by James Renner
It was a rough twenty-four hours. I stayed in my room and hid under the wool blanket and pretended to sleep.
Out by the TV, the other two inmates (both on thirty-day stretches) watched Cops and played cards.
* * *
When I woke the next day, I felt a little better. I took a shower after the doors opened and instead of going back to my room I sat with the other guys while I ate breakfast.
They were both younger than me. One guy, Matt, had a funny-shaped head and was missing a few teeth. The other dude, Alan, looked like an ordinary twenty-something. Cute. Dark hair. But kind of a badass. His mom dropped off a board game, Monopoly, for us. I watched them play. Alan ended up going directly to jail five turns in a row. I explained the concept of irony.
Twice a day they let us into the yard. It was a concrete pad with concrete walls and a chicken-wire ceiling. There were two soccer balls stuck in the corner, between the wall and ceiling, too high to reach. Sometimes I went out and sat on a bench.
On the way back to the pod, I asked the guard escorting us if the jail had a library. She took the others back and then led me down the hall to a broom closet. On a shelf behind the mops was a box of books. Everything I’d ever wanted to read but had never had the time for was in that box. Hemingway. Irving. I even found a paperback copy of Michael Crichton’s Travels, a little-known memoir I’d tried forever to track down. I took a stack. I was crying. I don’t know why. But I was crying. I felt cleaned out.
“Take that one, too,” she said. The corrections officer was a motherish African-American woman. Pretty. Plump. She pointed at a Bible.
“Okay,” I said.
“I don’t know what your story is,” she said. “But it will be okay. Do not let your heart be troubled. Read John 14.”
“Okay.”
“John 14. Don’t forget.”
Later that night, alone in my room, I did read it.
You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.
Get me out of here, I prayed. Please let me be with my family.
The next morning, five days into a ten-day sentence, the man who delivered our breakfast had some news. “Renner,” he said. “You’re leaving today. Judge let you out early.”
Julie was waiting in the lobby. She’d brought Casey and Lainey. I hugged them tight.
FIFTY-THREE
Beagle Strikes Back
Incarceration had taken a physical toll. I lost ten pounds in six days. Somewhere along the way I’d come into contact with some MRSA, too: because I left jail with an infection that rotted holes in my fingernails.
The ancillary effects of my arrest were unknown. I wasn’t sure how bad it would get before the end. Wasn’t even sure when the end would be. The biggest question was whether or not the media would cover my arraignment in Cuyahoga County Court, which was scheduled for June 19, my ninth wedding anniversary. Any decent press agent will tell you it’s in your best interest to get ahead of the story, and so that’s what I did. In a long post on Facebook, I talked about the arrest and my stay in jail.
The admission was immediately reposted on the Maura Murray Topix page.
The next day, Alden Olson, aka 112dirtbag, e-mailed the chair of the English Department at UAkron:
You might want to look into the fact that James W. Renner, an English instructor at the University of Akron, was recently jailed for contempt of court and later charged, as part of the same incident, with having assaulted a police officer at the Lakewood Municipal Court in Cuyahoga County.
I am the last person to discourage academic freedom, but Mr. Renner’s overall conduct online, and to some degree in person, has troubled many who follow him. Some will wonder why the content of Renner’s writings was not more carefully examined by the University of Akron before he was hired. To quote the UA website, “Safety is a top priority at UA, as evidenced by the wide variety of educational programs and safety services in place to help protect, inform and empower our students…”
Thank you very much.
Regards, Alden H. Olson
Hadley, MA
I play poker once a week with the chair of the English Department, and he’s gotten to know me well. Still, friendship can go only so far. “If you really do end up with a felony, the university will have to fire you,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do.”
The next hit came from Kevin Coughlin’s camp, still stinging from my profile of the former gubernatorial candidate.
A Twitter account associated with the politician direct-tweeted it: “Disgraced liberal blogger James Renner to be arraigned tomorrow for felony assault of police officer.”
It was only a matter of time before some newspaper jumped on the story. I could hear it, the sound of my reputation beginning to derail, a scenic-tour locomotive that took the last turn a bit too fast.
* * *
The day of my arraignment arrived. That’s when you have to go in front of the judge and formally hear the charges read against you. Outside the courthouse, there were TV vans parked all along the road, antennas stretching into the summer air like the mini-skyscrapers of a temporary city. I was fucked.
But when I got to the courtroom, there were no cameras in sight. Turned out Ariel Castro was also in court that day, appearing for a pretrial a couple floors below me. Our cases were staggered such that every time I came to the courthouse, Castro was there, too. More of that fearful symmetry. Or maybe this time it was just a coincidence.
I was taken through a side door and reprocessed through the county’s system, where felonies are prosecuted. Fingerprints. Mug shot. I spent the day in a dirty room with no windows, waiting for the bondsman to work out payment to the court. The place was filthy. Years of grime collected along the corners of the floor, slipping up the tilework like living depression. I watched guards in uniform escort prisoners down the hall. The county inmates were a different breed than the men I’d seen in muni jail. These men were beaten down, grizzled, worn. Through the whole ordeal, I was never so scared as I was those three hours in county lockup.
