Wild Card
While instant messaging with her friends on Facebook on her black laptop, a new IM popped open on Kat McDonough’s screen. It was from “Seth J Mazzaglia.”
“Our conversations the last couple of shows have been extremely interesting—when would you like to continue them?”
He then asked if there was a good time to talk away from the prying ears of the Last Rites cast.
Kat thought about it for a minute. It was late July 2011, and the play’s run would end the following week. She would soon be leaving for two weeks to train as a counselor at theater camp, and then she’d be back to start her senior year of high school.
She liked this guy, though, and decided she wanted to spend more time with him. Kat enjoyed pretending to be Scarlet. She thought it made her more interesting in twenty-eight-year-old Seth’s eyes. He seemed to understand Scarlet better than she did. Most intriguing of all, he seemed extremely interested in her, like he was willing to chase her. It felt good to be wanted.
As they prepped for the final performance of Last Rites backstage, Kat agreed to go to a movie with Lex. They settled on Captain America. Kat’s mom dropped her off at the Regal Cinemas on a Tuesday afternoon. Kat usually told Denise everything, but this time she had simply said that she was going to meet some friends, not revealing that the matinee was a date.
“Did you have any trouble sleeping?” Seth asked Kat on Facebook after the date.
“No. Why?”
“I felt Scarlet invading my astral space last night,” he said. “Just noting it in case there was a blackout on your end.”
Kat felt exhilarated. Was this for real? Could her Scarlet persona be something more than just a pretend personality? Might she be some psychic manifestation of a real woman? And could the man she knew as Lex interact with Scarlet on an otherworldly plane?
—
Seth Mazzaglia (his last name rhymed with “azalea”) lived in Dover, about twenty-five minutes north of Portsmouth, in a studio apartment in a converted nineteenth-century woolen mill. The complex, called Sawyer Mill, sat astride the Bellamy River, which had powered Dover’s textile looms for a century.
Seth’s parents had divorced when he was young. He confessed to Kat that hearing about her family troubles brought him back to his own childhood. Seth claimed he had more self-control than his parents ever had, but what he described made it sound more like they’d walked on eggshells around him.
“If they lose their tempers, I take it as permission to lose my own temper. The whole family learned very quickly to keep civil tongues during arguments.”
His mother, Heather Mazzaglia, was an educator in a local school district and had been on the library’s board of trustees. Seth appeared to have a strong bond with his mother and talked on the phone or visited for dinner often.
Heather Mazzaglia’s home sat in a little neighborhood that abutted the beginning of the runway for what had been a major U.S. Air Force base, until hundreds of military facilities like it were decommissioned after the Cold War. The base remained partly in the hands of the New Hampshire Air National Guard (whose KC-135s were flying midair refueling missions for the War on Terror) and partly in the hands of port authority officials seeking to build commercial and cargo flight routes out of Portsmouth. As a result, the house was frequently bombarded with the noise of planes coming in for a landing.
It was hard for friends and acquaintances to get a handle on what Seth’s relationship with his father, Joseph, was like. No one believed he had a bad relationship with him. The older Mazzaglia seemed perfectly nice to all, and no one could recall Seth publically bad-mouthing his dad. Joe Mazzaglia was a karate instructor, and Seth, who was a third-degree black belt himself, also taught self-defense to children and adults at the same dojo in Dover.
Seth was known for his patience as a teacher. At least one adult student described him as quiet and unremarkable, though disciplined. Seth told them his father had been his sensei.
Seth’s father also lived at the Sawyer Mill apartments in another part of the complex. Despite their physical proximity, acquaintances couldn’t recall either of them spending any considerable time in the other’s apartment—certainly not the same amount of time Seth spent visiting his mother. Whatever the quality of their emotional relationship was, it seemed to be known only to the two of them.
—
Unlike Kat McDonough, Seth hadn’t started out seeking a career in the theater. In high school, he developed an interest in computers and in graphic design, and in 2001, was accepted to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Admission to the engineering school is competitive, and Seth’s acceptance implied a considerable level of academic promise. He never lived up to it.
In his freshman year, Seth signed up for a course that seemed tailor-made for him: Cyberlore and Science Visions, a writing and literature class that focused on science fiction. For the class project, the students were tasked to work in groups to create websites tying their work to larger themes. On the site Seth worked on, he identified himself as a certified web designer “working on a dual major in Electrical Engineering and Computer science while maintaining his interests in Medieval reinactment [sic].”
