TEN

Until her sentencing, Melinda had been held at the Johnson County Jail in Olathe. Two weeks later, she was transferred to the Topeka Correctional Facility, the state’s only all-women’s prison. Considering her age, otherwise unblemished record, and potential release date, which stood less than four years from her arrival, Melinda was assigned minimum security status.

The bright light of official prison photos gives a high degree of scrutiny to facial features and skin, but Melinda looked almost unreasonably happy. Her shoulder length hair was well-kept, but no longer streaked with blonde, and her face was nearly aglow with a friendly smile. Given her almost childish laugh and behavior at her sentencing, it seemed Melinda would consider it bad form to show anything but a pleasing façade to the world.

Melinda was living in a dormitory-style setting with mostly non-violent drug offenders many years younger than her who looked to her for motherly advice. She was still as self-obsessed and self-pitying as always, forever in search of the loophole that would get her home before her anticipated parole date of April 29, 2010, but she was doing what little she could to better her small corner of the world. She led a Bible study class, and used her full weekly allotment of phone time speaking to the girls in the dental office, her children, and her husband, who visited her regularly. She seemed lifted up by an unseen force, and if she had doubted that force was God immediately after her conviction, there could be no doubt now that she was a true believer, someone whose spirit has been left fully intact. God would one day fairly soon allow her to return to Ohio, where she hoped to pick up where she left off, though with her children five years older, much will have changed.

As for Morrison, he rode the press attention that surrounded him after the trial straight to the office of Kansas Attorney General. The press took even greater notice when, on his way home from his new office in Topeka in his pick-up truck, Morrison saw a Doberman pincher attacking an old woman’s little dog and, screeching to a halt, dove on the bigger dog, allowing the woman to pull her pet to safety. He did not call a press conference, but the news leaked when the woman called the media herself. It was political theater of the most favorable kind imaginable. Here was a man who had managed to switch to the Democratic Party and still trounce a Republican in a state President Bush had carried with well over 60 percent of the vote. Now he was saving old ladies’ dogs and not even using his gallantry for political gain.

The whispers about “Governor” Paul Morrison grew louder.

And then, a year into his term, Morrison was accused of having an affair with a married woman named Linda Carter, in his old office, where the defeated attorney general, Phill Kline, had been appointed to fill Morrison’s old post. Morrison was even accused of spying on his arch-nemesis Kline through Carter, digging for information about the controversial abortion case that was still on-going. And, as if any other tawdry details were needed, he was also accused of demanding Carter get a tattoo that matched his. Carter sued for sexual harassment and Morrison, who with his wife taught marriage counseling at their Catholic Church, denied all her accusations except for the affair. Nevertheless, he left office and political life in disgrace only weeks after the accusations surfaced.

“I have held others accountable for their actions, and now I must be held accountable for my mistakes,” said Morrison in his resignation, just as a criminal investigation was getting underway. Kansas had not seen a fall from grace as dramatic and swift, it was noted darkly in state political circles, since Mark Mangelsdorf woke one morning in a multi-million dollar home and went to bed in a prison cell that night.

Morrison’s bad luck was self-inflicted, but Wall and James saw luck run the other way because of forces out of their control. The two had the best cold-case heads to display on the figurative mantle in Olathe, and their future posts seemed sure to reflect that. The Olathe Police Department, however, soon became fixated on an automatic rotation in posts, and Wall and James lost out. James was moved to internal affairs, the departmental equivalent of eternal damnation. Wall got put in charge of giving lie detector tests, which was as ignoble an appointment as James’s because most of the tests were given not to suspects but to potential hires, to see what secrets lay in their past. Those who knew Wall as a man who could sell a false bill of goods as well as anyone—a detective who had tricked suspects with lines of total nonsense—could only laugh at the irony of him now being set loose in search of verbal inconsistencies in others. If you asked, Wall would say he was always in the business of inconsistent stories.

“It takes a bullshitter to know a bullshitter,” Wall said with a crafty smile. “But a machine helps.” For a detective who operated on little more than a hunch, a lie detector was a little too scientific a tool for comfort, and the only knocking on doors in Wall’s foreseeable future would come from those potential employees arriving at Wall’s office to be grilled by a machine.

Both James and Wall hoped that in their future there would be one more door for them to knock on—the one to Mark’s prison cell. They wanted, more than anything, to hear an unqualified admission of guilt, a complete account of the killing from Mark’s own mouth, in Mark’s own words. They wanted an accounting of the thought processes that led a pious young man to believe murder was an acceptable solution in the eyes of God. They wanted, too, to hear an apology that rose to the level of the act he had committed. The fact that he had not gone far enough in his admission in court could still turn the two sour. They planned to ambush Mark with a prison visit, telling him they would haunt him at all of his future parole hearings unless he came totally clean. Over two years after the sentencing, they still hadn’t gotten around to that yet, busy as they were with their new assignments.

