Endless Thread - 'Violation,' Part 1: Two sons, lost

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

Why did Jacob Wideman murder Eric Kane? In 1986, the two 16-year-olds were rooming together on a summer camp trip to the Grand Canyon when Jacob fatally — and inexplicably — stabbed Eric. That night, Jacob went on the run, absconding with the camp’s rented Oldsmobile and thousands of dollars in traveler’s checks. Before long, he turned himself in and eventually confessed to the killing — although he couldn’t explain what drove him to do it. It would take years of therapy and medical treatment behind bars before Jacob could begin to understand what was going through his mind that night. It would take even longer to try to explain it to his family, to his victim’s family and to parole board members, who would decide whether he deserved to be free ever again. This debut episode of “Violation,” a podcast from WBUR and The Marshall Project, introduces the story of the crime that has bound two families together for decades. Jacob’s father, John Edgar Wideman, is an acclaimed author of many books on race, violence and criminal justice. He spoke with Violation host Beth Schwartzapfel in a rare, in-depth interview about his son’s case that listeners will hear throughout the series, including this premiere.

Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, endless thread listeners, it's Ben. I hope you're having a nice week. I have a little treat for you.

We have been making a podcast at WBUR in partnership with the Marshall Project called Violation. It's a story about a famous writer, our mysterious system of parole, and a murder. We're putting episode one in our endless thread feed just so you can check it out. And we'll talk to you soon. Take a listen. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Would you be willing to read a couple of passages? I brought some of your books with me that speak to some of these issues. Depends. I don't want to get into anything that

even begins to feel like he said, she said, because that ain't going nowhere. I have a couple of, I flagged a couple of passages. Let me see. This passage here that I've marked with the red pen. I don't know if I can read this, particularly after looking at that picture of him. This is John Edgar Weidman, author of more than a dozen books,

English professor, Rhodes Scholar, MacArthur Genius. I've been reading John Weidman's books for years, intrigued first by his lyrical explorations of the criminal justice system, of racism and class and privilege. And then later, even more intrigued when I learned how these themes played out eerily, tragically, in the life story of his middle child, Jacob.

Is this you guys in Wyoming? Yes. That's Jake. Huh, look at that. Who are you with there? When I finally arrived at his Manhattan apartment on one of the first blustery cold days this winter, it felt like I was walking into something intensely personal, something that as a journalist I'd been fascinated by for at least a decade.

But as a human, I was mindful, was a painful, was a painful, private story. As a rule, John doesn't talk publicly about Jake, at least not directly, even when he's asked about it by Terry Gross on fresh air, as he was in 1994. Do you think you'll ever write a more extensive piece, piece about your son Jake, or is that something that you think you might never care to share

in detail with the public? Well, the advantage of being a writer is you talk about things in your own way. Right. And sometimes people can look at your biography and make guesses about what, in fact, you're writing about and thinking about, but other times they can't. And it's a complicated way of taking the fit, if you will. Years after he sidestepped Terry's questions, John is finally letting someone in to ask him about his middle child. And he has a specific reason. He'd like to see Jake get out of prison.

This is not my reason for talking with John. It's my job to tell you everything I can find out about what really happened and why. Everyone talking to me for the story has their own reasons. Everyone has their own version of the truth, too. John Wyden can relate to that. I'm a fiction writer and a novelist. I also write nonfiction.

In my view, it's very hard to distinguish often among those genre, and sometimes it's impossible. And maybe they're all the same. As a longtime fan of John Weidman's writing, I can tell you that much of it is animated by this idea, that good stories contain some essential truth, regardless of whether they're actually true, or that in some situations,

true accounts may in fact be less true than fiction. One of the people who I'm hoping will help me understand what's real and what's false is John's son, Jake Weidman. I talk to people in prison all the time. I'm used to the noise, the terrible sound quality, the robot lady, constantly interrupting, to warn you that you're talking to a prisoner. An inmate at ASPC Tucson.

