Chapter Three
Born on the Fourth of July in 1959, Mark Steven Putnam was the eldest of three children raised in a rural and pleasant New England town, Conventry, Connecticut, about thirty-five miles east of Hartford. His parents, Barbara and Walter Putnam, built a house there in 1968, near the shores of Lake Wangumbaug. Walter, a truck driver for Sears, was a well-respected man in the community. Barbara was a housewife, a good mother, and a religious woman. With her two boys and her daughter, she attended St. Mary’s Catholic Church each Sunday.
The Putnams were hardworking, all-American folks. They spent summer holidays at the lake or at the public beach at Patriot’s Park, and celebrated special occasions at the town’s inviting country-style restaurants.
Mark Putnam went to the Robertson Elementary School, located in the working-class section of town. There he made friends mostly with kids from his own lower income bracket. According to townsfolk who knew him as a boy, he was a quiet kid who did the usual things. He played sports in the park, ate at the local pizza parlor, and attended summer concerts at the nearby outdoor band shell.
But as a youth, Mark had handsome, chiseled features, and his thick long hair and alluring eyes won him praise from women of all ages. People often said he could be a model if he were just a bit taller. In seventh grade, Mark entered the Middle School, located near downtown Coventry, and was a tremendous hit with all the girls. While in junior high, he became an active athlete, playing on the baseball, basketball, and soccer teams.
His junior-high soccer and basketball coach, Peter Sturrock, said Putnam was the best athlete they had, excelling as the captain of the soccer team and co-captain of the basketball team. Sturrock had nothing but respect for his former star player.
“Mark was an overachiever, a real hard worker, kind of driven to do well — and one of the nicest kids I knew,” Sturrock recalled. “He was a leader, highly competitive. In a soccer game, when Mark was goalie, he’d be yelling at his players to get them to move. Out on the sports field he was very aggressive. He had no fear of getting hurt. He’d jump at somebody’s foot to stop a goal. He’d do anything to win.”
However, while he came on strong and overly aggressive on the sports field, Mark seemed quite the opposite in his everyday dealings with people. Off the field, he was reclusive, very cautious in the way he approached teachers and classmates, extremely shy and private about his personal life. Many young women at school had a crush on him, and he got teased about it by fellow players and friends, but he seemed to turn off any interest in that side of his life, giving others the impression that he wasn’t interested in girls.
Sturrock says some of his athletes asked him for advice in personal matters, but not Mark Putnam. Mark listened to Sturrock when the coach addressed the group, but he never sought him out.
“I was a resource to the kids in many ways. They’d ask me about forming relationships, and I would give all the kids advice,” Sturrock said. “I tried to tell the kids to develop respect for all human beings. Not to get caught up in that macho thing of keeping score. We’d talk more about the girls’ feelings. I told them that if you went into a relationship with integrity and honesty, then you’d never have to second-guess yourself. But I don’t recall Mark ever asking me any questions about girls. He just wasn’t the type of kid to talk about it.”
Sturrock thought perhaps Mark’s shyness stemmed from his working-class background. He said it was possible Putnam was uncomfortable with kids from more affluent families.
“I think a lot of Mark’s friends were from a lower socioeconomic background, possibly on welfare, although the Putnams were not on welfare,” Sturrock remembers. “Mark was very comfortable with working-class people. He grew up in a nice little house, but they didn’t have a lot of things. It was very modest. The family was just hanging in there economically. They’d meet their bills.”
According to Sturrock, Mark was one of the kids who got economic assistance for the purchase of athletic uniforms, though he hadn’t asked for help. He’d been too proud to admit that he needed anything, and the coach had had to offer him aid.
When Putnam left junior high, he went next door to Capt. Nathan Hale High School, just like everyone else, but he stayed there for just one school year, 1974-75. He was the number one soccer player, a top all-around athlete and before the year was out, he was awarded an athletic scholarship to the exclusive Pomfret School, a prep school fifty miles from Coventry and a whole world away from Mark’s home.
