Each of the videos played out in a similar way. The men had been kidnapped over a period of a month, taken from their homes, offices, or hotel rooms, their disappearances reported by wives, mothers, coworkers. There was no trace of them, until the videos began to arrive.
The third video featured the star player for a Super Bowl championship team. He’d been accused of raping two women in two separate incidents, one in Miami, the other in Seattle. In both of the investigations, the police officers had asked for autographs and posed for photographs with the star athlete, who said the sex with the women had been consensual. No charges were ever brought, but he was suspended for three games by the NFL. On Super Bowl Sunday, millions of Americans ate potato chips and drank beer while watching the man throw a ball around a field. They clapped and cheered for him. On a visit to L.A., he went missing.
The next two videos featured two European soccer stars who’d been accused of paying an underage teenage girl for sex—a prostitute, the media had labeled her. The players denied the accusations, but the claims against them and media interviews with the girl had engulfed two of Europe’s leading soccer clubs. Prosecutors eventually declined to press charges, but the scandal only grew wider in Europe, involving other athletes and even more underage girls. While in Los Angeles to play an off-season charity match, the two soccer stars went missing.
The star of the sixth video was a film director of Eastern European origin who was accused of raping a thirteen-year-old extra during the filming of a remake of Lolita a decade earlier. It was consensual sex, the film director had said; in his culture, standards were different. “The girl was a Lolita,” the producer of Lolita had told the police, in defense of his director friend. Over the years, the acclaimed film director was dogged by protests and controversy, but no charges were ever brought, and he went on to win two Academy Awards. After a business lunch at the Chateau Marmont, he vanished.
Six other men with similar profiles were also targeted by the kidnappers, including a county attorney from Texas who’d refused to press charges against a teenage boy who’d molested a little girl because, as he told the girl’s mother, “boys will be boys.” Another target was Hal Jizz, the creator of the pornographic websites RevengeHer, where men retaliated by sharing intimate photos and videos of ex-wives and girlfriends, and VietCunt, which enabled Internet users in North America to access women and girls in Vietnam, who performed whatever actions the user requested via webcam. Someone in Ohio could pay to see a fourteen-year-old girl molested by an old man.
The media dubbed the twelve kidnapped men the “Dirty Dozen.” The director of the FBI appeared on television to plead for their release: “We urge members of the public to come forward with any information that might lead to the rescue of these twelve men,” he said, sounding official, but it was clear his heart wasn’t in it.
The friends and family of the Dirty Dozen stayed mostly clear of the media. The mother of Hal Jizz, when confronted outside Saturday-night bingo at her local American Legion, said she had “no comment” on her son’s kidnapping. When asked if she was proud of her son, the old woman, her hair wiry and gray like a scouring pad, took a drag on her cigarette and turned to the reporter, her black eyes penetrating the camera, “What do you think?” she said. In the parking lot of the Van Nuys accounting firm where he worked by day, employees ran from their cars to the building with file folders held over their faces, trying to outrun reporters.
The FBI director appeared on television again. “These twelve men have not been convicted of anything,” he said, but many commentators thought that was the point. “Kidnapping is a serious crime. If you have any information, please come forward. It’s not easy to transport and hide twelve grown men. Someone out there must know something.”
But no one did, apparently. A week later a skydiving plane went missing from an airfield in Nevada. The twelve men were dropped from the plane into the desert. The coroner estimated that the men, alive and without parachutes, fell from an altitude of at least 10,000 feet. By the time anyone noticed the plane had been stolen, it had crashed into the Sierra Nevada and animals were feasting on the men’s remains. There were no bodies in the plane. Investigators surmised that the kidnappers had parachuted out of it before the crash.
On her cable news show, Cheryl Crane-Murphy said, “As a committed Christian, it pains me to admit that I feel nothing but glee at the death of these pigs. God forgive me.”
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The New Baptist Plan, Task Four:
Blind Dates