A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

silence. “HOW GREAT IS THIS?” I said in a booming voice that no doubt caught the attention of the agents in the front seats. Brower looked at me. “We’re in the SHIT,” I said. Now he seemed confused. Did the FBI director just say “shit”? Yup, I had. “We’re waist deep in the shit,” I added with an exaggerated

And then I began to speak—to lie, more precisely. The lies came pouring out. I explained how estranged we were from our parents—hated them, actually—didn’t care what he took from them, and wouldn’t tell anyone he had been there. I lied again and again and again. The gunman told me to shut up and ordered both of us to our feet.

front door in the dark and debated going after the gunman. A police car pulled up in front of my house. We blinked the front lights and the car came to a stop. We ripped open the front door and ran straight at the officer, me barefoot and holding a large butcher knife. The officer quickly stepped from his car and his hand went to his weapon. I shouted, “No, no!” and pointed toward the Murrays’ house. “There he goes. He has a gun!” The gunman burst out from the Murrays’ front door and took off running toward the nearby woods. As police cars from many jurisdictions

Ramsey Rapist robberies and sexual assaults stopped. My encounter with the Ramsey Rapist brought me years of pain. I thought about him every night for at least five years—not most nights, every night—and I slept with a knife at hand for far longer. I couldn’t see it at the time, but the terrifying experience was, in its own way, also an incredible gift. Believing—knowing, in my mind—that I was going to die, and then surviving, made life seem like a precious, delicate miracle. As a high school senior, I started watching sunsets, looking at buds on trees, and noticing the beauty of our world. That feeling lasts to this day, though sometimes it expresses itself in ways that might seem corny to people who fortunately never had the experience of measuring their time on this earth in seconds. The Ramsey Rapist taught me at an early age that many of the things we think are valuable have no value.

They all constructed their own narrative to explain and justify their killing. None of them saw themselves as bad people. And to a person, they all said the same thing: The first time was really, really hard. After that, not so much.

Before she died, my mother showed me a note I had written to her after getting sent to my room at the age of seven or eight. “I am sorry,” the note read. “I will be a great man someday.” She had saved it in her dresser for almost fifty years.

was minutes into mopping when Harry appeared. He stood on the far side of Lake Milk, hands on hips, careful not to get any on his wing tips. After an eternity of admiring the lake, he asked, “Have you learned something?” “Yes, sir,” I replied. “Good,” he answered. “Clean it all up.” And he walked away. I was too young to see it clearly, but, at sixteen, I was getting a look at great leadership.

Being an outsider, being picked on, was very painful, but in hindsight it made me a better judge of people. In my life I would spend a lot of time assessing threats, judging tone of voice, and figuring out the shifting dynamic in a hallway or locker room crowd. Surviving a bully requires constant learning and adaptation. Which is why bullies are so powerful, because it’s so much easier to be a follower, to go with the crowd, to just blend in. Those years of bullying added up, minor

The day of her contempt hearing, the courtroom, courthouse hallways, and street outside were packed with dozens of police officers and federal agents, including police horses and motorcycles on the street. Fahey walked calmly to the “defendant’s” table in the courtroom and waited. The judge came out and was so rattled himself by the show of law enforcement community support

We were very angry. Had Collin been born with another doctor or in another hospital that required testing, he would very likely be alive, because Patrice would have been tested late in pregnancy and treated as she delivered him. But because he was born with a doctor who didn’t support testing and in a hospital that didn’t require all doctors to order it, he was dead. That didn’t make any sense. Patrice dug into the science and developed a relationship with a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and good people at the Group B Strep Association,