Violation Ep 7: No Safe Place

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Last time on violation, he called me and he was very threatening and he said, Something your life is about to change, and he hung up the phone.

And they just start saying, Oh, you messed up, you messed up. I don't know why you didn't set that appointment. And I think the other kinds of emotional traumas I'm describing have their root in some incidents that I haven't spoken about publicly before and don't really intend to speak about. But some incidents have...

The song across the wide Missouri always makes John want to cry, he wrote. Because it transports him to a time when he was a boy. And this song was the soundtrack to a movie he saw with his dad, Edgar.

Maybe that's why he forgets so much.

When we started telling this story, I told you it was not a whodunit, but that there are mysteries at the heart of it. About the big questions in this giant mess of a criminal justice system that crystallized so clearly in Jake's case, like, what should happen to people like Jake, people who did something terrible when they were children and then grew up? Is there anything they can do to deserve to be free again? And also, why do we understand? Can we ever understand what lived inside of Jake that night?

There's one last piece of the puzzle that might bring a little more clarity to that question. And in this last episode of Violation, we're going to dig deep and try as much as it's possible to understand.

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. This is part 7 No safe place.

It's no accident that Jake and his father, John, and John's father Edgar, all appear alongside each other in John's story about that song. Shenandoah. One of the preoccupations of John Wideman's writing is in this idea of generations of your ancestors being present in you as you move through the world. He begins several of his books with what he calls a Begats chart, a family tree, going all the way back to the runaway slave, who was their forebear and matriarch. Jake talks about that, too, at his first parole hearing, probably the highest stakes moment in his life since he went to prison.

As a teenager, more than 20 years earlier, he said, he sensed a gathering with me of those who are both alive and those who have passed on.

The issue of Jake's family has, of course, been central to his case all along. You may recall Eric's family blamed Jake's father, John, for creating a monster, for ignoring early warning signs of Jake crying out for help. How they pointed to John's writing as proof that he approved of violence. Jake's family came up again in 2017 when Daniel Strzok, the private attorney, the Corrections Department, hired to represent them in their efforts to bring Jake back to prison and keep him there. Spoke to the board. As you can tell from listening to him and seeing him, he's very articulate, he's very intelligent. He's a good-looking guy. Comes from an articulate family, obviously, but he's a cold-blooded killer. Strzok said this to the parole board at Jake's first revocation hearing.

The parole officer supervising Jake could accuse him of violating the rules of his home arrest and bring him back to prison to await a decision on that accusation. But now the board had to make a formal finding. Did Jake violate the conditions of his parole and, if so, should he stay in prison or be returned to the community? Remember, Jake had been arrested by his parole officer and brought back to prison because he had failed to follow a directive? To make an appointment with a psychologist on a particular day.

He had left a message, but before the psychologist had had a chance to call him back, he was brought back to prison. He may never get out again. The Supreme Court began requiring parole revocation hearings decades ago as a sort of guardrail to make sure that people on parole aren't dragged back to prison arbitrarily. The court said. These hearings can be informal, and they're typically no-frills, routine affairs. Katherine Blades-Pitak was executive director of the Parole Board from 2018 to 2022.

She was there while some of Jake's revocation proceedings unfolded, and she said everything about his case felt different.

The board had never seen anything like it. Strzok went back weeks and listened in on Jake's phone calls from prison, which, in Strzok's telling, were clear proof that Jake was dangerous. He made recordings of Jake talking to his wife, Marta, and to his mother, and shared them with the board. Remember the robot lady who reminds you at the start of every phone call that this call will be recorded and subject to monitoring at any time?

Strzok submitted the recordings to the board as evidence. That's how I heard them. They were in Jake's public parole file, and the recordings are painfully intimate. Jake telling his wife how much he missed her and how much he hated being away from her. But Strzok wanted the board to hear them because at the end of that call, Jake said this.

You know, I wake up with this tightness in my chest every day.

He tells his wife that he wakes up with a tightness in his chest every day and his anger and sadness about being with her. But he says, I am more angry than anything else. This is a man who just told everybody under oath that he doesn't have anger issues. This is not a person that you'd want out on the street.