According to a classmate, however, Seth wasn’t good about keeping in contact with his project group, and the others found the icon graphics he created for the site to be subpar, so they made new ones without his knowledge.
—
When people would ask Seth to tell them something about himself, he eventually would tell them an incredible story about his first love. If one were to compare notes, there would be variations in details, though it was always tragic and simultaneously dubious.
While attending RPI, Seth said, he met the woman he thought was the love of his life. Her name was Natasha. Seth said she was beautiful and had liked to highlight her natural platinum-blond hair with bright pink and amber accents.
Seth claimed that as he and Natasha walked alone through a Troy park one night, a mugger jumped from the bushes intending to rob them. The man pulled out a gun, pointed it at them both, and made threatening demands. Seth said the mugger then turned the gun on Seth and pulled the trigger, but Natasha threw herself in front of the speeding bullet. It caught her in the chest and she stumbled back into Seth’s arms. The mugger ran off into the darkness as Seth slumped to the ground, holding the love of his life as blood seeped from her chest wound. He said Natasha died in his arms that night.
The story always struck Seth’s friends as peculiar. Even his best friend, Andy, wasn’t sure he believed it. But it was one of Seth’s go-to personal tales. In some versions, Natasha woke up in the hospital before dying. He often worked the Natasha story into icebreaker conversations, as he did with a community theater husband and wife who were told a version in which Natasha was actually Seth’s fiancée. The couple assumed it was just another overdramatic anecdote from another eccentric actor.
While the truth is easy to prove, a lie is surprisingly difficult to confirm, as there’s no way to say for sure that something didn’t happen. That being said, the story didn’t pass even a cursory sniff test. Not only was no one in Troy ever arrested in that time frame for a shooting like the one Seth described, the Troy police have no reports of the incident. No news clippings exist that mention a homicide in a public park, a murderous mugger at large, or any similar crime committed against a person named Natasha. There are no records at all of a shooting involving an RPI student during the brief time Seth was enrolled there, from September 2001 to January 2002, nor do his RPI classmates remember hearing about a girlfriend who got shot. And while administrators at the school agree that such an event would be remarkable, there’s no institutional memory of it having happened.
But Troy, New York, seemed a million miles away from the New Hampshire Seacoast. Perhaps that was what Seth counted on when he told the Natasha story. For him, it wasn’t just an anecdote about a tragic thing that happened in his life. It was part of a mythology he was creating. Natasha’s “death” would be the source of a darkness inside him, a motivation for wanting to destroy the world and rebuild it anew.
Seth left RPI weeks into his second semester, returning to Dover in January 2002 with a different girlfriend he’d met while in Troy, and the two of them moved into an apartment at Sawyer Mill. The girlfriend stuck around for about a year before breaking it off.
Free from his academic pursuits, Seth’s other interests blossomed. He began socializing with student groups at the neighboring University of New Hampshire, including the school’s “pagan circle.” Seth’s obsession with video games and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons deepened. He was a part of a “nerd culture” that hadn’t yet reached the mainstream.
At social gatherings (which he preferred to avoid), he spoke to as few people as possible. When Seth did engage, others found his manner affected. He spoke and even dressed with an ill-placed formality, and whatever effect he was trying to achieve missed the mark. Seth came across as someone with no natural social graces stiffly trying to exert artificial ones.
Seth applied for full-time admission to the University of New Hampshire. After taking night-school classes to complete some prerequisites, he was accepted into UNH’s drama program. He studied ballroom dancing and eventually graduated at age twenty-four with a degree in theater, and a minor in dance.
After leaving high school with dreams of being an engineer, Seth finally left college as an out-of-work actor.
—
Even eight years postgraduation, Seth’s apartment at Sawyer Mill retained the distinct feel of a dorm room. He didn’t drink or do drugs, so there were no empty cans or smoking paraphernalia left around, but there were always clothes on the floor, strewn across seats, or hanging from doorknobs. Plastic cases for DVDs and Xbox 360 games were piled on the stained gray carpet. Extension cords and overtaxed power strips begged to trip someone. Dishes piled up in the sink, dust gathered beneath the appliances. The apartment also bore the telltale odor of Raven, Seth’s black cat. He owned almost no furniture. His couch was an inexpensive futon that doubled as his bed. There were a couple of wooden chairs but there was no table in the apartment’s small kitchen, so he ate his meals on folding tray tables he could move around the apartment. There was no cable TV plugged into his small flat-screen monitor, just a video game console. The only things that might have passed for grown-up furniture were a particleboard computer desk and a black office swivel chair. It was at this workstation that Seth spent hours each day on his desktop computer, writing bits of novels and plays and lengthy online missives.
