Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  As I sit in Ian’s kitchen, it suddenly makes sense to me that Chris Foster would choose to shoot Jill and Kirstie in the back of their heads. It was as if he was too ashamed to look at them. Maybe the murders were a type of honor killing, as if Foster simply couldn’t bear the idea of losing their respect and the respect of his friends. I ask Ian if he thinks Foster planned his night of mayhem or if it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. “Oh, he was meticulous that night,” Ian says. “That’s weeks of planning, isn’t it?”

  “When do you think he did the planning?” I ask.

  “Probably in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep. That’s when people’s brains start thinking about that kind of thing, isn’t it?”

  • • •

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, I drive to Hodnet, near Maesbrook, to the West Midlands Shooting Ground, where I’m due to meet Graham Evans, an old friend and shooting partner of Foster’s. Clay-pigeon shooting was one of Foster’s great hobbies. He used to come to Hodnet every Tuesday night. It was, in fact, how he spent his last day on earth: clay-pigeon shooting at his neighbor’s barbecue.

  On the way, it starts to rain, and so, by the time I arrive, Graham Evans and the other shooters are crammed into the bar, passing the time until they can shoot by telling incredibly offensive jokes.

  “What’s the difference between a prostitute and crack cocaine?” says Bill (not his real name). “A prostitute can clean her crack and resell it.”

  Everyone laughs. There are an awful lot of tasteless jokes floating around here today. In fact, the minute I arrived at the club—practically before I was out of the car—someone asked if I knew the one about the black woman in the sauna. Then there was the sign on the gate of the pretty wisteria-covered farm next door to the shooting range: “Every third traveler [meaning ‘Gypsy’] is shot. The second has just left.” In the old days, I think, jokes such as these were intended to display superiority, but now they seem to do the opposite. Although this is a lovely, rustic, and quite posh shooting club, the men here seem a bit sad and ground down.

  “I’m sure there are jokes we can do about Fossie,” says a club member called Simon (not his real name). “Let’s see. Did you hear the one about the barbecue that ran out of Fosters . . . ?” Everyone looks at Simon.

  “Um . . .” he says. He falls silent. “That doesn’t really work,” he says.

  “I can understand why Fossie might want to kill himself,” Bill says. “I’ve thought about doing myself in loads of times. . . .”

  Nobody seems at all surprised by this blunt admission, so casually made. Who knows: Maybe Bill is always going on about killing himself. Or maybe lots of the men here have considered the option. There are racks of rifles for sale all over the place—Berettas and Winchesters and so on. Perhaps being in proximity to so much weaponry invariably turns a man’s mind to thoughts of suicide.

  “I even know the place where I’d do it,” Bill continues. “There’s a lovely spot up over there on that hill near the satellite dish.”

  There are a few murmurs along the lines of “That is a nice spot.”

  “But to shoot your own daughter . . .” Bill says. He trails off.

  “Anyway,” Graham Evans says. “The rain’s stopped. Do you want a go at shooting?”

  “OK,” I say.

  We head outside. Graham hands me a shotgun. I aim, shout “Pull!” and proceed effortlessly to blow to pieces every clay pigeon that has the misfortune to fly past my magnificence. I’m a natural at this, and clay-pigeon shooting turns out to be an incredibly exciting thing to do.

  Suddenly, lots of the other shooters start yelling, “Whoa! Whoa! Jon! Steady on!”

  “What?” I say, perplexed.

  “You’re doing this,” says Graham. He does an impersonation of a crazed person waving a gun terrifyingly around.

  “I am not,” I say.

  “You are,” half a dozen shooters say in unison.

  Graham says it’s great to see me so invigorated, and adds that if I want even more excitement, I should try shooting pheasants. “Pheasants have minds of their own,” he says, “so that’s rewarding. The best time to shoot them is at the end of October, a few weeks into the season, because they’ve already been shot at and survived. So they’re wise then, you see?”