In addition to its reputation for providing a quality education, Pomfret offered Mark an introduction to the lifestyle of the super rich. He had entered into the world of high society, and as a star athlete in an academy that had fourteen athletic teams — including a championship crew and squash and ice hockey teams — Putnam had it made.
While there, his athletic experience revealed his commitment to hard work. His leadership on the field and his dedication to sports was looked at as a triumph for his school. At Pomfret, Mark played basketball, baseball, and soccer, becoming the soccer team’s captain in his senior year when the team went undefeated and won its division championship. “Captain Putt led the way,” the Pomfret School Bulletin often announced beneath pictures of Mark in his Number 11 soccer jersey. And he received the attention a star athlete is accorded. His father and former coaches would travel each week to cheer him on to victory; his classmates were in awe of him; at home, the whole town was proud of the local boy who “made good.”
Still, Putnam must have felt out of place in such posh surroundings. He was there, after all, not because his family could afford to send him, but because he’d received an athletic scholarship. Since that did not cover the cost of room and board, he was one of the school’s “commuter” students, traveling back and forth from Coventry each day in a car pool. Mark often rode with his good friend, Mike Rodensky. The two of them are pictured together in his senior yearbook sitting atop an Oldsmobile, Mark in a crew-neck sweater, corduroy slacks, and Topsider shoes, looking very much the prep-school kid. He graduated from the preparatory school in the class of 1978, leaving with a strong sense of purpose and the drive to use his abilities to their limits.
Mark went on to the University of Tampa, where he majored in criminology. He made the dean’s list in his first year, and as was anticipated, he excelled in sports, becoming captain of Tampa’s NCAA champion soccer team in his senior year. In fact, in his last two years at UT, the Spartan soccer team enjoyed its best seasons in the team’s history. With Putnam playing defense, the team went undefeated, winning the NCAA Division II championship at Yale University in 1982. It was a dream come true for Putnam, returning to Connecticut and beating the team of the Ivy League institution he had revered his whole life. Nathan Hale had been a Yale graduate, so Mark had grown up in awe of the place. Finally he triumphed there, winning praises from everyone around him.
At Tampa, Putnam wasn’t the typical “jock” who made it with the ladies by throwing his weight around. He was a hard worker, tough on the field; but he remained shockingly quiet about his personal life. No one really heard Putnam brag about conquests or the number of young women he went out with. According to some of his teammates, Mark seemed to exhibit the same qualities his coaches and teachers had noticed years before — aggression in sports and in class but extreme caution about divulging information about his private affairs.
“Putnam was an overachiever, easily the best student on the team,” said his teammate Kenny James. “Mark was an incredibly intense player,” another teammate, Jim Foytlk, recalled, “but off the field, he was almost shy — not glamorous at all.” His soccer coach at Tampa, Jay Miller, said Mark was a silent leader, one who led by example.
“We’d do running through the downtown streets of Tampa at seven A.M. every morning and he’d always win the three-mile race,” Miller said. The standard thing was how close the next guy could get to Putnam; he was so far ahead of everybody. One time, a teammate got real close to him, so Mark sprinted the rest of the way. He just had to be number one. That was his nature.”
Miller said Putnam was a good team captain, respected by all, and he gave one hundred percent to his team. When Putnam dislocated his arm in a game during his junior year, he still insisted on playing, the coach added. “And a lot of times a trainer would go out on the field and pop his arm back in. Then Mark would just go on with the game — he was determined.”
Always well-liked in college, Mark was apparently an all-around nice guy who, by that time, got along well with people from all walks of life and had no trouble fitting in with any group. When it came to women, Miller noted that Mark had plenty, but apparently there was no particular pattern to his taste in girlfriends. Although Mark had come to Tampa from an expensive private high school, that world hadn’t spoiled him. He wasn’t particularly interested in girls with money or girls who were glamorous. As his coach recalls, Mark’s dates came from all different social levels.
