Originally published on Aug. 19, 1987
It was late afternoon on Aug. 12, 1986, when a rented blue Oldsmobile with a summer-camp counselor and his four teen-age charges pulled into the University Inn in Flagstaff, Ariz.
The day had not been the high point of their western trip. The group was supposed to have driven from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. But because of a mistake in their routing itinerary they had gone too far south to Phoenix, then backtracked 90 miles to Flagstaff. By the time they arrived at the motel, everyone's nerves were frayed.
At about 6:30 p.m., they checked into two adjoining rooms. The counselor, Bill Hammond, and two boys took the triple. The double went to Jacob Wideman and Eric Kane.
The two boys, both 16, were bunkmates at Camp Takajo in Naples, Maine, which sponsors a cross-country trip each summer for the oldest campers. Both had brothers who had come home with tales of beauty and adventure in the national parks. Now it was their turn.
Jake and Eric had known each other for seven years, ever since Eric began attending Takajo.
Jake had more than a camper's attachment to Takajo's lake and pine woods. His grandfather, Morton Goldman owns the camp, and Jake had spent many summers there along with his family -- father John Edgar Wideman, the award-winning author and Rhodes scholar from Pittsburgh who taught Afro-American literature at the University of Wyoming in Laramie; mother Judy Goldman Wideman; brother Daniel, and later, sister Jamila.
Jake and Eric were acquaintances rather than friends, connected mainly by their age bracket at camp. Both were A students and more than 6 feet tall. But while Jake was a star basketball player, popular at school, Eric was shy and gawky, the result of a rare blood disorder that had kept him hospitalized or bedridden for much of his early childhood.
By all accounts, there was neither closeness nor tension between them. During pre-season planning, when a camp representative went to Eric's home to ask with whom he'd like to bunk that summer, Eric did not put Jake on either the "yes" or "no" list.
After having dinner at Roma's Pizza in Flagstaff, Jake and Eric went to different movies. Jake saw "Ruthless People" and Eric "Top Gun." They returned to their room separately and turned in at about 11:30 p.m. Eric went to sleep, but Jake, it was later explained, couldn't settle down.
After an hour, Jake got out of bed and asked Hammond for the car key so he could listen to some tape-recorded music. He said it would help him sleep.
A little later, Hammond looked out his window to see Jake alone in the car, reading what appeared to be a road map. Considering the day's mistaken routing, he thought little of it. He went to sleep with the door between the two rooms closed.
The next morning, Hammond awoke to find the car missing along with nearly $3,000 in traveler's checks in the glove compartment. The door to the next room was ajar. He went inside.
Eric's mattress was soaked in blood, clots of which led to the bathroom. There, Eric's body was seated sideways on the toilet, two deep puncture wounds in his chest. The medical examiner later ruled he had bled to death over the course of one or two hours.
On the floor between the beds was as souvenir knife with a 6-inch blade, purchased by Jake the previous day at Yellowstone. Hammond later described the purchase as uncharacteristic.
Jake was gone. At first police thought he might have been kidnapped. But eight days later, accompanied by his parent and lawyer, he turned himself in to the Flagstaff police. In the interim, he had crisscrossed the country, apparently aimlessly, by car, bus and airplane, using forged traveler's checks.
On Aug. 25, Jake Wideman is scheduled to go on trial for the fatal stabbing of Eric Kane. The charge is murder in the first degree. The defense has entered a plea of not guilty.
Now 17, Jake will be tried as an adult, although an appeal to reinstate his juvenile status has been pending for months before the Arizona Supreme Court. The key piece of evidence is his tape-recorded confession, 20 minutes in length, made in a surprise phone call to an investigator in Flagstaff. Conviction would carry a sentence of 25 years to life in prison, or death.
Since January, Jake had been held without bond in a windowless, 8-by-10-foot cell in the Coconino County jail. By law, he must be isolated from the other prisoners because of his age. The cell has a mattress on a concrete slab, a stainless steel toilet and a wash basin. He spends most of his time reading books sent by his father, or listening to the radio on loan from a guard. For an hour a day, five days a week, he lifts weights in the prison gym, works out on the punching bag or shoots baskets. Once in a while, a guard will spot him a game of table tennis.
