Playing the field: text from Brian Deer’s investigation into the death of Justin Fashanu

Reprint

End game

The Mail on Sunday, July 12 1998

Football star. Black hero. Gay icon. Justin Fashanu carried a lot of labels, and not just on his designer clothes. But after the impending inquest into his suicide, the label most likely to stick may be rapist.

BRIAN DEER INVESTIGATES

Justin Fashanu lit a marijuana joint and grinned an enormous, lopsided grin at a roomful of teenage kids. He felt pumped-up. He was in control. He could see it in the faces around him. No crowded football terraces roared him on, but the former soccer striker was back. Forgotten, if only briefly, was a lifetime of troubles, failures and forced retreats. Amid a smell of smoke and beer in a rented Maryland apartment, the grass hit. He felt a rush.

The time was 9.30pm on Tuesday March 24, and across Howard County, between Baltimore and Washington, silence and cold closed in. By nature, the area was all forests and fields, but freeways, shopping malls and luxury housing developments stamped footprints across the landscape. In the parking lot in front of Fashanu’s cream clapboard building at 8465 Oakton Lane, Ashton Woods, ranks of Dodges, Buicks and Toyotas creaked after hour-long commuter drives. In the back were trees – dogwoods, oaks and maples – where bats wheeled and small mammals dug.

Follow Brian on Twitter:

Follow @deerbrian

In the living room of apartment 2C, however, things were hotting up. Mike was there, with Steve, Tiffany and Carol. And DJ, and another boy. They were aged between 16 and 18, all minors, and they had beer: an illegal thrill. They sprawled on the floor and on a rented couch. They flicked cigarettes into the dogwoods from a plank deck at the back of the building. They eyed a ball game on a 40-inch television set. They praised Nirvana and rolled three-inch joints.

Most of the kids had been here before: word had spread about free-beer parties. Fashanu had rented the apartment for just two months, but had quickly put out feelers to local youth. He was a man with a natural, charismatic charm. He found it easy to win people’s confidence. When he bumped into kids, he would invite them to come over. And he would tell them to bring their friends.

He had made himself comfortable in what must have seemed to him like a previous place and time. He had grown up on the edge of a village in Norfolk, England, which though flatter and less humid than Howard County, Maryland, otherwise had much in common. And his teenage years had been his days of hope, when his life seemed to promise so much. Acting out his youth again, he must have felt complete. 2C was open house.

He was powerfully built: 190lbs, 6 foot 2 inches, and reasonably fit for his age. He had once been a star, albeit only fleetingly, in Britain’s national game. Back in 1981 he was bought from Norwich City FC by Nottingham Forest FC as the first black player in UK soccer history to rate a transfer fee of £1m. In 1990, he got the spotlight again for another first: for money, he declared himself in a series of tabloid newspaper features as the first out gay player in the sport.

But that night of the party, those glories were behind him. His career had collapsed in injury and controversy. More recently, he had been scratching around for work in Canada, New Zealand and even America. Howard County was as low as he had got. He needed these kids to give him a lift.

His guests were happily in the dark on all this. They knew nothing of his rise or fall. He was a witty kind of guy. His English accent was mellow. And he rented this neat place to hang. But as for his past across the pond playing soccer, they didn’t get too stoked about that. They were into basketball, baseball, athletics. “Soccer sucks,” they agreed.

“Yeah. Soccer sucks.”

Fashanu, who had done little but kick a ball since he was four, tried to bridge this frustrating gulf. You don’t have to like it, he advised them, but it was going to be big. A gold mine for players. Easy cash.

He told the kids that he was aged 28 and had come to their neighbourhood to help promote the game as part of a new team, Maryland Mania. He was an owner, he implied, and was looking for young people to help with back-office work. Delivering pamphlets. Designing publicity. All kinds of other cool stuff. The pay would be awesome: two hundred bucks a day. He told them: “We ought to talk.”

Mostly he lied. He was 37 years old and had no slice in any commercial property. The Mania was for real. It plans to compete next year in the second-rank American A-League. But Fashanu was retired with an injured knee and was only being considered as coach. The team was owned by others, including a guy called Ali, who had known Justin Fashanu for years. Ali’s local trading company sold Gourmet Swiss chocolates and the Purple Parrot suncare range. He had suggested there might be a position with the team’s management, but nothing more. No contracts were signed.

