The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [40]
He hadn’t always been so anonymous. He grew up in Everett, Washington, where at Snohomish High School his achievements set him apart. He was a straight-A striver and a standout swimmer whom The Seattle Times once named “Star of the Month.” Though Ed was too busy for parties, people knew who he was; he was friendly but never outgoing. “He was a little shy,” says friend Danielle Newton. “But at home with his family, he’d open up.”
Unlike Jocelyn’s, Ed’s background was middle-class. His father, Kyle, worked in circulation for The Seattle Times and took a second job driving for UPS to pay for his children’s college tuition. His mother, Lori, was a doting stay-at-home mom. They were a wholesome clan that got silly playing board games and seemed to enjoy one another’s company. When Ed was admitted to Penn on scholarship, his family couldn’t have been prouder.
But at Penn, Ed was just one bright undergrad among 10,000 others. Intimidated, Ed tried assuming the confident airs of his Ivy League peers. But if he made any sort of impression, it was for the way he feigned cheer to mask something else. “His niceness didn’t seem all that genuine,” says a former classmate. “When you talked to him, there was a feeling of disconnect. He was a bit fake.” And when Ed wasn’t making the effort to be pleasant, he revealed a very different side, one that was brusque and impatient. “If you weren’t on his good side, he’d make that clear,” says a fraternity brother. “He just always seemed like a dick.”
Still, Ed got by just fine. He studied hard, made the swim team, majored in economics and joined the frat Alpha Chi Rho. “He seemed to have his life together,” recalls former housemate Joe Pahl. After graduating in 2005, Ed went to work for Johnson & Johnson and then as an analyst for the giant real estate equity firm Lubert-Adler. His hard work had come to fruition. He was twenty-four years old, working in a glass skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia, commanding a comfortable five-figure salary. All Ed needed was someone to share it with.
IN THE SEDUCTION DEPARTMENT, Jocelyn had become a steamroller. One night, at a Drexel house party, a skinny indie-rock guy, Jayson Verdibello, caught her eye. So she ran after him as he was leaving the party, pushed him against the wall and made out with him, holding him by the collar to keep him from running away.
By that time, Jocelyn had developed a fearsome dramatic streak. “What did I do?” Verdibello begged throughout their ten-month relationship. “The fact that you don’t know just shows how fucked-up you are!” she’d scream back. She was forever berating him in public, and when he tried to walk away from her tantrums, she’d flail at him with her bony arms. “I was a little scared of her,” admits Verdibello. “I just let her have her way.” He wasn’t alone. Everyone gave Jocelyn lots of leeway, because she seemed to exist in a world apart—a world of plenty. Her friends lived in dorms, but Jocelyn lived in a $1,600-a-month loft apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and a rooftop pool. Jocelyn would take her friend Sallie Cook on her shopping sprees, using her father’s credit card to blow $5,000 at, say, Neiman Marcus. “My dad’s gonna be sooo mad,” she’d say coquettishly, rearranging her oversize bags while pointedly eyeing Cook’s own tiny purchase.
“Jocelyn is extremely confident,” says Cook. “There’s no cap to how strong she is or how arrogant she is. She wants what she wants. And she feels she’s entitled to it.” Even Jocelyn’s own father seemed cowed. When Lee Kirsch flew to Philly to take his daughter to Cirque du Soleil—bearing $190-a-pop VIP tickets—Jocelyn treated him with utter contempt. “Dad, shut up,” she