* * *
A short time later, Alden Olson reposted that scary video where he sits in his basement staring at the camera, laughing and leering, the one that ends with “Happy Anniversary.” Except the day he reposted the video wasn’t the anniversary of Maura’s abduction—it was my daughter’s first birthday. Then he posted a photograph of me beside a picture of Kenny from South Park. You know, the character who dies in every episode.
There were conference calls with a prosecutor and a police captain in Massachusetts, but in the end the prosecutor would not go after Alden for stalking my family.
“What if, God forbid, he really does drive out here and attacks my wife or my daughter?” I asked the prosecutor.
He thought for a moment, then said, “Well, then we would have a pretty good case against him.”
FIFTY-FOUR
The Fool
After the bondsman got me out, I took Julie to Greenhouse on East 4th for our anniversary. The kids were at her parents’ for the night and it was just us again, the way we’d been in school, a couple out on a date. It seemed a little extravagant. Imprudent, even. Keeping me out of prison was not going to be cheap. We talked about Casey, our new concerns about how we were raising him. We talked about Lainey and how it felt like she was going to be easier. We talked about Julie’s job, her plans for the next year. But eventually the conversation came around to Maura and what I was going to do with the book.
“I have to finish it,” I said.
“Why?”
“I’ve already put so much time into it.”
“I guess I just don’t understand this one,” she said. “Why her case? I get the Amy thing. She was your first crush, yada, yada.… But why Maura? Her family doesn’t even want you to do it.” She’d grown frustrated with the trips to New England, leaving her to parent two kids, and this was a long time coming. “Why can’t you just find something else to write about?”
“Becaus
e it’s the mystery of it. It’s not like Amy. I’m not in love with Maura. I don’t even think Maura was a good person. Nobody around her was a good person.”
“So why do you want to explore that?”
“Because I know I’m smarter than whoever it was who planned all this. I can’t quit. But I can promise you this will be the last one.”
She shook her head, but smiled. “So finish it already, dumb-ass.”
I went back to work.
* * *
In early August, we took the family to Ocean City, Maryland, and I met a psychic there I want to tell you about. Over the years, I’d heard from hundreds of psychics who wanted to talk about true crime cases. And in all that time, I’d met only one woman who convinced me she had the gift.
She was an old lady who lived on Cleveland’s West Side. She worked closely with Amy Mihaljevic’s family after her abduction. And though her help did not bring resolution, it produced evidence in the most unexpected way. After Amy’s body was found in that wheat field in Ashland County, the psychic visited the scene and took a picture of the churned-up dirt where her body had been. When the Polaroid developed, a man’s face could be seen in the shadows of the broken earth. It wasn’t the impression of a face like you’re thinking, like those pictures where you can see vases or faces if you look hard enough. No. This face was detailed. Ethereal, but defined. I saw it myself. The FBI were so freaked out about it, they had it analyzed by their forensics people. They determined that the film had not been manipulated.
There’s a boardwalk in Ocean City that stretches for a mile, beginning at an amusement park by the pier. Along the way, you pass sizzling funnel cake stands and arcades full of twenty-year-old video games, and places where you can get henna tattoos. There’s this authentic haunted house, too, from the sixties, the kind you ride, and it still makes you jump. Every hundred yards there’s a street performer doing a jig beside an overturned hat. And gulls by the hundreds ride the breeze rolling out to the ocean, diving after dropped hot dogs.
Not far from the haunted house an alley snakes away from the boardwalk. I was holding Julie’s hand, enjoying a late walk, and I looked that way in the dark and I saw her sign. PSYCHIC JEAN. And for some reason I was drawn by the romantic idea that I should visit her and ask about Maura. There was something about that night I’m not explaining well. A sense of freedom, of possibility. A feeling that all my troubles were petty and had been left far behind in Ohio, and that none of it really mattered. Or that nothing mattered more than we mattered to each other. I don’t know. Maybe it was the ocean.
Jean invited us in. She was a carefully ancient woman, bent over a bit. She brought us into her apartment and motioned for Julie to sit on the couch by the TV, which was playing that scene from Misery where poor Sheldon gets hobbled.
“I’d like you to tell me what you can about a young woman who went missing a few years ago,” I said.
Jean sighed. “You want me to find this girl? Tell you where she is?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “Okay. Let’s do this.” She walked over to a nook behind a cotton partition, motioned for me to follow. “But I can only tell you what I see.” Julie started after us, but Jean put up a hand. “No, dear. You must not enter.” I went in alone.
I sat across from the woman at a round table. She produced a stack of well-worn tarot cards.
“Cut the deck three times,” she said.
I obliged.
“Put twenty-five dollars on top.” Sure. There’s a bottom line. Always. But hey, I knew psychics enough to know this was cheap. Weirdly cheap.
I gave her the money and the cards and she made the green disappear. She began to place the cards in a pattern upon the tablecloth: the Hermit, upside down; the Sun; a guy being stabbed by swords; and, on the very top of everything, the Fool.
