Jorell’s close friend Mike Fuller and his twin brother, Montrel, were both being charged in the same 2017 robbery, but their cases were separate. The charges Montrel faced were more severe, since he had allegedly planned the crime, along with a woman named Christina Reed.
I met Mike and Montrel at the St. Louis County Courthouse on March 8, 2019, to offer support on a particularly fraught day. They were nervous. Reed had just been sentenced to fifteen years, and Mike and Montrel were about to learn what sort of plea bargain their lawyers had negotiated.
Mike arrived at 9:00 a.m., clad in an unlaundered white jacket and chewing on Starburst candies. He was followed by his lawyer, a burly middle-aged man named Anthony Muhlenkamp. In a small conference room, Muhlenkamp lectured Mike about money he owed him, before imparting the news: The prosecution was offering five years in prison. With good behavior Mike would do 40 percent of that, minus time already served. All told he might do less than two years.
Of course, Mike didn’t want to spend any time in prison at all, and they discussed the pros and cons of taking the plea. The lawyer believed going to trial was too risky; I wondered if he just didn’t want to spend more time on Mike’s case, especially since Mike still owed him money.
While Mike mulled his options, Montrel’s lawyer came into the room, a thin guy with a hipster aesthetic reminiscent of the actor Adam Scott. He told Montrel the prosecution was offering a favorable plea deal, similar to Mike’s, but under one condition—that Montrel submit to a drug test. Staying drug-free was a condition of his parole.
The catch was that Montrel needed to submit to the test here in the courthouse. Right now.
As identical twins, Mike and Montrel are hard to tell apart at first glance. Montrel is doughier, with a hair-trigger temper and a fierce intelligence. When he’s feeling philosophical he talks in thick, dense slabs of ideas, and when he’s under pressure he speaks in a higher register, making his voice sound threatening.
“I’m not going to pass,” Montrel said, standing up and growing agitated. “They’ll put me in jail right now.” The lawyer asked him to sit down. Fleeing the scene was far worse than failing the drug test, the lawyer insisted. “It’s best to take your chances.”
But Montrel wasn’t convinced. He grudgingly followed his lawyer out of the room to discuss the idea more, but quickly returned by himself. In a huff, he began throwing his belongings into his backpack. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Mike. “I just smoked some weed.”
I chimed in, speculating that if he only had weed in his system, it might not be a big deal. St. Louis County’s recently elected prosecutor Wesley Bell—a reformer who rode into office on a wave of outrage after the officer who killed Michael Brown wasn’t charged—had announced that his office would no longer prosecute small marijuana charges. Even if this didn’t apply directly to Montrel’s parole, there was a chance the judge could be lenient, right? Again, I wasn’t a lawyer, but running from justice seemed like a bad idea.
Mike too tried to discourage him. “C’mon,” he pleaded.
But Montrel could not be convinced. He argued back, his voice growing so loud that people looked at us through the conference room window.
Montrel zipped up his backpack and stormed out. Mike—who was his ride—clearly didn’t want a scene, and felt loyal to his twin. “I can’t leave my brother,” he told me, shrugging his shoulders and following Montrel.
I sat there for a few moments, stunned by what seemed like poor decision-making. When I finally got up to go after them, they were gone. Montrel’s lawyer soon returned, frowning at Montrel’s absence. He told me that, fortunately for Montrel, the favorable plea deal wouldn’t be immediately rescinded after all. He had until March 13—five days away—to turn himself in and submit to the drug test.
I called Montrel to tell him this, but he didn’t answer. We finally connected on the morning of March 13. He regretted his dash from justice, but said he’d been in touch with his lawyer and planned to mitigate the damage by turning himself in to authorities later that day. He had until 4:00 p.m.
Instead of hanging up the phone to prepare for his prison stint, Montrel turned ruminative. “How’s your Jorell investigation going?” he asked.
