; their house was stocked with cookies and chips, which came in handy when the boys became high school stoners. Except, Jason’s mom did not play that way; she did not like Jason’s friends hanging out. When Thomas heard her coming home, he’d book out the back way and over the fence. That lady was intimidating.
Jason was not intimidating. He was a supergenerous guy, and loyal, too. He and Thomas and their friends called themselves the Trooper Posse, after the Isuzu Trooper they used to ride in. The posse was mostly African American at a time when Eugene was 90 percent white and 1 percent black, as Thomas was. Some students at Sheldon High School at the time were tagging lockers “SFP”—Students for Prejudice. There were fistfights, and people were getting suspended; it would have been easy for Jason to hang with his more usual clique, mostly rich white kids whose families had been in Eugene a few generations, but he stuck tight with his new crew. He lived kind of a charmed life, played on the football team, dated the most beautiful girls, including Keli Townsend, and treated his friends to fancy lunches at bistro Marché when most kids from Sheldon High were headed to McDonald’s. Even as a young guy, Jason liked nice things; he dressed well and carried Visine and cologne so he would not look or smell like the weed he’d been smoking.
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