The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [39]
The truth about Jocelyn wasn’t as exciting as she advertised. She was a child of privilege and divorce, raised in affluent Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her father, Lee, was a plastic surgeon with a standoffish demeanor but known for his community service: He gave to charity, volunteered as a doctor for the high school athletic department and hosted a Lithuanian exchange student, whom Jocelyn took to her prom. By then, Jocelyn was living with her mother, Jessica, a nurse completing her doctorate in public health. Jocelyn also had a brother, Aaron, one year older, whom she shut out so completely that friends were unaware he even existed. Few realized how the Kirschs’ divorce had fractured their family: When Jocelyn went to live with their mother, Aaron stayed behind in their father’s Tudor-style manse.
“I always got the sense that her home life wasn’t very happy,” says high school friend Kate Agnelli. Jocelyn was closemouthed about the acrimony within her family and rarely brought friends home. But her anger bled into her public life. Classmates remember their sunglasses and cellphones disappearing in her wake. She was always hungry for male attention; she’d tell a later lover that she’d cheated on every boyfriend she ever had. Each year, Jocelyn also reinvented herself, trading old friends for new ones, transforming from goth girl to Abercrombie prep to outdoorsy rock climber to frisky cheerleader wanna-be. As her high school career progressed, and Jocelyn’s parents bitterly finalized their split, her behavior grew worse. Previously a good student, according to a friend, she was suspended twice for cheating. Jocelyn lied about her absences, telling friends she’d been visiting her dying grandparents (who were alive and well). Another time, she said she was battling ovarian cancer.
“This girl has been crying out for help forever,” says Agnelli. “She doesn’t like who she is, so she invents something she thinks is better.” In college, Jocelyn leapt at the chance to create herself anew. Once in Philadelphia, she rarely went back to North Carolina, especially after her mother swiftly remarried and moved to California.
At Drexel, classmates noticed that when Jocelyn wasn’t running her mouth, she didn’t know what to say. But then she’d blurt out some outrageous lie—like when she returned from shopping at Urban Outfitters saying they’d asked her to be a model—and suddenly she’d seem comfortable again. But, again, little things started to disappear from friends’ rooms: art supplies, kitchen utensils. Her boyfriend Thomas’ suitemates started spotting Jocelyn’s name in their dorm’s guest log when she was nowhere to be found—only to discover she’d been visiting the brawny swimmer next door. Not that Thomas listened to his friends’ warnings.
“I loved her,” says Thomas now. “I thought we had a future.” They made a curious pair, the glamour girl and the clean-cut ROTC engineering major. But he was graduating and heading for life in the Army, so he wanted to savor what little time they had left. He knew Jocelyn was in for a rough transition without him.
“She didn’t like being alone,” says Thomas.
She didn’t intend to stay that way for long. That fall, Jocelyn returned to campus transformed, with bleached-blond hair, a perma-tan and a set of new breasts, all of which she insisted were natural. Her face had changed too: Her nose and cheeks were somehow more sculpted. She had reinvented herself yet again, this time as a centerfold-quality beauty with a savvier, brasher personality to match, a new, more perfect Jocelyn, ready to take on the world. Or, at least, its men.
WHILE JOCELYN WAS FAST becoming Drexel’s answer to Paris Hilton, a few blocks away at the University of Pennsylvania, Edward Kyle Anderton was winding down his college career