And it's costing a small fortune. Your account balance is $26. And your calls are being recorded, and you'd better hurry up. One minute remaining. But ever since we started talking, in phone conversations I could record, and at in-person visits, the state of Arizona wouldn't let me record, I've tuned all that out to focus on Jake,

on the details he unspooled over weeks and months. Jake and I spent more than a dozen hours on the phone in 15-minute increments, and I visited him twice for three or four hours each time. He's a big guy, six-foot-one, 195 pounds, and like all the other prisoners, he wore an orange jumpsuit with the letters ADC for Arizona Department of Corrections in big black letters stenciled on his back and leg. His head is shaved bald, and in the midst of a COVID surge, he wore a janky face mask homemade from old t-shirts. Jake seemed to have earned a certain amount of respect and affection from the other prisoners. During my first visit, people kept walking by and handing him things from the vending machine, snack cakes and a little microwaved hot dog and a bottle of water. Jake Widman was sentenced to 25 years to life.

He spent 30 years. in prison before being released on parole. Then, less than nine months after he was back out in the world, Jake was yanked back into prison. And now, nobody knows if Jake will ever get out again. There's no end in sight. The details of that part of Jake's story? The parole violation that landed him back behind bars? Well, for now, we'll just say they were very unusual.

Much about Jake's case is very unusual, but much about it is also all too common. In looking at this case, there's a lot we can learn about how the system works and doesn't for everyone. In spending all this time with him, his family, lawyers, and others involved in his case, I've been trying to figure out what happened. I'm Beth Schwartzapville. From the Marshall Project and WBUR, this is a little. is violation. A story about second chances, parole boards, and who pulls the levers of power in the justice system. There was no motive, just murder. In fact, at the time the judge...

This is part one. Two Sons Lost. Jake's case takes all the dynamics at play in a typical murder case and cranks the volume way, way up. Victims' rights, political influence, race, privilege, mental health, senseless violence, how mass incarceration has morphed into mass supervision with all the same pitfalls and politics. Jake's family did not relish opening their personal lives up for public consumption. But with some prodding from Jake, his sister and brother and father each spent time answering my many questions, including, why agree to talk to me? This definitely is both, I think, for the love of Jake, but also for the love of justice. That's his brother Daniel. For Jake, talking to me was a leap of faith.

I mean, he has a famous writer for a father. It would have been much safer to let John tell it. John would, without question, see things from Jake's point of view. But Jake was clear. He wanted a reporter to look at what happened. It's time for the truth to come out. And I want to stand on the facts. I don't want anybody to feel sorry for me.

I don't want anybody to, you know, take my side out of sympathy or say anything like, well, you know, he's been in since he was 16 and 36 years and a poor guy. And I want people to have a conviction that justice needs to be done because of the injustice that has been done so far. I'm a reporter, so I believe in facts. I believe that if you talk to enough people and do enough research, you can get to the bottom of something. I'm also aware that some facts are unknowable, or what passes for a fact is just a matter of opinion, that you can stack up all the facts and still disagree about what they mean.

In this case, here's what we know. Jake Weidman killed a boy when he was a boy. There are mysteries in the story, but the victim and who committed the murder are not among them. In 1986, as a teen at summer camp, Jacob Wydenman murdered fellow camper Eric Kane. As Eric slept, Wydenman stabbed him twice in the chest. The crime devastated two families. Two fathers have lost their sons and don't know why. This is reporter Ted Bartamus.

