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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The First Envelope
I am writing this because I am dying, and because dying has not made me brave enough to say these things out loud.
My name is Jonathan Vetter. I am fifty-four years old. I have pancreatic cancer, stage four, diagnosed eleven months ago, and the doctors stopped pretending I might see another spring sometime around Thanksgiving. I am in my apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, twenty-two miles from the town where I grew up, which is close enough that I could drive there in half an hour if I still had the strength to drive. I don't. I can barely make it to the kitchen to refill my water glass. The hospice nurse, a kind woman named Lorraine, comes three times a week and speaks to me in the gentle voice people use on dogs that are about to be put down.
I have three manila envelopes on the desk beside my bed. One is addressed to the Granby Police Department. One is addressed to a journalist named Sarah Fielding at the Springfield Republican. One is addressed to a woman named Denise Lessing-Carbone in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Denise is the niece of a man named George Lessing, and it is George that this confession is about.
I want to be clear from the beginning: this is not a story about redemption. I am not writing this to be forgiven. I am writing this because the truth is owed, and because I am the only one of us who is dying soon enough to have nothing left to lose, and because even now — even with the morphine and the wasting and the certain knowledge that I will be in the ground before these envelopes are opened — I am still too much of a coward to pick up a telephone and say what I need to say to a living person who might talk back.
That is the kind of man I am. That is the kind of man I have always been. If you want to understand what happened to George Lessing in the summer of 1987, you need to understand that first.
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I grew up in Granby, Massachusetts, a town of about six thousand people in the Connecticut River Valley. It is the kind of place that people from Boston or New York picture when they think of small-town New England — white clapboard houses, a town common with a Civil War monument, a general store that sells penny candy and local maple syrup, hills that turn spectacular colors in October. It is beautiful. It is also the kind of place where everyone knows your business, where families have lived for generations, where the same last names appear on mailboxes and headstones and Little League rosters, and where the things that happen behind closed doors stay behind closed doors because the alternative is unthinkable.
My father, Richard Vetter, was a high school history teacher and the varsity baseball coach. My mother, Carol Ann, worked part-time at the library. We were respectable. We went to the Congregational church on Sundays. My father coached me in baseball from the time I could hold a bat, and I was good enough to make varsity as a sophomore, which in Granby was roughly equivalent to being knighted. I had an older sister, Beth, who had already left for UMass by the summer of 1987. I had a girlfriend, Pam Hutton, who was pretty and smart and too good for me, which I think I knew even then.
I was, by any reasonable measure, a lucky kid. I had every advantage that a boy in a small town could have. I had parents who loved me, a coach who believed in me, a girlfriend who saw something in me worth caring about. I had no excuse for what I did. None of us did, except for the one excuse that has covered more evil than any other in human history: everyone else was doing it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let me tell you about George.
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George Lessing was nineteen years old in the summer of 1987. He had been born with what they called then "severe mental retardation" — a term I use not because it is kind but because it is what was on his records, what the adults in town whispered to each other, what we as teenagers threw around like it was nothing. Today I believe the clinical term would be "profound intellectual disability." George had the cognitive abilities of a young child — five or six years old, maybe. He could speak, but in short, simple sentences. He could dress himself, feed himself, use the bathroom. He knew his name. He knew his grandmother's name. He knew the names of people who were kind to him, and he remembered them, and he smiled when he saw them.
He lived with his grandmother, Edith Lessing, in a small yellow house on Aldrich Road, about a quarter mile past the elementary school. Edith was in her late seventies, a widow, the kind of old Yankee woman who kept her yard immaculate and her curtains white and never asked anyone for anything. George's mother — Edith's daughter — had died in a car accident when George was twelve. His father had never been in the picture. Edith had taken George in and cared for him with a ferocity that I think most people in town admired but did not want to examine too closely, because examining it would have meant acknowledging that George existed, that he needed things, that the town had some responsibility toward him.
George was big. That's important to say because it was part of how people justified what happened to him — they would say, later, that he was a large man, that he was strong, that he could have fought back if he'd really wanted to. He was about six-one, broad-shouldered, with a round, open face and brown hair that Edith cut herself, always a little uneven. He wore the same rotation of clothes — khaki pants, flannel shirts in winter, plain white t-shirts in summer, work boots that were always untied because he had trouble with laces. He walked with a slight shuffle, his arms hanging loose, his head tilted a little to one side as though he were always listening for something.