The first photo of Mark in prison, taken during his formal processing, showed a frightened man. Against the backdrop of a cinder-block wall, in an unforgiving bath of whitish light, Mark’s shoulders were rolled slightly forward, giving him the look of a man reduced in size, his courage failing. His eyes were wide, even bulging, as though he was trying to ward off whatever bad was coming. There was no bravado, no armature, no posturing.

Mark, for a change, was in harm’s way. And he knew it.

After languishing in the county lock-up for two weeks after his sentencing, Mark was first taken to Kansas’ most modern prison, El Dorado, in an area of Kansas along the Walnut River known only for refining oil and interning prisoners. In addition to housing the state’s most notorious inmates—like Dennis Rader, a church president, civic advocate, and convicted serial killer—El Dorado is where all inmates are taken to be classified. At the Reception and Diagnosis Unit, a battery of psychological and medical tests, as well as the cataloguing of professional histories, is performed. Mark was held in solitary confinement during the diagnosis process in a cell more stifling by the day in the emerging heat. He joked on the phone to friends that he felt “like a Tandori chicken.”

Despite the heavy air and loneliness, Mark’s period of solitary confinement held its advantages. At least he was on his own and safe. As prison adversaries go, sexual predators were not Mark’s first potential enemy. At his size, Mark had the look of a man who could fend for himself, not one who was young and vulnerable. Of greater concern were the extortionists, those who knew from news accounts that he was a man of means and could lean on him to have his family make their canteen accounts flush—or else. Then there were those with whom one came into contact on a daily basis who, with match-strike tempers that had defined their lives and ruined the lives of others, could attack you for any random cause. It could be for slights real or imagined, or for the betrayal of one of the patchworks of behavioral standards in prison that did not come naturally to a man from privileged circles, like Mark.

While in El Dorado, Mark was assigned to kitchen detail, which meant his classification was, as he expected, going well. Mark had a lifelong interest in baking, but he had no experience baking chocolate-chip cookies on such a large scale. A small population of qualified inmates worked kitchen detail, leaving their cells early in the morning to work and coming back when others were out on less glamorous detail, such as mopping the hallways in an endless loop, a Sisyphean task performed as industrial-strength cleanser stripped out your nostrils.

As glad as Mark was to get kitchen detail, nothing in maximum security was simple. He was one of several given a key to a room storing flour and sugar. Once, he was threatened by a large, muscular inmate to give up the key, but he refused. Later, when bags were stolen, the man was blamed for the crime, and he thought Mark was the one who had turned him in.

One day, while Mark was talking on the pay phone to his father, the man approached him.

“What’s up?”

Mark looked at him. “I’m on the phone,” he said.

The man leaned in closer. “I said, ‘what’s up?’”

Mark had few options. He could fight the man to a double loss—he would get written up for fighting, imperiling his classification and case for parole, and he would lose the fight. Mark started talking, ultimately convincing the man that someone else had turned him in (Kristina maintains Mark did not turn snitch). Mark later joked that he had used every ounce of his business negotiation skills to get out of that situation.

El Dorado was a good place for Mark to find his footing. He had regular weekend visits from Kristina. Eric, who was one year old, was too young to know what was happening. Charlotte, who was four, happily played with her sticker books on the flight to Kansas and in the jail’s visiting area. While Kristina was disappointed that Charlotte did not rush to her father’s arms the first time she saw him in weeks, it was hard not to feel her heartstrings pulled when, as they were ready to leave, Charlotte asked if “Daddy could please pretty please” just walk her to the car.

Within a month, Mark was transferred to Lansing, the oldest prison in the state and the one where, early one morning, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith were dangled off the end of a rope until their feet tilted downward in the highest form of Kansas justice. Lansing had changed since the In Cold Blood killers had been hung there. Its name had been changed from the Kansas State Penitentiary to the Lansing Correctional Facility, with a majority of its facilities dedicated to medium and minimum security wings. Mark was assigned to live in a medium security dormitory that resembled a military barrack instead of a prison. The only downside was that, because of greater television privileges, more prisoners were aware of his case and standing. He was warned to expect the extortion attempts he had skirted in maximum security, but bluffed his way out of tense situations by claiming he had spent every last cent on his defense. His fellow inmates had more to lose than those in maximum and thus were less likely to risk a physical confrontation. Mark was thankful that he was still a convincing man.

