Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [90]
These are often tragicomic figures worthy of Shakespeare, to be pretentious about it, and while some might consider a story like Jack Whittaker’s a cautionary tale I would say no; we learn our own lessons by our own hand and simply note—with pity, awe, compassion, resentment, gratitude, whatever you’re made of—the fatal flaws of others. Jack’s fatal flaw, I believe, was a need to stand big—to be reckoned with, to be awed. In America but especially still in the rural or uneducated or undereducated American South nothing does this quicker than dollars. Everyone may not understand the rest of the known world, or want to, but a particular band of Southerners relates solidly and with Pavlovian reliability to money. A Ph.D. means nothing, and an MD everything. John Grisham is a literary hero for his zeroes. I could tell my family this story appeared in GQ and they would say, “That’s nice.” I could tell them GQ paid me $25,000 for it (which they certainly did not) and my family would love and celebrate me forever. A price tag legitimizes—or illegitimates—everything.
I wish I could say everything worked out for Jack Whittaker but I’m not sure that will ever be true. From the time we closed on this piece and the day it hit the racks, Whittaker’s life got perhaps predictably worse. An eighteen-year-old friend of his granddaughter Brandi Bragg overdosed at Whittaker’s house; the kid’s father is suing Whittaker for not having had better “control” over Brandi. (A lot of people thought Whittaker spoiled her. He paid her $109,000 a year to work at his construction company. She was seventeen.) Then, Whittaker was charged with yet another DUI, and with carrying a pistol concealed in his left boot, after his Hummer hit a concrete median off the West Virginia Turnpike. He had $117,000 in cash on him at the time.
Some said winning the Powerball was the worst thing that ever happened to the guy but then the worst thing actually did happen. Brandi was found dead. Her body was discovered the day our issue appeared on newsstands. The timing was sickening. It took months for the details to emerge but basically Brandi and her boyfriend partied one night with cocaine injections and methadone pills and Brandi died in the boyfriend’s bed. The boyfriend freaked. He wrapped Brandi in a sheet and a tarp and dragged her out to the yard and left her beneath a junked van. She lay there all through the manhunt, for two long weeks. Finally the boyfriend showed the state police where he’d put her.
They buried Brandi on Christmas Eve, nearly two years to the day Jack Whittaker won big.
As for the Pink Pony debacle, that one apparently has yet to be resolved. In the Billy Sunday’s case Whittaker pleaded no contest to misdemeanor assault but later asked the judge if he could take it back and stand trial because he decided the sentence of unsupervised probation and weekly AA meetings was too harsh (answer: ah, no).
And on it goes.
Big Jack apparently now lives in Virginia yet has been gilding and gilding the little Tabernacle of Praise, which isn’t so little anymore. It’s grown from a $4 million church to a $10 million 13.5-acre “campus.”
Not long ago he told the Beckley Register-Herald: “I don’t have nothing to live for since my granddaughter’s dead.” But then he said he will use his millions to establish West Virginia rehab centers for teenage girls (Brandi twice went to rehab, out of state). He told the Charleston Gazette: “That’s what I’m spending my life doing.” I suppose we’ll see.
Mary Battiata
BLOOD FEUD
FROM THE Washington Post Magazine
THE WORD WAS, PERRY BROOKS’S BULL