Those working on the show had no idea how fragile Jon was. After speaking with him, Karen Campbell went to talk to the secret admirer himself, who was waiting in another room. Scott Amedure seemed wired, curious about everything. (“Is this a green room?”) His face was flushed. After an easy chat (getting Scott to half-rehearse what he’d say on air without realizing it was rehearsal), Karen jotted down a note for Jenny Jones: Scott has an inkling that Jon is bisexual. Jon’s going to die when he sees Scott! She folded the note and had someone take it to the star.
In yet another room, Scott’s “gal pal” Donna Riley, who was going to appear on the show with him and who had originally introduced him to Jon back home in Michigan, was being interviewed by Ron Muccianti. An open bottle of Absolut vodka and tumblers were on the table. It was unclear whether the vodka was there to help guests relax or to loosen them up. No one said anything about it, Donna later remarked. It was just there.
Ron Muccianti reportedly asked her, “You had the feeling Jon was interested?”
“We think he’s a little gay at least,” Donna said.
When he appears on the clip I saw, Scott is grinning so hard his cheeks must have been sore. The audience hollers. He wears a dark vest. His thinning hair is slicked too flat on top. He’s pale-skinned, seems prone to flush, and is near-enough blond that the mustache he’s trying to grow has a juvenile transparency. His troublemaker’s smile and trim, jittery good looks are the “bad boyfriend” kind some people adore. (A friend later recalled that Scott always got whatever guy he went after.)
He’s a born performer. With show-offy bashfulness he seems delighted by the crowd’s enthusiasm about his crush. Everybody roots for a lover. He describes his first meeting with Jon: “Saw this little body sticking out from under her car.” Jon had offered to do some work on his neighbor Donna’s car in the parking lot of the Manitou Lane Apartments where they both lived. After meeting Jon from the neck down, Scott’s crush developed quickly in the succeeding days. He found a chance to leave a friendship bracelet for Jon at Donna’s apartment. It was never picked up. Jon said he was straight, but Scott was undaunted. A flier Scott found in a gay bar (Same sex—secret crush?) inspired his Jenny Jones Show ploy.
Only once, after Jon agreed to appear on the show and was getting excited about it—getting his hopes way up that the admirer might be his ex-girlfriend Kristen—did a sudden, clear-headed premonition cause him to question Donna and Scott. He wanted to make sure Scott wasn’t his secret admirer. No, Scott and Donna said, they didn’t know anything about it.
On the show, in spite of all the encouragement, Scott sounds a touch reluctant when he’s prompted to repeat the fantasy he must have rehearsed minutes before with Karen Campbell. “I’d like to tie him up in a hammock.” The audience laughs warmly and starts applauding again. Scott takes a countrified gulp for breath, glances at the star, and plunges on: “And it involved champagne and whipped cream and stuff like that . . .” He grins. Loud applause. He must have been feeling invincible. He glances at Donna in the chair next to him, huge in a garish red sweater. She hunches her shoulders and holds her tiny hands in her lap. Her smile lingers stiffly as her gaze skitters over the audience.
Jenny Jones seems to glow. The TV lights raise a resplendent aura from her oversprayed blond hair. Her creamy, condoning WASPiness makes her seem the perfect patroness for lowlifes. There’s nothing teasing or superior in the gentle, half-apologetic way she gestures across the stage with her microphone and colored note cards. “Jon?” Jon comes out.
He looks at Scott and Donna sitting there. All smiles. He walks toward them saying through his own smile, “You guys lied to me,” while the audience howls.
Scott moves to hug Jon. They embrace briefly as if with spring-loaded arms. The noise is incredible. It goes on and on, even after Jon sits down. He can’t suppress a smile. His hands rise and neatly cover his face. The smile reappears as soon as his palms hit his thighs again.
Jon functions affably enough. He grins the way we do when we’ve been had. In a small, unadorned voice he informs Jenny, “I’m definitely heterosexual.”
With a jocular flicker of grousing, Scott tells her, “Well, maybe he’ll be less nervous around me now.”
After the show, producer Karen Campbell says, she asked Jon whether he’d be all right flying home on the same plane with Donna and Scott. He told her he was okay with that. Of course, the show must already have bought three tickets on the same flight, but now there was no need for discussion. Jon seemed fine.
