Violation Ep 1: Two Sons, Lost

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.

Let me see this passage here that I've marked with the red pen.

Is this you guys in Wyoming?

But as a human, I was mindful 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 about your son Jake? Or is that something that you think you might never care to share in detail with the public?

Everyone talking to me for this story has their own reasons, everyone has their own version of the truth, too. John Wideman can relate to that.

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.

And it's costing a small fortune.

And your calls are being recorded and you'd better hurry up.

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, 6'1, 195 pounds. And like all the other prisoners, he wore an orange jumpsuit with the letters A..D.C 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 Wideman 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 Schwartzapfel from the Marshall Project and WBUR. This 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. 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.

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 Wideman 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 Wideman murdered fellow camper Eric Kane. As Eric slept. Wideman stabbed him twice in the chest. The crime devastated two families.

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.

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.

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 that later.

The parents of Jake's victim, Eric Cain, 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, belying a killer who could not be trusted to walk among us. This is Eric's mother, Louise Cain.

How can one tell what is the real truth, what is his and what belongs to the lawyer? If Weidman 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.

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 Wideman ever faced a parole board? Before Eric Cain 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.

Matlock had recently premiered on NBC, Matlock's A Winner. This fall, President Reagan was in his second term.

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 Tacojo 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 counselor 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 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.

His complexion reflected his family's mashup of heritages black on his dad's side, part Jewish and part wasp on his mom's. 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.

This is Janice Harris, an English professor and a good friend of the Weidmans, some years later, in an interview with attorneys. A very sweet child, a very curious child, always interested in things I can remember. In particular, a way he had, if we would be doing field trips, always asking.

He was a good basketball player.

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 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.

It's Madeline Barron from In the Dark. I've spent the past four years investigating a crime.

Military has kept from the public for years. Did you think that a war crime had been committed?

I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, host of On Point. At a time when the world is more complex than ever, On Point's daily deep-dive conversation takes the time to make the world more intelligible. From the state of democracy to how artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live and work, to the wonders of the natural world, one topic each day, one rich and nuanced exploration.

That's on point from WBUR. Be sure to follow us right here in your podcast feed.

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 Taco Ho, 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 Kanes 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 terribly bright.

On the quiet suburban street where they lived, one childhood friend recalled. Quote We all walked 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 Taco Ho 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.

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 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. Jake 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, sitting in the morning sun, I'll be sitting when the evening comes.

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 microcassette 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 Ciccanelli. He's now retired from the Flagstaff Police Department. But on that day, in August 1986, he responded to Bill's 911 call.

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.

Jake says he spent more than a decade trying to understand it himself, and then another decade trying to explain it to the Cains 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 Cains.

To the Cains, 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 Weidmans were no strangers to American prisons and jails.

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.

If you want more information about Jake's case, additional documents, photos and related stories, head over to themarshallproject.

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 a managing editor of the Marshall Project, and Ben Brock-Johnson, executive producer of WBUR Podcasts. Additional editing, project management, and web production from Amy Gurel. Quincy Walters is our producer.

Mix, sound, design and original music composition by Paul Vajkas. 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, Anne-Marie Sievertson, Nora Sachs, Ilan Kitterman-Uhlendorf, Grace Tatter, Samantha Joshi, Marci Suela, Kristen Holgersen, Rachel Kincaid, Briley Weaver, Dacree Brooks, Nicole Funaro, Gabe Isman, Ruth Baldwin, Ebony Reed, A.J. Flanzer, Chalina Fang, Bowan Koum, Terry Troncalli, Jennifer Borg, Jason Criss, Celine Carlo-Gonzalez, Ed Claris, Louise Caron, Ghazala Arshad and Ellie Stern. I'm Beth Schwartzapfel, your reporter and host.

I'll talk to you next week.