Jake's family is across the country in Amherst, Mass., where John Wideman is on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts, a position he accepted before Jake left for camp. His parents write to him regularly, prison officials say, and Jake speaks to them by phone at least once a week. They have visited him at least once. Otherwise his only visitors are his attorneys. He is getting no psychiatric care.
Several times a week, he has a brief exchange with John Koenig, the jail's administrative sergeant.
"In those single cells, people get lonely and want to talk," Koenig said. "They're always asking for things. Jake has never asked for anything, except showers. But I like to keep a barometer on him. We talk mostly about sports.
"We hit it off right away," Koenig continued. "Jake was not at all what I expected. He'd been accused of a heinous crime, but there he was, well-mannered, well-groomed, educated, soft spoken saying 'yes sir' and 'no sir.' I kept wondering: What the hell happened? What went wrong?
"I like Jake, but you do your damnedest not to get attached. Otherwise, you end up hurting or getting suckered. You have to ask first what's best for society. There's more than 'poor Jake' to think about. There's also another family that will ever have their young man at home again."
[Initial]If the defense could draw a picture of this baffling case, it might be of a burning building with one teen-ager dead inside and a second screaming to get out.
They would depict Jake as the second boy, troubled, confused and frightened, caught in forces beyond his control. In the year since the killing, they have tried to convince the court that although Eric is dead, Jake can and should be saved. They have tried to prevent a trial from taking place. Their client, they maintain, suffers from mental disorders and emotional immaturity that make the charge of first-degree murder ludicrous.
"We do not send sick children to jail in this country," said Garth Smith, one of Jake's attorneys from a prominent Phoenix law firm. "All the psychologists agree that Jake is amenable to treatment. He's been very cooperative. Most of what the court used against him, Jake volunteered himself. He wants to understand that happened. He is working very hard at figuring it out."
The prosecution, however, would draw a different portrait, one of a dangerous young man who stabbed his sleeping roommate knowingly, with premeditation and without provocation, left him to bleed to death, stole a car and fled.
If Jake Wideman is trapped in any symbolic flames, the state will hold, he lit the match himself.
Seldom has a murder case raised as many troubling, unanswered questions as this one, or as many tragic ironies.
If there is an explanation for Eric's stabbing, a precipitating incident or aggravated circumstance, it hasn't come to light. Investigators have ruled out drugs and alcohol, which both boys were known to eschew. Bill Hammonds, the counselor, told police he did not believe homosexuality played a part.
Jake himself described the stabbing as unprovoked and motiveless. Nothing, he said in his confession, had happened between himself and Eric. The crux of his statement was simply, "I've had a really tough year, and he was the target of a lot of built-up emotions."
Indeed, if descriptions from the victim's teachers, counselors, family and friends are any indication, there could not have been a less likely provocateur than Eric Kane.
"Eric would never let an argument get to that level," said a camp counselor. "He wouldn't fight with anybody. He didn't have it in him."
On the surface, Eric fit the profile many campers at Takajo: an upper-middle-class Jewish kid from the East. He grew up in New City, N.Y., about an hour north of New York City, and attended the exclusive Saddle River Day School, just across the New Jersey line in the nation's second wealthiest community. His father, Sandy Kane, is a executive with IBM, his mother, Louise, goes into New York city two days a week to work at a family business.
But in other ways, Eric was different - not just from the other campers, but from most boys his age
"There was something almost ethereal about Eric," said Arline Gold, mother of Eric's best friend Jonathan. "It was as if he was born older and wiser than the rest of us. He was sweet, gentle, he loved books and privacy and his thoughts.
"Boys always fight and wrestle, but this one never did. My daughter used to say he was the consummate pacifist. Jon would lecture him not to take it when people bothered him."
Some people did bother him. At camp, counselors say, Eric's eager attitude and awkwardness drew verbal abuse from the other kids. But his good humor, camp spirit and refusal to quit won most of them over. His last year at Takajo, they voted him Camper Who Tried Hardest.
"Eric was not easily understood by other kids," said Arline Gold. "He was too mature, really more of a grown-up than a teen-ager. He'd get into these animated discussions with my husband about politics and world events and Jon would get very impatient and go outside."