Although Jon downed another beer after the show, it had no apparent effect. He must have been brooding within. The show’s three Michigan guests weren’t seated together on the plane. Jon appeared nervous to the woman next to him. Perhaps because she was wearing a friendly expression, Jon explained apropos of nothing, “I had a weird day.” The woman introduced herself as Pat—Patricia Cielinski.
Jon told her about the show. Pat understood that he’d been ambushed and later testified that he told her, “What if my grandparents or my parents think I’m really that way? I didn’t do anything to make this happen.” He told Pat he’d spent six hundred dollars on new clothes for the show. He mentioned that he’d been hoping the secret admirer was his ex-girlfriend Kristen and that he’d considered proposing to her on air.
More mildly, Jon concluded, “I’m not angry. But I’m sure if I sit down and think about it, I could get really mad.”
The strange Sunday went on, unspooling in an emotional tangle. After the plane arrived in Detroit, Jon offered to drive Donna and Scott back home. Perhaps it felt like the gentlemanly thing to do, in spite of everything. Yet somehow the three decided to stop for a drink together. They went to Brewski’s, a chalet-style roadhouse. Two gigantic wooden eagles carved with a chain saw supported a gable over the entrance. The companions ordered a pitcher. They were having a nice time as far as their waitress could tell. Jon sat on Donna’s side of the table. She later testified that at a certain moment he threw his arm around her and nuzzled her shoulder.
After Brewski’s, Jon drove the other two back to the Manitou Lane Apartments. When he pulled in he hit a guardrail and smashed his right front headlight. Scott and Donna invited Jon up to Donna’s for a nightcap. Like an automaton he followed. All three sat around in murmurous quiet for who knows how long, then Jon said goodbye.
After Jon left, Scott mentioned that Ron Muccianti had told him the broadcast (which was never aired) was planned for “sweeps week.” He told Donna she’d better warn Jon. But the two friends had to have been deeply confused by Jon’s contradictory behavior. It occurred to Donna at Brewski’s that maybe Jon was interested in a three-way. As if nothing had happened, Scott started spinning anew his fantasy of hooking up with Jon. He told Donna that he was going to ask Jon to go with him to pick out a ceiling fan for his vinyl-clad trailer in Orion Parks. The two would install it together. Scott slept on Donna’s couch that night.
The next day, Monday, Scott probably felt a slight let-down because the wild ride in Chicago and on the show was over. He called friends and told them everything in detail. He called his mother, Pat Graves, who wanted to know how Jon had reacted. She later claimed Scott told her that he and Jon had had sex after the show. She insisted on this until her death. It’s easy to imagine a misunderstanding, or subtle fib, if Scott put it to her like this: “Hell, I spent the whole night with the guy last night.” But as she remembered it, Scott told her, “We spent the night together. I’d say that pretty much tells you his reaction.”
Recounting the story to his mom and friends apparently wasn’t enough for Scott. He called Ron Muccianti next. When he told Ron that he’d “spent the night” with Jon, Ron shouted out to the people in his Chicago office, “I think we got a love connection, guys!” To Scott, Ron dangled the possibility of a follow-up show—Jon and Scott together.
Meanwhile, Jon got into work late that Monday. He looked disheveled. “Who was it?” was the big question at Fox & Hounds, the rest
aurant where he worked as a waiter. He told his boss, “I’m not mad yet.” During lulls, he played a game of pool and a game of darts with coworkers.
On Monday night he called his father Allyn. He started sobbing. He was drunk.
Allyn got pieces of the story out of him like pulling boots from mud, and became alarmed. He knew how dangerous it was when Jon descended to these abyssal lows. Jon told him about “wrecking” his car, complained about the cost of repair, and insisted that he hadn’t asked for any of this.
Afterward, Allyn called his daughter, Jennifer Yoakum, and asked her to look in on Jon when she got a chance. Undoubtedly, both were dreading another possible suicide attempt. Like the first time with Allyn’s own heart medication. Or the second time with different pills. Or like the terrifying time Jon bought a shotgun. A few days later he returned it for two hundred dollars, still unopened. Allyn told Jennifer he didn’t think things were that serious but that Jon had had a bad time on the show and was drinking again.
