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kid whose dad worked at IBM. The four of them knew one another from the Phoenix rave scene. Though Andrews had recently been kicked out of his dorm for alleged cocaine possession, none of the accused killers had criminal records. Mikhail Drachev, also eighteen, was still in high school; classmates described him as “weird” and nicknamed him Mikhail Jack-Off. The other accused killer, twenty-year-old Dennis Tsoukanov, who had immigrated to Phoenix from Estonia nearly ten years earlier, seemed the least likely to be caught up in murder. He lived at home with his father, a successful builder, worked as a supermarket checkout boy and studied graphic design at a community college. Even though he is slightly cross-eyed, Tsoukanov dreamed of modeling for Abercrombie & Fitch.

According to police, the three young men had lured Simberg the day before his murder to an apartment shared by Andrews and Drachev. There they beat him, bound him in duct tape and held him prisoner in a closet for nearly twenty-four hours. Once in the Yavapai woods, they offered him one last smoke. Simberg, wrists still duct-taped, accepted the cigarette they pressed to his lips, took in the desert forest of scrub bush and pines and said, “Hey, this isn’t Mexico.”

During the hundred-mile drive up to the Yavapai woods from Phoenix, the alleged killers had told Simberg they were going to take him to Mexico and drop him off below the border. But instead, one of the young men pulled out a handgun, a TEC-9, bought the night before, and tried to shoot Simberg in the head. The pistol jammed. So they attempted to slit Simberg’s throat with a large hunting knife, but he struggled and they managed only to hack a piece of flesh off his chin. Finally, one of the attackers drove the knife into his back, puncturing a lung. As he fell to the ground, they could hear air gurgling from the hole in his back. His friends then doused him in gasoline and threw rocks over his body. They set him on fire and ran to their car as their friend screamed and writhed in the makeshift grave.

The flames that consumed Simberg also melted the duct tape that bound his wrists, as well as the flesh on his arms and hands. Somehow he managed to pull himself up on the bony claws that remained of his two scorched hands, tear off his burning trousers and run about three hundred feet to the banks of Fossil Creek, where, finally, he collapsed in the shade, next to a rock. Hunters discovered his corpse the next day.

Like other immigrants, Simberg had come to the New World in search of the American dream. In his own way, he came remarkably close to achieving it—his idea of it, at least: a B-movie, gangsta-video version that revolved around fast cars, flashy babes, get-rich-quick schemes, high-tolling con men and, in Simberg’s case, a strange, semi-legal drug catering to the nation’s fixation with eternal youth.

2. THE WONDER DRUG

GROWTH HORMONE SUPPLEMENTS have been used since the 1950s to treat patients whose pituitary glands could not produce enough on their own. Typically, these were infants who suffered from congenital pituitary disorders or children whose gland functions were damaged by illness or head trauma. Failure to produce sufficient growth hormone inhibits development and leads to dwarfism. Growth hormone therapy was a major breakthrough in treating dwarfism, but until the 1980s it could only be obtained in limited quantities by harvesting it from corpses. That changed in 1981 when researchers at the biology research firm Genentech succeeded in synthesizing it from genetically engineered bacteria, a process that promised unlimited quantities at greatly reduced cost. By then growth hormone was increasingly being used to treat the wasting symptoms—the shriveling of muscles and organs—caused by HIV/AIDS. In 1985 major pharmaceutical manufacturers began selling synthetic growth hormone. In a classic bit of marketing double-speak, vendors touted this new product as “human growth hormone,” or HGH, even though they were in fact selling a synthetic version of it.

In 1990 The New England Journal