After beating the immediate threat of his blood disorder, Eric spent the rest of his life struggling to overcome its effects. Migraine headaches, nagging colds and coughs plagued him. But the last year of his life he had begun to win the battle. He shot up 6 inches, gained weight, grew healthier.
Yet most tasks still were difficult, and Eric did things at his own pace. His handwriting was slow an labored; an assignment that took other students 2 minutes would take him an hour.
He compensated, though, with ferocious curiosity and force of will. His father said Eric could have driven less-patient people crazy with questions. "Once Eric decided he wanted to know something, he would not let go until he found it out," said Sandy Kane.
The willfulness could be wearing, Eric's parents had to make him put away his homework and go to sleep. They watched in amazement as he went out for the school sports teams, only to be rejected again and again.
"It's such a public thing to try out in front of all those people and not make it," said his father, "yet Eric never treated it as a failure. He could not be discouraged. He kept going back. He put the rest of us to shame."
A high school guidance counselor, upset over what she viewed as Eric's harassment by an inflexible teacher, arranged to have him transferred to another class, but Eric refused. "I can do it," he told her.
The work paid off. Eric's grades were high, even though he missed a lot of school. Teachers said his work could be startling in its insight. In language class, he would make French puns above the heads of his classmates. And his last year, he finally made it onto the junior varsity baseball team.
Randy and Laurie Kane, 21 and 19, lavished attention on their younger brother, and he idolized them both. Laurie would spend hours on the phone with him from her room at Cornell University, even during finals week. Randy and Eric would shoot baskets endlessly in the driveway. "A game could go on forever," he said in his brother' eulogy, "simply because we didn't want each other to lose."
Eric's killing has left the Kanes in uncomprehending pain and anger. The emptiness, they say, is excruciating and consuming. It comes in waves, like nausea, leaving them gasping and lost. They want to mourn their son, they say, but cannot until Jake Wideman is convicted of his killing. They say they are hoping for a sentence of death.
Laurie Kane dropped out of Cornell for a semester after her brother died. Louise Kane cannot stand to be alone. She insists on accompanying her husband on his frequent business trips to California. Although the travel exhausts her, it's still better than staying home, where Eric's room remains untouched and boxes of his belongings from camp sit unopened in the family room.
Louise Kane made copies of every photograph of Eric. One set of duplicates is in a fireproof safe at home. Another is kept by friends. She has copied other family photos, too.
"Suddenly I was forced to face all the things that can take your children from you," she said. "What if there's a fire or a car wreck? What if there's a mugging? These will be the only record I have. I can't afford to lose them."
When new acquaintances ask how many children she has, Louise Kane replies, "I have three children. One was killed.
"You can see them flinch," she said. "They don't know what to say. But I can never deny Eric."
[Initial] As the question "Why Eric?" haunts his family, another question hangs heavy in the air. "Why Jake?"
"I hate to speculate," said Jon Thompson, deputy county attorney, "but some of the psychiatrists suggest it's a subconscious attempt to get attention, or he's consciously acting out a bad seed concept."
The "bad seed concept" is at the heart of the irony, because Jake's uncle, Robby Wideman, is serving a life sentence in State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh for felony murder and armed robbery. Robby's case drew national attention when John Widemen wrote about it in his only non-fiction book, the critically acclaimed "Brothers and Keepers."
In it, Wideman took a hard look at his relationship with Robby, his youngest brother. "The bad seed, the good seed," he wrote "Mommy's been saying for as long as I can remember: That Robby ... he wakes up in the morning looking for the party."
"Brothers and Keepers" asked the question that has risen again, like a ghost, around Jake: How is it that one member of a family constellation spins out of control?
"The usual notion of time," he wrote, "of one thing happening first and opening the way for another and another, becomes useless pretty quickly when I try to retrace your steps and discover precisely where and when you started to go bad.
"When you were a chubby-cheeked baby and I stood you upright, supporting most of your weight with my hands but freeing you just enough to let you feel the spring and bounce of strength in your new rubbery thighs, when you toddled those first few bowlegged, pigeon-toed steps across the kitchen, did the trouble start then?"
