Killings

by Calvin Trillin

  Louis acknowledged nothing, but when Dyer learned of the interview he agreed to talk with Fredrickson. Eventually, Dyer admitted having initiated sexual encounters with Louis. He said that on a number of occasions he and Louis had engaged in mutual masturbation. When Fredrickson reinterviewed Louis, he gathered that Louis had felt trapped. When his mother had found him reluctant to accompany Dyer on outings, he hadn’t known how to explain his reluctance without telling her what he couldn’t bear to say. He had been worried about displeasing the man who had settled into a role so much like a father’s. He had been worried about his job and his hope for a career in the Forest Service. Louis’s story about what had happened on the outings matched Dyer’s story. Another boy—a boy named Keith, who had met Dyer at a church supper—told a similar story. Charges of sexual abuse were filed against Ed Dyer.

  For a while, it looked as if prosecuting Dyer might necessitate Louis’s testifying in open court. Louis was obviously reluctant. The prospect of being labeled a homosexual filled him with dread. “He wanted to cooperate with the process,” a clinical social worker who saw him at the time has said, “but he wanted to keep it a secret.” Still, both Louis and his mother were determined that he would testify if that was required to convict Ed Dyer. It turned out not to be necessary. After protracted negotiations, a plea bargain was made: in return for Dyer’s guilty plea to two charges of second-degree sexual abuse, the district attorney of Deschutes County agreed to recommend concurrent sentences and to drop any investigation of similar charges. Instead of a trial, there was a sentencing hearing—in Bend, the seat of Deschutes County—to consider questions of punishment and treatment and restitution.

  There was testimony from the mothers of both boys involved. “Before I knew all this had happened, I had said that I thought Ed would be blessed for his interest in my son,” Keith’s mother said. “But I know now that that’s not true, because his interest was selfish. It wasn’t to help my son or to love him. He simply used him.” Susan Conner answered questions about how much had been spent on counseling for Louis, who still seemed to her depressed. Although the one news item carried in local papers about the case, a tiny item in The Redmond Spokesman, had not mentioned the names of the boys involved, she said that some kids at school had brought up the subject with Louis. “He doesn’t want to go anywhere on weekends,” she said. “He doesn’t want to be around other high school kids, because he thinks they’re going to talk to him about this, and because of his depression.” She had decided, she said, that she was in need of counseling as well: “My son blames me for this, because I encouraged him to go with Ed, because I thought Ed was such a wonderful person.”

  Most of what the judge heard, though, was mitigating evidence presented by Dyer’s lawyer. Tona Dyer, speaking in a soft, sad voice, said that her husband was a kind man and a good father. A couple of men who knew Dyer through the Boy Scouts testified that he was sincere and law-abiding and had made a great sacrifice of his time and energy in the years he spent as scoutmaster of Troop 26. It was brought out that Ed Dyer had already suffered for his crimes. He had, in effect, lost his job—the Forest Service had allowed him to take early retirement—and that job had been the center of his life. (“It meant a lot to me to work in that job,” Dyer testified. “I really enjoyed it. It was a way of life. It wasn’t just a job.”) He had been forced to leave Scouting. He had been excommunicated by his church. Although two of the counselors who met with Dyer had come to the conclusion that he was without remorse—they thought he regretted only that he got caught—Tona Dyer testified that they were mistaken. “He’s been very depressed, and he is very remorseful,” she said. “He just sits around or lays around….He feels really bad because of what he’s done and how people feel toward him. He feels really bad. And he feels bad for the people he’s hurt. More than, I think, anyone realizes.” Mrs. Dyer said she had known about her husband’s problem for years. “It does bother me,” she said. “But I feel that you don’t always look at the thing that someone does wrong. You look at the other qualities a person has, too. And I think if you care about someone you expect that these people are good and maybe they’ll be able to crack this problem. And I do care about him.”