We're taping this episode in 2023, and Jake has been back in prison for almost six years. He's now had two of these revocation hearings, and both times the board revoked his home arrest and ordered him to remain in prison. This is his father, John Weideman.

Fantasy place in some sort of TV drama gives out five-year sentences for missing appointments with psychologists. But that's the situation as it stands now, and it's going to be six years soon.

In one instance, a man was found guilty of sending a pornographic text message to a minor. He was released back on parole. In four instances, the board found people guilty of assault, and in one case, a man threatened his parole officer. They were all released back on parole. Sometimes, the board required additional drug treatment or anger management or domestic violence counseling when they released the person.

They could have done that with Jake, they could have released him. With the requirement to follow up with Dr. McCain, that psychologist he was supposed to make an appointment with, for instance, but they didn't.

I asked Katherine Blades-Pitak, the former parole board director, about this. She said It struck her as weird that the state spent so many resources trying to lock Jake back up.

So almost every case they hear is a murder, it's either a murder or it's a repeat sexual assault. Like every case the board hears is bad, I mean, they're all bad. And so with. Having said that, I wouldn't say this case stuck out to me as being a hundred times worse than any other of the cases that the board would hear.

Do you have a hypothesis about why? Based on the presentation of the case, they seem to think that Mr. Weidman is just a really bad, dangerous guy.

And unless and until a judge or the parole board finds in his favor, he'll stay in prison for the rest of his sentence, which is the rest of his life.

After Jake filed that special action in state court, a judge said he was troubled by the way the board handled several aspects of Jake's revocation hearing. He ordered a new revocation hearing, which was held in 2020 and went very much like the first. Board members read Jake's failure to schedule an appointment with Dr. McCain as evidence that he had lapsed into disregard for authority at one point, board member David Neal said. Without that counseling, he's going to do something that is in the criminal ways, or he may just go hanging out with criminals.

I would appreciate it if you wouldn't give your.

Convoluted, manipulative. Answer just simple yes and no.

This idea that Jake was manipulating the board had come up again and again over the years. It was first raised by the keynes, but then over time struck. Parole officers and supervisors, even board members themselves, began to take the view that nothing. Jake said was in good faith, but rather was only a way for him to manipulate the board into getting what he wanted. Wagner is a self-serving, unpredictable, manipulative actor, engaging in behavior that was manipulative in some fashion, he continued with his manipulative behaviors that he's trying to do today.

I have thought a lot about this. The last thing I want is to be manipulated by Jake, to be taken for a sucker. And get on this mic and tell you a story that is biased or misleading, or just plain false. I've reviewed court documents, police reports, psychiatric and psychological evaluations, prison records, jail records, phone records, emails and calendar entries, and memos from inside the corrections department, the parole board and the governor's office. I've interviewed dozens of people, I can tell you that all the verifiable facts in the story have been verified.

But you can still stitch together true facts in a way that feels false. That's what the board is accusing Jake of doing. The same set of facts can either be read as an honest misunderstanding or as manipulation. Jake left a message and was waiting for a call back. Or Jake wanted to give his parole officers the impression he was trying without really trying. At Jake's revocation hearing in 2020, a corrections department employee picked up their phone and texted. The board has blasted holes in Weidman's defense.

I got this text to change in response to a records request. LOL, the person responded. Then later, after the board revoked Jake's parole, the employee wrote Unanimous revoked, and the other person again responded, LOL.

The records don't make it entirely clear who these people were, but the person who wrote LOL is listed as DP, or Dan. Daniel. Pareda, remember, was Jake's first parole officer, and the other person said he testified briefly that morning in his text, and the only corrections employee who testified that morning was Jake's second parole officer. Patrick Pogue, later Dr.

McCain told me the parole board and all the corrections officials seem to have already made up their mind about Jake. And in his view, nothing he could have said at these hearings would have changed their minds. Here he is talking about the 2017 hearing where he testified.