The answers he found cannot apply now. The Laramie where Jake grew up is not the Homewood of Robby's youth: Jake, the A student and athlete, is not Robby, the habitual offender.
No one in the Wideman family would agree to be interviewed for this article. But in writing about the psychological glue that held him to his brother, John Wideman also revealed at least part of the environment that surrounded his son.
[Initial] On a Sunday afternoon, in a head wind, it takes 12 minutes to drive from one end of Laramie to the other.
Besides the wind, the main thing in Laramie (pop. 25,000) is the University of Wyoming, the only four-year college in the nation's second-least-populous state, and the school where John Wideman was an English professor for 12 years.
From his first teaching post at the University of Pennsylvania, Laramie is where he brought his wife and two young sons, and where his daughter, Jamila, was born so prematurely that she and her mother almost died in the process.
In "Brothers and Keepers," Wideman describes Laramie as a place of refuge, the latest in a string of hiding places he had used to distance himself from a past that would not let him go. All his life, he wrote, he'd been running -- "from Pittsburgh, from poverty, from blackness," feeling relieved when he was gone, guilty when he returned.
He had found escape at college, surrounded by books and wealthy people. He'd found it again in Laramie, "just one more skimpy circle of wagons huddled against the wilderness . . . I'd come west to escape the demons Robby personified. I didn't need outlaw brothers reminding me how much had been lost, how much compromised, how terribly the world still raged beyond the charmed circle of my life . . ."
Laramie, though, was more than an escape. Here was also a private, hospitable environment for writing and teaching: here, his children could grow up safe and secure, untroubled by the problems of Homewood.
Homewood, he wrote, had deteriorated from a thriving, close-knit black community in the 1940s to a den of drugs, frustration and indignities in the violent '80s. For a young man like Robby Wideman, always looking for the party, Homewood was an engraved invitation to trouble. And Robby accepted every invitation that came along. One of them -- the last one, as it turned out -- led to the botched robbery of an Overbrook car dealer that ended in the man's death when one of Robby's accomplices shot him.
After his brother's conviction John Wideman tried, and failed, to have Robby paroled into his custody. He wanted to take him to Laramie, where nothing would be the same.
Laramie has 293 black people, including university students. Last spring, Benny Dees, the university's new basketball coach, got himself in hot water his first day on the job by saying he might have trouble recruiting talented black athletes because the town had no black community where they could feel they belonged. And people still remember the 1969 case of the Black 14, when football coach Lloyd Eaton kicked 14 black players off the team in one swoop. Against his orders, they had worn armbands to the game against Brigham Young University to protest the treatment of blacks by the Mormon church. Wyoming didn't win another game that year.
Still, residents say the prevailing attitude is that race doesn't matter much. Acquaintances say the Widemans' interracial marriage drew little notice and that nobody paid attention to the mixed race of their children, least of all the children themselves.
This attitude could be considered egalitarian or simply lacking in insight. Charles Mitchell, the high school principal, may have revealed more than he realized when he said of the children of one of the nation's pre-eminent black authors, "I don't think race had a thing to do with the Wideman kids' image of themselves. Our colored kids don't feel racial discrimination."
John Wideman had his own view of Laramie's small-town, cowboy atmosphere. He appreciated the friendliness, he told the Casper Star-Tribune, but couldn't help noticing the prejudice that went with it. "There aren't many black people out here, so people have rather peculiar and sometimes antiquated and funny reactions. Blacks are kind of a curiosity. And so it's not really malicious if somebody stares at you, but it is a form of racism."
The Wideman children were known around town as happy, athletic and gregarious. The adults' lives revolved around work and family. John was considered dedicated to his art, Judy to her husband and children. Students lined up for his classes, while his own books drew increasing attention. In 1984, he won the PEN/Faulkner fiction award for "Sent For You Yesterday," the third volume of his Homewood Trilogy that began with "Damballah" and "No Hiding Place." Judy helped to found and run the alternative Open School that her children attended; she typed her husband's manuscripts from his nearly illegible handwriting.