The next morning, Tuesday, March 8, Allyn stopped by the Manitou Lane Apartments on his way to work. He found his son distraught. Awkwardly, Allyn tried to comfort Jon. He says he told him that even if Jon really were gay . . .
Jon was late again to Fox & Hounds. Asked whether he was mad about the show, Jon told a coworker that he’d trashed his apartment the night before. A waitress, Michelle Wright, was worried about him. At the end of their shift, when she was pulling out of the parking lot, she saw Jon’s small, dark figure come out of the restaurant. She testified that she flashed her headlights at him to get his attention and invited him over to her place for a drink. Jon accepted.
Michelle lived with her parents, so she and Jon had to be especially quiet. They shared a drink or a joint. Michelle says she let Jon sleep on the couch.
Maybe Jon was disoriented when he woke up on Wednesday morning in sweat-softened clothes. Maybe it took him a moment to recall where he was. Remembering Michelle, the show, the world, and Scott probably came over him like a leaden wave. He was out of Michelle’s house by about nine a.m. and back at his own place at the Manitou Lane Apartments by ten.
An amber traffic warning light sat flashing silently in front of his door. Yellow “crime scene” tape zigzagged over the door. No one was around, but Jon probably felt exposed and embarrassed as if the Jenny Jones millions were watching. He pulled open a note taped to the door. John. If you want it “off” you’ll have to ask me. P.S. It takes a special tool. Guess who?
Ironically, Scott had misspelled Jon’s name.
Jon shut up his apartment, drove off, and withdrew $340 from a drive-through cash machine. It was a little after ten. He then went to Gary’s Guns and asked the clerk, Nancy Morgan, for a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. $249. As he filled out the purchase form with perfect self-control, he mentioned he was planning to do some hunting. He drove to a second store, Tom’s Hardware, to buy shells, a box of five hunting loads. He knew plenty about guns from his childhood in small towns in Minnesota and Indiana, before the family moved to Michigan.
He drove back to the Manitou Lane Apartments, where he opened the shotgun package and assembled the weapon, toylike with its plastic stock and rubberized recoil pad. New guns have a clean-seeming oiliness, like a film of sweat. It was still only ten thirty when he pulled out again.
At Orion Lakes, Jon left the shotgun in the car. Scott’s roommate, Gary Brady, answered the door of the trailer. For a second the two must have looked at one another uncomprehendingly. Jon knew nothing about Scott’s roommate.
When this cute, serious stranger asked for Scott, Gary let him in. After Scott came out, Gary left the room so the two could be alone.
There must have been some exchange about the note Scott had left on Jon’s door. Whatever was said was brief. Jon returned to the car.
Gary stuck his head in when he heard the door close. “What was that all about?” Scott waved him away. Gary realized Jon was coming back. He withdrew again and waited in a bedroom. He listened.
The screen made a twang. As Jon entered, he chambered a shell with the big mechanical jerk you use with a pump shotgun.
Scott may have seen the barrel as Jon entered and tried to press the door closed again. He fell back. “Gary, help! He’s gotta gun! He’s gonna shoot!” Scott grabbed a wicker chair, holding it up to fend off Jon.
Jon fired through the chair into Scott’s chest. Gary came into the room. In disbelief, he watched that cute, calm boy from a moment before rack the gun and chamber a second round. Noise and motion of some kind were coming from Scott on the floor. The blasted chair had tumbled aside. Jon fired again.
Hysterical, Gary called 911. His call came in at 10:58 a.m. Jon had gone. After the call, Gary says, he remembers hearing the amazingly loud hissing-spattering sound of air escaping Scott’s lungs through the wounds in his chest.
Jon stopped at a service station and called 911 from a pay phone. He wept when he explained to the female operator what had happened. He mixed little boy’s diction with the words of an angry man: “He picked on me on national TV. He fucked me.” The operator kept him talking until a police cruiser pulled up. Cautiously, a patrolman approached the man on the phone. Reddened eyes shifted to him, tears streaming. “The gun’s in the car . . . I just shot somebody.”
