Now that I had circled my three suspects—Chauncey James, Leron White, and Ricky Watkins—I worked to determine who was most likely to have killed Jorell.
I continued consulting Jorell’s close friend Mike Fuller, who was suffering through his time at the Boonville Correctional Center, smack in the center of Missouri. It was a notorious facility. Before the prison was established in 1983, it was a reform school for boys, one known for punishing members of its underage, African American population for ill-defined offenses such as “incorrigible” behavior by transferring them to a nearby adult prison, where many were raped.
Times had changed, some of it for the better. Mike was able to buy a television set, take a welding class, and communicate with loved ones over email.
But day-to-day life was miserable. The threat of violence hung in the air. “It’s a straight Thunder Dome,” he wrote me. I was shocked to hear he had to pay for much of his own “hygiene,” like toothpaste, soap, and shampoo. Shortly after Mike’s arrival in May 2019, some of his items were stolen out of his cell while he was eating.
“I caught four people running out my cell with my food and hygiene after chow,” he wrote, “and my soft ass cellmate was not standing on shit so I had to step on DAT situation right then and there.”
He’d fought with the offending party, and he was now writing from the hole, where he’d been sent as punishment. He’d been in isolation for two weeks, cut off from everyone. He was missing his family, losing track of the days of the week, and going crazy. He reached out to his caseworker about his mental health issues, and it took her nearly a week to respond, but she arranged for him to get out of the hole for three hours a day and to receive access to an iPad to send messages.
I sometimes wired funds for necessities to him and Montrel, who was in a state prison in Bonne Terre, Missouri. Mike was grateful for it, but it hurt him to even have to ask. “You don’t understand how hard it is when you don’t have a support system,” he wrote. “When you’re forced to do certain things just to survive in here it does something to you. When you have to beg someone for hygiene it makes you feel less than a man.”
He got out of the hole, and regular prison life resumed. From Amazon I ordered books for him that he’d requested, including my own and some urban lit titles. Many of the latter weren’t allowed, however; it turns out the Missouri prison system censors thousands of books. (It won’t disclose the contents of its banned list.) My books Original Gangstas and Fentanyl, Inc. got through, but not long after they arrived he called and asked if I could send them again. Someone had broken into his locker and stolen them.
“Were you able to read them before they were taken?” I asked.
“Yeah. But I was charging people. If someone wanted to see them, I would charge them a dollar to read it.”
Apparently there was a line to rent my books—this made me proud—and each night Mike collected them and put them in a storage locker. But the night before, someone had busted it open and stolen the books. Mike suspected one guy in particular, who’d made it known that he didn’t want to wait his turn.
“So I’m finna go and whoop him, like in an hour,” he went on. “I’m gonna beat him.”
“Don’t do it! I’ll send you new ones,” I said, noting that any altercation would likely get him sent back to the hole.
“That’s not the point, Ben. I got to,” he went on. “Because everybody gonna think I’m a ho.”
“But haven’t you already established yourself in there?”
“Yes…but I told everybody, I made a big announcement—” he was interrupted by the operator saying, This call is from a correctional facility, and may be monitored and recorded “—I’m just going to take off on the person.”
My attempts to calm him fell on deaf ears. Soon afterward he emailed from the hole again. Mike had gone after the guy, they’d fought, and he was again sent to solitary. “In prison, people kill over literature,” he said later.
I planned to see him and Montrel, but then coronavirus shut down visitation. By August 2020 the state prison in Bonne Terre where Montrel was in camp had sixty-six active cases of COVID-19, more than any prison in the state. These people desperately needed care, as well as smart management to prevent the outbreak from spreading. But Bonne Terre was missing more than one-third of its staff, due to the pandemic and also “longer-term, department-wide retention issues,” according to a report. Employees who had a fever weren’t sent home—rather, sergeants just cranked up the AC until their temperature readings lowered.
Back at Booneville, Mike came down with telltale COVID-19 symptoms: fever and a loss of smell and taste. “I really don’t have appetite for anything,” he wrote. Instead of giving him proper care—or even a COVID test—prison officials simply threw him in the hole again, as a form of quarantine. Meanwhile, they continued accepting new inmates from other prisons, many of whom were already infected. They lived in close quarters, making social distancing impossible.
“We’re packed like sardines,” Mike said.
