The Best American Crime Writing

by Otto Penzler

  Maybe because he’s the clear-cut comic foil in this late-night tableau, which is by now replete with all the makings of a Jayson Williams theatrical performance: alcohol, money, attitude. The only thing missing is a gun—the most obvious manifestation of a man’s need to prove his manhood.

  Tales of athletes and firearms are hardly unusual in this day and time, but there’s nothing routine about Jayson’s love of guns, not if one anecdote in his book is grounded in any semblance of truth. The scene was an after-hours gathering at Manute Bol’s home. Jayson and his buddy Franco were drinking with Bol and his uncle from the Sudan. Fueled by a couple of Heinekens, Bol’s uncle started giving Jayson a hard time. “You the one they call Mr. Capone? You not so tough.” When Bol’s uncle donned a necklace of crow feet, rooster feet, and turtle heads to prove that Jayson’s tough-guy act was no match for his charms, they all had a good laugh. But Bol’s uncle kept pushing. It was around 3:00 A.M. when Jayson fetched a pistol from his BMW, pointed it at Bol’s uncle, and scared the man half to death.

  These days Jayson’s tastes run toward shotguns. He shoots skeet, as if he has tamed his family’s legacy of Wild West shoot-outs. Turned his frontier sensibility into a rich man’s game. Truth be told, though, he nearly blew New York Jets receiver Wayne Chrebet’s head off by accident once, not the kind of gunmanship a hunt club looks for in a man.

  In fact, it’s remarkable that Jayson is permitted to own guns, considering the night in 1994 when he was charged with reckless endangerment and unlawful possession of a weapon in the parking lot outside the Nets’ arena. Prosecutor John Fahy claims Jayson fired a SIG Sauer .40-caliber automatic pistol over the heads of teammates. Jayson says he never fired the gun. No one was hurt. Over Fahy’s vigorous objections, the judge dropped the charges after Jayson agreed to enter a pretrial program and to spend a year lecturing children about the dangers of guns. As part of his rehabilitation, he purchased newspaper ads in the Bergen Record. “Shoot for the top. Shoot for your future. Shoot Baskets, not Guns.”

  The rack on the wall in Jayson’s enormous bedroom holds several shotguns. It is one of the first things Gus sees when he enters the room between 2:30 and 3:00 A.M. along with Jayson and three Globetrotters. Gus does not have to know that some of the guns are loaded to feel uneasy; he hates all guns. He has hated them since his father tried to teach him to hunt as a child. Back then Gus would not touch his father’s shotgun. Even the replica pistols his friend Joe used to collect gave him the creeps.

  According to witness accounts, evidence at the scene, and sources close to the investigation, this is what happens next: With Culuko in the doorway behind him, Williams opens the glass case—which is unlocked—and takes out a twelve-gauge double-barreled Browning shotgun. He cracks the gun open, lowers the barrel, and peers inside. Turning toward Gus, who stands three feet away, he flicks the gun shut with a snap of his wrist. The moment the barrel clicks into place, the shotgun discharges. All twelve pellets enter the left side of Gus’s chest. They open a hole large enough to swallow a silver dollar. Gus Christofi falls, coming to rest on the floor on his left side. The life bleeds out of him, a good life, fifty-five years in the making and a few minutes in the ending.

  It is not likely that he is conscious after the pellets tear into his chest. It is not likely he is able to reflect on the profound and futile and sorry unfairness of it all: that seven years spent fleeing his previous life led him back to a world worse than any he’d left. That there are some sins for which you never stop paying.

  According to witness accounts, the blast awakens Jayson’s half brother, who rushes in from a distant bedroom. John Gordnick comes from the downstairs gym, where he was playing ball with his two young sons. Williams and Culuko confer. Culuko instructs the witnesses to tell the police it was a suicide. Jayson wipes down the gun. And then he takes the hand of Gus’s dead body, still warm, and tries to imprint Gus’s fingerprints on the stock.

  Jayson takes off his clothes and tosses them to Gordnick to dispose of before the police arrive. He goes downstairs and dives into the pool to wash himself clean, wipe away any trace of what he has done, and when his body emerges, six feet ten inches of finely tuned athlete, it glistens, free of all sin—renewed, restored, absolved. He drapes it in a fresh set of clothes and awaits the arrival of the authorities. He will plead innocent to seven charges, including aggravated manslaughter, a crime that carries a penalty of ten to thirty years in prison.

  On February 20, Gus Christofi’s body is lowered into the ground, accompanied by Joe Armstrong’s seven-year-sobriety medallion. Gus himself didn’t make it to seven. But perhaps in death he will right one more life, the life of Jayson Williams, as Jayson sits and ponders his misdeeds, maybe in a jail cell, a cell Gus used to call home. Who knew?

  Jayson Williams’s book wasn’t your average athletes bio. Jayson Williams’s book boasted of the usual—his tough-childhood-to-rural-estate rise through the ranks; his basketball skills; his predictably defiant attitude. But it also boasted of some very odd stuff. Like his swaggery abuse of alcohol. Like the night he pointed a pistol at a teammate’s uncle. The night he inadvertently discharged a shotgun so close to another athlete’s head that the other guy was knocked unconscious. Jayson Williams was always a popular guy as a player. No surprise his book became a best-seller. Some must have loved it for its comic content. Me, I found it fascinating as a grim, dead-serious cry for help. For someone to save him from himself. But there must have been a lot of people who hadn’t read it, judging from the widespread response in the days after a limo driver was shot dead in Jayson’s bedroom after a night of revelry. Jayson? Jayson the doer of good works? Kind-hearted and funny as hell? Jayson couldn’t have blown the guy away. Jayson the national TV commentator? Former All-Star? But he had: with one of the shotguns he kept loaded in an unlocked case on his bedroom wall. After a night of drinking.

  To lifetime chroniclers of modern professional sport, there was nothing unusual about the story of Jayson Williams and the night he pointed his shotgun at and took the life of Costas “Gus” Christofi. Like so many before him, vaulted to a place in society for which he was entirely unprepared, Jayson Williams was unable to make a seamless transition when injuries cut a spectacular career short, and his other passions took over. For firearms. For drinking. For boasting. What was unusual was the nature of the victim. Gus Christofi, former addict, former thief, former all-time loser, had done something astounding: He had entirely turned his life around. Sober for years, he was a model counselor at his rehab clinic. The favorite driver of just about every client of the limo company that employed him. Huge sports fan. And gentle? He always walked away from a fight, even as a kid on the mean streets of Paterson. And he had a deathly, lifelong fear of guns.

  The night of his death, he’d volunteered for the job. Because he loved sports and admired athletes. Because he’d get to meet Jayson Williams. And he did. Very briefly—but long enough to see how wrong he’d been about thinking that stardom could make a man something special. As Gus bled out his life through his chest on Jayson’s bedroom floor, did he understand the larger message? That as we celebrate our athletes unto godhood, we are also stunting them? No. Gus undoubtedly forgave Jayson with all of his heart, or what was left of it. He left it to the rest of us to take a larger lesson from his death: that until we start paying as much attention to our superstars psychological frailties as we do to their physical triumphs, there will be more victims. For Jayson Williams was a train wreck coming from a long, long way off. Anyone could have seen it coming. If they’d wanted to.

  In February of this year, Williams and the family of Christofi settled a civil lawsuit filed by the family in October of 2002. Terms were not disclosed.

  The criminal trial was scheduled to start in February, one year after the shooting. But it was postponed when Williams’ attornies appealed the original indictment, arguing that the original indictment was flawed: The prosecutors presentation to the grand jury, they said, had been misle
ading.

  But before a state appellate court could hear arguments on that appeal, the prosecutors trumped the defendants counsel, obtaining a second indictment from a different grand jury—a stronger one, which carries a maximum term of 55 years, instead of the original 45, because of an added weapons charge.

  A new trial date has not been set.

  THE DAY TREVA THRONEBERRY DISAPPEARED

  SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH

  ELECTRA, TEXAS—1985

  She was a pretty girl, thin, with a spray of pale freckles across her face and light brown hair that curled just above her shoulders. The librarian at the high school called her “a quiet-type person,” the kind of student who yes-ma’amed and no-ma’amed her teachers. She played on the tennis team, practicing with an old wooden racket on a crack-lined court behind the school. In the afternoons she waitressed at the Whistle Stop, the local drive-in hamburger restaurant, jumping up on the running boards of the pickup trucks so she could hear better when the drivers placed their orders.