She looked over the cards at me, and I was struck by the beauty of her eyes. Such an old face, full of hardship, but those eyes … Were they violet, even? I heard once that only Elizabeth Taylor had violet eyes.
“There is a lot of darkness here,” she said. “You have traveled. But you have much traveling to do still.”
“And what about her?” I asked. I hadn’t come to hear about me.
“She was not traveling alone,” said Jean, with confidence. I had told her nothing of Maura’s case, or even her name, nothing more than she was a young woman who had gone missing. “Her car was left behind. And then she left with this other person. She wanted to be lost. You will not find her. She does not want to be found. Her life was sadness, bad luck. She wanted to escape this.”
“Where did she go?”
“I cannot see her. She is either dead or the darkness is hiding her.” Jean’s eyes opened. They stared back at me, accusatory. “You went into her past.”
“Yes.”
“As far as her school years, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why? It’s so much sadness.”
I shrugged.
“You thought this would be an adventure. But her bad luck has rubbed off on you, hasn’t it?”
I didn’t say anything. I heard Julie stir on the couch in the other room.
“Why did you welcome this darkness? I need to ask you: Do you ever feel possessed?”
“By work.”
Jean nodded. “Yes. You must leave this. Go. As quickly as you can. Leave it behind. Before the darkness follows you home.”
She waved her arms over the cards as if to wash them off, and I took this as a sign to leave. I stood and thanked Jean for her time. The woman put a cold hand on my arm, staying me a moment.
“This young woman you’re trying to find. She was her own…” Then she shook her head and went silent.
“What?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“She was her own what?”
“She was her own disaster.”
FIFTY-FIVE
Everybody Lies
By the time I got around to writing the first lines of this book, I had filled a large box with information related to Maura’s disappearance: court transcripts; interviews; photographs; newspapers; a copy of that book, Not Without Peril. The first thing I did was reread everything. Revisiting the e-mails people had written to me over the years opened up new avenues of investigation.
One of the things I rediscovered was this e-mail from a woman named Samantha, one of my Irregulars:
I am not sure if this is completely out there or not—but i was reading your post on the items found in Maura’s car and noted her Stop and Shop card number. I was interested in seeing if I could pull up a list of items purchased under that number. I went to the Stop and Shop website. I could enter the card number, which was associated with Maura’s name, but it requested I register an online account to view any information. I did not feel comfortable doing that. However, the site automatically filled in fields for the registration form—I’m assuming based off of what Maura provided when she set up the account. It included the phone number and address for Fred’s house in Weymouth—and the email address: [email protected]
After a google search—that email address seemed to be associated with a Richard Thousand, living in Cleveland OH. He commented on a few guest books using that address, one of which listed his location as Cleveland. A facebook page for Richard Thousand in Cleveland OH shows hes a registered nurse, and was in college around Maura’s time (class of 2003).
Could be nothing. Typo on the email address or maybe she gave a fake one to avoid spam—but I thought it was at least interesting.
I found that Facebook page for Richard Thousand and sent him an e-mail, asking about the strange way Maura’s shopping card linked back to one of his old e-mail accounts. I noted that his profile showed a photograph of a dog instead of his face. A search of Google didn’t find any photographs of him, either. That’s odd in this hyper-social-media era. But not that odd. He got back to me immediately.
Very Interesting! I did attend a meeting at U Mass
shortly after graduating from Nursing School in 2003. I was there for approximately a week and signed for a card at the Stop and Shop close to where I was staying because they had some money off on gas. Of course, while there I talked to several nurses attending the University and I do remember talking quite some time with a girl who fits Maura’s profile from your website. We were both runners and I grew up in Upstate New York and camped and hiked many of the same areas that she had in New Hampshire. I remember her mentioning a boyfriend in Oklahoma because I had told her I had moved to Ohio from Kansas and she said she was planning on getting a job there. She asked me about the kind of area it was. I also had been in the Air Force and she mentioned some military training, but I don’t remember her mentioning West Point Academy—but that was a while ago. As for the card, I don’t think she would have stolen it from me since I keep a very keen eye on my wallet and only carry the bare minimum. I am notorious about dumping these cards anywhere because they aren’t credit cards and we don’t have these stores in Ohio so I could have left it anywhere on campus. I still do this since I travel a lot but I guess I will be more careful in the future. I was rather shocked by what I read about her disappearance but I had a co worker in Kansas disappear and there were a lot of strange theories but they eventually found out that BTK was her neighbor and actually abducted her from her home and killed her.
Hmm. Now, according to my own litmus test, Richard Thousand had just made himself an outlier. Here was a man tangentially connected to two national mysteries: the BTK murders and Maura’s disappearance. He had my attention, but his story seemed plausible, given Maura’s history of petty larceny. So, yeah, I could see her stealing this man’s shopping card for the twenty cents she might save on gas.
I posted Thousand’s story on my blog, and it blew up like I thought it might. Who was this guy? Everyone wanted to know. One anonymous commenter summed it up nicely: