Features

SEEDS OF VIOLENCE

March 1989 Leslie Bennetts
Features
SEEDS OF VIOLENCE
March 1989 Leslie Bennetts

SEEDS OF VIOLENCE

LESLIE BENNETTS

The good seed/bad seed theme is an obsession of novelist John Edgar Wideman. He rose from a Pittsburgh ghetto to become the second black American Rhodes scholar at Oxford; his brother sank into a life of crime and drug addiction and is now serving a life sentence without parole for murder. A generation later, the theme has come back to plague him again, with one of his own golden children, Jacob, confessing to two vicious murders. LESLIE BENNETTS probes the mystery at the heart of the Wideman family

Up on the outskirts of town at Alta Vista Heights, which advertises itself as Laramie's best residential neighborhood, the boxy modern brick and wood houses command a sweeping view of the vast, barren plains and the snowcapped mountains beyond. The streets are very quiet here, and with no streetlights it gets so black at night you can't see to put a key in a car door. Local people like to brag that winter lasts ten months a year but that snow is never a problem, because the relentless wind scouring the high plateau sweeps Wyoming's snowfall over the state line into Nebraska. As the temperature drops below zero, people stay inside and mind their own business. On the street where the Widemans used to live, new neighbors have moved into several of the houses. Some of them don't even know about the family and the murders.

Over on the other side of town, the people are poorer, houses are meaner, and lurid yellow and orange neon signs bum bright near the highway. Just off the Snowy Range exit on the interstate is Foster's Country Comer, a motel and twenty-four-hour restaurant and gas station where the dieseltruck stop advertises "free showers and sewer dump" with any fuel purchase. Behind Foster's is a dirt road with a few shabby bungalows in back of an auto-service shop. Shelli Wiley used to live there in a small one-story building— what's known in these parts as an apartment complex—but these days you could drive down the road and never know anything terrible had happened. The fire that incinerated her apartment was so devastating that the unit was never rebuilt; only an empty lot overgrown with weeds marks the spot where she was killed. Out on the road the mailboxes are numbered two through five; if you didn't know to look for it, you wouldn't even notice that number one has disappeared.

Down at the public high school, the Plainsmen play basketball in the gym, though Laramie hasn't had a winning team in the last couple of years. The coach still regrets the loss of the younger Wideman boy: he would surely have become the best player in the school if he'd stayed. But around Laramie, even folks who knew the Widemans don't talk about them much anymore. When they do, they tend to shake their heads at the unfathomable and conclude, "Those poor people."

No one would ever have foreseen that John Wideman and his family would be remembered that way. From the time he was a child, John seemed to live a charmed life; although he was not bom to privilege, he created it wherever he went. An exceptional student and a superb athlete, he earned a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he not only acquired a Phi Beta Kappa key but starred on the basketball court, becoming captain of the team. He had dreamed of a career in the N.B.A., but when he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University—only the second black American ever to be so honored—it seemed clear that he had a bright future in the world of intellectuals and scholars.

Unlike many youthful achievers, John managed to sustain his winning streak as an adult, balancing a rigorous life of the mind with an equally demanding discipline of the body. He married a white woman from a well-to-do family, was granted tenure at the University of Pennsylvania and then at the University of Wyoming, and became one of the most prominent black writers in America, earning the 1984 PEN/Faulkner Award for his work. But while many former jocks lapse into the self-indulgence of middle-age spread, Wideman—tall, graceful, and fit, a charismatic figure who always commanded respect and attention—maintained his basketball skills, playing cutthroat pickup games every day and priding himself on the prowess he was determined to pass on to his sons.

While Wideman's novels garnered respectful reviews, it was his children who seemed most vibrantly to embody their father's success story. He himself had been raised in a working-class poor family in a Pittsburgh ghetto, but his own children were decidedly upper-middle-class; all three were talented athletes and good students, popular and well mannered. They grew up in Laramie, where their father began teaching at the University of Wyoming in 1973, and spent summers at Sports Camp Takajo in Maine. Their maternal grandfather owned the beautiful lakeside retreat, where the children of the affluent enjoyed clean air, good tennis courts, and team competitions, a stark contrast to the fetid summer streets crawling with drug dealers in the deteriorating neighborhood where John had spent his early years.

Like their father, the Wideman children too seemed destined to join the ranks of society's winners—until the August night in 1986 when Jacob Wideman, John's middle child, picked up a souvenir hunting knife he had just bought at Yellowstone National Park on a Takajo trip to the West and plunged it into the chest of his sleeping bunkmate, a boy he would later say he had no quarrel with. Calmly leaving his fellow camper to bleed to death, Jake stole the camp counselor's rented car and $3,300 in traveler's checks and drove off alone into his own tormented future. Like his victim, he was sixteen years old.

Eric Kane's lifeless body was discovered the next morning propped sideways on the toilet of the motel room where he and Jake had been assigned roommates. After lying in bed until the mattress was saturated with blood, Eric—undoubtedly in shock—had dragged himself into the bathroom, leaving a horror-movie trail of blood behind him and crimson handprints on the wall. Jake Wideman left his own trail of forged traveler's checks as he ricocheted around the country—from Flagstaff, Arizona, where Eric Kane died and the camp trip was abruptly terminated, to Phoenix to Los Angeles to Las Vegas to New York to Minneapolis to Duluth and then back to Minneapolis, bouncing crazily across the map by car, bus, and plane until he finally contacted his family and turned himself in eight days after the murder.

Flanked by his parents and a tough pair of lawyers, Jake pleaded not guilty. For the next two years, the Widemans and their lawyers led Arizona prosecutors and the Kane family on a roller-coaster ride through the judicial system, compiling a lengthy series of postponements and other legal maneuvers in their battle to save Jake from the direst consequences of his action, which could have resulted in the death penalty. Jake himself didn't seem to want to be saved; his lawyers told him not to say anything to anybody, but a month after turning himself in he called up the Flagstaff Police Department and told them he wanted to confess, waiting patiently by the phone until the detective who had first investigated the murder scene called him back to taperecord Jake's unexpected admission of guilt.

Jake's mother found notes he had written that said, "Killing solves problems.

I think I will murder someone."

His attorneys fought to suppress the confession, but by last fall, eighteen years old and legally no longer a juvenile, Jake pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison; although it would be twenty-five years before he was eligible for parole, the presiding judge issued an unusual recommendation, that even the Jacob Edgar Wideman of a quarter-century hence should not be considered for parole. The case is far from over, however; the Kanes, a family crippled by grief and consumed with rage over the Widemans' response to Eric's murder, have filed a $50 million civil suit against John and Judy Wideman and Judy's father, Morton Goldman, the longtime owner of the family's beloved Camp Takajo, among other defendants.

When Jake was first charged with the murder, his family, friends, teachers, and schoolmates were incredulous. Despite the confession, many found it impossible to believe that the quiet, courteous boy they knew, a teenager who eschewed drugs and alcohol and seemed to get along with everyone, could have committed such a crime. But in their lawsuit, Sanford and Louise Kane charge that Jake's family should have known: that contrary to appearances, Jake was a deeply disturbed youth, and that his parents and grandparents were guilty of gross negligence in closing their eyes to a growing body of evidence that their seemingly normal teenager was, in Louise's words, "an animal.'' Sandy Kane reserved his deepest fury for John Wideman: "He can't comprehend he created a monster," Sandy said bitterly at

Jake's sentencing hearing last October. As far as the Kanes are concerned, the dark side of John Wideman's success story had always been there, lurking just below the surface, held at bay only temporarily by the grace of time and a family's willful blindness.

Indeed, as the Wideman case wound its tortuous way through the legal process, the evidence of pathology had begun to emerge: reports of marital strife and discord within the family, and on Jake's part ugly tales of sexual molestation and chronic theft. But even those most committed to the idea that Jake was not a killer were stunned into silence in 1987, when Jake suddenly, with no warning, offered up a confession to a second homicide, the gruesomely savage slaying of Shelli Wiley in Laramie two years earlier, when Jake was only fifteen. That case was still unsolved at the time of his confession; already in the abyss, Jake seemed determined to ensure that he would never escape. In the process, he has resurrected all the tortured ghosts of John Wideman's past and carried them triumphant into the family's future.

You never know exactly when something begins. The more you delve and backtrack and think, the more clear it becomes that nothing has a discrete, independent history; people and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of necessity and interdependence and chance that after all could have produced only one result: what is. The intertwining strands of DNA that determine a creature's genetic predispositions might serve as a model for this complexity, but the double helix, bristling with myriad possibilities, is not mysterious enough. The usual notion of time, of one thing happening first and opening the way for another and another, becomes useless pretty quickly when I try to isolate the shape of your life from the rest of us, when I try to retrace your steps and discover precisely where and when you started to go bad.

When John Wideman wrote those words in 1984 in Brothers and Keepers, his first nonfiction work after the publication of six novels, it was not his son but rather his younger brother, Robert, who preoccupied him. As stellar as John's own life had been, Robby's seemed the troubled opposite. "Always there," John mused in Brothers and Keepers. "The bad seed, the good seed." Ten years younger than John, a child of the 1960s rather than the 1950s, Robby, whom John himself had named, gravitated toward drugs and the life of the streets, incurring his parents' helpless wrath. Robby never accepted the lesson John had learned so early: that success in a white man's world required playing the game by someone else's rules. John had done so brilliantly, but the price had been high: while he was controlled and in command on the outside, "inside was a breeding ground for rage, hate, dreams of vengeance," he wrote later.

"The problem was that in order to be the person I thought I wanted to be, I believed I had to seal myself off from you, construct a wall between us," John explained to Robby in Brothers and Keepers. "I felt uncomfortable around you. Most of what I felt was guilt. I'd made my choices. I was running away from Pittsburgh, from poverty, from blackness. . .my exile, my flight from home began with good grades, with good English, with setting myself apart long before I'd earned a scholarship and a train ticket over the mountains to Philadelphia.... If I ever doubted how good I had it away at school in that world of books, exams, pretty, rich white girls. . .youall were back home in the ghetto to remind me how lucky I was. .. . Just two choices as far as I could tell: either/or. Rich or poor. White or black. Win or lose. I figured which side I wanted to be on when the Saints came marching in. Who the Saints, the rulers of the earth were, was clear. ... To succeed in the man's world you must become like the man and the man sure didn't claim no bunch of nigger relatives in Pittsburgh."

But as John made his careful way in The Man's world, moving from his first teaching post, at the University of Pennsylvania, to a new life at the University of Wyoming, Robby was dealing drugs to support his growing habit and running petty scams. Although far away, John was aware of the problem, but he did not get involved: "Denying disruptive emotions was a survival mechanism I'd been forced to learn early in life. Robby's troubles could drive me crazy if I let them. It had been better to keep my feelings at a distance. Let the miles and years protect me. Robby was my brother, but that was once upon a time, in another country. My life was relatively comfortable, pleasant, safe. I'd come west to escape the demons Robby personified. I didn't need outlaw brothers reminding me how much had been lost, how much compromised, how terribly the world still raged beyond the charmed circle of my life on the Laramie plains."

The inevitable finally happened, and the shock waves reverberated all the way to Wyoming. John got the news in a phone call from his mother: Robby and two of his friends had killed a man during a holdup; Robby hadn't pulled the trigger, but he was a fugitive, wanted for armed robbery and murder. ''The distance I'd put between my brother's world and mine suddenly collapsed," John wrote in Brothers and Keepers. ''The two thousand miles between Laramie, Wyoming, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my years of willed ignorance, of flight and hiding, had not changed a simple truth: I could never run fast enough or far enough."

That truth was driven home to John when Robby showed up in Laramie nearly three months after the holdup. The Widemans fed Robby and his partners in flight and kept them overnight, but they took off the next morning. They were driving a stolen car; when they were arrested across the state line in Colorado, the police quickly realized they had happened onto something more serious than a missing Oldsmobile. But until two Laramie detectives showed up on his doorstep, it never even occurred to John that in harboring his brother he had also implicated himself. "Aiding and abetting a fugitive," he wrote in Brothers and Keepers. "Accessory after the fact to the crime of first-degree murder. The detectives hauled me down to the station. Demanded that I produce an alibi for the night a convenience store had been robbed in Utah. Four black men had been involved. Three had been tentatively identified, which left one unaccounted for. I was black. My brother was a suspect. So perhaps I was the fourth perpetrator. No matter that I lived four hundred miles from the scene of the crime. No matter that I wrote books and taught literature and creative writing at the university. I was black. Robby was my brother. Those unalterable facts would always incriminate me."

"Jake put himself in the same category as his dad's brother, because that's the way his dad's brother was treated."

Once Robby was serving a life sentence at a maximum-security facility in Pittsburgh, John finally tried to come to terms with his past by writing Brothers and Keepers, an autobiographical account of his own life intertwined with Robby's story. But in this effort, too, John unwittingly re-created the dichotomy that had always haunted him and Robby. Just as everything Robby touched seemed to go wrong, everything John did earned acclaim; he turned his brother's ruined life into another renowned book that won both of them a great deal of attention. Outraged by Robby's Draconian sentence to life without parole for a murder he didn't even commit, John also began a oneman crusade for parole reform, skillfully using such forums as 60 Minutes to publicize Robby's case.

He visited Robby regularly while he was writing the book, driving up to the prison in his new Volvo station wagon with his wife and children, but such occasions were accompanied by a cold clarity about his own emotional makeup. ''In crucial ways, my brother still doesn't exist for me in the intervals between visits," John wrote.

In fact, both John and Robby had always held each other at a distance; as John described it, that was the Widemans' way. "Neither of us had learned very much about sharing our feelings with other family members. At home it had been assumed that each family member possessed deep, powerful feelings and that very little or nothing at all needed to be said about these feelings because we were all stuck with them and talk wouldn't change them. Your particular feelings were a private matter and family was a protective fence around everybody's privacy. Inside the perimeter of the fence each family member resided in his or her own quarters." It was a legacy John would pass along to his own children.

What lessons did Jacob Wideman learn from his father's obsession with an outlaw brother? Jake turned six years old two days after Robby showed up in Laramie for his last night as a free man, and during the next few years the visits to Pittsburgh's Western Penitentiary became a regular feature in the Widemans' lives. Robby was calling himself Faruq now, but John identified more with his brother than with the system that had incarcerated him. Indeed, he made it clear to his family that he seethed at even the smallest constraints. As the family drove into the penitentiary, John got a perverse pleasure out of defying the rules, bypassing the visitors' parking lot and using instead the one marked OFFICIAL BUSINESS ONLY. "I want to start the visit with a small victory, be one up on the keepers," he wrote. He loathed the keepers, and his book is a scathing indictment of the prison system as well as a plea for his brother's redemption. As far as John was concerned, Robby is serving a life sentence because he is black and because a racist society had left him no way to make his mark except as a criminal. "If Robby fell because the only stardom he could reasonably seek was stardom in crime," John writes in Brothers and Keepers, "then that's wrong. It's wrong not because Robby wanted more but because society closed off every chance of getting more, except through crime."

Although Brothers and Keepers was widely praised, some were troubled by what The New York Times's critic, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called Wideman's "indictment of white society for rigging the game against all black people." Lehmann-Haupt objected to the book's ''many whining, posturing passages" and asked about its author, "If he himself made it out of the Pittsburgh ghetto, then how can he claim that his brother's only guilt as a criminal was being black in a white man's world?" Throughout Brothers and Keepers, Wideman's emphasis is on excusing his brother while blaming the system; he is fully committed to his view of Robby as victim rather than as someone who should be held accountable for the choices that led him to become a heroin addict, a dealer, a thief, and finally a partner in murder.

Indeed, paragon of success though he was, John himself manifested echoes of Robby's credo of "getting over," of seeing no harm in cheating, because all white men had stacked the deck. In Pittsburgh for one family reunion, John had brought with him a brand-new television his wife's father had just given them. While the rest of the family was out of the house, Robby—broke, sick, and desperate for a fix—stole the television and made it look as if the house had been burglarized.

When Mort Goldman learned that the TV had been stolen, he bought the Widemans another one immediately. Later, however, the Widemans discovered the theft was covered by their homeowners' policy, filed a claim, and collected the money. It never occurred to John to reimburse his father-inlaw until long afterward, when, at a family gathering, he related how well he had come out of the robbery, and saw the shock and hurt on Mort's face. Later, in his book, John would castigate himself for his obliviousness to the moral issue involved: "The failure was a measure of who I was,'' he wrote. "Ironically, it's also about stealing from a relative. Not to buy dope, but to feed a habit just as self-destructive. The habit of taking good fortune for granted, the habit of blind selfabsorption that allows us to believe the world owes us everything and we are not responsible for giving anything in return."

The Widemans would soon learn not only that their middle child had been a chronic shoplifter for years but that he prided himself on getting away with constant thievery without being caught.

Originally settled by the gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, and dreamers who attended the westward push of the Union Pacific Railroad, Laramie, Wyoming, quickly developed an infamous reputation as a place where Butch Cassidy and Jesse James both served time in the local jail but where lawless elements dominated the rest of the citizenry until a violent assertion of vigilante justice finally began to establish order. A hundred years later, Laramie remains a small, low-slung town, much of whose life revolves around the university, although the local paper tends toward such bulletins as an account of the Stockgrowers and Cowbelles annual dinner dance at the Elks Lodge. As a place to put down roots, the town—where black faces are rare and men wear Stetsons and cowboy boots with their business suits—might seem an odd choice for John Wideman. By 1973, however, he wanted "to get away from that Ivy League competitiveness, the pressure to be somebody," as he later described it to The Washington Post. The Widemans discovered Wyoming while John was on sabbatical at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and its remoteness from the world of the eastern establishment appealed to him despite the fact that it was far less prestigious than the University of Pennsylvania. "My particular imagination has always worked well in a kind of exile," he said. "It helps to write away from the center of the action."

Laramie seemed proud to have the Widemans. "It was quite a big deal to have a well-known author in town," says Connie Hull, a high-school teacher who had both Jake and his older brother, Danny, in her psychology classes. "Laramie's a small town, and John's name was in the paper an awful lot; it was pretty amazing to have an author who's winning awards and being on 60 Minutes here."

Wideman was also well respected on the university faculty. "It was very stimulating to have him," says Connie's brother-in-law Keith Hull, an English professor who was acting head of the department at the time of John's departure. "He's extremely intelligent and outspoken; he had his opinions, he upheld them very powerfully in debate, and he did not suffer fools gladly. He was very dedicated to the idea that ethnicism had a place in the university, that there should be a broad spectrum of society represented, and he worked very hard for that. But as far as I could tell, the Widemans did not really share their private life much."

The Widemans did have a few close friends, but many people saw them as somewhat removed from the community. "John was more aloof than anything," says Pam Benson, the mother of Jake's best friend. "He kept his distance; I don't know that I remember him ever intermingling with the other parents. I don't know whether that was because the Widemans had an interracial marriage and hung back or what." Although race rarely became an overt issue, some local residents acknowledge that it might have been a barrier for the Widemans despite the community's best intentions. "There aren't that many black people in Wyoming, and there's probably a lot of insensitivity," says Charles Mitchell, the high-school principal.

Whether the Widemans kept their distance from Laramie or Laramie kept its distance from the Widemans is a moot point. Years later, Judy Wideman would accuse her nextdoor neighbor Rogene Peak of not having extended herself to the Widemans when they moved into Alta Vista Heights. Peak's memories are somewhat different; her first encounter with Judy Wideman came during a snowstorm when Judy called to vent her outrage over the fact that the Peaks' dog had just left a deposit on the Widemans' property, and to demand that the Peaks come over immediately to remove it. Nor did Judy warm up with longer acquaintance. "If John was outside, he'd talk to you, but if she was outside, it was like you were invisible," says Jim Peak, a grade-school teacher. "She just wasn't friendly."

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George Torbert, who is now an elementary-school teacher in California, used to play basketball with John while George was an undergraduate at the university. "Off the court, he was a gentleman, but he was difficult to get along with on the court; it seemed like he was a different person," says Torbert. "He's a very intense competitor; he was very aggressive, he was very argumentative, and he would never admit he was wrong. He couldn't stand to lose. In a pickup game, people have to call their own fouls, but he wouldn't do that. If you don't, you're not playing according to the rules of the game, and somebody who does that constantly loses the respect of the people he plays with. Sometimes people got so fed up that the game would break up; people would just walk off the court."

The Widemans' children were less controversial; they always seemed to fit in well. "They were popular kids," says Charles Mitchell. Until their last year in Laramie, things seemed to be going well enough for the whole family.

Just before dawn on an October Sunday in 1985, two men who had gotten up early to go elk hunting drove past Foster's Country Comer and saw that an apartment behind the motel was engulfed in flames. When the police arrived, they found a grisly scene. Shelli Wiley, a twenty-twoyear-old part-time university student who also worked as a waitress at the truck stop, was dead, stabbed repeatedly, her head bludgeoned with a blunt instrument and her throat cut. There must have been quite a struggle; a neighbor had heard a woman scream shortly before the fire broke out, and there was blood all over the walkway outside Shelli's apartment. The police believe she was attacked inside but fought her way to the door and ran outside, only to have her throat slashed there before being dragged back into the apartment. Whoever killed her then doused the place with an accelerant and set it on fire. The damage to her apartment was so severe it was deemed irreparable and that unit was simply razed.

The inferno consumed most of what might have been valuable evidence, and for the next two years police were stymied in their search for the killer. It appeared, however, that this was no impetuous crime of passion, judging by what Laramie police sources called clear evidence of premeditation. That evidence included the chilling discovery that the phone lines to the entire apartment complex had been cut.

Sometime during that autumn—no one is sure whether it was before or after Shelli Wiley's death—Jake Wideman startled his closest friend by handing him a note in school. Lance Rainwater's best recollection of what it said is something like "I killed a kid yesterday. Call the police and turn me in." Lance thought Jake was joking and threw the note away; he says now that that must have been before the Wiley murder, because otherwise he would have been more suspicious. Lance didn't give the note serious thought until Jake was arrested for the murder of Eric Kane the following summer.

Even now, with his own confession on tape, Jake Wideman seems a problematic suspect. Could a fifteen-year-old have managed to stay out all night, travel to an apartment nearly five miles away from his house, kill someone in such an orgy of bloodletting that he could hardly fail to bear traces of the crime on his person, sneak back into the family home, and show up for breakfast with his parents without their ever noticing something amiss? Eric Kane's parents see that scenario as testimony to the Widemans' negligence; others are not so sure. Laramie police have agonized over whether Jake, despite his confession, really was the killer; they have considered a variety of other theories, including the possibility that he was covering up for someone else. Jake did implicate another local youth as an accomplice, but he recanted that portion of his confession almost immediately; he then told the police that there had indeed been someone else involved in the murder, but he wouldn't tell them who. Laramie law-enforcement authorities maintain that Jake knows too much about the murder not to have been involved, but some of the existing evidence is puzzling; police found a matchbook bearing a bloody fingerprint, which they think was dropped by someone fleeing the scene, but the fingerprint does not match Jake's. "This has been the most frustrating case I've ever worked on," says Gary Puls, the detective in charge. "I have a confession, but the question is, do I believe him? I want to believe him, but what he's telling me is not consistent with my investigation. Nothing fits in this investigation at all."

In contrast to the murder of Eric Kane, Jake did suggest a motive for killing Shelli Wiley. "The story was that Shelli was having an affair with Jake and Jake was afraid she was going to tell another boyfriend about their affair," says Puls.

Jake's best friend finds this hard to believe. Jake was seven years younger than Shelli Wiley and hardly a ladies' man; indeed, he often agonized to Lance Rainwater about the fact that girls liked him as a friend but never seemed to see him as a romantic object. Furthermore, says Lance, "anytime Jake had an intimate feeling for a girl, he would tell me about it, and he never once mentioned Shelli Wiley's name. He never even talked about going over to the other side of town.

That's the trouble area; everything bad that happens happens there."

Jake has yet to be tried for the Wiley murder, and in recent months his lawyers have claimed that he has recanted his entire confession, although Laramie police and prosecutors say this is news to them. But whether or not the Wideman family noticed anything strange during the fall of 1985, they were soon given ample cause to wonder about Jake's state of mind. Four months after Wiley was killed, Jake stole his father's Volvo and ran away from home. A state trooper caught up with him in Colorado and he was returned to his family, who had reported him missing; no charges were filed, and Jake was sent to a psychiatrist. After only six sessions he was permitted to discontinue therapy. He also saw his school guidance counselor—''He said things built up on him and he just had to take off," says Ryan Fulton—but only briefly. ''He broke a number of appointments and stopped coming in," Fulton says.

At around the same time, according to court testimony compiled during hearings in Arizona for the Kane murder case, Jake's mother also found notes he had written that said things like ''Killing solves problems. I think I will murder someone. I am proud I haven't been caught stealing."

Notwithstanding the Kane family's claim that the Widemans weren't paying attention to Jake's problems and the Widemans' later assertion that there was no way to foresee such a tragic outcome, the Widemans clearly knew that something was wrong. Judy, after years as a full-time housewife, had decided to become a lawyer and enrolled at the University of Wyoming in the fall of 1984. Like her husband, she had taken on Robby Wideman's predicament as a passionate cause. ''She felt very strongly about that situation, and she saw the law as a means by which she could redress what she saw as injustice within the system," says Peter Maxfield, then the law-school dean and a close friend. "She was an excellent student, among the very best; she's intellectually aggressive and exceedingly bright. But Jake began to have problems, and she started to feel very guilty about being in law school and spending all this time studying." After three semesters, Judy dropped out. Unfortunately, whatever the Widemans' level of attention to Jake's problems, they themselves appear to have been the cause of much of his pain, judging by what Jake later told various court officials and psychologists during a series of evaluation interviews in Arizona. One report referred to Jake's "profound sense of isolation" within the family; in another, Jake said his parents never showed much affection in the home. "He perceives his parents to be much closer to his older brother and younger sister," said one interviewer. Several of Jake's examiners noted the high standards and pressure to succeed imposed by the Widemans and observed that despite his academic and athletic achievements, which included a B-plus/A-minus average, Jake saw his siblings as having lived up to his parents' expectations and himself as having failed. One psychologist reported, "He feels like he is the odd man out. He feels he cannot compete satisfactorily in his family."

According to some of Jake's closest friends and former teachers, he had reason to feel that way. The Widemans doted on Danny, their older son; their daughter, Jamila, had been the object of special attention since birth, when she was frighteningly premature and it seemed a miracle that she had survived. Jake, the middle child, felt as if he got lost in the shuffle no matter how hard he tried. "Jake was always last on the list," says Lance Rainwater. "He told me that Danny was always the spoiled one; Danny always did things wrong but never got punished for them, but Jake always got in trouble for the smallest things, like being late. It seemed like he was always grounded."

Although Lance and Jake were basketball teammates as well as best friends, Lance remembers going to the Widemans' house only once. "I never really knew them, because Jake didn't want me to go over to his house and see how his parents treated him. He was really uptight around them. I saw him as a parent-destructed person. His parents put all this pressure on him, and they caused most of his problems. Everything he did was wrong. They told him that if he didn't try harder he wasn't going to amount to anything and he was going to be a nobody."

During what would turn out to be Jake's final year in high school, a bitter family dispute involving the school basketball team may have underscored to him that no matter how he excelled he would never win his parents' wholehearted applause.

That year Jake was a sophomore and Danny a senior, but Jake made varsity basketball along with Danny. Danny was on the starting team and Jake was on the bench, but as the season progressed, Jake played well and Danny went into a slump.

The coach decided to drop Danny back onto the bench and put Jake on the starting team. John was very upset and asked Dale Parker, the coach, to reverse his decision because it was causing "family problems."

"Danny was basically the fair-haired boy of the family, and the fact that the younger brother had replaced him in his senior year, that was deemed by the parents to be unfair on my part and creating family hostility," says Parker. "John would have accepted a situation where both sons would be starting, and he would have accepted it if Danny was starting and Jake was not, but he was not willing to accept the fact that Jake was starting and Danny was not. As far as I'm concerned, it's a week-to-week thing: whoever plays better is going to start. I thought the family should be happy that Jake was starting to make a mark."

Not only were they not happy, but Parker says that when he refused to accede to John Wideman's demands, Wideman organized a parents' group to try to get the coach fired. The effort went nowhere, but Parker, who is also a socialstudies teacher at Laramie High School, was struck by the irony of John's actions. "As an old history buff, one of the things I've always tried to get across to kids is that if you don't understand what's happening you're liable to repeat it—and that's just what happened to the Widemans," he says. "Judging by what John says in Brothers and Keepers, here's a repeat of the whole thing: here he's saying how he was treated by his father and how his younger brother was mistreated, and the Widemans turn around and do the same thing with their two kids."

The parallel was not lost on Jake, according to his friend Lance. "Jake put himself in the same category as his dad's brother, because that's the way his dad's brother was treated," says Rainwater.

Nor was this episode atypical. "Danny was highly protected," says Parker. "I always thought his mother was a whiner; I got lots of calls complaining about various things, that this was unfair or that was unfair. She was very protective, although I don't recall her calling about Jake except one time when he was sick; almost all her calls were about Danny. The Widemans came to all the games, but they were more concerned about whether Danny was doing well than whether Jake was doing well. They would instruct Danny to do things contrary to what I was telling him to do, at the top of their lungs from the opposite side of the gym. I always got the feeling that when Danny went home they told him what to do, and what they told him to do was not to listen to the coach. Jake was the opposite; he would do whatever you told him to do, and kill himself trying to get it done. He was a natural basketball player, more so than Danny."

By the end of the school year, Parker was looking forward to Danny's graduation; he saw great promise in Jake, and expected that he would be the team's star player by the middle of his junior year. But then Jake received a terrible blow. Danny was bound for Brown University, and the Widemans announced they were moving back East—leaving Laramie, where Jake had lived since he was three years old, to go to Amherst, where John had been offered a tenured teaching post at the University of Massachusetts. "Jake felt the move was for Danny and not for anybody else," says Lance Rainwater. "He didn't feel that was right."

According to Parker, Jake was so upset he pleaded with his parents to let him remain in Laramie; the coach even tried to arrange for Jake to live with family friends and continue at Laramie High, but the Widemans insisted he move with his family. Nor did Jake want to go on the Camp Takajo trip that summer. Again his parents prevailed.

Like the Widemans, Sandy and Louise Kane had three children who were raised in relative affluence. Sandy is an IBM executive; Louise has always been a full-time wife and mother. The Kanes live in New City, a comfortable Rockland County suburb of New York City, but Camp Takajo played an important role in the family's life. Like the Widemans' older son, the Kanes' older boy, Randy, was a Takajo camper for many years and had gone on the annual senior trip out West. Eric, always eager to follow in Randy's footsteps, could hardly wait until he too was old enough to make the pilgrimage to Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Zion and Bryce canyons.

For Eric Kane, nothing in life came easily. Chronically ill in his early years, Eric suffered from a massive gammaglobulin deficiency that made him a regular visitor to New York's Memorial SloanKettering Cancer Center, where he received long, painful gamma-globulin injections. "He was sick for a lot of his younger life," says his mother.

As a result, his motor coordination suffered and Eric developed slowly, putting enormous energy into performing physical tasks his peers mastered effortlessly. Despite his difficulties, or perhaps in part because of them, Eric was a sweet-tempered boy who forgave those who taunted him. When a bully at school wouldn't stop tormenting him and his headmaster finally suggested that Eric threaten his persecutor back instead of turning the other cheek, Eric gently refused. "It's just not my style," he said. When he failed at some goal he had set for himself, he simply started over and tried again, undeterred by shame or discouragement or even a sense of his own limitations. His father was stunned when Eric tried out for four sports teams in a row at school; impervious to the public embarrassment, he failed to make varsity basketball, junior-varsity basketball, or varsity baseball, but he finally made the junior-varsity baseball team. Eric's parents even had to push him to stop studying and go to bed at night; left to his own devices, he would stay up late, laboring over his homework. "Just watching him write was a painful experience," says his father. Notwithstanding Eric's problems, he was in his parents' eyes a model son: loving, obedient, even public-spirited at an early age, volunteering his time over Christmas vacation to work with the elderly and the infirm at the Rockland County Health Center.

Eric had been an enthusiastic camper at Takajo for seven years, and by the summer of 1986 he was thrilled to be one of four boys to go on the western trip. Neither Jake Wideman nor any of their companions recall any particular friction between Jake and Eric. The night Eric died, the Takajo group pulled into the University Inn in Flagstaff, Arizona, had dinner, and then Eric and Jake went off to the movies. Eric saw Top Gun, Jake saw Ruthless People. When they returned to the motel, Jake asked the camp counselor if he could borrow the keys to the car; he said he wanted to listen to some tapes. The counselor looked out the window a while later and saw Jake inside the car with the light on, apparently studying a road map.

Eric was asleep in bed when Jake came back to their room. Jake went to bed too, but woke up again a half an hour later. "I got up, I was just going to go for a walk, because I was restless," he told Mike Cicchinelli, the Flagstaff detective who took his confession. "I put on my clothes, and I saw the knife and I saw Eric, and I picked up the knife and I stabbed him twice." When Cicchinelli asked him why, Jake said, "It was not premeditated, it was a result of a build-up of a lot of different emotions. It wasn't premeditated at all. I never thought about it. I just woke up. I didn't know what I was doing, I wasn't thinking straight." Cicchinelli asked him again whether anything happened between Eric and Jake to precipitate the murder, and again Jake said no. "I was not provoked, I...it was hard .. .I've had a really tough year, and he was the target of a lot of built-up emotions." When Cicchinelli asked him why he had called, Jake replied, "Because my life is in pieces and.. .1 just'wanted to give up... I gave up trying to live my life in a normal way. I give up."

When Jake was charged with Eric Kane's murder, he was released into his parents' custody and spent time in several psychiatric facilities back East. However, according to Jon Thompson, the Flagstaff prosecutor, Jake assaulted another patient at a mental institution near Boston and was then returned to police custody in Arizona. The following summer he went through a period of deep despondency; John Koenig, the administrative sergeant at Arizona's Coconino County Jail, reports that Jake tried to kill himself twice by slashing his wrists. He also went on brief hunger strikes, and at one point he even asked to be shackled. "I think he was telling us, 'Hey, I'm thinking something crazy—help me,' " says Koenig. Shortly thereafter Jake confessed to the murder of Shelli Wiley. His lawyers make every effort to downplay this development. "I think he just did that for attention," says Michael Kimerer, one of Jake's attorneys. "At one point he wanted me to call the judge and ask for the death penalty. It's almost like a temper tantrum: 'I'm going to punish my parents for something; I'm going to hurt you, and in doing so hurt myself.'"

During the months of legal wrangling over whether Jake was to be tried in Arizona as a juvenile or as an adult, he was examined by a series of experts who later testified about his mental state. Several raised the question of Robby Wideman's influence, and with it the chilling possibility that Jake—unable to win his parents' approval through conventional forms of achievement—might have unconsciously resorted to crime, the means by which Robby himself had finally commanded John Wideman's attention. One report made reference to Jake's "reenactment of a family theme of 'the bad seed.' Jacob's unstable identification has been both with the 'bad seed' uncle and with the 'geek' (victim), whom he alternately tried to protect and felt compelled to destroy. He was unaware of his motivation because of an impoverished emotional development."

In several interviews, Jake talked about the fact that he had been shoplifting on a weekly basis ' 'ever since some family turmoil" which occurred when he was about twelve. He indicated that there were marital difficulties between his parents; he didn't specify the source of their problems, but in Brothers and Keepers John Wideman refers to the terrible emotional toll wrought by his wife's discovery that he had cheated on her.

Court documents also contain references to at least one episode in which Jake sexually molested his younger sister, Jamila, an event that seems to have been limited to what was described as "fondling." Other problems were chronic; throughout his life, Jake suffered from what was described in court testimony as encopresis—whose dictionary definition is "involuntary defecation of psychic origin"—a humiliating carryover from infancy into his teenage years.