I was a news reporter for the Arizona Daily Sun back in the 1980s. I asked him to read from an article he wrote in October of 1988. Sanford Kane lost his son to murder in 1986, and noted Black writer John Edgar Wyman lost his son Wednesday to life imprisonment for the same murder. Now, recordings of court and parole hearings are often comically bad to the point of being almost unintelligible. And you may be shocked to learn that recordings of police interviews

from 40 years ago are also not exactly high quality, or captured with audio journalism in mind. She seemed like a pretty normal guy. So in this podcast, you're going to hear bits of these recordings, but you'll often hear me repeating what's being said. And in some cases, where a recording is not available, you might hear a colleague reading what was said. With Jake, you'll hear our phone conversations more than anything else,

because while I can record phone calls, Arizona wouldn't let me record inside the prison. I needed special permission just to bring a pen. But I promise that whenever I can, I'll play you the words of people in their own voice. Now, in 1988 in Arizona, life imprisonment actually meant 25 years to life, which meant that after 25 years, Jake was eligible for parole. In 2011, at 41 years old, he could go before a board and try to prove that he deserved to be free. I first connected with Jake after he'd been before the board more than half a dozen times. Good morning, Mr. Wydenman.

Good morning, ma'am. We are now in session. The Arizona Board of Executive Clemency is about to commence. Jake told the board he had spent years in therapy, earned multiple degrees, that he worked for decades to make himself a model prisoner and a good man. That's something causing him anguish and suffering when unidentified and untreated for decades of his childhood and young adulthood until he had already spent years in prison.

We'll talk more about this. that later. Follow the work that I have done. I did what I did. The parents of Jake's victim, Eric Kane, still shattered by their son's murder, looked at the same set of facts and told the parole board they saw only danger. All those words, the sign of a master manipulator, Jake's accomplishments be lying a killer who could not be trusted to walk among us.

This is Eric's mother, Louise Kane. This year, the murder is a murder. has been packaged by professionals. How can one tell what is the real truth, what is his, and what belongs to the lawyer? If Wyman can do well in jail, then so much the better. But that is where he belongs.

Whose version of the story is the right one? To some, justice is and will only ever be served when people who kill or harm other people go away and never come back. or at least don't come back until we can be absolutely certain they will never harm anyone again, which is, you know, never. This is Brian Shea, a deputy county attorney in the office that prosecuted Jake at a parole board hearing. What will it take for Wyman to have paid his death to Eric and Eric's family of the society as a whole?

What amount of prison time is enough of this terrible senseless murder? I've been covering parole boards for years, and answering these unanswerable questions in tens of thousands of cases each year is their very reason for being. And lots of people have plenty to say about how good or not good they are at doing that. When I published my first big investigation into parole boards in the Washington Post in 2015, this dark, often secretive corner of the criminal justice system was largely unknown. and unexamined. But it's become increasingly clear as states grapple with ballooning prison populations that these unelected bodies of mostly political appointees with little or no legal training have in some states more power over how much time people serve in prison than judges or juries do. But before Jake Weidman ever faced a parole board, before Eric Kane was dead and buried and Jake was a grown man trying to tell,

his version of his story. They were two boys on an adventure. It was the summer of 1986. Matt Lock had recently premiered on NBC. Matt Lock's a winner this fall. President Reagan was in his second term. My fellow Americans, I hope you're relaxed and in a cool place. The fashion of the day included teased hair and giant shoulder pads. The new perm from Tony that gives your hair lots of volume you can do anything with. Jake Weidman and Eric Cain had just finished their sophomore years in high school. Jake and Laramie, Wyoming, where his dad was a professor at the University of Wyoming,

and Eric in the suburbs north of New York City, where his dad was an executive at IBM. The two boys had for years attended Camp Takaho, a sports camp for boys in southwestern Maine. It was a high-end camp with all the things, swimming, boating, overnight trips, arts and crafts, woodworking. It was pricey and very exclusive. The camp's owner, Morty Goldman, didn't advertise and filled the 400-some-odd spots on word-of-mouth alone. Jake had been spending summers there since he was a toddler because he was Morty Goldman's grandson. Later, as police and lawyers tried to piece together what had happened, they interviewed people at the camp. Here's fellow camper Todd Miller and counselor Bill Hammond describing Jake and the other campers.

