A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention

by Matt Richtel

  Linton became good, earning first chair in a jazz ensemble in junior high school and then high school, and winning scholarship opportunities to play music in college. Sure, he listened to Led Zeppelin and Hendrix like everyone else, but he loved Coltrane, too. Music was an escape from it all—the poverty and rough circumstances around him, the proximity of sexual abuse. Maybe he’d be an art teacher someday, he thought.

  By nineteen, some of the pain subsided, at least it seemed. Then another trauma: His beloved older sister Kathleen got very ill, first with cancer and then from the radiation treatment. He would read to her at her bedside as her condition worsened, and he prayed, sometimes blaming himself like he’d done when he was abused. “I thought maybe Kathy wasn’t getting better because I’d done something wrong,” he says. “No matter how much I prayed, no matter how much I fasted, she was not getting better.”

  “The mind-numbing, bizarre thoughts I’d experienced years earlier started to come back.”

  She died when he was twenty-one. At about that time, Linton went on his mission. This was what his family desperately wanted for him, and he supposed he wanted it, too. It was hard to make sense of things.

  He was assigned to go to Belgium. But his first stop was Provo, the Mission Training Center, the very place that Reggie had been.

  Like Baird, Linton was identifying with Reggie, but for different reasons. While Baird could identify with the clean-cut boy in Reggie, the one who had made a fatal mistake, Linton could empathize with someone who was in the middle of a mission that was about to end abruptly. In Linton’s case, he’d gone to the Mission Training Center and spent three weeks there, learning French. He’d felt deeply unsettled, then depressed. And then, one evening, he got out of bed, put on his clothes, and left. No warning, no explanation. He got home and told his parents he wasn’t feeling right about it. They were mortified.

  Linton was taken to talk to an athletic coach at BYU, who told the young man he was a “quitter.” A member of the Church told him he’d regret the decision the rest of his life.

  Of Reggie, Linton says he understood: “Pulling him off his mission was going to be incredibly hard.” Linton himself had left one, and knew what it was to be a young man in peril.

  But Linton, while he believed in God, had lost his reverence for the Church. It was cover for his abuser. It was not sacred. And so he was free to look differently at Reggie, and the case.

  It was another sign of the interesting role Reggie was playing. Depending on a person’s life experience, they saw Reggie and his actions in slightly different lights. Baird saw Reggie’s case one way, Linton another. Such was the razor’s edge of right and wrong that texting and driving played at the time; it seemed possible to view Reggie and his actions through different lenses. Over time, Reggie would become both a lightning rod and a prism through which people in the community, prosecutors, legislators, and others around the country would view themselves and their own behavior.

  WHEN LINTON TOLD DAINES of his decision, they had a decent back-and-forth. Daines expressed some skepticism, but he respected his colleague and appreciated the scientific background that Linton presented.

  Linton walked out of the meeting and asked his assistant, Nancy, to put together the paperwork for the charging document.

  Linton recalls thinking: “I had a lot of sympathy for Reggie. I knew this was going to be horrible for him.” In the same breath, he thought that this prosecution wasn’t just necessary—in a weird way, it was perfect. The perfect test case, the perfect way to set precedent—not with someone who was malicious, not with a societal outlier. “Reggie Shaw was the perfect person for me to prosecute, not because he was evil, but because he wasn’t evil. I don’t know how to say that. I don’t know how to put that. But I knew it.”

  CHAPTER 29

  REGGIE

  REGGIE WAS FEELING HIGH a month into his mission when it came time for his first missionary conference. This was a gathering of around one hundred missionaries for a pep talk and celebration. It was held in Saskatoon, about 160 miles from Regina, a three-hour drive across the northern Great Plains. Reggie was particularly excited because of the speakers who were going to be in attendance at the retreat. They included Elder Clayton, one of the members of the Quorum of the Seventy. This was a high calling in the Church, one of the elders, figuratively and literally, who would travel to teach congregations. Also, speaking the first morning were two district presidents, and their wives. After the speeches, Reggie felt ebullient, so fired up.