Much of Jake Wideman's behavior as a teenager can be read as an escalating series of cries for help, cries that were largely unrecognized except in hindsight, after an incomprehensible tragedy had taken place. "What makes this crime so difficult is that the 'why' has never been answered," said Coconino County Superior Court judge H. Jeffrey Coker at Jake's sentencing.

Those who knew Jake remain haunted by the unbridgeable chasm between their own experience of him as a gentle, wellbehaved boy and the news that he had become a killer. "It's very distressing that somebody who seemed to be so much one way could be so much the other way," says Pam Benson, Lance Rainwater's mother. "It made me be more aware; you look a little more at everything your kids do. That's the reaction most of the parents had: Are we that far out of touch with our children?' '

The Kane family feels particularly bitter toward the Widemans because John and Judy never contacted them after Eric's murder—not while Jake was missing, not when he turned himself in, not after he confessed, and not for many months thereafter. Mort Goldman attended Eric's funeral, but the Widemans didn't. Finally, a year after Eric was killed, Sandy Kane got a letter from John Wideman. "He goes into this business about how he doesn't have any answers, and then he goes on to say that he's aware of the fact that my wife and I have been rather public about what should happen to Jake," says Kane, who thinks Jake should have received the death penalty. "He said he has come to the point where he can forgive us for feeling that his son should be put to death. Forgive us!"

"He never said, 'I'm sorry you lost a child,' " says Louise, her voice quavering.

At the Kanes' home in New City, Eric's bedroom remains undisturbed, arranged just as it was when he lived there, with his Snoopy posters and football pictures crowding the walls and fresh red sheets on the bed. His sister, a college student when Eric died two and a half years ago, has been in and out of school several times since then, unable to finish. Eric's brother is silent and troubled: "Randy goes to the cemetery and just lies there on Eric's grave," says his mother. She herself cannot stand to be alone in her own house anymore; subject to panic attacks, she travels with her husband wherever he goes. Seldom used, the family dining room is lined with photographs of Eric, grinning in school tie and jacket, kneeling in a Camp Takajo T-shirt with a croquet mallet.

Mort Goldman, Jake's grandfather, has sold Camp Takajo, which he founded in 1947. The Kanes' $50 million civil suit against the Goldmans and the Widemans is pending. The Widemans are living in Amherst, where John teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts. Although he was heralded by Look magazine as "The Astonishing John Wideman" while still in his twenties and remained the object of favorable media attention over the years, since Jake was charged with murder, John and Judy have refused all interviews, maintaining that they would never get a fair hearing. They have also conducted an intensive campaign to pressure friends, colleagues, and even peripheral acquaintances not to talk to the press about them, telephoning around the country to ask those who have known them to stonewall all inquiries. If people inadvertently go against the Widemans' wishes, the retaliation can be swift and harsh. When questioned by Sally Kalson, a reporter from Pittsburgh, Rogene Peak, the Widemans' next-door neighbor in Laramie, said she hardly knew Judy. "She was a mystery around here," said Peak. "I never would have felt comfortable standing over the lettuce in the supermarket and saying, 'How are things, Judy?'

The day after this quote appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Judy sent a fourpage letter to Peak, denouncing her for having spoken in public about the Wideman family. "Poisonous, absolutely brutal," Rogene Peak says of the letter, shaking her head. Judy charged Peak with "gratuitously unkind comments," among other offenses, and concluded, "I hope you never experience the unimaginable and unmanageable nightmare our lives have become. And I hope your neighbors treat you with more respect and compassion than you have given us."

After Jake's sentencing last autumn, he was transferred from solitary confinement in an Arizona county jail to a maximumsecurity facility, where he awaits extradition to Wyoming and another murder trial for the Wiley killing. Jake avoided the death penalty in Arizona in exchange for pleading guilty; in Wyoming he will again face such a possibility. Tom Barb, the prosecuting attorney in Laramie, says he is inclined to seek the death penalty, "because of the way the crime was committed. The statutory language reads, 'heinous, atrocious and cruel,' and this fits."

The Widemans' perceptions are radically different. As with Robby Wideman, John and Judy see Jake as having been victimized by an unjust system; to friends, they rail against the fact that he was given a life sentence in prison rather than being treated in a mental hospital as a juvenile, a goal the Widemans pursued strenuously until the courts decided against them. To the state of Arizona, such a course would have been tantamount to setting Jake free; had he been tried as a juvenile, the law would have required his release at the age of eighteen, an outcome the judge did not feel was in the public interest. "Judy sees Jacob's treatment as profoundly wrong, a total failing of the system," says Peter Maxfield, the former law-school dean.

The Widemans continue to insist that Jake was "not himself' when he committed murder, as John put it in an interview with an Arizona probation officer just before Jake's sentencing. John and Judy spent much of the interview expressing their anger against the courts, the community of Flagstaff, the media, and the Kanes, among others, for what they charged was the unfair treatment of Jake and his family. The Widemans described themselves as having spent the last two years trying to discover the motive for what Jake had done. John Wideman told the officer that there was "no way to anticipate this type of behavior" and that his son's actions "remain a mystery."