McCaIN There is no basis whatsoever in anything I said or wrote ever about him. Okay, but that speaks to, I think, the propensity of some people to define their own truths and.

It's still in the back of my mind, why would a young man, young child, 16 years of age, murder someone without a cause? I can understand it if you were in a fight, I would also understand it if you was arguing over money or girl, or music, or drugs, or anything during that period.

He sounds just baffled, right? Many board members do over the many hearings and years, we even had one former board member tell us. She always suspected the two boys had some sort of sexual liaison that ended badly.

Jake and Eric were the only ones in the hotel room that night. If Jake had said, Yes, sir, you're right. The truth is, we were arguing about a girl. Or, yes, I admit we were in bed together and I freaked out. There would be no one to dispute that. And it would probably serve him better in his efforts to explain his crime in a way that the board can easily grasp. It just makes more sense than the complicated, confusing, messy story Jake has always told. I wish over the years that there was a simple explanation for the crime, but there really isn't.

There are all kinds of things like that throughout Jake's history. Things that would make no logical sense for someone to do if they were trying to manipulate the situation to their advantage. Like confessing to murdering Eric, like falsely confessing to murdering Shelly Wiley, that woman in Laramie whose case is still unsolved. So if he is manipulated?

They frame things in a way as to make themselves look good and others look bad, and they do it consistently.

Oh yeah, because, again, it's not uniquely, singularly situational, it's an enduring and pervasive pattern. Quote Okay, in terms of personality disorders.

Woods finally gave for those adrenaline rushes Jake had been having since childhood, the sudden, overwhelming rush of energy and anxiety and sensory overload. We'll never know exactly why Jake did what he did when he did. Because, of course, tens of millions of people experience temporal lobe epilepsy and never hurt anyone. But there are a few remaining pieces that might get us closer to some sort of understanding.

So remember how Eric was often teased by the other kids? I think it's fair to say, probably everybody at some point or another, um, just, you know, teased them gave them a hard time. Nothing that really. I talked to Todd Miller, the camper, in this recording recently. He didn't want me to use the tape from our phone call. But during our conversation, he described Eric as a little slow, a little different. One newspaper article published after Eric's death said it was as if Eric kept his own time on his own special wristwatch.

He'd get to wherever he was going when he got there. Jake said that with all his insecurities, all the secrets he was hiding, his paralyzing fear of being perceived as weird or different. Watching Eric get teased was like.

There were times when he would explicitly stand up for himself, but there were other times when he had the grace and the strength to just walk away. And for me, you know, there were times I envied that, and there were other times when it made me angry. Because I felt like he wasn't standing up for himself. And that was part of that kind of.

Experience of looking into a mirror, and it reminded me, as you can imagine.

Very powerfully, of the trauma that I had experienced as a kid.

Instead of seeing the prolapse itself as another piece of the puzzle, I thought about some notes I'd seen. Among the psychological evaluations from the 80s that mentioned two instances of Jake inappropriately touching another child. And then, after months of talking, Jake told me he was ready to discuss it. The missing link that would tie together all the confusing, messy pieces of the story he's told about Eric's murder.

It's Madeline Barron from In the Dark. I spent the past four years investigating a crime. When you're driving down this road, how do I plan on killing somebody? A four-year investigation, hundreds of interviews, thousands of documents, all in an effort to see what the U.S military has kept from the public for years.

Did you think that a war crime had been committed? I don't have any opinion on that. Season three of In the Dark is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

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Despite cold feet at first, Jake said he thought he had mentioned this childhood trauma indirectly enough times that people would probably figure it out.

Over the course of two years, when he was in elementary school.

The night of August 12th, he thought going out to the car to listen to some music would help calm him. It did for a time, he said, he even laid down on his bed and fell asleep with his clothes on for a while. But he woke up around 1 a..m in the midst of what he now knows was a temporal lobe seizure.