  Her name was Treva Throneberry, and just about everybody in that two-stoplight North Texas oil town knew her by sight. She was never unhappy, people said. She never complained. She always greeted her customers with a shy smile, even when she had to walk out to their cars on winter days when the northers came whipping off the plains, swirling ribbons of dust down the street. During her breaks, she’d sit at a back table and read from her red Bible that zipped open and shut.

  There were times, the townspeople would later say, when they did wonder about the girl. No one had actually seen her do anything that could be defined, really, as crazy. But people noticed that she would occasionally get a vacant look in her blue eyes. One day at school she drew a picture of a young girl standing under a leafless tree, her face blue, the sun black. One Sunday at the Pentecostal church she stumbled to the front altar, fell to her knees, and began telling Jesus that she didn’t deserve to live. And then there was that day when Treva’s young niece J’Lisha, who was staying at the Throneberry home, told people that Treva had shaken her awake the previous night and whispered that a man was outside their room with a gun—which turned out to be not true at all.

  But surely, everyone in town said, all teenage girls go through phases. They get overly emotional every now and then. Treva was going to turn out just fine. She didn’t even drink or smoke cigarettes like some of the other girls in town.

  Then, that December, just as the Electra High School Tigers were headed toward their first state football championship and the town was feeling a rare surge of pride, Treva, who was sixteen years old, stopped working at the Whistle Stop. She stopped coming to school. “She disappeared,” a former classmate said. “And nobody knew where she went.”

  VANCOUVER, WASHINGTON—1997

  The new girl arrived at Evergreen High School wearing loose bib overalls, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes, and her hair was braided in pigtails. She was fuller-figured than most teenage girls, wide-hipped, but she had an appealing, slightly lopsided smile and a childlike voice tinged with a southern drawl. She was carrying a graphite tennis racket and a Bible.

  Her name, she told school officials, was Brianna Stewart. She was 16 years old, she said, and for almost a year she had been living in Portland, Oregon, just across the Columbia River from Vancouver, walking the streets during the day and sleeping in grim youth shelters at night. She started attending services at Vancouver’s charismatic Glad Tidings Church, where she met a young couple who took her into their home after hearing her testimony. The couple, who had accompanied Brianna to school that morning, said that she was full of potential, determined to succeed—and that all she needed was a chance to get over her past.

  “What is your past?” asked one of the school’s counselors, Greg Merrill.

  For a moment Brianna said nothing, as if she was trying to maintain her composure. Then she told Merrill that she had been raised just outside Mobile, Alabama, by her mother and her Navajo step-father, a sheriffs deputy. Brianna said that when she was a child, her mother had been murdered, and after that she lived with her stepfather. At about the age of 13, she ran away, hitchhiking from state to state. Because Brianna remembered her mother telling her that her real father lived somewhere in the Northwest, she had come to the area hoping that she could find clues to her past.

  It was the most unusual case Merrill had ever heard in his thirty years of counseling students. When he asked about her education, she told him she had only been homeschooled, but she promised she would be a good student. “I’ve never had a normal life,” she said. “That’s all I want—to be a normal teenager like everyone else.”

  She was enrolled in the tenth grade at the 1,900-student school. One of her first classes was Algebra I. She walked in and was given a seat toward the back, where she pulled out a notebook and began listening intently to the teacher. Then she glanced over at the boy sitting next to her.

  “Hi,” said Ken Dunn, who couldn’t stop smiling at her.

  She giggled shyly. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Brianna. I’m new here.”

  ELECTRA, TEXAS—1985

  It didn’t take long for the rumor to spread through town that Treva Throneberry had last been seen down at the police station, where she had given a statement claiming that her daddy, holding a gun in his hand, had raped her. She added that her mother had only laughed when she found out what had happened. A stunned police officer called child welfare, which quickly sent a social worker to Electra to whisk Treva away, and a judge entered emergency protection orders temporarily preventing Treva’s parents from seeing their daughter or even finding out where she was. Soon, Electra was buzzing: Was it possible that Carl Throneberry had raped his own daughter?