The situation was infuriating, from both a human rights perspective and a public health standpoint. Not long afterward, in February 2021, at a downtown St. Louis city jail, more than a hundred inmates took over a section of the facility, setting fires and smashing windows, though no one escaped. According to inmate advocates, they were protesting conditions inside, including a lack of personal protective equipment. They escaped their cells by jimmying the locks, something that’s common in Missouri prisons, as an inmate told me. “Guys stick socks in the lock jam and close the door, and it looks on the [electronic monitoring system] like it’s closed, and even from the outside the guards can’t open it,” the source said. “But from the inside, if you pull the sock and give it some force, you can open it.”
Around this time, Mike learned bad news: he’d “lost his date.” Though originally scheduled for a March 2021 release, his release had been pushed back to August, owing to fighting and other violations.
He was promptly transferred to the Bonne Terre prison, which, in addition to the COVID-19 problems, was experiencing a rash of drug overdose deaths. This was bad news for Mike, given his history of opioid use disorder. I wondered how drugs could even get into the prison, since it was supposedly locked down for coronavirus.
A source told me that prison officers often supplied them, or that members of the work release program “keistered” bags of heroin or fentanyl (hiding it in their rear ends) upon reentry. Also common were outsiders spraying K2—a chemical known as synthetic marijuana—onto pieces of paper, and mailing them to inmates.
I checked in with Mike’s twin, Montrel Fuller, who was also bouncing from prison to prison. He was now at a state prison in Bowling Green. They had no air conditioning at the facility, and he watched a sixty-something man named Terry Allen die after being callously thrown in the hole at the height of the summer heat after unjustly being accused of being on drugs, Montrel said. (A Missouri Department of Corrections spokeswoman said Allen’s cause of death was unknown.)
Montrel asked me frequently for updates on Jorell’s case, and said he’d recently gotten an “RIP Jorell” tattoo from a guy with a homemade tattoo gun. The device used the motor from a CD player and was somehow powered by the USB port of a prison-issued tablet.
Montrel told me that, during his time in prison, he’d gotten close to a guy called Shard who hung out at the Horse House and knew Jorell. Shard was imprisoned because of a May 2017 incident, when he accompanied an associate who killed a man in Ferguson. Soon after, Shard was shot in the foot at a store nearby. It’s not clear if the events were connected.
Montrel believed Shard could provide good information on Jorell’s case. But Shard was something of a live wire. Montrel described Shard as he did Leron White, my #2 suspect, as a “cowboy,” known for recklessly discharging firearms.
Both Shard and White would be emerging from jail soon, it turned out. But I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to talk to them. These guys didn’t know me, and submitting to an interview with me wasn’t likely to improve things for them.
In fact, this investigation was beginning to spook me. Whenever I interviewed someone, I was worried they would tell others I was on the trail of Jorell’s killer. I was an outsider to this community, and I didn’t always know where peoples’ loyalties lay. I was pursuing someone who thought he’d gotten away with murder, someone with very little to lose, someone who’d likely experienced a lifetime of disappointment and distrust in people. I didn’t know how killing me might play into this man’s calculus. If he thought I was standing between him and his freedom, it might make sense for him to silence me.
This paranoia stayed with me. If Jorell could be killed, I reasoned, then so could I or my loved ones. Sure, my neighborhood was safer than his, but I lived only a short drive away. And it wasn’t just suspect #2 Leron White and the Kinloch guys I feared, it was the Clevelands’ neighbor Chauncey James, suspect #1, and the friends and family members of the Oak Boy Ricky Watkins, suspect #3, and others on the periphery of Jorell’s case. I didn’t know who had secrets, or how far they might go to conceal them.
Walking my dog around my neighborhood, I tried to look past the tinted windows of cars creeping by, wondering who was at the wheel. I imagined slugs piercing my duck-down winter jacket, sending feathers flying. I’d lie awake sleepless, anticipating the bedroom window shattering in a hail of bullets. I thought about my dog, Pippi—our beloved Dalmatian mix rescue—serving as the first line of defense if someone came through the door. I imagined gathering Anna and the boys in the kids’ room, pushing their dresser in front of the door, crawling under the bed, and calling 911. I looked up the odds of bullets hitting various vital organs.
There was so much murder, all over St. Louis. Everyone seemed armed to the teeth.
Many people of interest in this case, like Shard, had the same given names as their fathers, who themselves had gun or drug charges dating back fifteen or twenty years. I had sympathy for these kids, born into untenable situations. On social media they showed themselves living the good life, wearing fine clothes and eating rich food. Their guns, some nearly as large as they themselves, were intended to convey security in lives that fundamentally lacked it. Anyone messing with them would be blown to smithereens, they assured us.
