The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [31]
But now, sitting in the therapist’s office, Rob was about to surprise the doctors and social workers who had seen little evidence of change in him. After two years of round-the-clock therapy—at least two sessions a day, plus novel approaches like equine therapy, where he worked with horses—Rob was finally ready to apologize to Candace for threatening her. His therapists considered this the breakthrough they’d been working toward, and his caseworker noted in his file that he was mentally well enough to return home.
But when Rob asked her forgiveness for “saying all those hurtful things to you when I was mad,” Candace refused to accept his apology. Rob, she told a caseworker, had clearly been “coached” by his therapist. What’s more, she added, she would “never feel safe with Robert in the house.” She threatened to divorce Ronald if he ever brought his son home.
Rob was furious. The state had spent two years coaxing and pressuring and drugging him to get him to apologize—and when he finally did, it got him nowhere. “My stepmother is evil—she has no heart,” Rob told his roommate at Cooper Village, another skinny, lost kid named Dallas. As the days passed in quiet isolation, the two boys clung to each other—from the back, their long hair made them look identical—and swore an oath of brotherhood, sealed by wearing purple rubber bracelets. They called themselves the Purple Skulls. Noticing that the boys got into more trouble when they were separated, the staff made it a point to keep them together. “We were closer than brothers,” Dallas recalls. “Never apart.”
One day, when Dallas turned 17, Rob was given permission to go to a dollar store, where he got heaps of candy and all the soda bottles he could carry. That night, he invited the other patients on his hall over and threw Dallas a surprise birthday party. It touched his friend deeply. “Rob could be great when he loved you,” Dallas says.
As the months passed and other kids came and went at Cooper Village, Rob and Dallas remained, dutifully obeying the regimen of classes and therapy, scheduled in orderly blocks from wakeup at 6:30 a.m. to lights out at 10:30 p.m. The two worked the system to the point that the staff allowed them to have guitars and video games in their room, just like regular kids, and to stay up late playing chess and drawing and talking. It was during these late-night bull sessions that Rob admitted to Dallas that he missed his mother terribly. “He talked about her a lot,” Dallas recalls. “He wanted to be with her.”
ROB HAD NO IDEA where his mother was at that point, let alone the kind of life she was leading. By then, her marriage to Dotson had fallen apart and she was soon in full-blast dating mode, seeing three or four guys at once, hopping from bed to bed, taking full advantage of the variety and the freedom.
In December 2004, Rob finally caught a break and was relocated to a pleasant foster home. Run by a grandmother named Marty Glass who had 10 kids of her own, and who over the years had taken in nearly two dozen more children, it was the first place where Rob felt “appreciated and understood,” he told his caseworker. Glass thought he was a “joy to have around” and a “very intelligent boy with an interesting point of view.” Rob spent much of that winter outdoors, helping a contractor build a new addition to Glass’ front porch, and though he was still no angel—he was flunking out of Fort Calhoun High School, selling pot to seventh-graders and staging half-assed stickups at gas stations—that period, he would later tell his friends, was the happiest of his life.
It was around that time that