  Dyer himself was on the stand for some time. He denied that he had used his position as scoutmaster as a way of arranging sexual encounters. “It might be construed that way, but it wasn’t intended that way,” he said. “That was not my reason for staying in the program.” Dyer said that he had always wanted to seek help but had been afraid it would mean arrest and the loss of everything—his job, his family. “Most of the boys that I molested by their terms, by the terms of the law, I really loved,” he said. “I didn’t want to hurt them.” Then he looked at Louis Conner, who was sitting in the courtroom. “I know that Louis back here, sitting there, I know that he probably hates me now, because of the problems I brought on him and his family,” Dyer said. “But I truly did love him and enjoyed his company and all the good things we did. And I’m painfully regretful of that problem and that situation. And if there was any way I could erase it, and make his life better, I would sure do it.”

  Dyer may have been right about Louis’s hating him. Louis was angered by a lot of what was said at the sentencing hearing, particularly Dyer’s answer to a question about who had initiated the encounters between him and the boys: “It was mutual part of the time and part of the time maybe mostly myself.” Partly because of Louis’s fear of being labeled a homosexual, the question of who was to blame was terribly important to him—in the words of one counselor, “He needed to be real clear that it was not his fault that this happened”—and Dyer, despite his guilty plea, seemed reluctant to accept the blame. Just after the guilty plea, Susan Conner had angrily informed the district attorney’s office of a telephone call from Dyer in which he had told her that the encounters had come about by mutual consent, and that Louis would be free to make his own decisions on such matters as soon as he had his eighteenth birthday. Also, Louis, as he sat in the courtroom, knew what he had been afraid and ashamed to tell Detective Fredrickson: on two or three occasions, his sexual contact with Ed Dyer had gone beyond the mutual masturbation that Dyer had admitted. The district attorney’s office had eventually learned of those occasions. Presumably, one reason Dyer had finally agreed to plead guilty was the knowledge that if Louis Conner testified, he would be testifying about sodomy.

  There was nothing in the judge’s decision that might have made Louis feel better about what was happening. Although the presentencing report had recommended a considerable time in jail, Dyer was sentenced to serve only twenty days, more or less at his own convenience. The judge also ruled that Dyer would have to enter a counseling program for sex offenders, would have to be on supervised probation for three years, and would have to avoid associating with boys under eighteen. He was not specifically forbidden to see Louis Conner, even after the prosecutor pointed out that Louis, who may have looked only fifteen or so, would be eighteen before the year was out. “From what all the witnesses have testified to, why you’re a fine fellow, with a good work record, who’s done a great deal for the community,” the judge told Dyer. “If you feel positive about yourself, why these episodes aren’t going to mar your life, and you can make the best of it.”

  Presumably, Louis had been angry even before he got to the hearing. Two nights earlier, he had taken out the shotgun Dyer gave him—a 16-gauge single-shot. He had removed most of the stock. He had sawed off the barrel about six inches from the trigger. A sawed-off shotgun is, of course, easier to conceal than a full-length shotgun, and is also more maneuverable. For targets more than a few yards away, there is a sacrifice in accuracy and power. A sawed-off shotgun is not an effective weapon for hunting deer. What it is used for is killing someone at close range.

  —

  January 22 was a bleak day in Sisters. A cold rain fell intermittently. The stunning view of the Cascades didn’t exist. It was a Wednesday, five days after the judge in Bend ha
d pronounced sentence on Ed Dyer. As on any other school morning, Louis Conner climbed onto the bus that took him to high school on the edge of Redmond. He was wearing the blue parka he normally wore to school. Hidden underneath his parka was the sawed-off shotgun. At Redmond High School, Louis got off the bus with the other students, but he didn’t go into the school building. He walked back down Route 126 in the direction of Sisters—toward Ed Dyer’s house.