  He returned to his room. He was resting, getting ready for dinner. There was a knock on the door. Reggie answered.

  The visitor said: “President Morgan needs to see you.”

  “HAVE A SEAT, ELDER Shaw.”

  Reggie sat in an orange cloth recliner, nothing fancy, right out of the 1980s. President Morgan stood next to a desk. He was tall with brown hair turning gray and a wide smile, though he wasn’t wearing it now.

  “Elder Shaw, I hate to tell you this, but you need to go home.”

  Reggie’s eyes filled with tears. He didn’t have to hear more. He had been so happy before this moment. He’d come where he wanted to be, needed to be, had put that horrible thing behind him, not just the wreck, the thing with Cammi, everything.

  He stood up. He lifted the orange chair.

  He threw it across the room.

  He began bawling.

  President Morgan let him pour out his frustration and rage. He said, gently: “The state filed charges against you. We got a call from Jon Bunderson.”

  The summons and charging document had been submitted on Tuesday, August 21, though word had not reached the Church and Reggie until a few days later, on Friday. The summons ordered Reggie to appear in court on the following Tuesday on the charge of negligent homicide, a class A misdemeanor. It was signed by Judge Thomas Willmore, who had drawn the case. He’d been appointed to the bench in 1999 by then governor Michael Leavitt, a Republican.

  President Morgan tried to calm Reggie, but the young man was inconsolable, turning inward. President Morgan gave him his instructions: Return to Regina, pack your things. Tomorrow, you go home.

  AT THE APARTMENT, REGGIE called his parents from the landline. Nobody answered the phone at the Shaws’ house. He tried his mom’s cell phone, but she didn’t answer. He called his dad’s cell.

  “Who is this?” his dad answered.

  “It’s your son, Reggie.”

  “Oh, sorry. We’re at the high school football game.”

  Reggie felt a moment of anger. How could you be at a football game? He even asked.

  “It all happened so fast, Reggie. They decided to press charges, negligent homicide.”

  It was just like his dad, Reggie thought. To the point, matter-of-fact, life will go on and we’ll be fine. More likely, Ed was just overwhelmed, paralyzed. It was his greatest terror, the idea of his son in jail.

  “They pulled the phone records,” his dad told him. “They said that when the accident happened, you were texting.”

  “There’s no way that happened.”

  “Reggie, we’ll pick you up at the airport tomorrow.”

  “There’s no way that happened. That’s not what happened,” Reggie said.

  He could hear the football game in the background. This wasn’t happening.

  “We’ll get you at the airport.”

  They hung up, and it crossed Reggie’s mind that while his parents would be at the airport, he might not be. He could take off his LDS badge, change into street clothes, and get a job in Canada.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, back home from a mission for a second time, Reggie couldn’t eat. It was virtually unheard of for a missionary to return home twice. His stomach was in knots. He got ulcer medication. His mom took him to see Gaylyn, the longtime family friend and counselor.

  Gaylyn saw in Reggie a person who seemed at his wit’s end. She asked him to fill out two questionnaires, the Burns Anxiety Inventory and the Burns Depression Checklist
.

  The tests had questions you answered on a scale of zero to three, with zero meaning something wasn’t a particular concern and three meaning the client was bothered “a lot.” Anytime a client would notch a two or three (moderate or a lot), Gaylyn paid close attention.

  Among Reggie’s scores:

  Fear of losing control—moderate, a 2.

  Fear of cracking up or going crazy—moderate, a 2.

  Fears of criticism or disapproval—a lot, a 3.

  Pain, pressure, tightness in the chest—3.

  In all, on the anxiety test, Reggie’s answers added up to a 35. That was a red flag, for sure. Any score over 31 signified “severe” anxiety.

