by Beth Macy
As a child, Metcalf knew his father loved him. Even then he understood that drugs were the primary driver of his family’s instability. “I had seen my father nodding out into the spaghetti, and Mom was like, ‘Daddy’s sick,’” he recalled. When the antidrug rhetoric of the mid-1980s emerged, he was an immediate convert, buying into the “This is your brain on drugs” ad campaign that featured the searing egg in the iron skillet. To this day, a six-pack of beer would expire in his refrigerator before it would occur to him to drink all six.
“We stood in the cheese line,” Metcalf recalled of growing up in Chapmanville, where his mother worked two, sometimes three jobs before becoming one of the county’s first female coal miners. The Salvation Army Santa Claus came to their house with Christmas gifts. When his mom died, in 2015, mourners recalled how she had always stood up for the little guy, filling out black-lung benefit forms for her co-workers and threatening to sue the company when she caught a coal-mine manager throwing her and another woman’s job applications in the trash.
Asked if he was made fun of as a kid, Metcalf laughed. “Are you kidding? My grandmother chewed tobacco! Everyone at my school was in the same boat. No one had any money.”
Chapmanville was, in retrospect, another perfect breeding ground for the opioid epidemic, with OxyContin moving in just as most of the mines were shutting down in the late 1990s, and the only viable economic option—beyond disability and illicit drug sales—was joining the military, one that Metcalf took. He chose the Air Force because the recruiter promised he’d have a job in law enforcement waiting for him when he got out. Playing cops and robbers as a kid, he’d always insisted on being the cop.
“I distinctly remember teachers skipping entire chapters in textbooks because ‘you will not need this when you are working in the mines,’” he told me in late 2016. It took precisely one visit to an active low-coal mine for Metcalf to understand that his future wasn’t at the bottom of one.
The next county over, in tiny Kermit, West Virginia, Charleston Gazette-Mail reporter Eric Eyre had just won a Pulitzer for pointing out that Big Pharma shipped nearly nine million hydrocodone pills to a single pharmacy in a town of just 392 people, giving Mingo County the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in America. Metcalf had seen it coming as early as 1997. Out of the country at the time, he was serving in the Air Force and hated the thought of missing his ten-year high school reunion, though the turnout was dismal.
The chief organizer, a drug user, had absconded with the class-reunion funds.
“When everybody showed up, she wasn’t there, and neither was the party,” he said.
By arresting Jones, Metcalf was not only doing his job; he was atoning for the sins of his father. His wife, though, was starting to complain about his obsession with Jones—he routinely worked till midnight or later, leaving her stranded at home with their four kids. With every new conspiracy chart, he promised he’d request a desk job “after this case.”
“I spent one Thanksgiving on the hood of a car,” doing surveillance work, he said. He did not want to end up like Lutz, who’d recently split with his fiancée, partly due to conflicts over work.
A former Air Force military police officer, his wife, Jessica, understood the life. She’d witnessed how enraged Metcalf had been after arresting a user-dealer in a traffic stop and finding heroin tucked into his baby girl’s shoe, the smell of marijuana blanketing the inside of the car.
But their kids were another story. One night in the middle of the FUBI case, Jessica drove them to the task force headquarters to see Metcalf, and his youngest daughter asked him plaintively, “Daddy, is this where you live?”
He renewed his promise to his wife: After this case…
“Ronnie Jones was a predator, and the people in Woodstock were sheep to him,” Metcalf said. His desire wasn’t just to be a big-time heroin dealer, Metcalf believed. It was also “about money. Control. Manipulation. He created a market that didn’t exist before, then he manipulated it to increase his profits. And that’s the problem with heroin, and why I don’t think it’s going away: The money is insane, and the customers are always there.”
