by Pam Belluck
Later that night, after attending a party, Ben had some friends drop him off downtown. And strangely, Barbara notes, “with all the busyness of summer, nobody saw him.”
When Barbara didn’t see Ben the next day, Friday, August 8, she began calling his friends and had Ben’s brother text-message them. Then she went to Ben’s bedroom and found paperwork about his arrest. They looked for Ben for hours. Around 11 PM, she called police and filled out a missing person’s report.
Around 1 AM, Barbara’s older son remembered that when he was using Ben’s computer the previous day, he noticed that Ben had looked up safe methods of suicide. Then he told Barbara about a place in the woods where some of Ben’s friends had been building a fort. She and her older son got on their bikes and rode to the state forest.
“And,” recalls Barbara, “we literally walked straight to him. It was pitch dark. We were walking to the fort calling his name.” Ben’s brother “started looking in the fort, and I started looking around, and that’s when I found him. There was a rope hanging from a tree.”
Barbara and her older son called the police and stayed in the forest for hours. She wanted to “go back and see Ben,” but police had blocked off the fort as a crime scene. Lepore was called to examine the body. An autopsy conducted in Boston showed Ben was sober and had had nothing to eat or drink for twenty-four hours. There was a trace amount of pot in his system, but that could have been weeks old.
“This is a kid, little bit of a goth, dabbled in some drugs and alcohol but a good kid, very, very bright kid,” Lepore says. “There are a lot of people very surprised by it.”
Barbara pored over the coroner’s report with Lepore, but it contained no revealing clues. “Here’s this perfect boy,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s intact. Except there was blood on both his hands and blood on his neck. Dr. Lepore thinks the rope cut his neck, and I think he may have reached up at the last minute.”
Ben left no note. He had brought nothing with him except a backpack that police found high up in the tree. It contained a stuffed monkey Ben had had since he was three years old. “I still have it,” his mother says. “Now, Monkey is a kind of talisman.”
Barbara partly blames the police for the way they handled the fight two nights earlier. “Here’s a kid who’d grown up on-island, he’s going off to college—putting him in jail doesn’t seem like a good idea when he’s part of this class that just lost so many people,” she says. “Whatever made him decide to do it, I think it was highly affected by the fact that other people had done it.”
Barbara also thinks that in retrospect Ben “was really scared to go to college. My children were simply not prepared to live off-island.” Others who have grown up on Nantucket have felt the off-island challenge too. Lepore’s son Nick says, “Some kids would go to college and then come right back to the island. You’re in kindergarten with the same kids, in middle school, in high school—it’s almost like it kind of stunts your ability to meet people in a way, because you don’t have this shared history.”
Whether that was Ben’s real fear, his mother will never know. “Where a person goes when they decide to commit suicide isn’t the same place that you live in when you’re with the rest of the family,” she has realized. “Your kids try to protect you too. They don’t want to tell you things that will make you mad. You wish you could just hold them all the time and never let them get hurt.”
CHAPTER 13
WAIFS AND STRAYS
After school one afternoon, a twelve-year-old girl named Julie was lounging around the house like she always did. She usually lied to her mother and said she had already done her sixth-grade homework, or that she had none to do. Then she would submerge herself in video games, often bloody and violent ones like Diablo, which she was playing that day.
Julie was surprised when her mother, Patricia, sidled over and handed her a cup of hot chocolate. “Well this is strange,” she thought. “She never does that unless I ask her for something.”
Patricia, forty-seven, had moved Julie and her older brother from New Hampshire to Nantucket the year before, a few years after she’d gotten divorced from their father. Patricia had a cousin on Nantucket who rented them an apartment. But not long after they moved, Julie’s brother left and went to live with their father, and Julie and her mother lived a kind of tensely balanced existence. Julie was glued to video games and seemed precociously savvy about activities more appropriate for teenagers; Patricia had various health complaints and struck her daughter as a somewhat disengaged parent.