  Carl and his wife, Patsy, were known as good country people. They lived in a small frame home decorated with a photo of John Wayne on one wall and a rug that depicted the Last Supper on another. Carl was a big, lumbering man, a truck driver in the oil fields. He had met Patsy in the early fifties at a soda fountain in Oklahoma, and after a few weeks of courting, they had driven to the A&P supermarket in Wichita Falls, where the butcher, who was also a preacher, had wiped his hands on his apron, pulled out a small pocket Bible, and performed their wedding ceremony out in the A&P parking lot while the couple sat holding hands in the back seat of Carl’s Chevy.

  Yes, Carl admitted, he sometimes had trouble making ends meet, but he had always made sure his children—one son and four daughters, of whom Treva was the youngest—were well fed and dressed properly for school. In fact, Carl said, his older brother Billy Ray often dropped by to give the four Throneberry girls presents. After the older girls had left home, Billy Ray especially doted on Treva, bringing her candy bars, buying her clothes from the dollar store, and taking her on drives in his car.

  In court Carl and Patsy insisted that Treva had made up the entire story, and their attorney went so far as to demand that Treva be given a lie detector test. Treva’s sisters also gave affidavits saying they too believed that their father was innocent.

  If anyone had raped Treva, Carl told police officers and social workers, it was one of those fanatical members of Electra’s Pentecostal church. He knew for a fact, he said, that they had been trying to brainwash her into becoming a missionary. The church members, in turn, said they had only been trying to help a young girl who was obviously in great distress. They said that in the weeks leading up to her rape allegation, Treva had been telling them that she was scared of being at her home and that she had been slipping out at night to sleep in an abandoned house next door or even on a pew at the church itself. What was also perplexing to social workers was Treva’s behavior at the foster home in Wichita Falls where she had been taken. Her foster mother, Sharon Gentry, a middle school science teacher, said that she would often find Treva at night curled in a fetal position in the corner of her bedroom, the bedcovers pulled over her head. On other nights Gentry would find her banging her head against the wall, murmuring in her sleep, “Please don’t hurt me. I’
ll be a good girl.”

  Like so many who had known Treva, Gentry was touched by the girl’s gentleness. Around the house, she was soft-spoken and exceedingly polite. She began attending Wichita Falls High School, where she developed a reputation as a diligent, thoughtful student. She regularly read her Bible, and she wrote soulful teenage poetry in her notebook. One poem began:

  Raining tears, flowing down my face

  Yours forever, a lost case

  No one cares or sees you fall

  No one hears you when you call.

  As the weeks passed, however, Treva started to leave disturbing handwritten notes on the ironing board for Gentry. “Sometimes I wish I were dead,” she wrote in one note. “Sometimes I don’t. Life seems impossible and death seems eternal. I will have no life after death.” She came out of her bedroom one morning and told Gentry that she had been dreaming about shooting herself. In the dream, she said, she could see the bullet entering her head. She later told her a story about how she had been kidnapped in Electra and taken blindfolded by members of a satanic cult to an abandoned oil field, where she was tied to a stake. People in black robes danced around her, she said, then slit the throats of black cats and dogs and forced her to drink their blood.

  In May 1986 Treva went to see her counselor at Wichita Falls High School and said in an eerily calm voice that she was thinking about jumping off the third floor of the building to kill herself. Police officers sped to the school, handcuffed Treva, and drove her to the old redbrick Wichita Falls State Hospital at the edge of the city. There she spent long periods of time by herself, sitting in the dayroom of the adolescent unit, looking out through large windows on the neatly mowed lawns. According to hospital reports, she was often seen crying. She rarely ate. Her face was blank, her cheeks sunken, her hair flat. Doctors and therapists arrived to give her various tests, including the Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery. They sat beside her and asked if she felt detached, if she felt hostile, if she felt withdrawn, if she felt lonely. They prescribed Xanax, for anxiety, and Trilafon, which was designed to combat what they called thought disorders, and Tofranil, an antidepressant. They put her in a weekly group therapy session, where she and other adolescents sat in a circle on vinyl-covered chairs.