Judy Wideman is a bright woman who subordinated her own ambitions to those of her family, according Keith Hull, acting head of the University English department. " I think she was torn between the possibilities for herself and her duties to her children," he said. "She waited until the youngest child was 12 before she did something for herself."
At that point, she entered law school. Professors say she was a top student, a critical thinker outspoken in her liberal views.
Neighbors characterize the couple as private. The family spent summers in Maine, so there was no fence-leaning in the good weather. Folks could know John to some degree through his writing, but there was no such access to Judy.
"She was a mystery around here," said Rogene Peak, a neighbor who also worked at the university. "It was almost as if she didn't live here. My only face-to-face encounter was taking one of John Wideman's books over to be autographed. She was very cordial. But I never would have felt comfortable standing over the lettuce in the supermarket and saying, "How are things, Judy?"
What Laramie mostly offered, John Wideman wrote, was room -- for a writer to stand back and observe his subjects from a distance, for teen-agers to test their boundaries without scaring their parents half to death, for the prairie wind to whip and howl.
Jake Wideman spent his last year in Laramie leaning into a stiff wind of his own, but few people realized it. While he projected the image of a popular, well-adjusted teen-ager surrounded by a loving family, he was wrestling with private demons.
They began with a childhood condition referred to in testimony as incompresis, an involuntary soiling of the pants that doctors said had no physical cause. If he got any extended treatment for it, it hasn't been revealed. The condition began when Jake was about 5 years old and persisted at least until Aug. 13, the date of the stabbing, according to Garth Smith. It stopped, Smith said, while Jake was under psychiatric care immediately after he was charged.
At age 11, Jake began shoplifting small items, such as candy bars, but no one knew. He was never caught and he told no one until the pretrial psychological evaluations. "Something made me feel proud that I got away with it," he told one psychologist.
The evaluations also showed that Jake was given to fits of temper. His family called them "moose acts." They occurred when he perceived himself as clumsy or inept, which made him upset and frustrated. Further, the examiners said although he was very bright, Jake behaved obsessively -- reading the same book over and over, for example -- that he acted impulsively, lived in a fantasy world and had trouble connecting with people around him.
None of this was apparent to most people. In a family of high achievers, he seemed to fit in. He was a top student even during his last troubled year in Laramie. He also was a talented athlete, a starting guard on both the junior varsity and varsity basketball teams when he was a sophomore.
Jake's friends say he was sensitive to others, always noticing if they looked sad or worried, always offering a sympathetic ear.
But he rarely spoke of his own problems, and this apparently, was a family legacy. In "Brothers and Keepers," John Wideman wrote that he and Robby had trouble talking about their feelings because of a Wideman tradition:
"Don't get too close. Don't ask too many questions or give too many answers. Don't pry. Don't let what's inside slop out on the people around you."
At home in Homewood, he wrote, "It had been assumed that each family member possessed deep, powerful feelings and that very little or nothing at all needed to be said about these feelings because we were all stuck with them and talk wouldn't change them . . . you were encouraged to deal with as much as you could on your own, yet you never felt alone."
But Jake did feel alone.
"A kid in a rowboat out in the ocean scared and alone, empty and frightened," was the description from a Phoenix psychologist.
"Jake was pretty cool on the outside," said Lance Rainwater, his best friend and teammate. "He kept his emotions hidden. But he talked a lot to me about feeling separate from his family. He said he didn't think he could ever please his parents. He got grounded a lot, like when he got a B in English and his dad got mad. When an older girl he really liked asked him to the junior-senior prom, they wouldn't let him go. He was extremely upset by that.
"His parents thought he didn't work as hard as he could. I thought he worked harder than any normal student."
Jake also told Lance that his parents likened him to Robby, whom the family visited in prison from the time Jake was small. "He said his parents compared them, their builds and the way they acted," Lance said. "He liked his uncle, so it didn't bother him. He said he [Robby] was put in jail for something he didn't do."
No matter how brightly Jake shone, Lance said, his brother, Danny shone brighter in Jake's mind.
"Danny never got in trouble. He always did the right thing, no matter what it was."
Danny, two years older than Jake, was a charismatic leader at school. In 1986, he organized the student body to march downtown in support of making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday. The school newspaper voted him Student of the Year. His yearbooks contain pictures of Danny in the school play, clowning with his buddies, tearing across the basketball court.