“He dated just like everyone else. He always had a girlfriend. Over a four-year period, there were four girlfriends. Some would hang around the soccer team after a game, and from what I could see, there wasn’t any particular type he seemed to stick with. Each girl was different,” Miller said. “None of his former girlfriends had ill feelings for him, because he never jilted them. He was sensitive; that was Mark. But he was a good-looking guy, so he was tough for women to keep hold of.”
While in college, Mark told his soccer coach that his big dream was to be an FBI agent. Majoring in criminology with a 3.0 grade-point average, he was taking courses such as Criminal Investigation, which covered crime-scene search and recording, and Deviant Behavior, which dealt with sexual perversions and violent disorders. And his college career was going smoothly. Mark was making good grades and was becoming popular with both students and teachers.
He did not now have a scholarship to help pay the cost of his education, but his family assisted him and he earned money doing odd jobs around Tampa. Initially, everything was going well for Mark. He was delighted to be in Florida, surrounded by palm trees and bikini-clad girls. It was a whole new experience, a much freer and laid-back existence than the life he had known in the staunch New England surroundings of his youth.
But when he entered his sophomore year, tragedy struck the Putnam household and Mark found himself being called back to Connecticut on a regular basis. His father, Walter, was afflicted with an incurable cancer. By the spring of his sophomore year, Mark left school for two weeks, returning to New England where he watched his father die under the strain of radiation treatments and heavy drug therapy. It was a degrading type of death which hit Mark very hard. According to others, he wasn’t the type of kid who could accept his father’s destruction, yet there was nothing he could do to help him.
Bruce Johnson, a family friend and pastor of the First Congregational Church of Coventry, helped the Putnams throughout the difficult period of Walter’s long and drawn out death, which devastated the entire Putnam family. Johnson saw the Putnams as a close-knit group, faithful to Walter. He said they stayed at his beside in the hospital in Norwich, watching Walter struggle for months.
“It was a type of cancer that required a lot of radiation treatments, but the family was there with Walter the whole time,” Johnson said. “Mark was close to his father. It was difficult for him to see his dad defeated that way. He would return from Florida during his father’s periods of treatment, as I recall. Then, when death was near, he remained at his father’s side.”
Bruce Johnson performed the funeral for Walter Putnam on March 18, 1980. Mark was twenty. His younger brother, Tim, was just seventeen. Years later Johnson would perform Tim Putnam’s marriage ceremony and would baptize Tim’s child, but he never saw much of Mark after Walter’s death. Still attending college in Florida, Mark returned to Coventry every summer, but he remained a shy, quiet, reserved young man, who apparently did not open up much to anyone in that community; Bruce Johnson was no exception.
In August 1982, three months after Mark Putnam graduated from the University of Tampa, he landed a job as clerk at the FBI office in New Haven, Connecticut, the FBI headquarters for the state. Situated on the fifth floor of the Robert N. Giaimo Federal Building, an imposing, all-white edifice with revolving doors, guarded by heavy security and closed circuit cameras, the FBI office required visitors to get official clearance and to wear plastic badges upon entering. A large picture of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924-1972, occupied a prominent place in the reception area. The New Haven office had between forty and fifty employees.
While working there, Putnam wasn’t much noticed by the FBI agents or others higher up in the bureau. He operated the telephone switchboard, working night shifts and weekends from four P.M. to midnight or from midnight to eight A.M. He never exchanged more than casual greetings with his superiors.
But Putnam was biding his time, learning about the FBI through osmosis. It was his way of educating himself in the tricks of the trade. An anonymous co-worker said Mark was conscientious. “He started work early — and stayed late. He was a good person to be around. He was always pleasant, polite, a real gentleman.” Surely, Putnam put the extra time in because he expected it to pay off later. He had already made it clear to friends and family that he wanted to be an agent, to be in law enforcement.
