The Adderall Diaries (20 page)

It was his first victim. Sean was eight or nine years old (he changes his age in separate interviews). He was on a camping trip somewhere near the Mexican border, possibly over the border, possibly in Arizona. He was with his mother and her boyfriend and a number of others who lived in their house or frequently came around. They arrived at the campground in a caravan.

There were many adults, including a man who Sean claims regularly tortured and molested him, and the man’s daughter, who was around Sean’s age. “She used to braid my hair to my ankles and stick stuff in my ass,” Sean says. “She said she took part of my soul.”

He came upon her in a shallow pool half a mile from the campground near a waterfall. She had been set upon by a wild animal, or she had fallen and dashed against the rocks. “It was dark,” Sean says, his voice lowering. “Darkness is your friend. I was approaching the river. At first I thought I heard an animal cry. It was her. Looking at her in the pond, her face was messed up, arms, chest, her short-cut jeans were ripped. I’m not sure if she was still alive or if it was just that she looked like she looked at me. I got really angry. She wanted me to help her, after what she had done to me. I took back my soul. She was covered in blood; I made her more bloody. And I was liberal about it. I took part of her flesh. I was hungry. I was always hungry then. I drank her blood. She came from the water. My name is Sturgeon. I thought of her as a gift.” He waited in the bushes to see what would happen. He saw the father lift the child, wailing with grief. “I knew they would come looking for us. I didn’t understand the changes that were happening, that I had gained power, that I could fight back.”

Sean’s voice on the recording is incredibly creepy, often slipping into a whisper, and finishing with tears or a harsh, manic laugh. He lectures the officers, “Do not allow those you hunt to know you’re there… The hunt is sacred.” He sounds
too
much like a serial killer, as if he was reading a script. Parts of his confession sound like TV episodes. He says one of his victims belonged to an “extra-legal” organization and when he convinced the organization that one of their members was a molester they gave the man to him.

Sean makes fun of himself, but in a self-aggrandizing way. “I’ve lost lots of fights. I’m not Bruce Lee.” He likes to talk and he’s proud of his intellectual capabilities, which are impressive, and he likes Paul, who listens patiently, without judging. He says the father of the girl he may have killed when he was eight came to him in 1995 looking for a good time. He says the man lived for a day and a half.

“I said he could leave. All he had to do was get through me to the door. He didn’t leave. I showed him all the things that were done to me and the things I learned. He didn’t talk, he only listened and screamed. When I was done he was unrecognizable as a human being. It was like something from a horror movie.”

“Was the body ever found?” Hora asks.

“I don’t think so,” Sean replies. A few minutes later Sean tells Hora, “I have a feeling that if we win the case you might even take me out to sushi.”

Sean was interviewed at length three times. On one recording he refers to the girl’s father as his second to last murder, on another he refers to him as his last murder. He says 6.5 of the murders were direct retaliation, including that of the girl. At different points in the tape he mentions smashing her in the head with a rock and throwing the rock in the pond. He says he bit her neck. Of all the murders the girl is the only one described with any real detail. When they interviewed Sean’s mother, sister, and mother’s boyfriend, none of them could remember a child dying on a camping trip, or any accident in the woods.

In the final interview, conducted less than two weeks before I first contacted him, Hora and two inspectors sat with Sean for almost five hours trying to convince him to give them any identifying information. Sean enjoyed sparring with them, insisting his only concern was ending the cycle of violence. He admitted it was unlikely that relatives of his victims would seek revenge by hurting people he cared about, but they might, and that was enough. It was the same reason he gave me for not naming his victims. It’s a reason I’ve never believed.

Nothing linking Sean to an actual murder comes out in the recordings. What does come out is a pattern of violence and abandonment: the mother’s boyfriend didn’t like people and would beat the children if they were disobedient. His mother confirms the children were molested and admits to leaving the children for years at a time.

