The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [37]
By the time Molly was on her way to the police station, Rob was in the green Jeep she had given him, going in the opposite direction, toward the mall. He was so broke that even the clothes on his back were on loan: He had scrounged a winter jacket from Will because the morning was cold.
As she raced to find her son, Molly looked down at her cell-phone and noticed that there was a missed call. When she pressed the phone to her ear, she heard Rob’s high-pitched, reedy voice.
“Hi, Mom,” he said. “It’s me. I just wanted to let you know that I love you. I’m sorry for everything. See you later.”
MARK BOAL is a producer, screenwriter, and journalist. Born and raised in New York City, he graduated with honors in philosophy from Oberlin College before beginning a career as an investigative reporter and writer of long-form nonfiction. An acclaimed series for the Village Voice on the rise of surveillance in America led to a position at the alternative weekly writing a weekly column, “The Monitor,” when he was twenty-three. Boal subsequently covered politics, technology, crime, youth culture, and drug culture for Rolling Stone, Brill’s Content, Mother Jones, and Playboy. He is currently a writer-at-large for Playboy and a contributor to Rolling Stone.
Boal’s 2003 article “Jailbait,” about an undercover drug agent, was adapted for Fox television’s The Inside, and his piece “Death and Dishonor,” the true story of a military veteran murdered by his own platoon mates, became the basis for the film In the Valley of Elah, for which Boal shares a story credit with Paul Haggis. Boal wrote and produced the film The Hurt Locker, an award-winning, critically acclaimed war thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow and inspired by his firsthand observations of a bomb squad in Baghdad.
Coda
After it was published, the article hit a nerve, especially in Nebraska. Rolling Stone’s website was slammed by angry readers who wrote that Hawkins was a monster who didn’t deserve the attention of the national press. Many Omaha natives posted that their hometown had been unfairly portrayed as a wasteland for unemployed teenagers. Still, not all the write-in comments were negative, and quite a few readers praised the magazine for daring to treat the life of a mass murderer in such exacting detail.
Then, a year later, the Omaha World-Herald confirmed the discovery of a cluster of nine teen suicides in Sarpy County from 2005 to 2007, and the newspaper subsequently called for an official investigation into the state’s handling of mentally ill youth.
At the time of this book’s publication, no official action had taken place.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely
THE FABULOUS FRAUDULENT LIFE OF JOCELYN AND ED
FROM Rolling Stone
SHE TOLD EVERYONE her boobs were real, which was a laugh: They were immobile and perfectly round, and looked airbrushed, even in person. She credited her violet eyes to Lithuanian genes, rather than the purple contact lenses she wore. And on this afternoon last November, sitting in a Philadelphia hair salon with a college textbook open on her lap, she told the stylist she was a University of Pennsylvania student named Morgan Greenhouse. The name was as fake as the hair now being glued onto her head.
“I love this,” Jocelyn Kirsch declared, fingering her new $2,200 auburn hair extensions. “Don’t you love it?”
Her boyfriend, Ed Anderton, looked on adoringly. “I love it,” he echoed. The two of them returned to their murmured conversation, discussing the $400 room they planned to rent at the W hotel, once Jocelyn finished taking her final exams. After that, they planned to spend winter break vacationing in Morocco.
Jocelyn and Ed made performance art out of their extravagance. They posted photos on Facebook of their constant travels: smooching under the Eiffel Tower, riding horses along Hawaiian beaches, sunning themselves on Caribbean sand. They lived in one of Philadelphia’s most expensive neighborhoods, Rittenhouse Square, where they dined in pricey restaurants