To Lynn Bergfalk, it was the first explanation that made sense. “The whole situation, from my perspective, is that the hanging is totally inexplicable unless there was an external factor like a death threat,” he told the local paper. “They were a happy family, with no reason to do something like this.” To the sponsors of the lowland-Lao families, it was an explanation that made no sense at all. The Lao all denied that anybody had said anything that could even have been misconstrued as a threat. Their sponsors believed them. They pointed out that the Lao had visited the Yangs two or three times, that Theng Pao had used the widower’s phone to call his cousin in California, that the Lao families had been present, taking snapshots, when the Yangs were visited by friends from northeast Iowa. The Lao’s sponsors were concerned that the Lao were being unfairly maligned and perhaps even endangered: a number of out-of-town Hmong, the noted guerrilla fighters, had begun to show up in Fairfield to see if they could be of assistance. Lynn Bergfalk said it was nonsense for anybody to be concerned about the possibility of retaliation, but for a week or so after the hangings Lao women who were alone while their husbands worked night shifts found themselves with visitors from among the sponsors. Some people in Fairfield thought that what the Baptists had found—during a time when they could be expected to be feeling both grief-stricken and guilty—was not an explanation but a scapegoat. Some Baptists thought that the other sponsors were refusing to consider the possibility that their refugees could lie to them—that Theng Pao and Yi Ly had been telling the truth. As positions hardened, Keith Lingwall, a pastor who is friendly by nature and ecumenical by policy, found himself uncomfortable in the presence of Lynn Bergfalk.
—
The county attorney of Jefferson County, a young man named Edwin F. Kelly, had a complicated legal situation to deal with. He was satisfied, after a time, that he knew what had happened that night at the Yangs’ bungalow, but he was not optimistic about finding out for certain exactly why it happened. He could find no evidence, other than the story told by the Yangs, that a threat had been involved. That still left the question of whether to prosecute Theng Pao and Yi Ly—both of whom had presumably tried to hang their children as well as themselves. Some of the people involved in Iowa refugee work contended that, considering the unchallenged authority of the father in a Hmong household, Yi Ly could hardly have been expected to do other than her husband had instructed her to do. Kelly believed that both Theng Pao and Yi Ly were lacking in what lawyers call mens rea—criminal intent. There was another consideration that weighed heavily with Kelly. Whatever crime had been committed had been committed against the children, and Kelly believed that the deportation of the Yang family—an inevitable consequence of a felony conviction—would bring the victims not justice but simply more suffering.
Among the material furnished him by the Iowa Refugee Service Center, Kelly came across a paper by a San Francisco psychologist named J. Donald Cohon which dealt with instances of “trauma syndrome” found in refugees throughout the world. Kelly underlined some of the symptoms of trauma syndrome that were familiar from the investigation of what Theng Pao had been like around the time of the hanging—paranoid tendencies, for instance, and inability to concentrate and loss of appetite and fear that something could happen to members of his family. Kelly’s presentation to the grand jury stressed the possibility that Theng Pao had been suffering from trauma syndrome, and that, Theng Pao being Yi Ly’s only source of information in Fairfield, his version of reality had become her own. The grand jury returned no indictment. The Yangs were resettled among Hmong in another part of the state, in an arrangement that included some outside supervision of their children. It seemed a humane, Iowa sort of solution—what Keith Lingwall has called “a kind door-closing on a sad and tragic situation.” There were presumably people in Fairfield who believed that the Yangs had got off too easy, but, like the people in Iowa with doubts about whether refugees should be there in the first place, they did not make a public issue of it. Everybody seemed satisfied. The way some of the Baptists would describe Kelly’s solution, though, was not as “a kind door-closing” but as “a convenient answer that lets everybody off the hook.”