I told him I was focusing on the guys from Kinloch. I talked about the Horse House, the Gutter Crew House, and Leron White, someone who claimed to be Jorell’s friend but also may have lifted his prized gun off his dying body. I had several puzzle pieces, but they weren’t adding up to a coherent picture. Something wasn’t right.
Montrel listened while I laid all of this out. Finally, he spoke up.
“Nobody’s being honest with you about Jorell,” he said, before pausing. “I don’t know why everybody wants to sugarcoat shit. I’m twenty-eight years old, I’m finna be thirty. I gotta go to prison for five years of my life. I’ll give you the truth, even though it’s gonna come with a lot of backsplash on me.”
I took a deep breath. I had no idea what he was about to say.
“Did Joe show you the autopsy report about what was in Jorell’s system before he died?’
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll give you the truth. I’ve been getting high since I was nineteen years old. Heroin. And Jorell was using heroin too.” He paused. “I ain’t trying to diminish his name. I loved that little dude. I loved him like a brother.”
Like many African Americans, Montrel pronounced “heroin” as “hair-ON.” I found myself focusing on this detail. I wasn’t ready to absorb what Montrel was telling me.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because I watched it go down,” said Montrel. Jorell was introduced to heroin by people hanging around the Cleveland house, he went on. Not Jorell’s family members, but by a group of twenty-somethings, whose names he didn’t want to reveal.
Montrel said Jorell joined the group in taking Xanax pills and snorting heroin. Though Jorell “wasn’t no junkie,” Montrel said, his drug use grew increasingly problematic. He began purchasing heroin in Kinloch for $100 per gram. One time after drinking and using heroin he climbed into the bathtub and began screaming, fearing overdose.
Jorell’s heroin use and his increasingly hotheaded behavior seemed linked, others told me. “He started picking up bad habits,” said Jorell’s sister Peaches later. “He wanted to fight with me all the time, over the smallest things ever. It be like, a pair of shoes on the floor, and he would be yelling, like, ‘Why this stuff all up on the floor? Y’all just nasty, y’all don’t clean up!’”
“Even me and him got into it once,” Montrel went on. “So bad.”
On the night in question, not long before Jorell’s death, his girlfriend Danielle was staying over with him at the Cleveland house. She had just gotten off her shift at St. Louis Fish & Chicken Grill, and it was payday. Danielle had both her and Jorell’s payouts in her purse; the total was around $200, in cash. When they woke up the next morning, it was gone.
Montrel vehemently denied he’d taken the money. He claimed the culprit was a mutual friend they’d been hanging out with the night before. But Jorell was unconvinced. “He was pissed off,” said Montrel. “But I was pissed off too, because he was accusing me. I told him that I was gonna grab him and beat him like a child.”
As their argument escalated, Jorell grabbed one of his guns and followed Montrel into Mike and Iesha’s room. “He pulled the fucking trigger!” Montrel said. Fortunately, the gun didn’t have its clip in, and no bullets were fired. “He was trying to scare me. Jorell had reached a point in his life, he wasn’t taking no bullshit from nobody.”
Montrel actually respected him for this, and, as unlikely as it sounds, the pair quickly reconciled. The very next day, in fact, Montrel was once again at the Cleveland house. He had a job interview, and although Mike wasn’t home, Montrel had come to borrow a pair of his brother’s black pants. Montrel went upstairs to retrieve the slacks, only to encounter Jorell once again.
“What’s up ’Trel,” Jorell said, startling him. Standing at the top of the stairs, Jorell wore a sheepish expression and apologized for the gun incident the previous day.
“Man, we ain’t even gotta talk about that,” Montrel responded. “You don’t have to apologize. We brothers.”
They patched things up, and before long each confirmed that he was carrying drugs; Montrel had heroin, and Jorell had marijuana. To cement their reconciliation, they shared their stashes and got high together.
“We did, like, a whole half a gram [of heroin], just me and him,” Montrel told me. “And we smoked that blunt. He helped me find the iron to iron my pants.”