This tape is hard to hear, but Todd Miller says that only Jake and a few other kids at the camp were black. And counselor Bill Hammond says these kids came from backgrounds with private schools. It was an annual tradition at Tacoho that the oldest campers got to go on a tour of national parks in the west at the end of the summer. Early that August, Jake, Eric, two other boys, and Councillor Bill had flown into Salt Lake City, rented a Blue Oldsmobile, and launched on an epic road trip to Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Bryce Canyon. About two weeks in, a mix-up in their itinerary

en route to the Grand Canyon, unexpectedly landed them about 80 miles southeast in Flagstaff, Arizona, a small college town in the mountains, 7,000 feet above the valley where Phoenix sprawls. Because of its elevation, the weather in Flagstaff resembles New York. England more than it does the hot desert climate that people associate with Arizona.

There are pine trees and crisp fall days, and in the winter, snow. Ted Bartimus, the Arizona Daily Sun Reporter, lived there for years. Flagstaff tends to be kind of a time warp community. A lot of deadheads. You had a lot of cowboys, a lot of lumberjacks. You could walk at certain parts of the community, and it was like, like I said, time warped. Did you go back to the 60s? Because of its location on his historic Route 66, the town was something of a crossroads. Like the group from Camp Takaho, people often pass through Flagstaff on their way to somewhere else. Millions of people are going through there all the time. And a lot of them are

fine people, but some of them aren't so fine. This is John Verkamp, who was at the time the county attorney in Coquanino County, where Flagstaff is located. So we do have more than our share of strange, incidents. This was kind of an example. To Jake's family, to his teachers and coaches and friends in Laramie, this incident was more than strange. It was shocking. Jake murdered someone? Jake was the second of his family's three children. Tall, athletic, a talented basketball player. His complexion reflected his family's mash-up of heritages, black on his dad's side, part Jewish and part wasp on his moms.

His hair was improbably blonde as a kid, his skin a pale tan. This is John describing him in an essay he wrote years later. You were blonde then, huge brown eyes, hair on your head of many kinds, a storm, a multicultural of textures, kinky, dead straight, curly, frizzy, ringlets, hair, thick in places, sparse in others,

all your people on both sides of the family ecumenically represented in the golden crown atop your head. His family was part of a close-knit group of families of professors at the University of Wyoming and Laramie. And as a young kid and later a teenager, Jake was known among them as unassuming, bright, and polite. There was this tall, gangly kid, very leggy,

again, just a very sweet, gentle, smiling kind of kid. This is Janice Harris, an English professor, and a good friend of the Widens, some years later in an interview with attorneys. A very sweet child, a very curious child. I'm always interested in things. I can remember in particular a way he had, if we would be doing field trips, always asking, what if this, what if that, what if this? As a teenager, Jake was friendly and well-liked, camper Todd Miller again.

He seemed like a pretty normal guy. If you were not in his bunk, he seemed like a pretty normal guy, Todd says. If you were not in his bunk, he seemed just like a regular kit. He was a good basketball player. Um, nice, nice guy. But Jake says many of those relationships were superficial. He had very few close friends. That's because he felt he had a lot to hide.

Since I was in his bunk, two years. Since I was in his bunk for two years, Todd said. When you're in his bunk and you've lived with him for a while, he would act strange sometimes for no reason, just bizarre behavior, just be hyper, very hyper, like he was almost possessed. In his own mind, Jake thought of these episodes as adrenaline rushes. He thought he was hiding them,

fooling everyone about the turmoil inside his head. But it would be years too late before he told anyone about them and many more years before he understood what they were. Stay with us. We'll be right back. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. Neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics.

Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, We bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts.

There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships team. Become a thought leader. recruit new talent, reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. We've talked a lot about Jake.

But the other boy we're here to talk about is Eric Kane. He had a mop of dark curls and a warm smile. He was the youngest of three children. As kids, his older brother and sister never needed dolls, their mom. said because they had Eric. At a sports camp like Takaho, Eric Kane stood out for being not very sporty.