Seth did have a bookcase, packed top to bottom, which served as an indicator of his interests: a smattering of books on drama and one-act plays; a couple of classics like The Odyssey and The Art of War, and two copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula; hardbound editions of Batman and Superman graphic novels; and mainstream horror from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King. There were also more obscure selections in Seth’s library. He owned every book in a sword-and-sorcery series that was labeled ultraviolent by critics, as well as a copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Instead of a traditional bookend, he used a life-sized ceramic skull on one of his sagging shelves, and around the room were several prop skulls serving as decoration on windowsills, footlockers, and stereo speakers. His decorating style leaned toward faux Halloween-esque candelabras, dragon statuettes, and figurines of wizards and warriors. Affixed to the walls were a four-foot-long battle sword meant to look as if it had been forged during the Dark Ages, a framed poster from the vampires vs. werewolves movie Underworld, and a pair of Native American dream catchers.
Overall, the place gave the impression that its occupant was stunted, like an overgrown man-child—someone with a preoccupation with the occult and the supernatural.
At the time he met Kat, Seth didn’t have a full-time job. He’d obtained a certification as a basic emergency medical technician (EMT-B) and was seeking work with local ambulance companies. He’d held several retail jobs, but his steadiest gig was teaching karate. The kind of self-defense he excelled in was not a discipline in which one protects oneself by deflecting an attacker’s jabs. His karate was the study of pressure points used to immobilize a foe with crippling pain.
Seth’s proficiencies in both hand-to-hand combat and with weapons were skills he tried to leverage in the local theater scene. Occasionally Seth would find work as a stage combat choreographer for local theater companies, and he made sure those involved with the productions also knew he was a trained actor.
He needed the edge. In the subjective world of talent evaluation, local directors later said they thought Seth Mazzaglia did not audition well. His awkward personality traits often showed through whether he was delivering a memorized monologue or cold-reading lines from a script. One director called him “off-putting.” Another saw him as one of the “regulars,” someone who would continue to audition despite rejection, to whom it was easier to grant a small part after the principal characters were cast.
Seth had a reputation for attempting to flirt with actresses during tryouts and rehearsals. He was not smooth, though, and while too polite to say so to his face, many women shared junior high school–like “ick factor” stories about him.
One of the few people who thought Seth was a good performer was Kat’s mother, Denise McDonough. She’d only worked with him at a script-reading workshop, but she thought he had a strong voice and a good presence.
Seth was neither tall nor short. His hair was dark and full, and he almost always sported facial hair. He was broad-shouldered and had a solid build, but his body type didn’t carry weight well. In a matter of a couple of months, Seth could easily transform from fit to doughy if he didn’t keep up a strict diet and exercise regimen. It didn’t help that his cooking skills were as stunted as his other domestic skills and were limited to boiling macaroni and cooking variations of stir-fry.
Seth was keenly aware of how he was typecast. With his deep, close-set eyes and average build, he knew he would never be seen as a leading man. He did think he was sinister-looking, however, and saw that as a potential advantage. He thought he could get bigger roles as villains or their henchmen. Sometimes he would fashion his whiskers with wax to make himself look like an archetypal silent-film villain, the sort who’d tie a damsel to the railroad tracks.
Though he won no big theater roles, Seth still believed he could have a starring turn somewhere. He eventually landed a bit part playing a stickup man in a low-budget indie film shot on the Seacoast. On set, he talked to the stunt coordinator about what it would take to break into that field, but the stuntman was discouraging, telling Seth that the training was long, the pay bad, and that a stuntman was finished the first time he fractured a bone.
For a Christmas Carol–inspired show in which he’d been cast, the costumer asked for Seth’s input on his Victorian-era wardrobe. Standing in front of the dressing-room mirror, Seth said he was fine wearing the assigned black suit and cravat, but his eyes lit up when the seamstress slipped a blue vest on him. He liked the way it felt and thought it made his torso appear slim.