That March evening, Fashanu got off on the group’s energy, but there was one special kid (who Tiffany had brought) who particularly attracted his interest. DJ (short for D- Junior) was 17 years and three months old, fair haired, blue eyed, with a wide smile and pink cheeks. He was 5ft 9 and 145lbs, with a gym-trained, weight lifter’s physique. His forearm circumference bulged to 16 inches. He bench-pressed 200lbs. His T-shirt hung loose and his trousers sagged. He was the best-looking boy in the room.

Though Fashanu’s sexuality had hit the headlines in Britain, he kept it to himself, at first. But then, around 9.30, DJ asked to use the phone. He wanted to call his mother and his girlfriend. Fashanu showed him the phone in the bedroom, closed the door, then lay on the bed as the boy made the call and, during it, made a grab for his groin.

The kid was talking to his girlfriend, Laura, and hadn’t been disturbed by Fashanu’s presence. But when he felt the hand in an unexpected place, he leapt up and abandoned the call.

“I prefer woman,” he said, without anger. “I’m not gay.”

“I’m sorry,” Fashanu replied quickly, flustered by the rejection. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

DJ believed him. He had a generous nature, and tended to take people as they seemed. His parents had only moved to Howard County 14 months previously, and before then he had lived in a town of 200 people in southern Pennsylvania. It was Amish country, conservative, neighbourly, where crime was low and trust was high. And if furtiveness clouded the middle-aged man’s sexuality, the kid was better adjusted. Despite his remoteness from big-city life, he was young, watched MTV didn’t fear homosexuality. He thought being gay was cool.

The kid then called his mother, Julie, and another kind of age-gap yawned. He didn’t own a car and she wanted him home. She said he should come right now. Julie, 44, used to be a nurse, but in January of last year had been disabled in a traffic accident. Her husband, a 54-year-old sales executive and former policeman, was away on a business trip. But the stoned and slightly drunk 17-year-old felt compelled to snatch the last word. He was having fun. He never had fun. Why shouldn’t he stay out. It wasn’t late?

“DJ,” his mother snapped, “have you been drinking?”

“Can’t talk now.”

“You must come home.”

“I’m partying.”

“When your father hears, he’ll ground you.”

“So?”

Angrily, his mother hung up the phone. DJ returned to the living room.

The party dissolved at 11pm, and the kids mostly went their own ways. But DJ was still trying to assert his autonomy, and agreed with a suggestion from his charismatic host that they should go get more cans of beer. They drove in Fashanu’s rented black Mercedes to the Allview Liquor Store, half a mile west, across I-29, on the Old Annapolis Road.

The kid liked Fashanu, was drawn by his smiles and took his accent as suggestive of class. DJ was the youngest in a family with four sons and felt natural in the little brother role. He was also an athlete and hoped to learn stuff from this guy, who he thought was 28. DJ was an amateur wrestler, played American football, 10-pin bowling, and his top sport, baseball, was such a passion he dreamed of a pro career.

He wasn’t the most academically-minded of persons, having dropped out of high school for a job delivering dishwashers and cookers. He was also lonely, or at least isolated, in the loose, suburban life that his family had adopted in Howard County, Maryland. He knew none of his neighbours, and without a car he found it hard to get out and make friends. Now he had a friend in this smooth-talking Englishman. He figured that maybe things were looking up.

All but one of the other kids had now left the apartment, and when Fashanu and the 17-year-old returned to Oakton Lane, the party was down to three. Then, soon after midnight, DJ felt tired, as if the evening had suddenly caught up. He felt a strange hazy feeling, not easy to explain. It was not a feeling that he was at all used to. He had only drunk three 22oz beers, and the marijuana didn’t pack that kind of punch.

“I’m too drunk to go home,” he told Fashanu. “Can I crash here on the couch?”

“Certainly,” Fashanu agreed. The perfect host. “Of course. You crash. No problem.”

DJ fell asleep. The other kid left. Time moved on to 2am.

Soon after, Fashanu seized his chance. He would not take rejection a second time.

At some dimly-lit level DJ knew what was happening. But his struggle to stop it failed.

Fashanu’s power was briefly regained. The ex-star raped the boy.

*****

Detective First Class Glenn Case of the Howard County police department was first told of the Fashanu matter shortly after noon the following day, March 25. The information came through to his desk at the district public safety complex, a prosaic, one-story concrete slab and redbrick structure shared with the fire department behind a shopping mall, six miles south of Ashton Woods.