  Dyer’s pickup was not in the driveway. He had gone to a swap shop in Bend to see what he might get for a set of sleigh bells he was ready to part with. On the way back, he stopped in Redmond to chat with a friend. In a cold, driving rain, Louis Conner stood in a field waiting. Two hours later, Dyer still hadn’t returned. Finally, Louis, soaked and shivering, knocked on the door and told Tona Dyer that he was there to see her husband. She was concerned by his presence. Her husband, after all, had been instructed by the judge not to associate with boys under eighteen. She asked Louis in, though, and told him to stand next to the woodstove to dry out. Twenty minutes later, Ed Dyer showed up. When he was told that Louis wanted to talk to him, he said he’d have to call his probation officer first. The probation officer told Dyer that he should not talk to Louis. Dyer was instructed to drive Louis back to Redmond High School immediately. Tona Dyer, who didn’t drive, was to accompany her husband and Louis, so that they wouldn’t be alone. The three of them walked out to the pickup. Ed Dyer and Louis Conner had exchanged hardly a word. At the pickup, Dyer opened the door on the driver’s side and then went over to lock what he called his sport shed—the place he kept a lot of his outdoor equipment. As Dyer returned to the truck, Louis stepped out from behind the driver’s door, holding the shotgun. Tona Dyer thought she heard her husband say something like “No, Louis!” Louis shot him in the chest.

  Dyer was still standing when his wife ran into the house to call an ambulance, but she was certain that he had been mortally wounded. In Redmond, a few miles away, Lynn Fredrickson, the state police detective who had filed charges against Ed Dyer, was eating lunch in his car when he heard the report of a shooting on Route 126. The address sounded familiar, and he asked the dispatcher who lived there. When he was told that it was the home of an Edwin Dyer, he thought he knew what must have happened, and he headed for Dyer’s house. Before he got there, an ambulance had arrived, and the crew had seen that there was nothing to be done for Ed Dyer. It was Fredrickson and his partner who found Louis, an hour or so later. He was standing in a field about three-quarters of a mile from the Dyers’ house. He offered no resistance.

  —

  In Oregon, any sentence imposed by a juvenile court, the court that normally has jurisdiction over everyone under the age of eighteen, expires on the defendant’s twenty-first birthday—so a juvenile defendant who is, say, seventeen cannot be locked up for more than four years no matter what he has done. In the case of certain serious felonies, though, a district attorney can move in juvenile court to have a defendant who is fifteen or older remanded to the adult court system, where no such limitation on the sentence exists. The criteria for making the decision include the previous criminal record of the juvenile, the protection required by the community, and the “aggressive, violent, premeditated, or willful manner in which the offense was alleged to have been committed.” The district attorney of Deschutes County announced that he would attempt to have Louis Conner remanded to the adult court system and tried for murder.

  It was not a popular decision. There were people in Deschutes County who said that there was no reason for any trial at all. For some people, Louis Conner had become a sort of hero; at the very least, he seemed more the victim than the offender. Although the risk would have been too great, it occurred to Louis’s lawyers that if they elected to try him in the adult court system, where his fate would be determined by a jury rather than a judge, it was unlikely that any jury would convict Louis, no matter what the evidence. It’s possible that there were people in Deschutes County who agreed with the district attorney that Louis was guilty of murder. It’s possible that there were people who, whatever their views on how the case should be dealt with legally, were disturbed by indications that in the public mind Louis Conner, the timid boy who dreaded the thought of being labeled a homosexual, had, in the tradition of the Hollywood Old West, transformed himself into a hero with one blast of a gun. If there were such people, they kept their opinions to themselves. In letters to the editor and gossip at the cafés and late-night talk in the bars, the prevailing opinion was that Ed Dyer had got what was coming to him.

  In Sisters, at least, that view was often expressed after a qualifying observation about how nobody has a right to take the law into his own hands. Most of the people in Sisters are not the sort of people who condone violence or preach vengeance. It’s the sort of place whose response to what had happened included inviting two specialists on the problem of sexual abuse to come to town and conduct a symposium. Still, people in Sisters were disturbed at what seemed to be a disparity in the way the county had treated Ed Dyer and the way it was treating Louis Conner. “I think people don’t blame Ed or Louis but the judicial system,” Eric Dolson, the editor of the weekly paper in Sisters, said as the remand hearing got under way in Bend. “People like to think that the guilty are punished and the innocent are protected. It’s part of our sense of security. If they think there’s reason to believe that’s not true, it upsets them.” By the time the remand hearing began, about two months after Ed Dyer was shot to death, a defense fund for Louis Conner in Sisters had raised more than eight thousand dollars.