—
“It’s easier for everyone else to say ‘Let’s end this chapter,’ ” Bergfalk said recently. In the view of some Baptists, the people of Fairfield, comfortable with their humane solution, ended the chapter without investigating thoroughly enough the possibility that Theng Pao Yang was driven to his appalling decision by a threat. Although Lynn Bergfalk has not made any accusations against the Lao families personally, it is apparent to his colleagues in the ministry that he has never accepted Kelly’s notion that what Theng Pao did can be explained by a paper written by a psychologist in San Francisco. The reluctance of the Baptists to discount the possibility that the Lao played some role in So Yang’s death was bolstered by the Hmong who came to Fairfield just after the incident. To them, the threat Theng Pao described had a dreadful resonance. “It’s the sort of thing that would happen at home,” Tou-Fu Vang, a Hmong leader, said recently. To Tou-Fu Vang, the fact that the Lao visited the Yang family is not an indication that they were friendly, but an indication that they had designs on Yi Ly. Why else would Lao visit Hmong?
Publicly, there is no argument in Fairfield about the Yangs. Privately, there are hard feelings. A Methodist refers to the Yangs’ sponsors as “those Baptist people” in the same tone Lao might use to speak of Hmong. A little girl who goes to the Methodist church is upset because a Baptist friend says, “That old man your church brought caused all the trouble.” A clergyman like Keith Lingwall is troubled because he realizes that the door never quite closed. “I need to go visit with Lynn,” Lingwall said not long ago. He did, but the visit did not change the views of either of them. “The truth, no matter how unpleasant, has to be faced,” Lynn Bergfalk has said. There are expressions of compassion in Fairfield for the anguish the Baptists must have suffered over the death of So Yang, but there is also talk about what the Baptists might have done wrong—the possibility that they “smothered” the Yangs or treated them like pets, the possibility that Theng Pao’s self-respect was threatened, the possibility that the Yangs were insulted rather than pleased at, say, having their laundry done for them. There are people in Fairfield who, out of irritation with the Baptists or a paucity of Christian charity or a sincere belief that they are facing an unpleasant truth, say that So Yang would be alive today if the Baptists had been willing to risk having to pay an extra installation charge on a telephone.
—
Nobody knows, of course, whether a telephone would have made any difference. Nobody knows what caused Theng Pao to decide that he and his family should die. In Fairfield, though, there is no shortage of theories. It may have been, some people say, that Theng Pao, in addition to his other problems, was suffering from an awful failure in communication. What he heard from his hosts, after all, had to be translated from English into Lao, a language that Theng Pao may have understood imperfectly, by someone who only began learning English last spring. Perhaps Kesone Sisomphane’s dramatic message about breast-feeding gradually grew in Theng Pao’s mind into the impression that his wife was going to be abducted. Perhaps, through the muddle of languages or his own disorientation, what Theng Pao understood from the changes announced in English class that day was that he had somehow been rejected as a student of English. Perhaps the notion that everyone would die anyway had come from a Lao New Testament Bergfalk had given him. It is possible to envision Theng Pao as someone trapped in a horrifying isolation—receiving information only through the short circuits of half-understood languages and his own confusion, communicating only through people he mistrusted. It is possible to envision him entertaining friends or talking to his first cousin in California on the telephone. It may be that Theng Pao Yang, bewildered and unsure of the language, understood a joke, perhaps even a cruel joke, as a threat. It may be that Theng Pao was, in fact, threatened with death by the Lao. It may be that
he was suffering from trauma syndrome.