  And then it starts raining again, so we rush back indoors and pass the time window-shopping the guns for sale. The conversation returns to Foster. Graham says he was a really impressive sight, turning up in his Porsche every Tuesday night. He says everyone knew he was loaded, “but around here people aren’t prejudiced against that sort of thing. Fossie was a good guy. A good shot. He called me El Supremo.” Graham pauses sadly. “He loved guns,” he says. “He had hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of them. He was a real collector.”

  On my way home, I drive once more through posh little Maesbrook. All the talk on the radio is of the credit crunch. They’re interviewing Oliver Letwin and Harriet Harman. Both admit, quite sheepishly, that they have no savings, only overdrafts.

  “I wish it weren’t so,” Letwin says, “and incidentally I wish people in Britain were all saving more. I know I ought to, but my wife and I are too extravagant and we should cut back.”

  The police followed me out of the village last time I was here, in part because I seemed too scruffy for these exclusive, nouveau-riche surroundings; but it dawns on me that perhaps—like Letwin—the people of Maesbrook actually have nothing but overdrafts and all these fancy cars and mansions are just an illusion. Maybe, with my meager savings, I’m the richest man in town.

  • • •

  LESS THAN A MONTH after the murders at Maesbrook, yet another father wiped out his family, this time in Southampton. His name was David Cass. He smothered his two daughters, telephoned his estranged partner, Kerrie Hughes, told her that the children had “gone to sleep forever,” hung up, and hanged himself. They were apparently going through a messy breakup. In the U.S., according to the Department of Justice, a parent—usually a man—wipes out his family, and then himself, about once every week.

  It’s startling to hear Foster’s friends talk about how they empathize with his actions. I wouldn’t have guessed how on the edge people in this Shropshire enclave can be, and how easy it is for the whole thing just to unravel.

  PART FOUR

  STEPPING OVER THE LINE

  “I know it’s bitter. Just keep drinking. Put your finger over your nose and chugalug it all down.”

  —George Exoo

  Blood Sacrifice

  On a Friday afternoon in January 2002, Susan Ellis sneaks past the security staff at Guy’s Hospital, London. She’s pretending to be a patient, although nobody asks. She catches the lift to the fourth floor, finds the kidney-dialysis waiting room, and whispers to me, “It’s perfect.”

  And, for her purposes, it is. It’s easily accessible from the corridor and security is not tight. It’s almost empty of patients and staff. Most crucially, there’s a table full of magazines. Susan pretends to read them. Nobody notices as she slips business cards inside the pages. She hopes patients will leaf through the magazines and see her card, which reads: “Need a kidney transplant? I can donate a kidney to you for free. Contact me at: kidney_for_free_from_me@yahoo.co.uk. This is a genuine free offer.”

  Donating kidneys to strangers is illegal in the UK. When I called the Department of Health to ask why, they said, “You mean, strangers selling kidneys?”

  “No. Just giving them away.”

  There was a silence: “Giving them away?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean, when the donor is dead?”

  “No, alive.”

  “We’ll get back to you,” they said. They did, with a prepared statement: “ULTRA [the Unrelated Live Transplant Regulatory Authority] insists on confirmation of an emotional relationship between a donor and a recipient.”

  The DH’s view, they explained over the phone, is that anyone who wants to donate a kidney to a stranger must be in it
for money. If they’re not, they must have psychiatric problems, and so they need to be protected from themselves. No one would go through such a traumatic, invasive operation for sane, altruistic reasons. When I met ULTRA’s chairman, Sir Roddy MacSween, he said he was sympathetic to altruistic donors in general, but added that the law’s the law, and any infringement would result in three months in prison and a £2,000 fine.

  Susan already knows about the illegality of strangers donating to strangers, so her plan is this: Once a recipient contacts her, they will together concoct a story about how they’ve been best friends for years. They will prove this long-standing friendship with faked photographs. Some of Susan’s wedding photos, she says, could easily be doctored—a recipient’s head superimposed onto a bridesmaid’s body, etc. If this plan fails, Susan will try to donate abroad.