  The deputy district attorney who represented the state in the remand hearing—Roy Miller, the same deputy district attorney who had prosecuted Ed Dyer—basically argued that the three and a half years until Louis Conner’s twenty-first birthday was not enough time for the state to have him in custody, whether the custody was considered treatment or punishment. Miller argued that the crime had, in fact, been premeditated. The shotgun had been sawed off two days before the sentencing hearing that so upset Louis; there was no indication that Dyer had said or done anything to provoke Louis just before the shooting. Louis’s lawyer, a former Eugene prosecutor named Stephen Tiktin, said that it was Louis who had been the victim—the victim of “sexual abuse perpetrated by a homosexual predatory pedophile.” Louis had been willing even to undergo the embarrassment of testifying in open court in order to bring the man who victimized him to justice, Tiktin said, but the sentencing hearing convinced him that “the system had failed.” The state presented witnesses to support its contention that there were facilities in the adult correctional system appropriate for Louis; the defense presented witnesses to support its contention that Louis was a natural victim who would be “fair game as soon as he steps into the bowels of the penitentiary.”

  The witness who seemed to speak with the most authority was Dr. John Cochran, the senior forensic clinical psychologist for the State of Oregon, who was called by the prosecution but testified in favor of the defense contention that Louis should be treated as a juvenile. Cochran turned out to be a pudgy man with a mustache and a thoughtful expression that made him appear personally concerned even when he happened to be speaking of test results that sounded rather technical. In a way, Cochran’s testimony amounted to a retelling of the story of Ed Dyer and Louis Conner, this time in psychological terms. Cochran described Louis as a naïve and passive and dependent boy, less mature socially and emotionally than the average boy his age. More than most boys, Cochran said, Louis had a need for the approval of others, to the point of being willing to subject himself to “abuse or intimidation to avoid rejection or abandonment.” In other words, Cochran said, Louis was an easily manipulated boy who was perfect prey for Ed Dyer—“a pedophile extremely experienced at grooming people like Louis.” In Cochran’s view, the stress Louis was under once the investigation of Dyer began was magnified by Dyer’s response to the charge against him. “As the circle began to tighten, instead of protecting his pseudo-child he aba
ndoned him,” Cochran said of Dyer. “Once in court, instead of making a clean breast of it he blamed Louis.” The result, Cochran said, was “a massive amount of betrayal.” According to Cochran’s interpretation of the events, Louis had not gone to Dyer’s house with the intention of shooting anybody; the shotgun was an “equalizer,” a way of making certain that the larger man paid attention. Louis desperately wanted to find out why Dyer had said in court that some of the sexual encounters had been initiated by both of them, Cochran said, and Dyer’s adherence to the probation officer’s instructions not to talk to Louis was, ironically, the last straw: “The usual coping methods that Louis has were obliterated.” Cochran testified that the combination of events required to drive Louis Conner to violence would be unlikely ever to occur again. He was, in Cochran’s term, “a situational offender.”

  To no one’s surprise, the judge held that the juvenile court would retain jurisdiction over Louis Conner. In holding for the defense, though, the judge, John M. Copenhaver, was careful to separate himself from the notion that Ed Dyer had got what he deserved—the notion that sexual offenders should be “destroyed like rabid dogs.” In announcing his decision, Judge Copenhaver said, “Sexual abuse does not mean that a person’s life has no value to us. The loss of any life diminishes the quality of life in our community.”

  —

  Shortly after the remand hearing, Louis Conner’s lawyer sent the tort notices required if he intended to file suits in civil court against the Redmond Police Department and the U.S. Forest Service—suits that would presumably allege negligence that led to Ed Dyer’s remaining in the company of boys even after his background was known. There were two more hearings remaining in the criminal case against Louis. From what the judge and the defense had said in court, it seemed clear that they both believed what Louis had done fit the legal definition of manslaughter, but there had to be a hearing on that question. And there had to be a hearing—what juvenile courts call a dispositional hearing—to decide on a sentence. While those hearings were being prepared for, the judge let Louis remain at home. Susan Conner found her son in relatively good spirits. “People expect him to be depressed,” she said. “But for the first time he doesn’t have the cloud of Ed Dyer hanging over him.”