Bulk dealers like Mack, the New York supplier, manipulated Jones by adding their own diabolical spin to the scheme, designed to keep him returning for more: When Jones sent a runner up to Harlem to buy 200 grams of heroin for $13,000, rather than just give the mule what Jones paid for, Mack typically sent the runner home with double what Jones had ordered—400 grams—plus a bill for an additional $14,000, amounting to $5 extra per gram on the fronted drugs. It was double the Pringles at a bargain interest rate, and Jones had no trouble selling the dope.
The rule was: The money had to be paid back to Mack, via Western Union or MoneyGram, before the next order could be placed. The arrangement not only contributed to the exponential growth in heroin in Woodstock and bigger profits for both Mack and Jones, it also created a paper trail that Metcalf could follow. “They thought, ‘These country bumpkins will never figure this out,’” Metcalf said.
With Shaw’s supply side of the ring still operating, dozens more low- and mid-level user-dealer arrests were made as the summer of 2013 wore on, including in an EconoLodge motel in Dumfries, where police found dealers setting up shop in a room and selling heroin stuffed into the false bottom of a can of Red Bull. As local task force officers staked out more deal-making hot spots, Metcalf tried to home in on Mack.
Wolthuis plotted out the officers’ progress on the FUBI chart as one arrest led to another. Every time another person was jailed, Wolthuis tallied the offense by the weight of the drugs sold in grams and by the dosage unit: the number of times someone stuck a needle in his or her arm. One low- to mid-level dealer ended up with a five-year sentence for selling the equivalent of between 6,400 and 14,400 needles’ worth of dope.
Metcalf wanted badly to arrest Jones’s main girlfriend, in Dumfries—he’d found the Decapitator loaded in a safe in her apartment next to a concealed-carry permit in her name. Surely she was also complicit and not just going to the movies, as she claimed, as Jones’s heroin made its way to farmers’ kids and high school football stars. Did she really buy Jones’s story about fixing computers at the local library? Didn’t she realize what paid for all those new Lucky jeans?
Wolthuis, the prosecutor, had to keep reminding Metcalf: “There’s this thing the courts require, Bill. It’s called evidence.”
The E-word became part of their banter, with Wolthuis drawing a giant E on a piece of paper and telling Metcalf to stick it to the ceiling above his bed. By the time the case wrapped up the following year, with sixty-six people prosecuted in state courts and eighteen convicted federally, Metcalf presented Wolthuis with a homemade award: a glass-encased can of cheddar cheese Pringles, with a single word on the trophy nameplate: EVIDENCE.
In a corner of Wolthuis’s desk, not far from the trophy, he still keeps an old case file open. Experience tells him that the September 2013 death of Jesse Bolstridge, once the Strasburg Rams’ defensive star, was connected to the FUBI ring, but the shards of evidence have never fully formed into a whole. “I don’t forget this one,” he said.
Wolthuis, sixty-one, is known for litigating “death cases,” prosecutions of suppliers in which a person has died as a direct result of that dealer’s drug. From his perch in the U.S. attorney’s office in Roanoke, the same office that prosecuted Purdue Pharma, he’s indicted heroin dealers for decades, long enough to witness the transition from a small, fairly quiet group of mostly black and middle-aged users in the mid-1990s to a much larger, younger, and whiter group. One of his first death cases involved a thirteen-person conspiracy brought to his attention when police found a middle-aged woman slumped over on a chair inside her apartment door, shortly after she’d shot up in the bathroom of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. “She was sitting on a claw hammer when [the officers] found her; they’d just left her there all alone to die.” Her friends had propped her up in the chair, he remembered, pla
ced atop the randomly discarded tool.
Another woman prosecuted in that same heroin conspiracy sent her child to the door to deliver the heroin because she was nodding out in her bedroom and couldn’t get up. “There’s just something so fundamentally soul-sucking about heroin,” Wolthuis said.
He said he was still “just waiting for something to fall from the sky” in the Jesse Bolstridge case. The timeline between the point of sale and his death was not airtight: Too much time elapsed between the time Jesse’s best friend, Dennis Painter, bought the heroin and the moment Jessie died, some eighteen hours later, and there were too many people with Jesse in the interim and too many other unknowns.
