The Big Gamble - Michael Mcgarrity [74]
“He joined the right clubs, hung out with the right people, especially the popular jocks, and got involved in campus politics—member of the student senate, student rep on an activities planning committee. That kind of thing.”
“So, he played the angles,” Kerney said. “How was he unscrupulous?”
“Drugs, women, and gambling,” Shuler answered. “While the campus cops and narcs were busting the longhairs and student radicals for using, Norvell and his pals were allegedly selling drugs to frat boys, sorority girls, and students living off campus. He supplied women for bachelor parties, took bets on sporting events, even organized spring vacation gambling jaunts to Denver.”
“You know all this as fact?” Kerney asked.
“I got some information from an anonymous informant while I was editor of the college newspaper, but I couldn’t confirm it. I spent a lot of time trying to corroborate the story through other sources. All I got was second- and third-hand rumors and gossip.”
“What stood in your way?”
“I was the longhair liberal running the college newspaper. The enemy, so to speak. Norvell’s customers were the kids who saw themselves as the elite. They were well-off, clannish, spoiled brats. Socially, they kept to themselves and partied pretty much out of sight. They’d rent a suite of rooms in a nice hotel, gather at private houses away from the campus, or go out of town for their big bashes.”
“How did the anonymous information come to you?” Kerney asked.
“By letter. Two of them.”
“Did you happen to save them?”
“You bet I did,” Shuler replied. “I kept hoping someone would come forward and give me something tangible that I could verify and print.”
“Were they typed or handwritten?” Kerney asked.
“Handwritten.”
“I need to see those letters,” Kerney said.
“They prove nothing.”
“I still need to see them.”
Shuler rummaged around in a file cabinet, pulled out a folder, and handed two sheets of paper to Kerney. They were note size, no dates, with writing on one side only. The first letter read:
Tyler Norvell is supplying drugs to a young friend of mine and taking advantage of her. He has parties at his house and gets her high on drugs. She tells me that she sometimes wakes up in the morning in bed at his house with a boy or a man she doesn’t know, and can’t remember what happened. She says there are lots of girls at his parties who have had the same experiences. I think he and his friends are drugging these girls and then raping them. My friend also tells me that Tyler and his friends take some girls to Denver on weekends once a month and the girls come back with expensive gifts. Something very bad is going on.
If a student who is supposedly a campus leader is doing these kinds of things, I think it should be made public knowledge.
The second letter read:
I wrote you before about the illegal things Tyler Norvell is doing. Now my friend is addicted to cocaine and says that Tyler loves her and wants her to enter a treatment program in Denver, which he will pay for. I think he just wants to get her out of town. She’s planning to drop out of school and move to Denver. I’ve talked to a psychologist and have tried to use his advice to help her, but it hasn’t changed her mind about going. Can’t you expose this criminal in your paper? All students should know about the terrible things he does.
“When did you receive these letters?” Kerney asked.
Shuler checked his file and read off dates that corresponded with Anna Marie’s cousin Belinda Louise Nieto’s time in Albuquerque.
“Whoever the person was,” Shuler added, “I don’t know why they didn’t go to the police.”
Kerney knew the answer to Shuler’s question. There were millions of reasons why people shied away from talking to cops. It didn’t matter if they were friends, family, relatives, or total strangers. He’d seen women protect abusers; parents lie on behalf of felonious teenagers; people confirm false alibis for friends; and witnesses deny they’d seen a crime occur. The rationales for either lying to or avoiding the