He had a medical condition as a kid that left him sort of uncoordinated and clumsy. He would dictate his schoolwork to his dad because he found it hard to type. Even 30 years after his death, there's still a lot of information in the public record about the kind of boy

Eric was, the kind of young man, he might have grown up to be. That's because his parents have made sure of that. Gathered thousands of letters from family and friends spoke about him at every public hearing. And that's important. I don't want Eric to be a sort of black hole in this story, an absence instead of a presence.

Obviously, Eric's not here to tell me about himself, and unfortunately, the Cains have declined to talk with me. I can understand why. Judging from their testimony over the years, their grief is still real and raw. They sent their son off to summer camp, and he never came home. As a parent, how do you ever get over that?

I've done my best to assemble some details from the letters and decades of testimony and public statements by his family. When he was small, Eric wanted to be a knight. He played piano, and guitar. He loved science and dolphins and drawing. He had a poodle named butterscotch. Eric loved to read, his mom said. I remember when as a small child he was stricken with a migraine

headache. He lay holding a book the way another child would hold a stuffed animal. He had an insatiable curiosity as long as I could remember. And from the earliest, he would ask questions about everything. In elementary school, he and another friend who quickly outpaced the other kids in reading were pulled out of class to have their own little book group in the principal's office. We not only read books, we devoured them. We learned to read in the voices of the characters in the stories. We discussed the books. We wrote.

And we laughed. He was so very sweet and so deeply kind and so terrible. and so terribly bright. On the quiet suburban street where they lived, one childhood friend recalled, quote, we all walk to school together, rode bikes up and down the block, and played in the streets

until our parents called us in for dinner, end quote. Another friend said Eric embodied the feeling of the little town they grew up in. It was, and he was, kind, caring, simple, and sweet. On the Camp Takaho National Parks trip, the kids more or less got along.

Besides for the kind of bickering you might expect when you coop four teenage boys up in an Oldsmobile for hours at a time. Eric in particular came in for a lot of teasing. Here's camper Todd Miller, speaking to detectives later. I think it's fair to say probably everybody at some point or another.

It's fair to say probably everybody at some point or another just, you know, teased him, Todd said. Gave him a hard time. Nothing that really sticks out in my mind. On the night the kids landed in Flagstaff, they split up to eat dinner at different restaurants. Some of them went back to the motel to watch a Billy Crystal special on TV. Eric went to the movie theater to see Top Gun. Jake saw ruthless people.

Meet Mr. Stone. He wanted to kill Mrs. Stone. My only regret, Carol. Jake and Eric's movies ended at different times, so Jake walked back from the theater by himself. Counselor Bill Hammond picked Eric up a little later and dropped him back in the motel. hotel room he was sharing with Jake. Bill was staying with the other campers, Brian and Todd, in the room next door. Much of this information, by the way, comes from old and poorly recorded interviews with Bill, which we got from the county attorney's office in Flagstaff. As bad as the recordings are,

they do help us understand what happened that night. Around midnight, Jake knocked on the door of Bill's room. Could he borrow the car keys, he asked? He wanted to sit in the car and listen to his tapes. Sure, Bill says, just bring the keys back when you're done. I trusted him, Bill said. I had no problem trusting him, and I had no reason not to trust him. Jay can't remember what tapes he was listening to that night, but he remembers he loved Motown, Smokey Robinson, the Supremes, the Temptations. Bill said that while they were on the road, Jake would put sitting on the dock of the bay

by Otis Redding on in the car quite often. I'll be sitting in the morning sun. I'll be sitting when the evening comes. I looked out there a few or 20 minutes later, 10 minutes later, and you never see Jake in the bar. Bill says, I looked out there 15 or 20 minutes later, and I remember seeing Jake in the car, and the car light was on, and he had the fold-out map in front of him.

Bill figured he'd get the keys back later. It was late, so he got ready for bed. It was the end of another long day on the road. Except for the aggravation of the inadvertent detour, nothing was out of the ordinary. Bill couldn't have imagined what would happen in the next few hours. The next morning, when he went to wake Jake and Eric, he found their door ajar.