Along the way, Mark Putnam had married a dark-haired beauty named Kathleen, the daughter of a man in real-estate who lived in the Manchester, Connecticut area. The two met just after he began his job at the FBI’s New Haven office, Mark leaving work a bit early one fateful night to go meet Kathy upon his mother’s insistence. Reportedly, Mark received a phone call from his mother, Barbara, who was out listening to some music at a local bar:
“I just met this girl, Mark,” she said emphatically, “I think you better get down here.”
Barbara and Kathy spent over an hour together in the bar that evening waiting for Mark’s arrival. During their initial conversation, the two women evidently got pretty close and had a heart to heart talk, Kathy telling Barbara about what kind of wife she planned to be and what a wonderful mother she would make. The two women quickly became close and at some point in their conversation, before Mark arrived, Kathy turned to Barbara and said, “I’ve always wanted to be a mother. I want to bake cookies and play with the kids.”
Barbara Putnam decided that Kathy was just the girl Mark needed. She wanted to see her son settle down, and Kathy was beautiful, with rich brown hair that made her hazel eyes jump out like stars. Moreoever, she was elegant, with tiny features, an up-turned nose, and perfectly tweezed eyebrows. And she wore very little makeup. A natural beauty.
Perhaps it was love at first sight. Perhaps Mark knew that Kathleen was the person he had been searching for. Certainly she felt that way about him, later telling a reporter he was charismatic, “the kind of guy who just melted you.” At any rate, after a few hours of chitchat, Mark was already telling Kathy his life’s ambitions. “He told me he wanted just two things,” she later revealed. “He wanted a family, and he wanted his kids to be able to say my father’s an FBI agent.”
Just two years younger than Mark, Kathy was the residential manager of a luxury apartment complex, and she was studying to be a paralegal. She believed in long-lasting love. Her parents were sound people. “We fit perfectly,” Kathy later recalled, and she admitted that the two of them had spent that night together.
For the next two years, Kathy and Mark lived together in her luxurious Connecticut apartment. They didn’t socialize much. They were both loners. On weekends, they’d go to New York City for a romantic dinner and would sometimes get tickets to a Broadway show. In the summer, they’d often hit the beaches in Rhode Island. They loved each other, and they planned to achieve their dream: two kids, a house in Florida, and Mark’s becoming an FBI agent.
In 1984, they were married on Easter weekend by a justice of the peace in New York City. However, neighbors in Pikeville remember seeing elaborate wedding pictures of Mark and Kathy, so presumably the couple had a formal wedding celebration at some point, complete with bridesmaids, floral bouquets, and a wedding cake.
Kathy became pregnant very soon after they were wed and gave birth to their daughter, Danielle, at a nearby hospital in Hartford. She quit her position as a resident manager and went to work for an insurance company, leaving that job after a short time. Kathy was not a career woman; she wanted to be a “career mom,” as she repeatedly told family and friends.
Meanwhile, Putnam continued to do good work during his stint at the FBI’s New Haven office, and in January of 1986, when he qualified to take the entrance exam for the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, Putnam left the New Haven office. Reportedly, going from a clerical position to being a special agent is rare, but Putnam was determined to beat the odds. After applying to the Bureau, the IRS, and several police academies, and after a brief stint with Burns International Security in Hartford, Putnam was accepted into the Connecticut Police Academy, but was ousted after just nine days because of an arm injury suffered during his soccer career. Then, in mid 1986, Mark Putnam received word that he had been appointed to the FBI Academy. He was finally on his way to becoming a full-fledged FBI agent.
While Putnam awaited notification to report for the FBI training course in Quantico, he returned to work at the FBI’s New Haven office, in a better job than he had formerly held, and he was also working at a liquor store, trying to build a nest egg for his young family. By the time he was to arrive for training at the FBI Academy, he wanted to be financially ready to make that move.