It was a bonding experience, Montrel remembered with both nostalgia and sorrow, since it was the last time the two of them ever spoke. Soon the talk turned to their drug suppliers. Montrel had a contact who supplied him with heroin, in St. Louis proper. But Jorell had his own heroin source, in Kinloch. In recent months he’d been going there to buy the drug.
“I gotta tell you the truth, Ben,” Montrel told me, almost apologetically. “Everybody else has been giving you the runaround.” The narrative about why Jorell was in Kinloch at the time of his death, that he was on his way to buy chains for his brother Jermaine and his girlfriend Danielle? There may have been some truth to that, Montrel said. But another reason Jorell was in Kinloch, the main reason, was to buy heroin.
It’s not clear where he got it—likely the Horse House or the Gutter Crew House—but Jorell seems to have purchased and snorted heroin right before he died.
This is what Montrel believed. And though Montrel didn’t know who killed Jorell, he believed that the transaction cost him his life.
I absorbed all of this silently over the phone. When Montrel finished I thanked him for talking to me. I asked him to stay in touch while he was in prison, and we hung up.
Over the coming weeks the Fuller brothers learned their fates. Montrel actually didn’t turn himself in the day of our call—more than a month later he was pulled over on a driving infraction and taken in on a fugitive warrant. This seems to have badly hurt his case, as he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Mike, in contrast, received only five.
During this same time period, I processed the new information about Jorell.
When I’d heard that he was violent and reckless with firearms, I hadn’t believed it, at least at first. But when Montrel said Jorell was on heroin, it immediately rang true.
I’d spent a lot of time around users of heroin, fentanyl, and other opiates for my book Fentanyl, Inc. In retrospect, I recognized the signs in Jorell. He’d often been moody around me, and prone to nodding off at odd times. Back then I’d reasoned he was staying out too late and his home life was chaotic, which is why he needed to catch up on sleep when he came to our house.
The truth is, I didn’t want to see what Jorell’s behavior was actually telling me. When I observed how carefully he guarded the contents of the locked Lacoste man purse he brought to our house, I assumed it contained weed. But maybe it contained heroin too.
Later, I received Jorell’s autopsy. Just as Montrel said, it confirmed that he died with opiates in his system.
The idea of a young man, a teenager, lost to heroin, was as sad as anything imaginable. I fell to the depth of despair upon learning that Jorell had turned to hard drugs. I walked around numb for days. It felt like an after school special come to life, or the kind of film reels we used to suffer through in junior high, with bad actors screaming hysterically. I never thought someone so close to me would fall victim to heroin, never imagined I would become a character in one of these melodramas, playing the part of the clueless mentor completely out of touch. I’d bee-bopped through my daily life, oblivious, while the warning signs were all around me.
I felt anger toward my own stupidity. Before writing Fentanyl, Inc. I’d been largely ignorant of the opiate epidemic. No one I knew did heroin when I was growing up. But by the new millennium everything had changed. The overprescription of pills like Oxycontin had kicked off the plague, which segued into a heroin problem when patients’ prescriptions expired and they sought opiates on the black market. Now, most of the heroin sold in the US is cut with fentanyl, a much deadlier drug, and this problem has hit low-income Black communities particularly hard. It’s likely that the “heroin” being sold in Kinloch was actually heroin mixed with fentanyl.
I’m not sure if Jorell was influenced by peer pressure, or if his life was just so miserable that he used heroin to feel better. Besides the everyday indignities of life in poverty he experienced, he was also failing out of school. Further, he’d recently flunked an Army practice quiz, which meant his dream of serving in the armed forces was fading.
I should have recognized the warning signs. If I’d known he was taking heroin, I could have supported him and directed him toward services like medication-assisted treatment, which is provided for free by recovery clinics. He could have taken medicine like buprenorphine or naltrexone, which helps opiate users quit. He would have stood a chance.