In every show he was cast in from that point on, Seth would wear a vest if he could get away with it, even if his costume didn’t require a jacket. He thought the look was dapper. To most everyone else, he looked like a bartender.
At home, Seth dabbled in writing plays and films. Write what you know, he’d heard, so his stories were primarily horror and fantasy, the genres he read most avidly. Theater had scores of whodunit mysteries but few truly scary horror stories had ever been staged, and Seth thought he could create a niche: shows that would terrify the audience, perhaps even spray them with fake blood. (It apparently hadn’t occurred to him that such an experience might be unpleasant for those who’d dressed up for a night at the theater.)
On the page, his characters were powerful, untamed. They were warriors and ghosts who lived on a spiritual plane, on the other side of the mystical “Veil of Separation” that divided our world from theirs. Some of these characters were heroes; others were motivated only by laying waste to their universe.
Seth seemed to believe there were other entities on other spiritual planes—perhaps from past lives—that were tethered to his current existence. He told Kat that he had not one, but many of these personas, and he sometimes held them responsible for his life’s difficulties. He’d turn to the more reliable ones for direction on major decisions. The personas offered him guidance as well as excuses for his failures.
Like Kat’s “Scarlet,” there’s no indication Seth’s personas were the manifestation of a clinical mental illness—delusions or hallucinations. In this own imagination, his alter egos gave him comfort and satisfaction, and were wish-fulfillment fantasies of a certain sort. And Seth Mazzaglia and his fantasies had big plans for one another.
—
Aware that their ten-year age difference would necessitate some secrecy, Seth and Kat developed their relationship largely online. Most notably, they used Facebook’s instant message feature to communicate when Kat wasn’t in school, often late into the night.
As a cautionary move to avoid detection, Seth urged Kat to regularly delete the chat log on her computer. Seth did the same on his end, but before emptying the log he would copy and paste their conversations into a separate text file. Left behind were more than eight hundred pages of instant messages between the two of them, documenting a rare, intimate look at the course of their courtship.
This historical record would be incredibly valuable source material for investigators and writers reconstructing what would become a most unusual relationship. It was a relationship that lived in two worlds: one bizarrely spiritual, one dangerously sexual.
Communicating remotely had its obstacles in the McDonough home. Kat had complained to Denise that her father’s habit of unplugging the family’s Wi-Fi at night was keeping her from chatting with friends, so Denise agreed to get Kat a smartphone so she could use its 3G signal to connect directly to the Internet instead of relying on the house’s router.
The phone was an LG model called Optimus and Kat named it “Optimus Prime,” after the robot in the hit movie Transformers. She customized the phone’s sounds so that every time she received a text, the phone said, “Incoming transmission from Autobot headquarters!”
Age difference aside, Kat and Seth found that they had much in common. They were both fans of superheroes and science fiction. Kat had a purple belt in karate. Seth was tickled he’d met a girl who could geek out on science fiction along with him. She was intrigued by his interest in Live Action Role-Playing, in which large groups of people in Tolkeinesque costumes would wage mock combat with foam swords. They both liked video games, fantasy adventures in which players use magic to survive in a world of monsters, evil wizards, and dragons.
Each Monday night Seth would play Xbox games with his friend Andy. The two had met as seventh graders at a summer camp, then had attended Berwick Academy, a private school in Maine. Seth also had a platonic female friend, Peggy,* who sometimes came to game night. He told these friends little about Kat other than he was seeing someone younger. They nicknamed her the “mysterious disappearing dragon.”
—
In the intimacy of their private online conversations, Seth aggressively drew Kat into his fantasy world, telling her all about his alter egos who thrived there.
Seth said his Wild Card persona lived in another spiritual dimension beyond the Veil of Separation between our corporal world and a magical one. The barrier created by the Veil, however, is thin. The powerful entities there can see into our world, predict our futures, even change our destinies. Likewise, we on Earth can sometimes take actions that affect the fates of these beings.
Teaching his new student, Seth said he was psychically “tethered” to Wild Card. He said Scarlet also resided beyond the Veil and was tethered to Kat. He was trying to convince her that the persona that had been in her head, the one she’d used as an emotional escape, was a real spirit living alongside other spirits.
“There is another being with Scarlet, isn’t there?” he asked her.