  On the depression test, more of the same:

  Was he feeling sadness, down in the dumps?—3

  Low self-esteem—2

  Are you self-critical, do you blame yourself?—3

  Have you lost your appetite?—3

  “Reggie, you are in a severe stage,” she told him after reviewing the numbers. She recommended that he get a prescription for an antidepressant.

  He drove home, drained but not feeling any better. Later, he and his mom got a prescription from a local doctor. But when he got home with the prescription, he went out back of the red-brick house. He pulled the prescription out of his pocket. He tore it up. He put it in the dumpster.

  He thought: This is something I can handle. I can deal with this.

  And there was something else going through his mind: “The pills would make me feel a false sense that everything was okay when nothing was okay. The pills would make me feel like everything was all right, and I could just live every day like they were all right.”

  He knew his mother would find out from Gaylyn he’d gotten medication. So he told her he’d filled the prescription and was taking the drugs. Another little tiny lie, right? Would it be harmless?

  REGGIE, AND HIS FAMILY, met with Bunderson. What the lawyer heard, overwhelmingly, was that the family wanted to fight. Reggie, too, but Bunderson’s impression was that the family wanted it more. Regardless, he started putting together ideas for a defense. His impression, on its face, was this was a “tryable case,” one he had a reasonable chance of winning.

  As Bunderson sought information, he was curious about Reggie himself. Exactly who was this kid? How might a jury react to him?

  “Let’s go back,” Mr. Bunderson said. He wanted to talk about what happened before the accident.

  Before?

  “Your mission. What happened there?”

  Reggie fidgeted.

  “I had an issue with a girl,” Reggie said.

  Recalling back, Reggie reflects: “He gave me a look.”

  “I need to know the details,” the lawyer said. He asked Reggie whether he’d feel more comfortable if his parents left the room. Reggie said they could stay. He explained about how he’d lied to Bishop Lasley, telling the lay leader that he’d not had sex with his girlfriend.

  “He was trying to figure out how I lied and why I lied and if something would ever come up in court about how I lied before about big issues.”

  The stuff with the mission, questions about his own character, in his own mind, weighed heavily on Reggie, more than he let on.

  “That was a character problem, and I realized that, at that point, it could affect potentially more than my mission. It could affect anything I had to say in court.”

  Bunderson realized it, too. It could be a huge problem. Assuming, that is, the prosecution convinced the judge to allow such evidence.

  “If the prosecution were to tell a jury here in Utah that he’d lied to his bishop about something he’d done before going on a mission, then they might think he’s lying about everything.”

  But as Bunderson thought through the possibilities, he figured there were some very good ways around that ever happening. Yes, this case was winnable on that front, and a lot of others.

  CHAPTER 30

  HUNT FOR JUSTICE

  ON THE MORNING OF September 18, 2007, Leila O’Dell put on a black floral skirt and a matching sweater. She drove her Prius to the Cache County courthouse.

  In contrast to the more traditional surrounding architecture, such as the county attorney’s office across the street, the three-story courthouse sports steel trim around a checkerboard of clear glass windows that stretch the buildings height. Inside, light bathes the hallways. The sun, or flat light on a cloudy day, pours in from every window; if there are secrets here, it seems to say, the light will quickly find them.

  Leila took the elevator to the third floor, and entered courtroom 5. It was large and packed; this was not just a hearing for Reggie but for many others being arraigned. She found Megan, and Jackie, and Terryl. They sat in the long brown courtroom pews, taking in the light through the south-facing windows and views of the three sets of jagged-topped mountains reining over the three canyons beneath them—the Logan, Providence, and Blacksmith Fork peaks.

  Linton sat at the front. He got his first look at Reggie in person. He was struck that there was something different about this kid from virtually every other defendant in the place. No tattoos or piercings, no shifty or menacing look. Something all-American about this guy.

  Megan O’Dell glared at Reggie and thought: You killed my dad and I hate you!