He spent his days walking around town. That was his life. He'd walk to the general store and buy a Coke with quarters Edith gave him. He'd walk to the elementary school playground and sit on the swings. He'd walk along the river trail and pick up stones and line them up on the bridge railing. He'd wave at everyone he passed, and most people waved back, and some people stopped and talked to him, and he would beam at them with a joy so uncomplicated and genuine that it was almost painful to witness.
He wanted, more than anything, to have friends. He wanted to belong. He wanted people to like him. This is the thing that I have carried for thirty-seven years, the thing that wakes me at three in the morning even now: George Lessing wanted to be our friend. He came to us willingly. He came to us with trust and eagerness and a simple, devastating hope that we might be the people who would finally include him.
And we used that against him in every way that cruelty could devise.
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I need to talk about Jack Newsom.
Jack was eighteen in the summer of 1987, a year older than me, the son of Dr. Peter Newsom, who was Granby's only dentist. The Newsoms lived in the nicest house in town, a big colonial on the hill above the common, and Jack had everything — a car, money, good looks, athletic ability, the kind of effortless charm that made adults trust him and kids follow him. He was the captain of the football team. He was the president of the student council. He got good grades without appearing to try. He had a smile that could make you feel like you were the most important person in the room, and he deployed it strategically, turning it on and off like a light switch.
I wanted to be Jack Newsom. I think most of the boys in Granby did. He was everything I was not — confident, commanding, never uncertain, never afraid. Where I was always calculating how to fit in, how to say the right thing, how to avoid drawing attention to myself, Jack simply occupied space as though it belonged to him. People arranged themselves around him naturally, like iron filings around a magnet.
I did not understand, at seventeen, what Jack actually was. I do now, after decades of thinking about it, after reading books about personality disorders and criminal psychology and the banality of evil. Jack Newsom was a sociopath. Not the Hollywood kind — not a wild-eyed killer with a chainsaw. The real kind. The kind who understands human emotions perfectly well, who can mimic them flawlessly, but who does not feel them. The kind who sees other people as instruments, as objects, as things to be used and manipulated and discarded. The kind who gets a genuine thrill from control, from seeing how far he can push, from testing the boundaries of what he can make other people do.
Jack did not hate George Lessing. That is what I want you to understand. Hatred would have required seeing George as a person, as someone whose existence mattered enough to provoke an emotional response. Jack looked at George and saw a toy. A laboratory animal. A thing to experiment on.
And the experiment, as I came to understand much too late, was never really about George at all. It was about us. Jack wanted to know how far he could take us. He wanted to know what ordinary, decent, well-raised kids from good families could be made to do if the pressure was applied correctly.
The answer, it turned out, was anything.
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I should name the others. I owe them that — the exposure, I mean. They don't deserve protection.
There was me, Jonathan Vetter. There was Jack Newsom. There was Billy Foss, who was Jack's closest friend, a big kid who played offensive line on the football team and who did whatever Jack told him to do with the unquestioning loyalty of a golden retriever. There was Kevin Shaughnessy, who was quiet and smart and who I think understood exactly what was happening and participated anyway because the alternative terrified him. There was Chris Regan, who was mean on his own, who didn't need Jack's permission to be cruel but who thrived under Jack's leadership because it gave his meanness structure and purpose. There was Tommy Wicks, who was the youngest of us, just sixteen, a skinny kid who laughed at everything because laughing was easier than thinking.
Six of us. Six ordinary boys from a small Massachusetts town. Not one of us had a criminal record. Not one of us came from a broken home. Not one of us had any excuse that would satisfy a moral accounting.
And then there was Doug Burgess, who was part of the group at the beginning and who did the one thing that none of the rest of us had the courage to do: he said no.
But I'll get to Doug.
I'll get to all of it.
Let me start at the beginning, which was a Tuesday in June, the first week of summer vacation, the day that Jack Newsom looked at George Lessing sitting on the swings at the elementary school and said, with that smile of his, "Hey, let's go talk to the retard."
And I laughed.
That's where it started. With a laugh.