When he pushed it open, neither Jake nor Eric was there. But the bed closest to the door was covered in blood. He went to get the other campers. Brian, from the room next door, described the scene later to police. Bill tried in his mind to rationalize the situation to himself.

Maybe someone had had a nosebleed. Maybe one of the boys had gotten sick or injured overnight, and the other had driven him to the hospital. Jake liked to play basketball. Maybe he had gone out to shoot hoops early that morning and hurt himself. That would explain why the car was gone. Again, Bill is hard to hear right there

in this 37-year-old micro-cissette interview, but what he says is, and I stood there and thought a minute and looked at the bed covered in blood and thought, that can't be just a nosebleed. He went back to his room and called the police. This is Detective Mike Chicanelli. He's now retired from the Flagstaff Police Department,

But on that day, in August 1986, he responded to Bill's 911 call. When we got the call, we walked in, and there was a knife. And Eric Andrew Kane was 16 years old. And Jacob Edgar Weidman, also 16, was missing. For a while, police thought that some third party might have kidnapped Jake and killed Eric. What in the world else could explain? what had happened. But like I said, the mystery of the story is not who killed Eric. The mystery of the story is why. Do we understand? Can we ever understand what lived inside of Jake that night?

To his friends, his family, to all those who knew Jake, this seemed impossible. Totally surprised, totally unexpected. Totally unpredictable remains consistent. I think I was just interested. I think I was just in shock. Jake says he's spent more than a decade trying to understand it himself. And then another decade trying to explain it to the Keynes and the parole board. Years of therapy and treatment. He's told me about all of it. And I have hundreds of pages of psych evaluations and reports. We're going to talk more about all of that. But none of that matters to the Keynes. To the canes, it's all bullshit. None of us know why he brutally murdered Eric.

Their beautiful son is dead, and all they hear is lies and excuses. What should happen to kids like Jake? The Supreme Court has said that kids are different from adults. Even kids who commit the most serious crimes are less culpable than adults and should be treated differently. Is Jake dangerous and right where he belongs? Or is he the victim of a concerted campaign by people who hate him? This story is also about families and the stories they tell.

You see, by the time their son went away for murder, the Widmans were no strangers to American prisons and jails. I heard the news first in a phone call from my mother, my youngest brother, Robbie, and two of his friends had killed a man during a holdup. Some people were already suggesting that violent crime ran in the family. John Weidman's brother, Jake's uncle Robbie, was already serving a life sentence for murder.

Hello, everyone. I'm Maury Popovich. Welcome to a current affair. Our main story tonight is about the family of a respected author and academic. Pulitzer Prize winner John Wydenman. In Wyden's generation, the bad seat was his brother. Had something been passed down through his family over generations? That's next time on violation. If you want more information about Jake,

case, additional documents, photos, and related stories, head over to the martialproject.org slash violation and WBUR.org slash violation. Violation is a production of WBUR in Boston and the Marshall Project. Editing of the show comes from Geraldine Seeley, who is also managing editor of the Marshall Project, and Ben Brock Johnson, executive producer of WBUR podcast. Additional editing project management and web production from Amy Gorell. Quincy Walters is our producer. Mix, sound design, and original music composition by Paul Vichis. Fact-checking help from Kate Gallagher at the Marshall Project.

Illustrations for our project come from Diego Mago. Special thanks to Victor Hernandez, Susan Shira, Margaret Lowe, Mara Corbett, Laura Hertzfeld, Ashley Dye, Amory Sievertson, Nora Sacks, Elon Kitterman Ulandorf Grace Tatter Samata Joshi Marcy Suela Kristen Holgerson

Rachel Kincade Briley Weaver Dachry Brooks Nicole Funaro Gabe Isman Ruth Baldwin Ebony Reed A.J. Flanzer

Chalina Fang Bo Juan Kum Terry Tronkali Jennifer Borg Jason Chris Celine Carlo Gonzalez Ed Claris

Louise Kauron Gazzala Urshad and Ellie Stern I'm Beth Schwartz-Apful, your reporter and host. I'll talk to you next week.