  Susan is a Jesus Christian. She has long forsaken her possessions to live in a camper van currently parked next to a jogging track in Catford, South East London. Even though the Jesus Christians have been widely labeled as a sinister cult by the media and anticult groups, there is nothing externally odd about them—no unusual rituals or anything like that. They simply spend their days keeping fit, discussing theological matters, and hanging around shopping precincts, handing out cartoon books that look like Simpsons comics but, in fact, depict, among other parables, the persecution of the Jesus Christians by the courts, the media, and the anticult groups.

  The lifestyle is the thing. The Jesus Christians alone, they believe, are obedient to the teachings of Jesus, particularly Luke 14:33: “Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.” They have forsaken everything: families, possessions, jobs, homes, their place in the outside world, and are now in the process of giving up their spare kidneys, too, en masse.

  A year ago, their leader, Dave McKay, was flying home to Australia after visiting his followers in the UK, India, and the U.S. The in-flight entertainment was A Gift of Love: The Daniel Huffman Story, a TV movie about a boy who donates his kidney to his grandmother. Dave was profoundly moved, and that’s when he had the idea. In a round-robin to his followers (there are around two dozen Jesus Christians worldwide; Dave’s strict lifestyle criteria tend to keep the numbers down), he e-mailed his own intention to donate a kidney to a stranger. He also wrote, “If anyone else is interested in doing the same, let me know.” The majority took him up on the offer.

  Dave imagines that when the world learns of his mass kidney-donating plan, we’ll regard it in one of two ways—either as a really lovely thing for the Jesus Christians to do, or as the self-destructive act of a religious cult acting under the spell of a notorious leader. I am surprised to learn later that he is not only expecting the latter response, he is hoping for it.

  Susan has been researching and strategizing. As well as the business cards, she’s been posting messages in chat rooms where people with failing kidneys support one another emotionally while they queue, often in vain, for a transplant. At an Internet café in Sutton, she checks her account to see if anyone has responded to her latest messages. There are scores of e-mails for her. The first is from the chat-room host: “I do not wish to be associated with anything that could be construed as illicit as this would risk the group being shut down. I will discuss this matter with my son who’s a police chief inspector and get back to you.”

  Susan laughs nervously. “Whoa!” she says.

  She clicks on to the next e-mail, which reads: “You are probably using this opportunity to get into the USA. Sorry, but no black-market organs here. Stay in your own country.”

  “Why is everyone taking this the wrong way?” sighs Susan.

  She clicks on to the next e-mail, from Portsmouth: “What are you? Some kind of sick moron? This is no fun. Don’t mess around with us. We have a severe illness. Can’t imagine anyone would donate a kidney to a stranger without any strings.”

  And then the next one: “You’re sick. How can you give people false hope like that? A lot of these people are on dialysis, waiting for a kidney, and Mrs. Christianity has got two good ones! Whoopee for you! What are you going to do? Eenie, meeny, minie, mo, or a raffle? You’re one sick attention-seeker. If you’re for real, why be so desperate to send so many ads? You sound sad, lonely and unwanted. The gate you’ll be touching when your number is up is bound to be hot.”

  There is a silence.

  “Hasn’t he got a point?” I ask.

  She looks hurt.

  “Not the going to hell,” I clarify, “but the . . .”

  “The eenie, meeny, minie, mo?” says Susan. “Sure. But that’s like Schindler’s List, right? He had an eenie, meeny, minie, mo situation, too, but what was he supposed to do—nothing? Just because there’s a greater need than what you can give doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give.”

  And then she clicks on to the next e-mail: “Hi, I just received your e-mail about you giving away one of your kidneys for free. I’m curious why you would want to do such a thing, and for NOTHING? I’m sorry, but I find it hard to believe. I don’t want to be rude but I’m 36 years old and I had a kidney transplant—my third—about five years ago, and have been told it’s failing and will be needing dialysis shortly. I’m not looking to get your kidney. I’m just interested in hearing your reasons. Sincerely, C.”

  Susan is thrilled. “I’m jumping up and down. I’m so happy.” She says she’ll write back to C, who lives in Scotland, and perhaps strike up a friendship with her.