“Nobody has to worry about me anymore,” Sean told me over a year ago. “The worst I ever do to anyone now is quote scripture at them in bad Aramaic.” I believed him. On the tapes, Sean’s pastor says Sean came to a place of faith where his sins were washed from him. In the months after Sean confessed his murders to his pastor he became violently ill and took to bed. The pastor told Sean his body was responding to this guilt, that God was trying to get his attention. Sean’s been born again, turned to Jesus for sustenance, laid his own soul upon the cross. But that’s just who he is now. This is America. We reinvent ourselves here all the time.

“We both believe in justice,” Sean told Hora at the end of his last interview. “I’ll just leave it at that.”

Three months after the verdict Sean writes to say he’s ready to meet. I arrive at the diner where me met a year ago. It’s Friday night.

He walks in with a woman dressed in a white scoop-neck T-shirt and tight jeans. Her hair is dyed blond with black roots, her nails are pressed on and painted white at the tips. A larger black woman is already waiting for him and they sit with her at a table near the door where I join them.

“Are you still into bondage?” Sean asks, motioning toward the blond. “Because I think she likes you.”

“He showed me your Web site,” the blond girl says. “I like your writing. I like that line about a drop of blood in a glass of water.”

“I didn’t write that line,” I say. “That was a quote from somebody else. When did you meet Sean?”

“Today,” she says.

A group of black kids enter the diner, one and two at a time. Some of them bang on the window, waving at the others before coming in. They’re in their late teens and early twenties and there are maybe eight of them total. They stop by the table to say hello to Sean. “You must be Elliott,” they say, shaking my hand. One kid has gold plating on his front teeth. Another has thick black glasses with no lenses in them. He squeezes my hand hard, stares at me. He might be the youngest of the group, probably only seventeen years old. His glassless glasses remind me of the disguise my father claims to have worn when he killed a man. But the boy’s face, both tough and innocent, reminds me of Cateyes. Sean tells them he got good news recently: the police are giving him back his guns.

“Who are these people?” I ask.

“I know people,” Sean replies. He looks straight at me, his hands folded on the table, as if we were having a staring contest.

“What do you consider consent?” the black woman next to Sean asks me. “Do you think you have the right to write about people who don’t want to be written about?”

“It’s complicated,” I say. “But if I contact someone and tell them I want to write about them and they meet with me, I consider that consent.”

“He has my consent,” Sean says. “I told him he could write about me in an email.” He smiles as if he has nothing to do with this. As if he was as surprised by the question as I was and hadn’t orchestrated this evening’s event. As if we both just walked into some absurdist play together.

Sean unbuttons his shirt. He has two large scars beneath his chest as if he had once had breast implants, and more scars on his stomach. “I’ve been wasting away,” he says. “I’m sick with something. I’ve lost thirty or forty pounds even though I eat like eight thousand calories a day.”

“You look fine,” I say.

Sean leaves his shirt open, inviting me to stare at his hairless pink skin and all his marks. “So,” he says. “What do you want to know?”

The black woman leaves. I should leave, but I don’t. I ask him why he confessed to eight murders and he says Paul Hora asked about them. Hora had heard through Hans somehow. It contradicts earlier statements he made and I tell him that. I ask about the girl he may have murdered, why his mother and her boyfriend can’t remember a child dying in the woods. He says they were hippies and they were doing drugs. Also, they don’t like talking to the police.

I ask him about the “extra-legal” organization. “What extra-legal organization are you talking about?”

“You want to know the name of the extra-legal organization?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Hey guys,” Sean calls out. “He wants to know the name of an extra-legal organization.” The boys shamble over from their tables and surround me. They take positions behind me and to my right and in front of me behind Sean, all of them talking at once, like a parody of a Greek chorus. It’s like the group homes all over again. I feel something resembling fear but I’ve been afraid so many times I’m used to it.

One kid says, “What do you mean by that? What’s extra-legal?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. That’s what I’m asking.”

“Talk to me,” another says. “Look at me. What are you talking about? Make me understand.”

“You heard of Chauncey Bailey?” one of the kids behind Sean says. “He got killed because he was trying to report shit he wasn’t supposed to.”

“Are you threatening me?” I ask. “Are you trying to intimidate me?”