Though Kat had never previously mentioned any personas except for Scarlet, she told Seth that all of his talk about other spirits had indeed put her in touch with another persona within her. Her name was “Charlotte,” Kat said, and her personality was different from Scarlet’s. Scarlet was a fighter. But Charlotte was more mature, someone who knew how to handle herself without resorting to combat. Seth responded as if he were already aware of this.
“She [Charlotte] has begun invading my astral space too,” he said knowingly. His plan to mingle their personas had begun.
—
After their first date, they made plans the following weekend to see another movie.
“Let me know if something goes wonky with three P.M.,” he typed on his desktop computer in Dover. In her bedroom in Portsmouth, Kat began composing her response. Earlier in the day she had mentioned her deepening friendship with Seth to Denise, a trial balloon designed to gauge her mother’s reaction. It didn’t go as she hoped.
“I’m not sure if I’m even gonna be able to go now. My mum is kinda freaked about the age difference.”
“I’m willing to jump through a hoop or two if it’ll calm her mind,” he wrote.
Seth said he “didn’t do well” in large gatherings because he felt he couldn’t speak freely, but he suggested Kat hang out with some of her friends at an agreed-upon place so they could “cross paths.” Afterward, she could mention bumping into Seth and get her mother used to the idea of him hanging around.
Kat tried it and lied to her mother about how innocently random the meeting was, but Denise’s opinion didn’t improve. Kat was still only seventeen, she wouldn’t be turning eighteen for another three months, Denise said, and she wasn’t comfortable with her daughter dating a twenty-eight-year-old man.
The following Saturday, Kat asked Denise to drop her off at the Bowl-O-Rama in Portsmouth so she could spend the afternoon with her friends. Denise pulled up to the front door, kissed her daughter good-bye, and watched her enter the bowling alley. Inside, Seth loitered by the bowling alley’s arcade games. After waiting until the coast was clear, the pair walked out the building’s side door and resumed dating in secret.
—
When Kat went away for two weeks to Camp CenterStage in Maine, the couple tried to stay in touch. It was Kat’s third year, and she was a “counselor in training,” which meant she could work at the camp the following year as a summer job. While she was away, Seth made some demo reels with the hope of landing parts in more indie films.
Kat waited until lights were out in the camp’s cabins before instant messaging with Seth. When IMing, Seth would greet “Kat and Skar” as if he were chatting with two people simultaneously. Kat always played along.
Seth decided that “Scarlet” should instead be spelled “Skarlett.” That made it more of a warrior’s name. Kat agreed to the “k” but insisted on one “t” when writing out her whole name. From then on, Kat’s alter ego went by “Skarlet” or “Skar” for short.
This name change was not an insignificant suggestion. Scarlet had been Kat’s personal creation. Seth was attempting to put his own stamp on her persona, to in a way make it his own. It was the first of many actions he would take to control the narrative of the Veil and—by extension—control Kat.
After theater camp and a brief family vacation, Kat returned to Portsmouth and readied herself for her senior year. She told her friends she was excited about school starting, especially because both of her younger brothers would be attending Portsmouth High along with her. She said she planned to take pictures of everything and make a scrapbook of all her high school memories.
Kat and Seth kept up the charade that they weren’t seeing each other. When Kat worked her after-school shifts at Target in neighboring Greenland, Seth would park in the store’s lot and wait for her to come out on break. If the night got too chilly, Seth would go inside and pretend to shop in men’s apparel or the video game section. After her shift, they’d retreat to his car and make out. Seth urged Kat to devise plausible excuses for getting out of the house so they could spend even more time together.
Knowing the kind of reaction it would get from Seth, Kat told him how her father had once shoved her in the bathroom doorway; however, she greatly exaggerated the story’s outcome. Instead of the family hugging it out, Kat said the confrontation ended with her nose being broken by the flying door. Seth was furious. Kat got what she wanted out of the lie: the display of a hero wanting to rescue a damsel in distress. Seth chivalrously offered to swoop in and rescue her from her dungeon, just like a knight would.
It’s not clear reading the chat transcripts whether Seth worked to debunk the story, whether he’d asked why no one at school took note of such an obvious injury, whether the doctor’s office notified the police, whether her father was arrested, or why the door swung into the hallway when doors usually swing into rooms. It didn’t matter. Seth got what he wanted too: a clear path for convincing Kat to leave home and move in with him.