Details were sparse. A sexual assault. The victim was a minor. A male. A uniformed unit had responded to a 911 call received that morning from the boy’s home on Tamar Drive. After a brief assessment by a sergeant and an officer, the kid, accompanied by his mother, had been ferried for tests to the emergency room at Howard County General Hospital.

Case was 31, with a heavy chin and grey-blond hair cropped tight in military style. His police experience was six years in uniform and three as a county detective. He drove to the hospital, and at 4.25 began the delicate task of taking a statement. The kid seemed shocked, and his mother was angry. The father was out of town. The detective listened as the party was described, the drinking, the marijuana. He heard of the phone calls, the liquor store, the couch and then a blank. The victim thought he was drugged.

DJ said when he woke, at 8am, he found himself in Fashanu’s bed. His undershorts were around his knees and his host was performing fellatio on him. He said he yelled “no”, struggled up, got dressed and immediately left the apartment. He walked to Tamar Drive, approximately one mile. In tears, he told his mother what happened. There had been no delay. There were no doubts in his mind. He was clear about what had occurred.

Case’s questions were intrusive, but the interview wasn’t the worst part of what happened at Howard County General. DJ had already undergone the standard physical and forensic checks for a suspected sexual assault on a male. A doctor had recorded a tear in the kid’s rectum and noted a quantity of blood. He had looked for pubic hairs that may have been acquired from an assailant. He used a proctoscope for DNA samples.

Next morning, the detective drove to Ashton Woods, where Fashanu appeared polite and co-operative. He gave the impression of being surprised. Case noted a bible lying on the floor. Yes, the kid had slept there, the suspect agreed, but nothing untoward had occurred. He said that he had heard the front door close when DJ had left to go home.

Case explained that Fashanu was not under arrest, but that answering some questions could help. Fashanu agreed, and didn’t ask for a lawyer. He had chosen to brazen it out.

“Are you a homosexual?” the detective asked.

“No I am not.”

“The boy says that you took him to buy beer. Is that true?”

“No it is not.”

The detective had been trained to appear non-judgmental. He kept the heat down by taking slow notes.

Fashanu said that he was concerned about publicity, because he was waiting on news of a job. “I want to get this over with,” he said. “I want to clear my name.”

“Would you be willing to take a polygraph test?”

“Yes, I would.”

“And provide us with a sample of your blood for forensic examination?”

“Yes, of course.”

Case left the apartment puzzled by Fashanu’s self-assurance. Given the possibility of a rape charge, self-assurance was an incongruous demeanour, whether he committed the offence or not.

The detective, like the kids, knew nothing about soccer. His favourite sport was lacrosse. So a couple of days later, he sat at his desk and accessed the world-wide web. He tapped “Justin Fashanu” into a search engine field, hit return and studied the screen.

There were two particularly helpful sites: one local, the other in Britain. There was first a page called “The Out List” compiled by a guy at Maryland’s Washington College: an inventory of “living, famous, or distinguished people who have publicly acknowledged that they are lesbian, gay or bisexual.” Among the Fs, Case located “Justin Fashanu, British pro soccer star.”

The second site, from South Bank University, London, was titled “The Knitting Circle”. This included a condensed biography. Evidently, the suspect was a celebrity. Born 1961. Played for various teams. Ranked 99 in The Pink Paper’s list of 500 lesbian and gay heroes. And there was a quote from a book of essays, Stonewall 25, about how he “came out” in The Sun newspaper. “I genuinely thought that if I came out in the worst newspapers and remained strong and positive about being gay,” he was quoted as saying, “there would be nothing more that they could say.”

Strong and positive about being gay? The detective did not think so.

By now police had spoken to the other kids at the party and had witness statements that Fashanu and DJ had indeed driven out to buy beer. So that was two lies established in the interview. And he was waiting on the forensic tests. The Maryland state crime lab in Baltimore soon confirmed the presence of semen in the samples that had been collected at the hospital. Fashanu hadn’t used a condom in the offence. Case was ready to charge.

On Thursday April 2, eight days into the investigation, detectives obtained a search warrant and entered Fashanu’s apartment. The suspect, his clothes and personal effects were gone. Case looked in vain for the bible. The telephone was fitted with caller ID, which revealed a string of incoming calls back to Friday March 27, suggesting flight within 24 hours of the interview. He would not now be available for the polygraph test or to give a blood sample to the crime lab.