Remember how Jake talked about Eric being a mirror? Watching Eric navigate? Being different and being teased brought up all of Jake's insecurities about feeling different, about his shame and his fear of being found out, about his terror of being vulnerable, about his inability to protect himself when it mattered most. Again, these are insights Jake says he developed over the course of decades. At that moment, in 1986, all he knew was that he woke up shaking and sweating and hot and completely out of control, he says. And he felt this compulsion to destroy all of those overwhelming feelings and memories that arose when he saw Eric lying there sleeping.

Did you think about going for a walk? did you think about using the knife on yourself? Were there other things that occurred to you, or did it all happen too fast to consider alternatives?

And yeah, there was no time, there was no consideration of anything.

I woke up and saw those things and did what I did.

So Patty asked Jake about it, she says, and that's when they started discussing it openly. Jake told Patty the name of his abuser from Taco Ho, and she tried to find out what had become of him to try to corroborate Jake's story. He did not want it to be public, he didn't want it to come out. I had talked with him, saying, you've come this far to remember this and to think about it.

You know, let's really think about whether this could be helpful in your case. And he just absolutely didn't want to do it. It's too hard, it's too painful, it's too everything.

So it just stopped. For Marta, it was around 2011 when she was helping Jake prepare the packet he submitted for his first parole board hearing that it became clear. I knew about the signs and symptoms of, you know, people who have been sexually abused. So when I was like, you know, I read the stomach violations, you know. When he was a kid, you know, and I was like, there's no way that something had not happened to him. But I never said anything about it.

I just felt like if he wanted to tell me something, he would, because I just felt like he needed to. You know, come to it on his own, I guess, and eventually he did. A year or two later, he wrote her a long letter, but he was not ready to discuss it publicly until now. But why now?

Is this just a tactic to garner sympathy from me and from you? That is almost certainly what people opposed to Jake's release will say at any future parole board hearing. That it's all too convenient suddenly to frame himself as a victim, and even if he was sexually abused, that is no excuse for murder. That this disclosure at this moment is a manipulative act by a man who will say anything to get out of prison. Because I can anticipate that that same narrative is going to be.

About the outcomes of the abuse, not the abuse itself, but the outcomes, the behavioral outcomes, the emotional outcomes, the developmental outcomes. All of that I discussed with the board for hours and hours, and hours and hours. And the fact that I'm now opening up about the source, you know, the deepest source of some of those outcomes, doesn't change anything. It doesn't mean that I wasn't honest with the board.

He also says he feared for his safety. Talking about this stuff publicly back then, even as recently as 2011, was dangerous. You know, 2011 is only chronologically 11 years ago.

And I didn't want to have to deal with the consequences of having everybody know that I had been abused as a child.

When Jake and I first had this conversation, he had never spoken to his family about the abuse. He has since begun the long, painful process of those conversations, knowing that the information would be public soon. But for years, he avoided it. My parents in particular.

And I felt as though, and to some extent, still feel as though. Opening up about the fact that I was abused. And that they had no idea would only layer more guilt upon that which they already feel.

Did he know how much Jake was struggling? Jake hadn't talked to me or to his father about the abuse. Yet. This was a broader question about Jake's mental health struggles in general, and it clearly struck a nerve with John. Well, I think that question is asking me.

And so I would just simply have regret that I could not, that I wasn't up to it, that I didn't, wasn't there. That's all.

Children hide things from parents, and kids are very cunning and their necessities, but.

I can't. I mean, that question just makes me speechless because it goes, How much responsibility does one take for one's life, and when and how?

But, believe me, I've asked that question of myself many times, and I'll ask it until the day I die, why wouldn't I?

Instead, I've had to rely on these terrible tapes, which are so affecting, despite the awful sound quality. Sometimes when we're out, we'll see the back of a young, tall man with dark curly hair. Sometimes when we're out, we'll see the back of a young, tall man with dark, curly hair. And for an instant, we look for a miracle. Eric's dad, Sandy says there, and then he turns around and we go back to reality without Eric.

Over the years, I sent the Kains emails explaining who I was and that I hoped they would speak to me. I had a phone call with their attorney explaining the podcast. I asked to speak to someone else close to them, a friend, a family member, their attorney. Even. They declined all of my requests and I respect that. But it has also been really important to describe their role in this case using the information that was available to me.