The ruse about having nothing but lint in his pockets worked for Mark. In truth, because he had spared himself the exorbitant costs involved with a trial, Mark had a large amount of savings and stock options left from his high-salaried jobs. Kristina, with her affluent background and six-figure salary, likewise helped. She bought a home in Lansing, only a half hour from the Kansas City airport, and established regular weekend visits as part of a family routine. A later official prison photo of Mark showed him more at ease, having grown a goatee. That look of puzzled fear was gone.

In January, 2007, barely more than six months after pleading guilty, Mark was transferred to the minimum security wing at Lansing. This meant he had the privilege to work outside the facility, quite a coup for a convicted murderer only halfway through the first year of his sentence. These were labor-intensive work details for most—essentially chainless chain gangs—yet fate smiled on Mark again when he earned a plum assignment working in private industry.

Mark worked “off campus” at a firm called Impact Design. The company designed and manufactured clothing, such as shirts and hats, and earned tax advantages for putting inmates to work. Five percent of Mark’s wages were garnered by a fund to benefit crime victims, though in something of a financial irony, 10 percent was held for the benefit of Mark’s own retirement, an assurance against inmates dying in destitution. At first, Mark performed menial tasks, but he increasingly took on a greater role advising management. Before long, the company started securing accounts from businesses like Tricots St. Raphael, owned by Perry Ellis. Management couldn’t believe a Harvard MBA had fallen into their laps from behind the prison walls, though by that time Mark did not technically live behind a wall.

When Impact decided to move to Johnson County, of all places, Mark was forced to resign, since a prisoner could not work for a firm headquartered in the county in which he had committed his crime. It was a setback, but those who knew Mark had little doubt that he would regain his footing.

By this time, a third photo of Mark had been taken by the Kansas prison system. It showed a man comfortable in his own skin and surroundings. Looking like a veteran of the penal system, Mark had a close-shaved head and glasses. Stretching his neck up, Mark was back to his customary position of looking out, and looking ahead—no longer a man scared of what might be lurking behind him. And why not? In front of him lay the probability of an affluent future in a fancy suburb with a loving, supportive family. He is eligible for release on May 7, 2011.

After giving out the protest fliers the day of the sentencings, John Harmon made a last visit to David’s grave in Oak Lawn Cemetery in Olathe. He had gone two decades without seeing it and probably would never see it again. The distance between Chili and Olathe was too great. A church member had at one point offered to finance a move of David’s body to Chili, but John said David had lived his life “right with the Sweet Jesus,” and it was better to let him end his journey where he was. John understood why David had moved to Olathe to begin a new life.

The city had been changed inexorably thanks to that cascade of evangelicals David had been fortunate—and unlucky enough—to be part of. Olathe was, with George W. Bush in the White House, right at the center of the ascendancy of a conservative Christian America. This was what David had been promised when he was packing his bags to leave Chili.

The displacement of those lonely farmers in a fledgling Olathe was a distant memory. Farmers Insurance and Honeywell call Olathe home, along with dozens of companies that dot the numerous corporate and industrial parks in the city. In 2008, Money magazine ranked Olathe as the eleventh best place to live in America, up two notches from 2006, with a staggeringly low three-personal-crime incidents per every one thousand inhabitants, one of the lowest in the nation.

The spire of the College Church of the Nazarene still pierces the sky more noticeably than anything else around it. MidAmerica Nazarene College, not a generation old when Mark and Melinda first shared whispers in the dean’s office, was now called MidAmerica Nazarene University, with fewer restrictions these days, drawing great minds not only from across America but around the world. New buildings had sprung up like wildflowers, and the student body had increased almost tenfold since its inception. Sante Fe, the main drag and the well-marked former stagecoach trail where missionaries, trappers, traders, prospectors, and hustlers of every stripe had walked, was now a modern thoroughfare with a Chuck E. Cheese, a Starbucks, and one of the city’s two Wal-Marts.

So wholesale was the change that there was no longer any discernable tension between the evangelicals and those old-time farming families. The housing stock had improved since then, quite markedly, with cul-de-sac upon cul-de-sac laid out with perfect geometric certitude, without the architectural and landscaping challenge of hills. Olathe, it was now said, was not named for the Shawnee Indian word “beautiful” or “duplex,” but “another new evangelical church on the corner.”

Like Melinda, Mark Mangelsdorf will one day soon leave Kansas for a second time. And for a second time, he will likely return to the higher echelons of society as a perfected soul who has paid for his crime and who is at peace with his God. In this cold-blooded business, one errant act, even one as brutal as the murder of David Harmon, does not have to define a life.