Next morning, an arrest warrant was sought from a district court commissioner. “DFC CASE has received information that FASHANU has not been in contact with friends or associates since he was interviewed by DFC CASE,” the application noted. “DFC CASE fears that FASHANU is a flight risk.” The charges cited were first and second degree assault and second degree sexual assault. The maximum punishment was 20 years in jail, although the tariff was closer to 10.

DJ was hoping, even more than the detective, that his assailant would quickly be found. Since word had got out about his ordeal, there had been ugly, whispered speculations. Surely this kid was too strong to be raped. He bench-pressed 200lbs! Maybe he was gay and just didn’t know it yet. Why the hell did he stop overnight? With Fashanu missing, there was no chance of silencing those who gossiped that DJ was willing. They conjectured that the kid must have changed his mind. He must, really, have asked for it.

Then there were DJ’s more private turmoils, as memories and flashbacks surfaced. He appeared to suffer from rape trauma syndrome, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. What was it that attracted Fashanu’s attention? He wanted to know: why him? He felt guilty, ashamed, confused, invaded. He became withdrawn and disliked being touched. He collapsed his social circle to his parents, Laura and his only close male friend, Josh. Previously, people said he was calm, easygoing. Now, he was quick-tempered, angry.

He received weekly counselling, but the therapy was poor. The counsellor had never dealt with men. A consensus has formed among specialists in this field that up to one quarter of all rapes involve male victims, but there is an extraordinary reluctance to come forward. Such few studies as exist show that victims (and also their assailants) are most often heterosexual. And also that in the United States the median age of who are attacked is 17.

DJ’s question “why me?” wouldn’t be answered. At least, not by Justin Fashanu. On Wednesday April 15, the soccer player turned up in England and travelled to a religious retreat in Leicestershire, to which ten years before he had (unsuccessfully) applied to become a novice monk. He used his mother’s maiden name, Lawrence, in an effort to stay hidden, before journeying to London, contacting family and friends, and trying to sell his story to the press. He called his old agent, hoping to place an “exclusive”, claiming that his victim was a blackmailer. But his agent, Eric Hall, was ill and never called back. Fashanu’s last story went unsold.

Two days later, he was discovered in a garage, hanged with electric flex.

*****

Had the accused not fled, The Trial of Justin Fashanu would have convened at the Howard County Courthouse, Ellicott City, three miles north of Ashton Woods. It’s a grey granite building, dating to 1841, with tall Georgian windows and an elegant extension added in the mid-1980s. On the ground floor level are clerks’ offices, administration and the public records department. Above, are five high-ceilinged wood-finished courtrooms, off a wide corridor floored in marble.

Ellicott City was founded by Quakers. Their businesses were iron and textiles. Out-of-town shopping malls have strangled traditional commerce, but the narrow Main Street is among America’s best-preserved, with formerly-thriving grocery and hardware stores now converted to the tourist trade. They sell antiques, gifts and bric-a-brac. There is an all-year Christmas shop. There are countless protected historic residences and hotels. Across the Patapsco River and up a steep slope there’s the shell of an old cotton mill

Court parking is tight and facilities limited, but America might have enjoyed the trial. Maryland bans cameras from proceedings, but the network live trucks and foreign satellite up-links would have carved a Fort Fashanu in the lot. An ageing black sports star, retired with knee trouble. A white victim. An immediate flight. The formula was there: a little OJ II. The hearing had the potential to be big.

At face value, however, it could well been a short one: the forensic evidence could hardly be doubted. Even the fashion for legal challenges to science couldn’t easily discredit the DNA.

But the forensic tests would only establish the sex. The question of force would then arise. By its nature rape is rarely witnessed by others, and defendants almost always claim consent. With Fashanu’s dead body, a suicide note was found, suggesting he would have taken that route. “I want to say that I did never and have never sexually assaulted that young man,” the memo said. “Yes, we did have a relationship of mutual consent, but the next day he demanded money off me. When I said ‘no’, he said ‘you wait and see’.”

Fashanu added: “The first I heard that I was a fugitive was when I turned on the television news. I realised that I had already been presumed guilty.”

Of course, blackmailers must offer their prey time to think, and in his distraught state of mind Fashanu may not have considered how quickly his victim came forward. But in the weeks between the soccer player’s flight from Maryland and the news of his death in London, DJ pondered the trial with dread. Rape victims always do.