Metcalf and Lutz believe Dennis bought the heroin from a local user-dealer originally supplied by people in the Jones/Shaw ring, but such death cases are hard to prove in the fluid realm where most overdoses occur, and resources are limited. “We don’t have the capacity to try everyone involved in a ring of hundreds of people,” Wolthuis said. “But we do try to cut the heart out of the monster.”
Kristi Fernandez was already scared when a homesick Jesse begged to come home for the weekend from an Asheville sober house in May 2013 against his counselor’s advice. She worried that weekend, too, when he disappeared for hours at a stretch with Dennis. She liked Dennis—and still has pictures of the two of them together playing in the sandbox at their preschool, Grasshopper Green—but she knew full well that Dennis had been in and out of drug rehab for heroin. And as far as she knew, Jesse’s problem hadn’t progressed to that.
When Jesse returned to Asheville that Sunday night, he tested positive for marijuana and, per the contract he signed when entering the program, counselors booted him out. He had loved living there, telling his Facebook friends a month earlier: “I’m grateful to have such a big support group, I love all of my family & friends. They’re the best.”
And: “So glad to be sober on this date. 93 days!”
Those same supportive counselors advised Kristi not to welcome Jesse home after his dismissal, but she took him in anyway. “I don’t regret that,” she says. “I was not going to leave my eighteen-year-old son in a different state with nowhere to live.”
And unlike Jamie Waldrop, the Roanoke mother and surgeon’s wife, Kristi could not afford to spend thousands sending her son immediately to another rehab, or flying with him to make sure the transfer stuck. Kristi had already sent Jesse to a rehab in Jacksonville once, in January 2013, a ten-week treatment regimen that began with intensive counseling and medical detox, during which Jesse briefly took buprenorphine (more commonly known by the brand name Suboxone), a partial-opioid agonist designed to stem cravings. Jesse still owed $25,000 for that earlier rehab stint, even though he was on his mother’s insurance, paying $25 a week that he had autodeducted from his checking account.
He was weaned off Suboxone after three weeks, a not-uncommon practice that would become increasingly controversial as the treatment became more prominent. As National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) director Nora Volkow told me in January 2016: “To be clear, the evidence supports long-term maintenance with these medicines in the context of behavioral treatment and recovery support, not short-term detoxification programs aimed at abstinence.”
NIDA, the Institute of Medicine, the World Health Organization, and the White House drug czar’s office would all agree that indefinite (and maybe even lifelong) maintenance treatment is superior to abstinence-based rehab for opioid-use disorder. And even Hazelden, the Betty Ford–affiliated center that originated the concept of the twenty-eight-day rehab, changed its stance on medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, offering Suboxone to some patients in 2012.
But the rehab Jesse went to was aimed at abstinence, as most were, then and now.
“The whole system needs revamped,” said Tracey Helton Mitchell, a recovering heroin user, author, and activist. “In the United States, we are very attached to our twelve-step rehabs, which are not affordable, not standardized from one place to another, and not necessarily effective” for the opioid-addicted.
Clearly, more recent data supports ongoing MAT, but there is a catch: “One of the reasons people stay so hopeless about the epidemic is that, in any given episode, they only see a small proportion of people get into remission,” Harvard researcher John Kelly told me.
“What happens is, it takes about eight years on average, after people start treatment, to get one year of sobriety…and four to five different episodes of treatment” for that sobriety to stick.
And many people simply don’t have eight years.
After being kicked out of the sober-living house in Asheville, Jesse moved back home and took a construction job with his father, commuting ninety miles one way to the D.C. suburbs, where they worked on a government contract and Jesse earned $1,000 a week.
He was a good worker. He was pleasant to be around. And he lived rent-free with his mom. And so Kristi was stymied, later that summer, when the overdraft notices from Jesse’s bank started piling up.