Basketball games were a centerpiece of family attention. John Wideman had been an All-Ivy League player at the University of Pennsylvania who turned down an offer from the pros, and had played on the team at Oxford. From Laramie he sometimes drove to the state prison at Rawlings to shoot hoops with the inmates. He also played in a Laramie league. According to one acquaintance, John "sharpened his elbows pretty good before he played."
The Widemans rarely missed their sons' games and were vocal spectators, according to Dale Parker, the coach and one of the few people who sensed Jake's floundering. Even this became a problem for Jake.
"Jake was going to be a better basketball player than Danny, no question," Parker said. "Jake was team-oriented. Danny was more concerned about himself.
"But Danny was the fair-haired boy at home. At the state tournament, Danny took a bad shot and I got on his case. His mother, two rows back, yelled, 'That's OK, Danny, you go ahead an shoot whenever you want to.'"
When Parker moved Danny in his senior year from the first to the second team and started Jake, a sophomore, in his place, he said their parents were unhappy.
"Nobody patted Jake on the back at home and said good job," Parker said. "Instead, they called me and wanted to know why Danny wasn't starting. Another parent told me it was a poor move on my part because it tore the family apart."
Lance Rainwater said Jake was wounded by his parents' reaction. "He told me his parents didn't want him to play unless Danny was starting. I think part of that was more perceived than true, but it upset him the worst of everything. He was really proud of Danny and didn't feel competition with him, but he seemed depressed most of the time after that."
Parker found the situation baffling. "I couldn't understand it," he said "From John Wideman's own experience with his brother where he was the fair-haired boy and his brother wasn't, you'd expect him to do everything to keep that from happening again."
But Charles Mitchell, the principal, believes the Widemans had no idea how Jake was reacting. "It's easy for kids to get the wrong impression of how their parents feel," he said. "I'm sure the Widemans never intended to give Jake that impression. I have more faith in them than that."
Jake's troubles began to show even before the basketball switch. In mid-season, Parker said, Jake came to him and asked for a week off.
"He said he was really having some problems and needed to get away. I told him to do what he had to do, but I couldn't guarantee his spot would be open when he got back."
Jake kept playing. A week later, he was starting on both teams and Laramie was winning. Parker asked if he still wanted time off, and Jake said no, that he was fine.
A week after than, in early February, Jake disappeared. Hearing he had run away from home, Parker called the Widemans and asked if there was anything he could do. They thanked him but said no.
Jake, it turned out, had taken his parents' car and left a note that read, "Don't come looking for me." His parents took it as a suicide note, according to Smith, his lawyer. Jake then drove to Colorado and got into a wreck, but wasn't hurt. The precipitating incident, it later came out, was a perceived rejection by a girl at school. The rejection, Smith said, was all in Jake's mind -- the two barely knew each other.
"It didn't take much to break Jake's heart," said Coach Parker. "He wanted to go out with girls, but he got too serious too fast."
The Widemans took Jake to a psychologist in Fort Collins, Colo., for treatment. They had six sessions. After the stabbing, Jake told another psychologist he had never connected with the first one.
Following Jake's disappearance, Judy Wideman dropped out of law school.
At least one other adult noticed Jake acting strangely. Donald Shoefelt, his math teacher, said one day he had to call Jake into the hall and "chew him out" for disruptive behavior. "He said he was having a tough time," Shoefelt said. "It was very unlike him."
One more incident, and the subject of wide rumor, was detailed by Lance Rainwater. One day in school, Jake handed him a note that read: "Killing solves problems."
"I could tell from his face it was obviously a joke," Lance said. "He was smiling when he gave it to me. It got all blown out of proportion."
Laramie police didn't hear about the note until after Eric's stabbing. They went to question Lance, but he had thrown it away. The reason for their visit was another stabbing, still unsolved from October 1985, when a university student was found dead in her apartment. Police say Jake is not a suspect [editor's note: he later confessed to that killing, then recanted]. But the note figured heavily in his psychological evaluation.
Parker wonders how Jake felt about the family moving east in what would have been his first years at home without Danny, who was going to Brown University in Providence, R.I., the following fall.
