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The Sherwood Suicide Cult case was an ugly one.
Not that it was a particularly complicated one to unravel – in fact, as cases went, it had been a relatively straightforward affair to put together the clues and identify the culprit. Teenagers, as it turned out, were not the best at planning ahead.
No, the ugliness was more in the nature of the crime itself. There were, strictly speaking, worse cases to be on, worse cruelties to witness. But the sight of that smoking ruin of a school, filled with nearly unrecognizable bodies, the anguished cries of parents – it was all something that weighed on even the most hardened investigator, would haunt their dreams for a while. It was all just...unpleasant.
The FBI had been called in, of course. The scale of the act demanded it, even if it hadn’t been clear almost from the outset that foul play was involved. The “suicide cult” name stuck, and the press ran with it, but no one on the investigation had actually entertained that for very long. Not when the “suicide note” was suspiciously intact for surviving that explosion, and the survivors – the students who hadn’t attended the pep rally that day – whose signatures were also found on the note were all, to a one, adamant that they had either not signed anything, or had signed something completely different.
This “mass suicide” was nothing less than an act of domestic terrorism, and everyone knew it.
Identifying the culprit took a little longer, but not by much. Heather Duke was the first one implicated, in that multiple survivors testified that she had been the one collecting their signatures. This line of investigation was quickly dropped. She didn’t match the typical profile of a teenage terrorist, for one thing, but more to the point, she was identified among the dead. Miss Duke may have been involved – to what extent, they would never know – but she could not have been the one to plant the suicide note that she had apparently prepared signatures for. There was at least one surviving perpetrator out there.
The second suspect was revealed in an interview with one of the survivors and witnesses, who had, in a twist some agents found morbidly ironic, narrowly avoided death because her own suicide attempt had delayed her attendance at the pep rally. Martha Dunnstock, still reeling from her injuries and the shock of the event, had nonetheless been firm in her conviction that the culprit was Jason Dean, even going as far as to voice suspicions that he had been involved in some of the suicides that had preceded the tragedy that was at the center of their investigation.
Interviews with other survivors only contributed to the picture being painted now, the perfect image of a troubled youth, colored, perhaps, by retrospective suspicions among the survivors, but compelling nonetheless. It was almost too good of a profile for their prime suspect, but between the absence of his body among the dead, and an obvious avenue for access to explosives (something that was quickly confirmed when the investigation turned to the older Mr. Dean’s business and found a suspicious shortage of explosives).
So, they had a suspect. Finding him, however, turned out to be where the investigation started to sputter. They took the father into custody, but he seemed unwilling or unable to tell them much of anything about his son or where he would flee – they were drifters, no real roots to speak of, no real connections with anyone.
Eventually, a reliable sighting came in from the west. But he’d slipped out of that local precinct’s grasp, and left another complication in his wake.
Dean had not been alone, when he was spotted. A teenage girl had been with him.
Checking against the bodies that had been identified, and the students who had survived, the investigation was able, after a time, to identify her, too.
And that just left them with the question: was Veronica Sawyer an accomplice or a victim?
On first glance, she seemed unlikely as an accomplice. She was a studious, intelligent, popular young lady with a stable and loving home who’d applied to some of the most prestigious universities in the nation, and not, it seemed, without good reason to believe she would be accepted. This was a girl with bright prospects and a future. She could not be more unlike their main suspect; she existed in a completely different world to him.
And yet, as the investigation turned up, she had associated with Dean a lot more than would be expected of their respective social standings. Sources had no real consensus on the exact nature of their relationship. Dean’s father was confident that Sawyer was his son’s girlfriend, and several students agreed. Others said that they had been dating, but had broken up recently. Sawyer’s parents and Dunnstock, apparently close with Sawyer, said only that the pair were friends.
Regardless, it was evident that there was some connection between them, even if the details weren’t clear. The investigation was split – some believed it wasn’t worth worrying about until they had the pair in custody, and some believed they needed to decide whether they were approaching this as a pair of terrorists, or a terrorist and a hostage or even a trafficking situation. The wrong approach, those in the latter group argued, could sink the whole case.
And despite Sawyer’s generally upstanding image, there were things that didn’t quite fit into the portrait. Her behavior in the days leading up to the tragedy had reportedly grown increasingly erratic, some saying that she’d started having conversations with thin air. She’d actually claimed to have killed their fellow students, one student told the investigation, though it had been a laughable claim at the time. Dunnstock, as convinced of Dean’s guilt as she was, was reluctant to implicate Sawyer in his crimes, but eventually admitted, with no small amount of grief, that perhaps she had not known her friend very well at all.
The most bizarre piece of the puzzle came from Sawyer’s family. Her mother told them that not even an hour before the explosion, Sawyer had played a cruel “prank” on them, pretending to hang herself, and possibly coordinated that prank with Dean, who had been the one to inform Sawyer’s parents that she was suicidal.
It would be an outrageous coincidence if that wasn’t tied to the fatal pep rally somehow, but the agents couldn’t make any sense of it. If she and Dean had wanted to lead her parents to believe that she had been part of the student body’s “suicide pact”, why the hanging as well? Why reveal that it was fake? Had Sawyer, perhaps, felt regret for causing her parents grief, and wanted to leave a message that her subsequent “death” at the school would be fake as well? But why do it in such a way?
Perhaps, one agent suggested, the girl had had some sort of mental break, and they shouldn’t expect any logic in her actions. Perhaps Dean had taken advantage of this and used her mental confusion to aid him in destroying the school.
Though, they couldn’t determine what role, exactly, she had to play in that, if she had one. Dean had been the one with access to the explosives; he would not have needed her for that.
Perhaps he had simply taken her as his “prize” for his success in pulling off his crime.
But here, unfortunately, is where the case died.
They had put together a decent, if imperfect, picture of what had happened, their suspects and motivations. But they did not have the actual suspects in hand. They chased after sightings, but somehow Dean and Sawyer always slipped through their fingers. Eventually, they lost sight of them altogether.
In Sherwood, life went on. Families grieved; the surviving students shuffled off to other schools while the town debated whether to build a new high school over the ruins of the old, or to find a new site. But they never received closure. Jason Dean and Veronica Sawyer, almost certainly the architects of Westerberg High School’s destruction, had vanished off the face of the earth.
Perhaps they had disappeared into the wilderness, and perhaps they still lived out their days there. Or perhaps they had been caught out there, reckless and unprepared the way teenagers on the run would be, and died at the hands of nature that had been no more merciful than they were.