“Why do you keep writing stuff down?” the girl sitting next to me asks, letting out a lazy laugh and leaning her shoulder toward my shoulder.

“Hey,” Sean says. “We don’t want to surround him and be threatening.” The boys move noisily back to their tables by the windows. Sean starts speaking in a low, menacing voice, squinting, almost spitting. He talks about Nina, the pain he carries. Asks me if I know what he’s been through as a result of things Josh and I have written about him. He says people stalk him. Accost him near his home.

“I doubt it,” I say. “I haven’t published anything about you yet.”

Sean says he doesn’t believe me. The girl presses her leg against my leg and I move away from her. “Am I making you uncomfortable?” she says. “Why do you keep moving away from me?”

“Everybody gather around,” Sean says. “I want everybody to hear this.” He’s speaking really loudly. He wants the entire restaurant to hear him. The boys come over again. “I hereby withdraw my consent for this story to be told. I remove consent. You do not have consent to write about me.”

“You don’t have a person’s consent, you can’t do it,” the blond girl says.

“I got it on tape,” one of the kids says, waving a small black tape recorder. “You don’t have consent.”

After seeing Sean I go to a friend’s house, the same woman I kissed whom I met at the conference in Portland last August. She’s packing her things, preparing to go to the Democratic National Convention. It’s almost two in the morning and I lie on her couch, too angry to sleep.

“He set me up to be intimidated,” I say. “It was ridiculous.”

“You can stay here,” she says. She means in the living room.

I don’t stay though. I go home.

Sean changed his mind about being written about. I told him several times he wouldn’t like how I portrayed him. Maybe he was just realizing what that meant: not that I would show both his good and bad sides, but that I would show a version of him he wouldn’t recognize, someone that had little in common with how he saw himself. It was too much control to give away. He wanted to tell his own story. In an interview with
48 Hours
soon after our meeting, he admits he made the whole thing up. He says he was at least partly responsible for one death, maybe more. He says he pulled the number “eight and a half” out of thin air because he didn’t want to testify.

“Did you confess to killing eight and a half people to try and help Hans?” the interviewer asks.

“I can’t answer that question,” Sean says. And I wonder if he can’t answer because he doesn’t want to incriminate himself or because he really doesn’t know.

During the trial people frequently asked how a person like Nina could be with men like Hans and Sean. It struck me as a ridiculous question. Sean loved Nina and Hans wasn’t capable of love. Sean gave her a bridge from the world Hans trapped her in. A little over a year ago he extended a bloody hand to help me across my own chasm and into the next place I would go in my life, the woods where I would continue my search. I didn’t know Sean would push me toward myself. This book is not about him.

In a powerfully written article, an author tells the story of his years on Ritalin, a methylamphetamine compound indistinguishable from Adderall. The first time he took Ritalin, he wrote, he felt a surge of artificial illumination so sharp it made him grin. But by the end of the piece he had seen the error of his ways, come face-to-face with the economy of decreasing rewards. He decided he had had enough concentration and intensity and missed the person he used to be, someone who was more curious and lazy than the piercingly focused person he’d become. When I met the author in January of this year and told him I was working on a book called
The Adderall Diaries,
he asked if I had any. I said I thought he had quit. “Well,” he explained, waving his hand, “I’ve made a separate peace. I still take it, just not as often. After all, I’ve got to work.” It was almost midnight and we were at a party thrown by a mutual friend and he was ready to pop a pill that would keep him up through the morning.

In that same article the author calls Ritalin as euphoria inducing as any illegal drug he had ever tried. In fact, he said, the effects were better. And compared to street drugs, it was cheap. He sounded like the Beatniks, William Burroughs and Joan Vollmer, cracking inhalers, soaking the amphetamine sheets in their coffee, or popping amphetamine and meta-amphetamine tablets, sometimes taking more than a hundred milligrams at a time. Jack Kerouac cranked out one hundred twenty feet of single-spaced, Benzedrine-induced prose in less than three weeks, producing
On the Road,
his greatest novel. The book defined the exuberance and promise of a generation, but it’s actually a story of children scrambling across the continent strung out on speed.