They are the victims in this case and they have been key factors in how it has played out. The Kains have made very clear that they want the state to incarcerate Jake forever, and that the only way that Jake can begin to make amends is to stop trying to get parole. To stay in prison until he dies. This is Louise Kain at nausea, he says. He's full of remorse, but still cannot bring himself to understand or to care about us in the hearing last February, Weidman said. And I quote, I wish so much, I wish with all my heart that I could relieve them of that burden of suffering.

At every hearing, we've told the murderer that he can make it better for us by not having all these hearings. Obviously, his words are just meant to have you think he's remorseful. Words are cheap actions count.

That is a fundamental tension in any story like this one. The Kains want Jake to go away and never come back, and Jake and his family say that. He has served enough time that he has fulfilled his part of the plea bargain, and he has proved he's ready to be free. Eric's family does not want you out of prison. They've made that very clear.

They want you to be in prison until you die, and you obviously are a human being who wants to be free. How do you reconcile that?

There's no logical refutation to that, and there's no emotional refutation to what they feel. I understand it completely. Who among us could possibly say, with any objectivity, that they wouldn't feel exactly the same way? About the person who took the life of their son, especially their son at such a young age? Especially in the circumstances that I took Eric's life. But having said that, under the law, I was given the opportunity to one day apply for parole and be given a chance. And I felt like over the years, as I healed from the mental illness and the other psychological dynamics that I believe led me to commit the crime, that I did, taking full responsibility for that. I believe that the healing and the overcoming of that and becoming a person who is no longer a danger to hurt anybody else. I wanted the opportunity to make an impact outside of here.

And even to victims, it's not clear whether all those rules are keeping them or us safe. So here we are in 2023. Jake is in prison, serving a life sentence for ending another human being's life, the most elemental and devastating violation. There is a young man who lay defenseless, sleeping.

Jake was given another chance and he blew it, or some would say Jake is in prison, serving a life sentence for not getting a call back from Dr. McCain. For a petty misunderstanding, cynically twisted into something dangerous by people determined to see him back behind bars for a technical violation.

So about those mysteries at the heart of this story? Is Jake dangerous and right where he belongs, or is he the victim of a concerted campaign by people who hate him? I can't answer those questions for you, I can give you all the information I have about what happened and why.

And then each person has to decide those mysteries for themselves. But the last piece, the mysteries at the heart of families and the stories they tell, let's dig into that before I leave you.

Remember Jake's uncle, Robbie, John Weidman's baby brother, who was serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania for a botched robbery in which a man was killed? Robbie was the subject of Brothers and Keepers, John's 1984 memoir, exploring all of the messy, thorny themes—racism, punishment, culpability, justice—that came to define both his life and Jake's. In Brothers and Keepers, John describes Robbie as first a man.

This year, Jake filed a second special action in state court, arguing that the Department of Corrections, under outside pressure, invented a pretext to revoke his parole and asking the judge to release him from prison and reinstate his home arrest. A new judge is currently considering whether he agrees if he doesn't side with Jake, Jake has very few remaining options except to begin a new round of parole board hearings every year, trying to convince the board to release him. That ruling could come any day now. And the justice system, which is to say all of us in every case, every day in courtrooms and parole board hearings across the country. Has to reconcile the two sides. And find some kind of answer that feels like justice.

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

Mix, sound, design and original music composition by Matt Reed and Paul Vikes. Fact-checking help from Kate Gallagher at the Marshall project. Illustrations for our project come from Diego Maggio. Special thanks to Victor Hernandez, Susan Shira, Margaret Lowe, Mara Corbett, Laura Hertzfeld, Ashley Dye, Amory Severson, Nora Sachs, Ilan Kitterman-Uhlendorf, Grace Tatter, Samantha Joshi, Marci Suela, Kristen Holgerson, Rachel Kincaid, Briley Weaver, Dakri Brooks, Nicole Funaro, Gabe Isman, Ruth Baldwin, Ebony Reed, A..J Flanzer, Chalina Fang, Bo-wan Kum, 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.