"You'd think it would have been Jake's turn to shine, with Danny away at college. But here you had the family moving east, and Danny going east to school -- you have to wonder if there was a connection in Jake's mind."
In resigning from Wyoming, Keith Hull said, John Wideman had cited family considerations, including his relatives in Pittsburgh and Judy's in Princeton, N.J., and Maine.
"We knew we couldn't keep him here forever," Hull said. "He was getting more prominent while the state's economy was falling apart. We couldn't offer a competitive salary anymore -- and he didn't ask us to."
Two days before he left for Camp Takajo, and knowing that his time in Laramie was ending, Jake called a classmate named Trishell Glasco and asked her to meet him in the park. Trishell had been dating Lance Rainwater. She and Jake were friends. She said he was excited about the tour of the national parks but seemed nervous and agitated. He tried to talk to her, but had difficulty speaking.
"It took him half an hour to tell me that he liked me," she recalled. "Then he said, 'What if I told you I loved you?' He used the movie 'St. Elmo's Fire' to explain his feelings, something about 'friends forever.' I was really surprised. We'd been such good friends and I had no idea."
While on his trip, Jake sent Trishell a letter saying she could tell Lance how Jake felt about her if she wanted, that maybe it would be better if she did.
Trishell cannot understand what went wrong with the boy she knew, and neither can anyone else in Laramie.
"All the things you can come up with to explain it -- the bad gene, the victim of racism, the family tension, the identification with his uncle -- they're all so hideous and none of them seems valid in my experience," said Keith Hull.
"All of the explanations are things you don't want to face. Yet no explanation is just as bad."
[Initial]Camp Takajo is back in session, reportedly as heavily attended as ever, although the cross-country trip was suspended this year. Bill Hammond did not return. A counselor told his mother recently that nobody at camp talks about the stabbing.
One week ago today, the Kanes observed the first anniversary of Eric's death according to the Hebrew calendar. They lit a candle, as is the custom, and said kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
Jake will turn 18 on Feb. 13. If he is in prison at the time, he will be moved from the isolation of his cell and treated as an adult inmate.
The trial date is 15 days away, although another postponement seems likely. It would be the fourth, all by request of the defense.
Whether the trial begins or not, the legal issues could be appealed into next year and beyond.
The defense has filed five key motions. Every ruling so far has gone against them.
First, they asked the court to close the transfer hearing because Jake, as a juvenile, was entitled to privacy. Thompson opposed the closing, and so did the Arizona Daily Sun, the evening newspaper in Phoenix. The judge ordered the hearing open. The defense appealed and lost.
Next, and far more critical, is Jake's adult status. So far, defense arguments have fallen through a crack in Arizona law.
The three psychologists at the transfer hearing disagreed on whether Jake's problems are mental or behavioral. They agreed, however, that he is amenable to treatment. They also agreed that such treatment would take years.
But Arizona cannot hold Jake for years as a juvenile. The law says that anyone convicted as a juvenile of any crime, even murder, must be released at age 18. To the state, then, trying Jake as a juvenile would be tantamount to setting him free.
The defense wants Jake to be transferred to the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. There, the state could commit him to Boston's McLean Hospital, a highly regarded institution specializing in long-term care. The court would then be required to recommit him every two years without limit, until he was deemed no longer a threat to society.
As defense attorney Michael Kimerer put it during the transfer hearing, if Jake were to spend years in prison without psychiatric care, "you take all this anger and hate, and then what have you passed on to society when he gets out? We have already had one tragedy. We don't need two."
Jon Tompson fought this proposal and won the first round when Judge William Garbarino of Coconino County Superior Court ruled against the motion.
"We think it's not legal," Thompson said. "Massachusetts has no jurisdiction. Even if it were legal, we'd still object. We think the public safety could not be protected through psychological treatment. And the state of Arizona would have no control over what Massachusetts did."
The decision is on appeal. A motion to delay the trial until the appeal is resolved was denied.
The next issue concerns the charge of first degree murder. Thompson intends to prosecute it two ways, and one could become a test case. It could also be the final irony.