  For Leila, sniffling, holding it together, it really wasn’t about Reggie. It was about Keith. Regardless, she also believed that this whole thing, the entire deadly affair, was about to reach some kind of closure: Reggie was going to plead guilty, of course, she thought. The evidence with the text records was, as they say, black-and-white.

  Judge Willmore also saw Reggie for the first time. The judge had grown up in Logan and graduated from high school there; attended law school in Sacramento, California; then returned home and practiced law for sixteen years before being appointed to the bench where he’d presided for nearly seven years. In his chambers, his bookshelf kept histories of great men, like Ben Franklin, Harry Truman, and, most cherished by the judge, Lincoln. Two books were more cherished than the others, and he kept them in his desk. One was a big blue manual for Alcoholics Anonymous, something he consulted often because so many cases he presided over involved addict defendants. The other was a beat-up paperback edition of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in which he’d underlined passages in red and blue pen. It touched on so much of what he faced: crime, rehabilitation, the role of the system for good and sometimes ill.

  He’d gotten the State v. Reggie Shaw by lottery, a random assignment of cases to one of the four judges in the district. A veteran, he approached this stage of the process, the arraignment, with efficiency. Meaning: He didn’t get too invested in individual cases, or even wish to be particularly informed about them, because there was no point in doing so. He didn’t know if someone would plead guilty, not guilty, or reach a plea. He and others in the system referred to this mass arraignment as a “cattle call.”

  “How does the defendant plead?” he asked when Reggie’s case came up. The judge had short, manicured hair, slightly graying, and he spoke quietly in a way that suggested he was restraining an intensity.

  Bunderson responded: “We enter a plea of not guilty and request a preliminary hearing.”

  Leila was incredulous. “You’re kidding me. You can’t be serious!” Her mind was racing. This was supposed to be so straightforward.

  The judge set a date.

  Leila and the others were struck by what she called Bunderson’s “belligerence.” But he was doing his job. They might well have been reacting to what they saw as a travesty of justice. It was the first outward sign he was going to fight zealously for his client in what he saw as a winnable case.

  JUST AFTER THE HEARING, the families—Leila and Megan and Jackie—along with Terryl and Linton, went down the hall in the courthouse to a conference room. They had a short meeting, where Linton tried to set expectations. He told them that jury trials can be unpredictable, even though he thought they had all the f
acts and the law on their side.

  He gave them a 30 percent chance of prevailing. He was trying to set realistic, if not conservative, expectations.

  He was not surprised that Bunderson was pushing the issue. He suspected that a different defense attorney, maybe someone the Logan prosecutors knew better, might have taken a quick plea bargain. Not Bunderson.

  Linton had already begun preparing for a full-blown trial. On August 15, about a month earlier, he’d written a memo to all the attorneys in the prosecutor’s office. It was titled “Texting While Driving.”

  “Last night I found out that on August 7, 2007,” he wrote, “a Harris Poll was released showing that 89 percent of American adults believe that sending text messages while driving should be outlawed.”

  He went on to say that, despite this awareness, “amazingly,” 64 percent of the adults in the survey said they had sent a text while driving.

  Linton was thinking: People did it, but they knew it was wrong. If they looked inside themselves, they could see the disconnect. They’d sense that Reggie should have known the risks of texting and driving—that he must have known.

  He concluded in his memo: “This might be an important issue in any trial conducted in State v. Reggie Shaw and how we choose the jury and approach the issue.”

  THESE SAME ISSUES WERE going through Bunderson’s mind, too.

  His first thought was: Who knew?

  “Who knew this was grossly negligent conduct?”

  He was thinking: Who had told the public you weren’t supposed to text and drive? Where were the studies? Who told Reggie?

  A second big issue for Bunderson had to do with the evidence that Reggie was texting at the time of the accident. Yes, the phone records clearly showed some texting activity. But they didn’t prove that Reggie had been texting at the exact moment of the accident.

  He thought: They won’t prove that he was texting at the exact moment.