And here I was, trying to expose them. I strongly considered abandoning the search for Jorell’s killer altogether, and telling my editor I was giving up on this book.
There’s a positive side of this kind of fear, however. It forces you to appreciate what you have. One morning I found myself in church with the boys, somewhere we rarely go. They fidgeted in the pews. Afterward I took them out for breakfast at a nearby diner, its walls covered by crayon scribblings. While we waited for our pancakes, the boys, armed with crayons of their own, added to the bedlam. I let them get whipped cream.
Thinking about how quickly life can be taken made me want to squeeze my own boys tight. And so I took a moment to do so.
Still, I was used to this feeling. I’d been experiencing anxiety over my reporting for many years, dating back to my alternative weekly days. Back then our editors encouraged us to be confrontational and edgy, so we stepped on toes. Along the way, I’d managed to piss off the World’s Strongest Man.
The man, whose name I’ll omit, earned the title by winning the championship of the World Powerlifting Organization. He couldn’t wear normal T-shirts because the neck holes were too small, and he exercised by pulling a metal sled full of free weights across a parking lot. I interviewed him at his gym and penned a snarky profile for the Riverfront Times.
The joke was mostly on me—I could only bench-press a small fraction of his total—but I also noted in the piece that powerlifters don’t share the camera-ready physiques of Schwarzenegger-type bodybuilders, and can seem, on first glance, obese. This was unwise, and upon publication he called my cell phone, saying he’d like to meet up so I could repeat that line to his face. I declined, and spent the next few days looking over my shoulder.
Following the 2016 publication of my book Original Gangstas, I feared reprisal from Dr. Dre, the famous rapper and producer. While digging through the LA County court archives, I learned that in the 1980s he assaulted the mother of three of his children, Lisa Johnson, numerous times, including while she was pregnant. I verified these accounts and, as I prepared to publish them, Dre’s high-powered attorney threatened to sue me. This never happened, but I nonetheless feared street justice. Johnson said Dre told her he would “deal with me,” and I wasn’t sure how to interpret that.
My 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc. included even more beehive-kicking. I went undercover inside Chinese companies making and selling fentanyl, and then published the names of the CEOs profiting off the drug. I also broke the story about how the Chinese government was subsidizing the fentanyl industry. Having pieced together a conspiracy that went all the way to the top, I spent paranoid nights wondering if retribution was imminent, and what it would look like.
In both cases, my wife talked me down. Dr. Dre had recently sold his headphones company, called Beats, to Apple for $3 billion, she noted; he had too much to lose. The Chinese drug traffickers lived half a world away. Besides, they more resembled nerdy scientists and businesspeople than drug cartel members. Ultimately, violence was bad for business.
Anna was right; I never heard back from any of these people.
My search for Jorell’s killer, however, was different. This investigation was taking place in our backyard. When I began this project I had no idea who killed Jorell, so it was hard to fear what I didn’t know. But now the suspects had come into focus.
Matthew Allen, the private investigator and gun expert I met at Starbucks, was shocked that I walked around without protection.
“You don’t have a gun?” he asked, incredulous. “This is Missouri!”
At a certain point, I couldn’t let this story go.
I didn’t want to live in a world of murder with impunity. I couldn’t stand the idea of Jorell becoming a statistic. He deserved justice.
And yet, justice was complicated.
Jorell’s killer was most likely a Black man from Ferguson or Kinloch. Was it right for me, as a white person, to try to get him thrown in prison? Especially in the post–George Floyd era, with millions demanding societal change and criminal justice reform, this was a pertinent question.
I wrestled with it, consulting the Clevelands, my family, community advocates, journalists, and others. Most everyone agreed that the concerns of Joe—Jorell’s father and longtime guardian—were paramount. He wanted to know the perpetrator’s identity and motive. He needed to know. Not knowing was affecting his health, he said.
And so I deferred to him. Since, as he made clear, he wanted to find the killer, I would try my best. If I succeeded, and Joe wanted him put in prison, I would try to help with that too. Otherwise, I would back off.
I still desperately wanted the detectives’ notes for Jorell’s case, the information they gathered in their investigation. I suspected this file would contain everything from interviews with eyewitnesses to the make and model of the killer’s car, and information about the suspect they’d arrested, Chauncey James.
I believed this file could help me crack the case. Yet it remained under lock and key.