“We were doing everything we knew how,” Madelon Heckenberg said recently. “Maybe we just didn’t have the know-how.” Lynn Bergfalk has given a lot of thought to what the First Baptist Church might have done differently in its sponsorship of the Yangs—whether finding a Hmong interpreter at the beginning would have made any difference, whether searching out the Hmong families in Ottumwa would have made any difference. He has given a lot of thought to whether or not a tendency to believe in the likelihood of some external factor like a threat is simply a way of dealing with feelings of guilt. National agencies involved with the resettlement of the Yangs are considering the possibility that Hmong ought to be settled only in clusters and that sponsors ought to be more carefully briefed on the cultural background of arriving refugees and that refugee agencies ought to figure out how to communicate with each other more effectively. The people in Fairfield who noticed some signs of stress in Theng Pao wonder what might have happened if they had expressed serious concern to his sponsors, who saw only smiles. “We every last one of us feel guilty about this,” Barbara Hill said recently. It may be, of course, that there is no reason for anyone to feel guilty. No isolated Hmong has ever before attempted suicide. What would the Baptists have done differently if they had been experts in Hmong culture? Perhaps what happened to the Yangs was caused by something from their past in Asia. Perhaps it came from a combination of the reasons people in Fairfield have offered—or from none of them at all. Barbara Hill sometimes thinks that the Asians she teaches are not as intent as Westerners on finding reasons for everything. “We can’t tolerate a void,” she said not long ago. “We have to find a cause. It may be that we’re trying to find reasons for something Theng Pao never intended there to be a reason for.”
Among Friends
* * *
Savannah, Georgia
FEBRUARY 1981
Publicly, George Mercer IV was reported missing on February 7, 1980. His picture ran above a small item in both the Savannah Morning News and the Savannah Evening Press. The item said he had been missing since January 29. It described him as being twenty-two years old, five feet eight inches tall, about a hundred and fifty-five pounds. It asked anyone having information about him to telephone the Savannah Police Department. The picture showed a young man with the sort of thick mustache and blow-dried hair that make a lot of twenty-two-year-olds seen at racquetball clubs or singles bars or pleasure-boat marinas look pretty much alike to the unpracticed eye. The item in the two papers said little about George Mercer IV beyond giving his physical description, but not many people in Savannah needed to be told who he was. The Mercers have long been a prominent family in Savannah—a city particularly conscious of prominent families. In Atlanta, a successful businessman who wants to upgrade his background beyond simply awarding posthumous commissions to a few Civil War ancestors may allow his neighbors to infer that his family was originally from Savannah, Georgia’s first settlement. The Mercers are the sort of family he would be trying to suggest—the sort of family whose discussions of military forebears tend to focus not on the Civil War but on the American Revolution. The Mercers are among the families that people in Savannah sometimes allow themselves to refer to as “the bluebloods”—a phrase that would be difficult to utter without a smile in Atlanta. Bluebloods still have enough power to be taken seriously in Savannah, partly because Savannah has been the sort of place that respects their credentials, partly because Savannah has not been the kind of place that attracts a lot of ambitious newcomers who might shoulder them aside. Until their family company, which manufactured Great Dane truck trailers, was bought up by a conglomerate several years ago, the Mercers were one of Savannah’s major industrial employers. George Mercer III, who did not remain with Great Dane after the purchase, is the chairman of the board of Savannah’s Memorial Hospital and a former member of the Chatham County Commission. Although no one named Mercer is a force in the business life of Savannah these days, the Mercers remain the Mercers—stalwarts of the Oglethorpe Club, the kind of family that can ordinarily sort out any difficulty with a telephone call. It could be assumed by readers of the Savannah Morning News and Evening Press that the police would spare no effort in trying to find George Mercer IV. As it happened, there was another agency interested in the search for George Mercer IV—the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI had reason to believe that he had been kidnapped.
On River Street, where bars and restaurants have opened in restored warehouses in the past several years, FBI agents were already showing bartenders a photograph of George Mercer IV. The people George Mercer IV went around with often ended up on River Street late in the evening—sometimes early in the evening. “They have a lot of time on their hands,” someone who knows them said recently. Some of Mercer’s friends were from his childhood—people who had gone to the same private schools and the same debutante parties—and some were just the people a single young man might meet over a pitcher of beer on River Street or at a party after a rugby match or during the quiet exchange of marijuana that young men with time on their hands think of as routine these days. The time they put in on River Street—or in similar bars near Armstrong State College, on the south side of Savannah—was not a matter of respite from working their way up in their chosen fields. Most of them had not got around to choosing a field. They tended to be young men who had put in a semester of college here and a semester of college there, but not enough semesters to have reached the point of selecting a major. Even those who still had recourse to the family’s refrigerator or its speedboats needed spending money, but the jobs they took to get it tended to be temporary or seasonal or part-time. Their ambitions for the future often seemed to settle on schemes for getting rich rather quickly, perhaps through being on the ground floor of some technological breakthrough in communications. For a while, George Mercer IV and a childhood friend talked of opening a videodisc outlet in Atlanta. They also talked about obtaining the Southeast regional franchise for a new electronic method of producing advertising spots.