* * *
The long legal aftermath of the “Jenny Jones” case was continuing in 1998 when Matthew Shepard was murdered. His story immediately became emblematic of this kind of crime. An enormous amount has been said about that case, which is persistently murky, but at the time gay people were galvanized. Shepard’s mother wrote a book and became a potent political force in her own right. The country was entering an era of “hate crimes” which appears to be continuing. A black man, James Byrd Jr., had been killed that summer in a grotesque racist attack. And four months after Shepard’s Wyoming murder, Billy Jack Gaither, a closeted gay man, was killed in Alabama. The story I have to tell next happened during the summer of the same year, 1999.
The Williams brothers didn’t commit an individual murder but made a bizarre attempt to start a holy war in North Central California. The mayhem culminated in the killing of two gay men. The double murder was purely ideological. Nothing in the least sexual ever transpired between the murderers and the victims. In fact, the sexual issue comes up only obliquely as the story proceeds, along with racism and anti-Semitism. But it’s appropriate to start with a wide shot of America’s religious and cultural landscape of intolerance, the habitat of a certain dark, masculine ideal. If Jonathan Schmitz felt his personal honor needed defending, here we have the fantasy of a whole culture in need of defense against decadence. This type of violence is often “inspired” policing or a maddened drive to purify society, as Karen Franklin found. The Williams story offers a portrait of a young man as a deluded kind of savior.
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MATSON, MOWDER, AND THE WILLIAMS BROTHERS, 1999
I. An Education
California’s Tennessee-sized Central Valley doesn’t feel like the California of TV. Its northern end, the flat, well-tended Sacramento Valley, breaks into dreamlike oceanic hills that crest around Sutter Buttes, a huge volcanic island right at the center of the valley. Fields of trained kiwi fruit vines look exactly like vineyards. This farm country has an earnest middle-American beauty with a hint of Southern Europe thrown in.
On hot days the silence is so deep that a soft, unnameable swish can be heard in the background. It seems to come from all sides and fill the world. It’s a boring, ominous noise like a snake’s one-note crooning, impossible yet oddly familiar.
Here, opposite a peach orchard on Higgins Avenue, behind a listing white picket fence, a house is nestled among trees and organic garden plots. As neighbors recall, every so often a tall man in a sun hat strode off the property. Turning right toward Myers Avenue, he walked and preached to the world. He carried a staff like Charlton Heston’s Moses. Otherwise, he was dressed in jeans and boots like any boutique walnut or kiwifruit farmer from
around here—Gridley, California. He didn’t seem completely crazy. An unpleasant, almost-aware-of-it smile sometimes formed in the white thatch of his half-grown beard. But you didn’t want to get caught on the listening end of his harangue. He’d park his gaze stubbornly on the sky or on the dusty margins of the road. He’d take a deep breath and continue his sermon right at you. Nothing as hackneyed as Repent, for the end is nigh! But neighbors suspected that was the gist of it.
Ben Williams may have been unlikeable but probably wasn’t dangerous. His wife Sally, ten or fifteen years younger, seemed laid-back, kindly, a touch fluttery, and not in the least overawed by her husband. She taught elementary school down in Yuba City. People said Ben had once worked for the US Forest Service, but now he simply ruled his one-acre Eden on Higgins Avenue. And occasionally preached like this to no one or everyone.
As Edens have to be, the place was cut off from the world. Planting screened the house from the road. Sally left to go to work, of course, but the family kept to themselves. Between the vegetable patches and berry bushes, chickens for laying and for slaughter, little needed to be brought in. As far as possible, the modern world was kept out. To Ben and Sally, even the conservatism of Reagan’s ’80s couldn’t disguise an America in full decline. Their two boys were homeschooled.
Some neighbors shook their heads when the older boy got it into his head to start preaching like his father. Matt was dark-haired, pretty, preternaturally self-possessed. He paced around spouting what sounded like Bible verses in a wild soprano. The stolid younger boy, Tyler, sometimes trailed him, and the family dog, Shadow, an Australian shepherd, sometimes shadowed Tyler. It was weird, but maybe it wasn’t that weird. They were enthusiastic about their religion. So what? Kids have to make their own fun in farm country.
American Honor Killings Page 2