How was it, he knew defence attorneys would demand, that he had apparently gone to sleep on the couch in the lounge and had awoken in Mr Fashanu’s bed?

DJ could not answer this. He simply didn’t know.

Wasn’t it true that his mother, not he, was the most insistent in calling the police?

His mother was insistent, but so was he. He was outraged by what had occurred.

Could he tell the court again… and again… and again… what it was he said happened that night?

By confronting the taboo against discussing male rape, there was the consolation that weathering what would have been a painful cross-examination might have accomplished a public good. And attention would soon have shifted from the victim’s motives to those of the man accused. What were the clues that explained what he did? Who was this Justin Fashanu?

*****

Incredibly, the sportsman’s celebrity status had been secured with a single, left-footed kick, that propelled him to the top of his sport. Playing for Norwich City against Liverpool in February 1980, he received the ball by the right of the opposition’s penalty box, spun and whacked a rising shot past the goalkeeper’s outstretched hand. Like a golfing hole-in-one there was a big chunk of luck, but it became the television goal of the year. The BBC screened it weekly on Match of the Day. And Nottingham Forest snapped him up for one million.

But things were not so simple when in August, next season, Fashanu ran onto the field as the number 9-shirt striker for Forest. In the following months he clashed with the club’s manager, Brian Clough, who turned against the brash 20-year-old. Clough loathed homosexuals almost as much as he despised unproductive forwards, and Fashanu had not only been seen in gay bars, but in 32 games scored just three times.

“Forest,” wrote Clough’s biographer, Tony Francis, “had opened up themselves, but this time with the gay abandon of a child in a sweetshop. Justin Fashanu was a hopeless misfit. It was only after paying £1m for him that Clough and Taylor realised he could not play their style of football.”

Clough blew the whistle and fired him from Forest. The fall had begun, so soon.

Fashanu drifted, first to Southampton, later back to Nottingham, with Notts County. But on New Year’s Eve 1983, a physical disaster struck. His right knee was punctured by an opponent’s boot studs and, though his career limped on, the damage was done. He was only third-rate after that. In July 1986, he was let go by second-division Brighton which advised that “he doesn’t play football again.” He did trials with five other British clubs, but doctors reports made him uninsurable on the field.

Had he not killed himself and had the court case gone ahead, reporting no doubt would have maintained his celebrity, almost as assiduously as he maintained it himself. In October 1990, his agent Hall sold a string of stories to The Sun for more than £100,000, detailing how he had allegedly “bedded” a member of parliament and had “romped” at the House of Commons. Two years later, exclusives appeared about a supposed affair with the actress and Coronation Street star Julie Goodyear. And in February 1994, another story broke linking him with Stephen Milligan, the late Conservative MP, whose body had been found in compromising circumstances.

The core of these stories were for-profit fabrications and caused uproar in the sportsman’s circle. After the first yarns, his younger brother John Fashanu, also a front-rank soccer striker, publicly disowned him. After the Goodyear tales, friends dating back to his teenage years stopped returning his calls. And after the Milligan deception the minor Scottish team Hearts fired him for dishonouring the game.

This descent into ruin would be quickly researched for the trial, and this material might have assisted the prosecution. A track record of lies would certainly damage his position in a stand-off against DJ’s testimony. But perhaps the defence might have something to say about the events which had shaped their client. The material might well have only been in pleas for leniency, but it might have helped his critics to understand.

Fashanu’s life had never been without trouble, pretty much from the day it began. He was born on Sunday 20 February 1961 – a day so foggy the River Thames’s Woolwich ferry was suspended for nearly two hours. Both his parents – Pearl and Patrick – were new immigrants to Britain and after moving between now-demolished semi-slum terraces at Shellgrove Road and Gainsborough Square, east London, in 1964 broke up to start new families. They abandoned Justin, then 4, and John, 2, to the tender care of the Dr Barnardo’s organisation’s neo-gothic orphanage at Barkingside, complete with clock tower, church and sexual abuse.

The brothers were then fostered by a middle class white couple who lived in the Norfolk village of Shropham. Although Pearl came to visit from time to time, there were no other black people, at home, or at school, or for 15 miles in any direction. Neighbours say that both children were shy, confused about their status and that Justin openly craved to be white. He had no role models, or access to knowledge about the issues and meanings of race.