“She always had migraines,” Julie notes. “She would take a bunch of different medications. She would always be in her bed or lie on the couch watching TV.”
That’s why the hot chocolate seemed to come out of the blue. “I drank it,” Julie recalls. And then, “I felt, like, wicked weird. I felt like I was going to pass out and stuff.”
She announced to her mother, “I’m going to lie down in your bed,” but before she could make it there, she staggered and clutched herself, “I think you better call the hospital,” she whimpered.
Patricia resisted at first. A recovering alcoholic, she had been sober for years, but that night, she’d had a drink, Julie recalls. “Oh, you’ll feel better,” she told Julie, “and it’ll be done.” But Julie wasn’t feeling better. Patricia ultimately called 911, and an ambulance raced Julie to Nantucket’s hospital. There it was discovered that Patricia had laced the hot chocolate with Klonopin, a drug used to treat anxiety disorders. Too much Klonopin can cause confusion, hallucinations, memory loss, mood changes, seizures, even suicidal thoughts or actions. And the Klonopin was mixing with a brew of Julie’s other medications: for depression, attention deficit disorder, and sleep problems.
Julie’s mother had apparently tried to poison her.
A nurse picked up on the poisoning, and Lepore, standing by, praised him for the quick diagnosis. There wasn’t much to be done except to watch Julie until the Klonopin passed from her system. She didn’t lose consciousness but was groggy. She stayed hospitalized for several days because in such cases, “you never quite know whether they’re on the uphill or the downhill,” as Lepore puts it. And “if a kid comes in in that type of situation, you have to come up with a plan.” Police and social services agencies have to be called. “Everyone has to be figuring out what happened, why it happened, and what is going to be done immediately.”
Julie recalls snatches from that time. “I was so out of it. The guy put the needle in me, and it hurt so bad, and I was like, ‘Oh fuck.’ And the guy got very mad at me and said, ‘Don’t ever talk like that again.’ I was very paranoid.”
Her mother didn’t hang around long, as Julie remembers it. Telling her daughter she was “just going to go into another room,” she ran out of the hospital. “They caught her at the Essex playground. I haven’t seen her since.”
That was October 6, 2006. Patricia was arrested and charged with two counts of assault to murder. “This was not a whodunit,” recalls Thomas Shack, the prosecutor on the case. “Julie was able to communicate with us what had happened. They got the cup for the hot chocolate from the kitchen, and that was corroborative of what Julie was saying. There were some writings—statements to the police—where Patricia laid out exactly what she had done.”
Patricia ultimately reached a plea bargain; in lieu of going to prison, she would serve four years of probation while undergoing psychiatric treatment. She was also barred from having any contact with her daughter until Julie’s eighteenth birthday. She went to California and entered a treatment facility, “which I liked because it was 3,000 miles away,” Shack says.
Patricia’s motive wasn’t entirely clear, although Shack says, “basically she was going to use this medication in a dose that would potentially cost Julie her life, and she would commit suicide afterwards.”
That’s what Julie believes, too, that her mother intended the two of them to be joined together in death. After her arrest, “she wrote
a letter that said, ‘I want to commit suicide and take her with me,’” Julie says. “She was very depressed.”
Julie was immediately removed from her mother’s custody. “It was a very difficult case,” notes Shack. “I remember thinking the entire time, ‘What’s in Julie’s best interest here?’ Is it in the best interest of the child that their parent ends up going to prison? Are we setting the child up for a feeling of, ‘Geez, it was my fault that my mother went to prison because if I had just said nothing, nobody would have known?’ Julie was at an age where you’re not young enough to forget and you’re not old enough to understand. We always thought that the best interest is letting her know that her mother was treated for what happened as opposed to her mother was punished for what happened.”
Julie was placed with a couple she knew, experienced certified foster parents who took care of her for a year. But it was a rocky experience.
