WEST McCRAY:
It’s been a year since I turned up on Amanda’s doorstep and she told me Keith was dead. The next words out of my mouth were, “I think we should call the police.” In the time since, I’ve been collecting the pieces of everything that’s left, trying to put them together in a way I can understand. Amanda agrees to meet me to go over what happened that day. She’s a white, thirty-year-old mother of one. She has asked me not to use her last name.
AMANDA:
I don’t know where to start.
WEST McCRAY:
How did you meet him?
AMANDA:
He came to the place I worked at the time.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: Amanda no longer lives in Farfield. She lives in a new town, a different state. She’s trying to put her relationship with Christopher—the name Keith was going by at the time—behind her. It hasn’t been easy. She is haunted by everything that happened then. She’s finding it hard to cope.
WEST McCRAY:
You worked at a bar.
AMANDA:
Yes. He showed up one night, and then another. He was nice, attentive. He didn’t drink, he just ate there. He kept coming back. There was something about him—I felt like I could talk to him, and I felt whatever I said, he understood. I’m a single mom and it’s difficult to find people—I found it difficult to find people willing to listen.
WEST McCRAY:
You have a daughter.
AMANDA:
[PAUSE] Yes.
WEST McCRAY:
How old was she at that time?
AMANDA:
She’d just turned ten.
WEST McCRAY:
How long did you know him, before he moved in?
AMANDA:
About a month and a half. He was there for every one of my shifts, and every one of my breaks. My days off. I was—I thought I was in love with him. I remember thinking that was ridiculous, to feel that way, but at the same time, why couldn’t one good thing happen to me?
If I had known that bringing him home … if I had known what I was bringing home … my daughter never said a word to me. She never told me something was wrong. You’d think, as her mother, I would’ve known. You think that I— WEST McCRAY:
He targeted single mothers of young girls, women who were alone and had to look after more than their fair share. He preyed on them as much as their children. You can’t blame yourself.
AMANDA:
I know that, but knowing it and …
Knowing it and believing it, those are two different things. [PAUSE] He didn’t have a job. Any other time, that’d be a red flag for me. But he was so nice and so good with my girl that I thought having someone around more often, someone who, at the time, she seemed to like—I thought that would be good for her.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: Amanda’s daughter is in therapy now. Twice a week.
AMANDA:
So I’d be working and he’d be home. With her.
WEST McCRAY:
Tell me how he died.
AMANDA:
One of the girls at the bar asked to switch shifts with me, so I went in a little earlier than I usually do, and came home a little earlier than I usually did. When I got home, my daughter was there and he wasn’t. She told me she’d been at the bookstore and when she got back, he was gone. I was absolutely furious because I didn’t want her home alone because I didn’t think that was … [LAUGHS] I didn’t think it was sa— I’m sorry.
WEST McCRAY:
Take as long as you need.
AMANDA:
Anyway, he came in around nine o’clock that night. He looked awful. He was … dirty. Just filthy. He was pale, he was trembling, favoring his left side. I was horrified. Couldn’t believe my eyes.
WEST McCRAY:
What did he say happened?
AMANDA:
He told me he got mugged. He said, how did he put it … “I got jumped, they took all my money, they took me for a ride.” But he never said who they were and when I asked, he got real vague about it. He was in pain, though, and something had happened to him—that much was true.
WEST McCRAY:
You didn’t go to the police.
AMANDA:
I wanted to. I begged him to. He refused. I told him we should at least go to the hospital and get him checked out, because he was clearly hurting, but he was adamant that he was fine, he was just a little sore, he just needed to sleep it off. And, as if he was trying to prove his point, he sat down and he had a late dinner with me. Then he took a shower. He went to bed. He was alive. The next morning, I checked on him, he said he was fine, he just wanted to sleep. So I let him sleep. I sent my daughter to a friend’s house, to stay the day and night, so he wouldn’t be disturbed. I went to work. When I came back home, around midnight, he was unresponsive, still in bed. I called 911.
WEST McCRAY:
He had tried, unsuccessfully, to treat a stab wound in his left side. It became infected. He died in the hospital of sepsis a few days later.
AMANDA:
When he died, I was devastated and completely out of my depth. I had no idea who to contact. I couldn’t afford a funeral. He didn’t really mention a family … so I went through his things. I found … in his wallet—he had money in it. That tripped me up because he told me “they” had taken it. His muggers. In his truck, I found an ID. It had a different name on it. It wasn’t Christopher.
WEST McCRAY: Jack Hersh.
AMANDA:
I didn’t understand it, but I managed to get in touch with his parents, Marcia and Tyler. They’d been estranged since Chris—Jack was eighteen. They came down and identified and claimed the body after the police released it and I was left with this … grief for a man I thought I knew and this utter shock of not really knowing him at all.
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: Before Jack Hersh was Keith, Darren or Christopher, he lived in Allensberg, Kansas. After high school, he moved on, like many often do. No one there ever saw him again. But they remembered.
Residents of Allensberg described Jack as a loner, creepy. His parents were devout Christians who often kept to themselves. There were rumors, though, that things weren’t great at home, that Jack’s father drank too much and had a temper.
His parents refuse to talk to me.
There was an incident when Jack was twelve; he exposed himself to a group of girls at the elementary school.
Marlee Singer was ten years old when her brother, Silas Baker, became best friends with Jack. They were both seventeen. It happened suddenly, seemingly without explanation.
MARLEE SINGER [PHONE]: I think it was that they probably recognized themselves in each other.
WEST McCRAY:
Marlee has finally agree to talk to me.
WEST McCRAY [PHONE]: You knew Jack long before you were romantically involved with him. You sent Sadie to your brother, to find this man, and you knew or at least suspected both of them shared the same predilection, didn’t you? So my only question for you now, Marlee, is why? Why did you send her to them and why did you lie to me?
MARLEE SINGER [PHONE]: Because if you’d seen the look in her eyes, you would’ve known absolutely nothing was going to stop her. And I never … I’ve never been able to stand against my brother. And I didn’t tell you, when you came, because I was afraid and I felt like I had something to lose.
[TODDLER CRYING IN BACKGROUND]
AMANDA:
When Jack died, my daughter—I had this thought she wasn’t upset enough about it but I reasoned that kids work through those kinds of things differently. Now I know.
She was relieved.
WEST McCRAY:
What happened after I came to your house?
AMANDA:
We called the police.
WEST McCRAY:
While we waited, I showed you a picture of Sadie, in case you had been in contact with her without realizing it.
AMANDA:
My daughter was there, between us, and she said, “I saw her.”
WEST McCRAY [STUDIO]: Amanda’s daughter told us that Sadie had appeared the same afternoon that Jack said he was mugged, as best as she could remember. What she related of their encounter was unsettling.