“I can’t stop,” he finally admitted to his mom. He was spending $200 a day on black-market opiates, he told her, and asked for help returning to rehab in Florida. He was so high then that she refused to allow him to come home, to protect his younger sisters. But she arranged for him to stay in a nearby town with her sister, who made him hamburgers that night and let him sleep on her couch. He used what she believed was the last of his money to buy an airline ticket to Jacksonville. He was forty-eight hours away from a do-over, the insurance and admissions paperwork already arranged.
And yet Kristi still didn’t comprehend the depth of her son’s addiction. “I hate to even say it, but I thought he was going back to rehab for ‘just pills.’” Jesse still looked like a linebacker, after all. He was handsome and tanned. He hadn’t missed a day of work at his construction job. “They’d leave at four a.m., and that’s not easy work,” she said. He had plans to start community college in January 2014, then transfer to a four-year university. His goal was to become a phys-ed teacher, coach, or sports medicine trainer. He hungered still for the football field.
The idea that her son was shooting up heroin hadn’t crossed her mind, she said, then corrected herself: The truth was, the thought had crossed her mind; she just hadn’t let it roost. Despite evidence to the contrary. Despite having already padlocked her bedroom door, to keep Jesse from stealing money for drugs.
Only later would she learn about the spent syringes found on the Porta-John floor at the construction site where Jesse worked. Only later would she understand that Jesse lied about his dismissal from a warehouse job a year earlier. He swore he had nothing to do with the syringes his boss found in the bathroom, and Kristi believed him. How could someone who looked that robust be addicted to heroin?
It was late September 2013, and news of Jones’s heroin ring hadn’t yet appeared in the local press, though several arrests had already been made, and federal agents were working with local police from seven counties to target the leaders of what they were privately calling one of the largest heroin rings in the state. The region’s pill problem had become a full-fledged heroin epidemic in the span of just a few months.
But the only ones to know about it—other than the addicted—were a handful of cops.
That Friday night, two days before Jesse was scheduled to fly to a Jacksonville treatment center for his do-over, Dennis was deep in the throes of dopesickness when he and Jesse stole insulin needles from Jesse’s grandmother and bought heroin.
“I was puking,” Dennis recalled of their last day together. “I told him, I was like, ‘I gotta gotta get this dope.’”
“I’m not trying to do dope,” said Jesse, who’d spent the summer injecting black-market Roxys. But the pills had worn off, and he, too, had been throwing up off and on all day. He tried eating his two favorite foods—McDonald’s chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese—but couldn’t keep them down.
As soon as Dennis made the buy, Jesse relented, deciding it woul
d be his final hurrah before returning to rehab. They hosted a going-away party at a friend’s house. Late that night, a mutual friend broke down crying when she saw Jesse shoot up in front of people; he’d never before been so open about his heroin use, she told me.
But Jesse assured his friends that he liked the rehab he was returning to. Even though he missed his mom and twin teenage sisters, Jesse said, he liked being with people his age going through the same struggle as he was. He hugged Dennis’s girlfriend, Courtney Fletcher, and told her, “I promise, I’m gonna be OK.”
The next morning, as several friends left to go four-wheeling, Jesse came out of the spare bedroom complaining of a headache. Courtney offered him Tylenol from her purse, but Jesse declined and returned to the bedroom, she said.
Two hours later, Dennis saw that Jesse’s door was cracked open and went in to bum a cigarette. His bed was empty.
A few steps away, Dennis found his best friend unconscious in the bathroom, slumped over the vanity, a needle stuck in his arm and the belt he’d used to tie off with in a perfect circle on the floor.
“What do I do?” he shouted, running back and forth between the living room and the bathroom, screaming and crying and grabbing his hair. Some friends quickly fled, chucking the drugs and the paraphernalia into the woods beside the house.