Some sources claimed later that his foster family had caused him to lose track of himself. “He never once, in my company, referred to gay or black people as anything other than a third party,” an ex-lover recalled after his death. “Absolutely never in the same breath as a personal reference.”

But whoever, or whatever, he felt that he was, he might have felt he could have whatever he wanted. In Shropham, he lived a spoilt life in the “Flint House”, a two-story lodge behind holly and hawthorn bushes, down country lanes festooned with cow parsley. His foster mother, Betty, played the organ at the 13th century local church, where Justin was the black face in the choir. Her husband, Alf, ran a backyard engineering business, but was a loner and had a reputation as a drunk. They lavished luxuries and treats on the boys, but people said Alf had “moods”.

These dislocations in themselves might have assist his defence, but something else might by then have been unearthed. According to Betty and Alf’s son, Edward, who was 15 years older than Fashanu (and who slept in an adjacent room) during his teenage years Justin suffered from the most terrifying, traumatic, violent nightmares. He would sit up in his sleep and lash out with his fists, as if fighting-off some unseen assailant. On one occasion, when he was 15 or 16, he punched clean through his bedroom window, sending a shower of shattered glass onto the lawn.

Nobody knows the frequency with which these terrors descended, but in Clough’s autobiography, published in 1994, the former Nottingham Forest boss reported a similar incident in adulthood. The team was staying at a Spanish hotel and members of the squad were woken at 2am by “a sound like gunshot” from the striker’s bedroom. “The door was in splinters, with a huge hole right through the middle,” Clough wrote. “Fashanu had been having a nightmare.”

*****

The defendant’s background might have softened the judge’s heart, but whatever the mitigation that might lie in the past, if Fashanu had lived to return to the United States, he would almost certainly have gone to jail. Maryland shares the obsolete “sodomy” laws of many Southern states, under which even oral sex between husband and wife is technically a felony offence. And Case was preparing to upgrade the charges to first degree sexual assault.

But Fashanu evaded the scrutiny of a trial, and such was the tragic aspect of his death that his reputation has been subtly enhanced. On Friday May 8, a British newspaper was leaked an excerpt from his suicide note and ran a story sympathetically, headlined: “Boy lover blackmailed me.” A month later, a Channel 5 documentary lauded his soccer career. And on Tuesday June 23 – three months after that fateful night in the Ashton Woods apartment – gay activists held a “memorial tribute” in London, dubbing him “a victim of racism and homophobia”.

His brother was approached to cast light on his bereavement, but stood mute in the face of questions. Rejecting an interview request, John Fashanu’s agent Ian Wilson said: “One, he doesn’t particularly want to do anything at the moment. Two, if he does, he will do it in his own way, and his own feelings would be his own property, and he would either have those within a book, or within a major newspaper thing which he was in control of. Why give – this is my view – somebody else all that material? Why?”

Yet despite his death, Justin Fashanu will get a hearing, although not on any criminal charge. In the next few weeks – the date is yet to be fixed – Poplar Coroner’s Court, a redbrick Tudor-style corner house in east London, will be the scene of a short trial of his fate. The coroner will probe the circumstances of his death and of the events which led to the garage. The only thing so far known about the hours beforehand was that he was seen at a gay sauna called Chariot’s, near Liverpool Street, almost opposite where his body was found.

DJ and his mother will not go to the hearing, but they anxiously await the results. They suspect the kid was incapacitated in the apartment with one of a number of “date rape” drugs which are increasingly involved in sexual assaults. One candidate is Rohypnol, another GHB, and there are also sedatives, such as Valium, under suspicion. Tests on the boy were delayed at the hospital, so his system would have cleared any trace. But such were the circumstances of Fashanu’s hanging that they wonder if he had a supply in London and perhaps consumed some to steel himself for death.

The kid’s parents also hope that the coroner’s hearing will help DJ reach a sense of closure. For DJ himself, too much is unresolved. He still wants to know the reason why. The family have since moved from Howard County, although he still visits with Laura and Josh. He says that he’s okay, but others don’t think so. They say that something, somewhere, is wrong.

The most obvious evidence is that since last spring he has been stalked by night-time terrors.

In a Maryland bedroom, untidy with toppled CDs, crumpled jeans and thrown-down sports gear, a circuit closes, he sits up in his sleep and he lashes out into the dark with his fists.