The FBI Academy is located on the Marine Corps base in Quantico, just fifty miles south-west of Washington, D.C., where the surroundings are heavily wooded. The facility is somewhat similar to a small college, with regular classroom buildings and dormitories. When newly appointed Special Agents report to the FBI Academy, they take an oath and then undergo training for approximately sixteen weeks — classroom instruction, physical fitness testing, and firearms training. While in training, they receive a regular salary.
Agent trainees must demonstrate proficiency in firearms, mastery of defensive tactics, and expertise in simulated arrest situations, which are carried out at the FBI’s notorious Hogan’s Alley, a re-created street, not unlike a Hollywood set. They must also pass two examinations, including one on FBI conduct, rules, and regulations. Special Agent applicants must also undergo a formal interview, a urinalysis for drug use, and a polygraph examination at some point during or prior to their training period.
As would be expected, the regimen at the FBI Academy is grueling. The days begin early, and training sometimes lasts well into the night. It is mentally and physically strenuous. Trainees must do pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, and they must score highly on a one hundred twenty-yard shuttle run and on a two-mile run. They are told that as FBI agents they will be required to relocate and to serve a one-year probationary period under the guidance of a veteran Special Agent.
During his training, Mark Putnam learned that being an FBI agent was not a “nine to five” career. He would be required to work nights, weekends, and holidays. Moreover, the work would be very demanding: he would be required to carry a weapon; he might be called upon to use deadly force to protect lives; and he would be involved in every phase of investigative work, including surveillance, interviewing witnesses and suspects, apprehending fugitives and criminals, collecting evidence, and providing testimony in court.
In addition, Putnam learned that once he had the credentials of an FBI Special Agent, his training in firearms and defensive tactics would not end. Along with the rest of the ten thousand FBI agents operating out of field offices, he would be required to undergo routine firearms training at least four times a year, to do additional work in defensive hand-to-hand combat, to attend two to three sessions in which he would be brought up to date on federal law and recent supreme court decisions.
Mark Putnam graduated from the Academy on October 6, 1986, and was issued his gold FBI badge in the shape of a shield. He was now officially a part of the investigative arm of the US Department of Justice. His dream had come true.
In February of 1987, Special Agent Putnam got his first FBI assignment, to the isolated two-man office in Pikeville, Kentucky. In Pikeville, Putnam would operate under the tutelage of Special Agent Dan Brennan. He would learn how to work in the field, handle informants, and live with danger. His duties would include investigations into public corruption, bank robberies, interstate criminal activity, the apprehension of fugitives, and drug-trafficking matters. Putnam felt challenged.
But Kathy Putnam didn’t like the sound of Pikeville and didn’t want to move there. Mark had originally been assigned to the Louisville office, and Kathy had even gone down there with her dad to look at housing. Then word had come that Pikeville, not Louisville, would be Mark’s assignment.
“Usually,” Kathy later told reporters, “new agents are assigned to a big office.” And she had been sure Mark could be reassigned to the original Louisville location. According to one reporter, Kathy viewed herself as the force in the marriage. She saw herself as the one with the brains and the money, and she felt she was running things from behind the scenes. However, she couldn’t win on this one. Mark wouldn’t refuse the Pikeville post. He told her he looked at it as an opportunity. But Kathy believed it was just that nobody else would go there. She saw Pikeville as the worst possible assignment, a place out in the middle of nowhere, two and a half hours away from the nearest airport.
Allegedly, Kathy phoned the FBI’s D.C. headquarters, insisting that Putnam wasn’t suited for the Pikeville assignment. He was too inexperienced, she told them. He belonged in a large office, not a two-man one. When an FBI official responded that Putnam was the best candidate for the challenging position in Pikeville because of his prior police experience, Kathy reminded him that her husband had merely been a police trainee, never a member of the Connecticut force, but her pleas fell on deaf ears.
Like it or not, the Putnams were on their way to Pikeville. Mark moved there first, purchasing a seven-room house for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars on the “pleasant” side of town. Kathy would follow a couple of months later, having stayed behind to take care of any loose ends in Connecticut.