  And then Susan returns to her camper van and her eight-year-old son, Danny, who is unaware that his mother wants to donate one of her kidneys to a stranger. Whenever I’m in their van, and we’re talking about kidneys, and Danny runs in to ask his mother a question, we have to stop talking abruptly.

  At the same time, in the U.S.—where altruistic kidney donors are welcomed at a handful of hospitals—two Jesus Christians in Dallas are ready to donate, in Minneapolis, on February 21. Robin is thirty-six and has been a Jesus Christian for twenty-one years. Casey is twenty-three and joined the group only in 2001. Like Susan, they decided to donate after Dave sent his e-mail. I telephone Casey in early February, three weeks before his scheduled operation. “Have you told your mother?” I ask him.

  “No,” he says.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “If she’s opposed to the idea, she’s going to be opposed to it whenever I tell her. So I’d rather get the operation out of the way first and then tell her.”

  I e-mail Dave. I say I think Casey should tell his mother. Dave’s response is this: “Although he’s nearly 24 years old, and not a child, I can understand that it sounds cowardly, and maybe inconsiderate, not to tell her ahead of time. However, I’m the LEADER of this sinister little cult, and I am not telling relatives because they reacted so strongly when I first mentioned it. It’s just a nuisance when people start raving and treating you like you’ve lost your mind. If it would make YOU feel better, I think he would probably agree to telling her. It’s only three weeks now until he donates, so it’ll have to be pretty soon. I personally would feel better if she DID know, so it won’t be so much of a shock when she finds out afterward, as long as she does not try to make problems with the hospital where the transplant is taking place. See, in our case, she would only need to phone and say he’s part of a religious ‘cult’—the magic C word—and the operation would probably be off.”

  A few days later, Casey decides to test the water with a chatty e-mail to his mother. “It was full of mundane things,” he tells me. “Small talk. How are her days going? And I just mentioned in the e-mail that I’m thinking of donating a kidney. I haven’t heard anything yet.”

  “How do you think she’ll respond?” I ask.

  “She may have the impression that I’m being coerced,” he says.

  “Does she feel that way about the Jesus Christians, anyway?” I ask.

  “She does feel conflicted by our unity.”

  “That you’re a live-in group?”

&
nbsp; “That we hold ourselves accountable to each other. We make group decisions. It isn’t the kind of personal freedom she feels I should have, I guess.”

  During the pre-op psychological tests, the doctors soon realized that Robin and Casey’s altruism was part of a group scheme. “Will your Christian friends think less of you if you don’t donate?” they asked.

  “No,” said Robin.

  “What if you have an accident in later life?” asked the doctors. “Maybe you’ll need your spare kidney in the future.”

  “The Bible says we must step out in faith,” replied Robin. “We must do the good we can do today and not wait until tomorrow.”

  They were given questionnaires. They had to tick the statements that they felt most applied to them: “I hear voices most of the time”; “I feel I have a tight band around my head most of the time”; “I’ve always wanted to be a girl.” The doctors told them to answer honestly, because they had ways of telling if they were lying.

  “I don’t hear voices, but I do get stressed-out,” Casey tells me. “But they don’t provide little boxes where you can explain these things.” Casey is feeling stressed-out, in part because he feels the process is taking too long. “I wish it would all go quicker, because I’m pretty committed,” he says.

  They passed the tests. The hospital warned that “even a hint of publicity” would result in the operations being abandoned. I send Casey and Robin a video camera, to film the trip to Minneapolis.

  That night, I receive an anxious e-mail from Dave in Australia: “Jon, I am taking a big risk by sharing this with you before we have donated. Even the slightest leak could sabotage the entire project.”

  A flurry of e-mails follows from Dave, more than sixty in all. Sometimes they are chatty. Often they are tense: “You and I both know that the idea of a ‘cult’ donating kidneys en masse is a ‘sensational’ story. Susan said that you were talking like you still suspect that members are being coerced into donating, that they are getting paid for donations, and that the money is going to me. She said that she thought you were quite nervous about being seen with her placing the business cards in waiting rooms. You’ve asked us some hard questions, so I think it’s time for us to ask you a few. ARE you thinking of writing something nasty about us?”