First, he will point to the purchase of the knife, the borrowing of the keys and the reading of the map as evidence of premeditation. In addition, he will claim that Eric Kane died in an act of child abuse -- even though Jake was himself a child, in fact three months younger than Eric.
Under an amendment passed last year by the Arizona legislature, child abuse that results in the child's death is considered felony murder -- the same charge that put Robby Wideman in jail for life. But in Arizona, felony murder is first degree and carries the maximum penalty of death.
Jake's age is irrelevant, Thompson said, because the law makes no mention of the perpetrator's age, only the victim's.
"This is the first reported case using it," Thompson said. "In some ways it may be a test case of that law."
The defense has called the felony murder charge "outrageous" and has moved that it be dropped.
"How can one child commit child abuse against another child?" asked Garth Smith.
"Our contention is that no legislator intended this law to apply to a 16-year-old killing another 16-year-old. It was intended to protect our children against adults, who are bigger and stronger. To use it in a situation like this is crazy. It's a denial of equal protection and due process, and flatly unconstitutional."
The defense further moved to send the whole case back to the grand jury, which was never permitted to hear psychological testimony. His lawyers claim that if the jurors had been aware of Jake's mental condition, they would not have returned a first degree murder indictment to begin with.
Both motions were denied on July 30 by Judge Jeffrey Coker of Coconino County Superior Court.
At the same time, Coker made the last key ruling, regarding Jake's confession. The defense had asked that the statement be suppressed because of the circumstances under which it was given.
After being charged with Eric's murder, Jake was released into the custody of his parents, who put him in Charles River Hospital in Wellesley, Mass., for psychiatric examination.
While there and without telling anyone, Jake called the home of the Flagstaff investigator, Detective Mike Cicchinelli on Sept. 17. Cicchinelli, who was under court order not to speak with him unless a defense attorney was present, took Jake's telephone number, went to the police station, called him back and turned on a tape recorder.
Jake confessed to the stabbing. In tones later described as flat and unemotional, he said:
"I murdered Eric Kane ... It was not premeditated ... I never thought about it ... I didn't know what I was doing ... I got up, I was just going to go for a walk because I was restless and I put on my clothes, and I saw the knife, and I saw Eric, and I picked up the knife and I stabbed him twice."
The legal issue, according to Smith, "has to do with how you treat a statement made by a mentally ill juvenile who calls from a secured ward of a psychiatric hospital, and what are the duties of police then.
"Here the officer was in direct violation of an order that there be no communication with my client unless I was present. They pooh-poohed the order."
Coker ruled the confession admissible because Jake had waived his rights by initiating the call.
One more incident was cited by the prosecution as evidence that even under psychiatric care, Jake was still a threat to society. After making his confession, he was moved by his parents to Arbour Hospital in Jamaica Plains, Mass., where he got into a fight with another patient.
The details of the incident are in dispute, but after the fight, Jon Thompson got a court order blocking Jake's release to his parents and moved to have him returned to Flagstaff.
If all appeals fail, Jake Wideman will go on trial as an adult for first degree murder and the jury will hear his tape-recorded confession.
What will his lawyers do then?
Smith said he has considered the options, presumably including an insanity plea, but that discussing them would be premature. "It's too early to adopt a stategy or answer hypotheticals," he said.
It is open to question whether the jury could find Jake guilty of a lesser offense -- second degree murder at 15 to 20 years, or manslaughter at five years.
Most people think it unlikely that Jake, if convicted as charged, would get the maximum sentence, although Thompson has said he would consider submitting cruel death as an aggravated circumstance warranting the death penalty.
If and when the jury hears Jake's confession, it also will hear a plea he made to Cicchinelli in the course of his statement:
"Excuse me, I want to make one request, that whoever does this case makes a move to not have the death penalty apply ... My life is in pieces and I think that with rehabilitation I can put it back together ... I just want to say that I deeply regret what I did ... I should be given a chance to live and to try to make something of my life ..."
As they consider this, the jurors will have another statement before them, written across the faces of the Kane family. The Kanes say they intend to be in the courtroom every second of any trial, reminding the jury, and the Widemans, of another boy who will never have that chance.
First Published: May 13, 2011, 7:00 p.m.