George Mercer IV had a lot of enthusiasm for the schemes. His friends thought of him as rather gullible. He had been slow in school, with learning problems that included dyslexia. Once, when he was putting in a semester or so at LaGrange College, someone matched up the information that he liked to compose songs on the guitar with the information that his great-uncle was the songwriter Johnny Mercer, and the publicity resulted in the scheduling of a couple of public appearances. At the last minute, though, Mercer withdrew. He had decided he wasn’t ready. His father diagnosed the problem as the sort of preperformance nervousness he calls “buck fever.” After LaGrange, Mercer tended to play the guitar in public only when there were just four or five people left at the party. He spent some time at Armstrong State and at the night school of the University of Georgia, in Athens. Toward the end of 1979, while back in Savannah living with his parents, he got a job selling vacuum cleaners. It may not have appeared to be an appropriate job for a Mercer, but, as it happened, George Mercer IV seemed to enjoy selling vacuum cleaners. Some of his friends thought that the job had done a lot for George’s self-confidence. His father agreed. He was hoping that sooner or later George Mercer IV might move from selling vacuum cleaners to selling Great Dane trailers. Then George Mercer IV disappeared.
Demands for ransom came almost immediately. There were notes. There were telephone calls. The instructions tended to be complicated, even bizarre. George Mercer III was instructed to draw a circle in orange spray paint at a certain intersection to indicate his cooperation. There were instructions to take the ransom—forty-two thousand dollars—in a small motorboat down the Ogeechee River, flying a flag with a yellow triangle sewn onto a field of green. At one point, the ransom was actually left in a wooded area, but nobody picked it up. When the item reporting George Mercer IV missing appeared in the Savannah Morning News and Evening Press, FBI agents did not even know whether he was dead or alive—but they did have a pretty goo
d hunch about who might have written the extortion notes. When they walked up and down River Street showing George Mercer’s picture, they also carried with them a picture of Michael Harper.
Nobody has ever described Michael Harper as slow or gullible. “He could put anything over on anybody he wanted to,” someone who knew him told the investigators. A slim, bearded young man about the age of George Mercer IV, Harper had grown up in a suburb of Savannah, the son of a certified public accountant. He didn’t have as many semesters of college as Mercer had, but people he came in contact with regularly described him as brilliant and accomplished—a wizard with electronics and math and computers, an expert at scuba diving and flying airplanes, a talker so glib that he had worked as a disc jockey when barely out of high school. They also described him as somewhat mysterious. No one seemed to know precisely where he lived. The jobs he mentioned holding ran from assistant manager of a fast-food chicken outlet to operator of what he described as a hush-hush project at Hunter Army Airfield called Quest Laboratories. The get-rich-quick schemes he discussed with friends were more complicated than opening a videodisc outlet—shadowy mail-order deals, for instance, and a plan to use a Savannah Police Department badge to hoodwink a couple of dope dealers out of some marijuana. One of Harper’s schemes landed him in jail. In 1974, when he was only seventeen, he had been sentenced to fourteen months for trying to extort forty-five hundred dollars from a former neighbor by threatening to kill the man and his entire family. Later, in Augusta, he was convicted of theft by deception and given a probated sentence. Roger McLaughlin, one of the FBI agents assigned to the Mercer kidnapping, had worked on the 1974 extortion case, and he thought he recognized Harper’s style. Within a couple of days, the FBI had ascertained that Harper had moved back to Savannah from Augusta and that he knew George Mercer IV. They had met at a rugby match.
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