“Julie was like a feral cat,” recalls Cathy Lepore, who was Julie’s counselor at school, where she was in a special education program. “She was literally addicted to computer games. Nobody had ever said she couldn’t watch an R-rated movie. She was watching movies like Pulp Fiction at age nine or ten. They got this kid, and, you know, they have rules—most people do.”
Julie says that living there was okay at first, “but it started to get hard. When I was living with my mom, I didn’t have to do anything, no chores.” Now, she was expected to do chores and limit her video gaming. “It was very different to me, and I would get into fights with them a lot.”
Eventually, says Cathy, the foster family “just had enough.”
But the Department of Children and Families was at a loss. The agency couldn’t find anyone on Nantucket willing to take Julie, and she faced the prospect of leaving Nantucket and being placed in foster care elsewhere.
“I was scared,” Julie remembers. She confided her fear in Cathy.
“We won’t let that happen,” Cathy told her. “You can move in with us.”
“Oh my gosh,” Julie thought. “This is going to be awesome.”
Cathy recalls that her feeling was, “this kid has already been through so much. We’ll try it for two weeks.” Two weeks turned into two months, two years, and more; the Lepores became Julie’s foster parents. The doctor had to lock up his guns so the house could pass muster with social workers. And the Lepores began the odyssey of parenting a damaged and difficult child.
Julie’s arrival was hardly the first time the Lepores had opened their doors. They have repeatedly taken in people who are down on their luck or need a place to stay. “Lepore’s slop house,” the doctor sometimes calls it.
“They feel they are very lucky and want to be able to help,” says Chris Fraker, their neighbor. “People just sort of drive over here and show up.”
While Nantucket is an island with jaw-dropping wealth, the Lepores are hardly affluent. Their home on Prospect Street is modest and not overflowing with space.
But “they were always taking in strays,” their daughter, Meredith, says. “It’s just part of who they both are.”
Their son Nick says he “never realized that that was odd. It was always my family plus whoever was there. I think it then kind of became, like, ‘Oh hey, this person needs a place to stay—maybe I can get in touch with the Lepores.’”
One foundling was a high school student named Lynn, who was “having troubles with her mother,” Lepore says. After living with the Lepores, she joined the Peace Corps and then became a nurse. A student from Denmark named J.C. was so beloved by the family that “the first time I saw my dad cry was when J.C. left,” Nick says.
And a Bosnian Muslim girl, Aida, arrived on a temporary student visa after having hid in a cellar in her home country and cut her hair short to help conceal her identity so she would not be raped. Aida was placed with an older family on Nantucket, “but it wasn’t really a good fit, so the sponsor asked us to take her,” Lepore says. Later, when Aida returned to Bosnia for what she thought was a Christmas visit, she was told that because she had held a job at a restaurant while being a student on Nantucket, she would not be allowed to leave Bosnia and return to the United States for seven years. The Lepores wrote letters on her behalf and contacted their congressman, but to no avail.
The Lepores have also taken in several nieces and nephews, some of whom were having trouble in school or experiencing stressful home lives. And they have played host to teachers who had come over to do stints in the schools, like Bob Barsanti, a high school English teacher who needed a place to stay for the summer and was supplementing his income by being a bouncer at a club called The Muse.
“If we have room, I’m happy to help people,” Lepore says. “It’s never been an intrusion.” Not every member of his family, however, has always been so sure. Cathy considered Lepore’s running buddy, Dickie Brainard, a less than ideal tenant. Brainard lit candles in the basement, setting off the fire alarm in the middle of the night. He ate food that Cathy was saving for the family.
“He was responsible for the infamous Dickie Rule,” Meredith says. “Once you cross the Dickie line with my mom, there’s no going back.”
The Lepores have also given money to people who are struggling, although they are not wealthy themselves. While they earn about $200,000 a year between them, Nantucket is expensive, and Lepore’s income is not always consistent. One year, when he bought an ill-fated computer billing program for the office, Lepore made only $25,000 and had to take out a personal line of credit to pay his staff.