When I filed a Missouri Sunshine Act request with the St. Louis County Police Department, the case’s “ongoing” nature was given as the reason for my denial. At first this gave me a tinge of optimism; did “ongoing” mean that they had promising leads, that the investigation was still moving at full steam? Could they be close?
I quickly realized, however, that they almost certainly weren’t. Cases are considered “ongoing” until they are solved, even if they aren’t active. Jorell had been dead for three and a half years by now; in reality his case was less “ongoing” than “moribund.”
Again, my mind went to dark places. Did the detectives not care? Why was this case not a priority? In the same way that I was an outsider to Jorell’s community, I was also an outsider to the insular world of police, an organization with its own customs, secrets, and internal priorities. I wanted to motivate them on Jorell’s cause, but couldn’t figure out how to do that.
And it wasn’t just the police, it was the media and the culture at large. If Jorell had been a white girl from Clayton, this story would have dominated nightly news. Tips would have come pouring in. But since he was just another young Black man from North County, everyone shrugged their collective shoulders.
I began to explore back channels. The private investigator Matthew Allen said he had good contacts inside the detectives’ department, and he offered to try to grease the wheels for me. I spoke with other private investigators as well. One claimed he had a “mole” inside the police force, who could potentially get Jorell’s file. This sounded almost too good to be true.
Before hiring a PI, I decided to try one last approach to get the file. A Hail Mary of sorts.
In late February 2020, I emailed a records request to the St. Louis County Police Department, asking to see all cases involving Jorell Cleveland. Even though I’d researched everyone else in his orbit, I had never done a background check on Jorell himself. I’m sure that, deep down, I hadn’t wanted to know the full truth about him. But the time had come and, who knew? Maybe this check would turn up something about his murder. My expectations were low, but it was important to turn over every stone.
Not long afterward the department said my files were ready, and I could come get them.
I’d picked up dozens of similar files in the preceding months, and by now the trip was routine: I parked on the street in downtown Clayton and fed the meter some quarters. I walked the couple blocks to the headquarters of the St. Louis County Police Department, a sturdy, sightly building of brick and stone. I entered and nodded to the three cops overseeing the entry. After putting my keys in a basket, I passed through the metal detector. Inside the records room I took a number, and when it was called, I approached the counter.
But unlike my previous visits to pick up records, this time I was welcomed by an unfamiliar clerk. The woman I usually dealt with was on vacation that week. Her substitute said my records would cost $46.
“How would you like to pay?” she asked.
The price seemed steep, but I gave her my credit card, and she handed me the packet of records, thicker than I’d anticipated. The packet contained five files. The first four were slim and inconsequential, involving cases I already knew about, including the Lil Glen shooting. But then—whoa, Nelly. The fifth was forty-seven pages long.
It was Jorell’s homicide file.
I took the packet to a chair in the waiting room and sat down, my heart beating fast. I opened the file, expecting anything sensitive to be blacked out. But that was not the case. Nothing was redacted, not a single line.
This was it—the document nobody wanted me to see. The whole case! I was holding it in my hands. I glanced around, worried someone would realize their mistake and seize the papers back. I probably should have just left, but I couldn’t bring myself to move until I’d consumed the documents’ contents. The first time through I skimmed the pages quickly, and then I started reading more carefully.
It was all there: the names of the agencies and officers who responded to the original 911 call from Kinloch; the gory details, from entry wounds, to how his body was positioned when it was found, to the bullet shell casing description; the detectives’ interviews with witnesses at the scene, including with me; an anonymous phone tip about the case; information about the guys who stole Jorell’s gun; interviews from the following weeks and months as detectives worked the case; descriptions of cell phone pictures; a marital dispute; an emergency trip to the hospital; the arrest of a suspect; the detectives’ attempts to charge the suspect with Jorell’s murder; the assistant county prosecutor’s decision not to take the case.
Apparently nobody told the substitute clerk that the file was off-limits. It was an unbelievable stroke of good fortune. I sat there reading until my meter expired. And then I kept reading some more. There was so much to take in. The detectives had pursued this case with more effort than I’d realized. Some key information they never uncovered—like a strong motive for Jorell’s killing—but my own reporting filled in the gaps.
By the time I finished reading I felt I knew right then and there who killed Jorell. It seemed crystal clear.
Everything about the case added up for me. There was no doubt in my mind.
I felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted, that I’d found clarity that had eluded me for years. Jorell’s death no longer felt like a random act of the universe. I felt I could ascribe it to one particular person. I was satisfied it had been real and deliberate, the purposeful extinguishing of a life force.