Now it was too late. It just felt like another way I’d failed him.
Despite my self-pity, I made a strong effort to push those feelings aside. If I was going to solve Jorell’s murder, I had to remain objective.
And so I cleared my head and looked into Montrel’s theory—that buying heroin in Kinloch led to Jorell’s death.
It made a certain sense. In fact, it addressed an issue that had long been nagging at me.
The issue was this: nobody understood how Jorell could have been killed at point-blank range. That’s because Jorell had grown so paranoid in his final months. Fearing enemies were all around him, he didn’t let potential adversaries close enough to do him harm—not without pulling out his own weapon first.
That meant he must have been killed by someone he trusted, many believed. “Whoever it was, Jorell had to know him,” his sister Rece told me. “He was always aware of his surroundings.”
But if he were high on heroin, that changed everything. His judgment would have been clouded. His reaction time would have slowed.
He would have been too impaired to properly defend himself. If an enemy crept up on him in this state, he would have been too high to realize it.
So, who pulled the trigger? I still didn’t know.
Leron White’s role in this remained difficult to understand. It seemed possible that he, or someone close to him, had supplied Jorell with heroin. And it seemed even more likely that he’d taken the pistol off Jorell’s body, or at least been there when it happened.
White certainly didn’t look good in all of this. But interviewing him would be difficult. He was in prison, for one thing, and the coronavirus pandemic had shut down visits. Plus, I didn’t want him to know I was working on this story. Who knew how he would react? Even if he hadn’t killed Jorell, he had a lot to lose, and every reason to be suspicious of a random white guy who wanted to talk about a murder.
Fortunately Mike and Montrel were doing their own investigating. Inside the penitentiary system they doubled down on their efforts to solve Jorell’s case and had great access to key figures.
When it comes to sleuthing, the incarcerated are often better informed than those on the outside. That was particularly true in this case. Many of my “people of interest”—including some of those whom I suspected of killing Jorell, and associates of those suspects—were on the inside, either at the St. Louis County Jail, Missouri state prisons, or federal prisons.
The Fuller twins had talked to some of them at the St. Louis County Jail following their arrests for robbery, before their mother posted their bond. In late 2017 they encountered Leron White there, who was also locked up while awaiting trial.
It was awkward, considering many believed White killed their close friend Jorell. Nonetheless, Mike didn’t hesitate to ask him tough questions.
“I heard you guys had something to do with my little brother getting killed,” Mike said.
“I didn’t do it,” White insisted, adding that none of his Kinloch associates from the Gutter Crew House or the Horse House were responsible either. “We didn’t have nothing to do with his death, I swear.”
At another point, Montrel and White became cellmates. “I was in a cell with Leron for, like, a month and a half,” Montrel told me. “Me and him played cards together a few times. He used to cheat.”
To Montrel, Leron White also contended he hadn’t harmed Jorell. How could he have? The two of them were friends, he insisted.
Indeed, by all accounts, White and Jorell spoke warmly of each other. White even attended Jorell’s candlelight memorial service following his death.
And yet, according to Mike, White admitted taking Jorell’s 1911.
“He said that he did steal the gun from off Jorell body,” Mike said, “because he didn’t want people to look at Jorell as a [criminal]. He said he wanted to give the gun back to us, but he ended up getting locked up around that time.”
This was one hell of a tortured story. I found it difficult to believe. Mike and Montrel also thought it sounded suspicious.
Still, White maintained his innocence in Jorell’s killing and even offered an alternate theory. The real killer, he claimed, didn’t come from Kinloch at all, but from Oak Avenue in Ferguson. The culprit was someone with a hair-trigger temper they all knew, who’d had a recent, acute beef with Jorell.
Mike Fuller prides himself on being someone who doesn’t suffer fools. He recognized that Leron White had a strong incentive to lay blame elsewhere.
And yet, in spite of himself, he couldn’t help but believe that White was correct.