Meredith says her father told her, “You’re not getting an inheritance,” because the family had no resources saved up for that. “But you’ve got your education.”
Pam Michelsen, Cathy’s friend, says that growing up in a large working-class Irish Catholic family gave Cathy “a natural empathy for people,” making her “just as happy when a kid does something well, even if it’s not their kid. I don’t know of any two people who are more humane in this often inhuman world.”
Their generosity has come at no small cost. At one point it was stressful enough that Meredith told her parents point blank: “I don’t want anyone living in the house except us.”
One trying situation involved the adopted daughter of one of Cathy’s brothers. The Lepores took her in when she was thirteen to help Cathy’s brother, whose wife had passed away a couple of years earlier. Cathy says the girl had been diagnosed with attachment disorder and had gotten into trouble stealing things from classmates.
The Lepores thought they could handle it and made sure she had counseling on Nantucket. But “she was a nightmare,” Cathy recalls. “The kid was really disturbed. She would lie, and she would smoke weed. I would find pot in her handbag, or she wasn’t doing what she was supposed to do for school. She would sneak out at night. She could be very sweet and very nice—you’d say, ‘Oh my God, this is such a nice kid’—and then she would turn around and do crazy stuff.”
Cathy believes the girl had missed some crucial love and security before being adopted. “Brains develop in layers,” she says. “If you do not develop that trust and attachment to a primary caregiver, if that doesn’t happen when it’s supposed to, the next layer comes in without everything it needs. She had no conscience. She would be upset if she got caught, but not because she did something wrong. She just had no remorse if she did anything. She would just turn around and do it again if she could get away with it.”
After about seven months, Cathy came to the troubling realization that it wasn’t working, most significantly because “I can’t keep her safe.” Lepore agreed, and told their niece: “You either come down and talk to us about it, or you pack your bag.” The girl packed her bag.
But it was the experience with another niece, Martina, that led to difficult long-term fallout for the family. In 1991, when Martina was fifteen, her mother, Lepore’s sister, Cheryl Buckley (called Sherry), asked the Lepores to take her for a while. Buckley, who lived in Connecticut, says her marriage was undergoing stra
in.
“My husband was an alcoholic,” says Buckley, whose husband has since sobered up. Her job as a lending broker involved being on the road a lot. “I was working. There was no other money coming in. I made that decision to protect her. Her being alone with him and him being irresponsible and drinking—I couldn’t have her home with him drinking and driving.”
Lepore offered to pay for his sister to resettle on the island, but she rejected that idea and sent Martina to Nantucket for tenth grade. The Lepores, of course, weren’t about to turn Martina away. They had previously let Buckley’s sons, Tim and Jonathan, stay during the summer, and Tim Buckley was so inspired that he decided to become a doctor like his uncle Tim. So the precedent was encouraging. And early on, everything was fine.
“I got off the boat, we immediately went to the beach, and I was playing football with T.J. and Nick and my uncle,” recalls Martina. “I was like, oh my God. This is what a family was like. I immediately felt loved and immersed in a new family.”
Coming from her unstable home life, “I loved Nantucket,” she says. “For me there was no chaos. If I ever had problems with things, I’d just go over to the beach, sit, and watch the ocean, and it would rejuvenate my thoughts. Part of it was the whole fact of the island—you were sheltered; you were protected; nobody could get to you.”
And that was before her uncle Tim saved her life. Shortly after Martina arrived on Nantucket, “my uncle noticed I was pretty heavyset, and I didn’t eat anything. His food bill wasn’t really going up, and it didn’t make sense.”
Lepore was concerned because, as he so delicately put it, “she looked kind of porky.” Martina remembers having been like that for a while, but that at home, “my mom was working a lot, and my dad wasn’t really aware of what I was doing. Nobody really noticed me.”