"I once read an interview with Kurt vonnegut in which he talked of his disenchantment with scientific truth because, quote" ""we dropped it on Hiroshima," unquote." "Vonnegut's metaphor is apt." "The truth is no flickering Hawaiian lantern." "It is searing white light." "It scorches roaches and saints alike." "It can flash a liar to cinders and in the same stroke, smoke the poor bozo next to him, who all the while thought that God was on his side." "We knew for some time that this area was ripe for wildfire." "It had been dry for years and it was so hot." "It was like a hundred degrees for, you know, every day for three weeks." "And on the one particular night then there was huge thunderstorm activity and a number of fires got started in the hills that are rugged hills that are just to the South of town." "It started as just a little bit of smoke on the horizon in the morning time," "But to the South you could see this ominous cloud of smoke rising in the distance." "My first call was to go out to the city dams and keep people back from the helicopters." "I remember thinking to myself, that's three or four Miles South to here, and this is ten Miles South of town, what's the big problem here?" "Well, the next thing I knew, the fire's coming in on town." "It looked like something out of a monster movie." "I was sitting up on the South side of town on a hill watching it come." "And it would just-- Kept marching towards town." "And these things throw debris everywhere, debris that's on fire, so they can just spread it like a virulent disease." "It was pretty exciting to be driving down the highway and look over to the side and just see flames leaping from tree to tree going as fast as we were back toward town." "I'm on the roof with a hose because embers dropping in our neighborhood." "You could hear the fire just" " I mean that crunching, that terrible voracious crunching sound as it came over the hills." "We could see it blazing all around us." "The whole town was evacuated all the way to sixth street." "We had our car packed." "We were ready to go." "A couple of people said they didn't want to go." "I said, "well step outside here for a minute"..." "And they'd say, "I'll be right with you."" "There's just no stopping this thing, but they did stop it." "They had 600 firefighters all along here with all the equipment they had." "Of course, things are still smoldering for days and days." "It looks kind of like the area of the fires of mordor where they've struck." "It was wild." "It's probably a once-in-a-lifetime-experience to be that close to a really big fire that was threatening a town like ours." "This is six years, almost seven years later so you can get a faint idea of what it looked like." "A man named Steven hardier, a math Professor, a theoretical mathematician, came here toward the end of that summer just after these fires." "He took a position as the math Professor at chadron state college." "Three months later, Steven haataja disappeared without a trace." "Ironically, fire marked the beginning of his new life in chadron and it also marked the end of his life... in chadron." "It was widely reported that the cause of death of Dr. haataja was smoke and soot inhalation combined with thermal injuries, that is true." "In layman's terms, that means that Dr. haataja unfortunately burnt to death." "Additionally, there were wrappings around Dr. haataja's ankles around his torso his midsection connecting him to a tree." "Ooh." "Like I said, when I first got here," "I come in up on top of this hill and I was looking down into this area here." "I didn't know there was a body." "I thought maybe they'd already taken him out, until you got up close, and started looking and talking to some of the investigators." "Then-- then it became, you know, obvious that there was something not quite right." "I don't know" " I don't know enough about the case to sit here and say that he was murdered, but I don't believe that he was there alone." "I think the suicide scenario fits for me." "Obviously, it makes perfect sense that he would kill himself by tying himself to a tree and lighting himself on fire." "That-- that doesn't make any sense to me at all." "None." "If it was suicide, it would have had to been assisted suicide." "Someone had to help him get where he was take the things he did, do the things he did, you know, and-- and that's" "Either that or someone killed him." "It's time now for the latest entry in our series "three books."" "Here's author Marion winik." "Poe Ballantine proves that there's still a member of the beat generation wandering among us, a ridiculously gifted writer, who could tell a good story about nothing." "Ballantine has made sure he doesn't have to by spending most of his adult life as an itinerant writer, cook, day laborer, gambler, and moral philosopher." "Ballantine is unflappable, hilarious, and so observant of his fellow men and women that his half-cocked hobo lifestyle cannot be mistaken for anything but a spiritual path." "My name's ed Hughes, I'm an author." "I'm a writer, and my pseudonym is poe Ballantine." "Right, that's good enough I think as a start." "I've" " I published my first book with hawthorne, in 2001 I believe it was, and then we've had four books ever since." "A fifth book, this one we're talking about now." "It's about my neighbor Steven haataja who taught for three months at the local state college here and disappeared one day, just before the end of the semester, and was found..." "In my opinion murdered." "And I've put my full time, what's amounted to six years now, into the exploration, the examination of this profound and very disturbing mystery." "I used to use a lot of cilantro." "I use just regular parsley now because it's got so much more um... it's one of those super foods." "I'll throw a bay leaf in and I think we're ready to go." "Sound's rolling camera is speeding, and action when you're ready." "Uh, that's chadron, population 5,600." "My name is Joseph applegarth." "I am 49-years-old and I have lived in chadron, Nebraska, since I was 15." "My name is Karl daly." "Loren Zimmerman." " My name is Phil kerry." " My name is joni burns." " Dean Tucker." " Christina Hughes." "Christopher menshaw," "I tend bar here at wrecker's roadhouse." "I'm the sheriff of dawes country, Nebraska." "Jeanne getsinger, and I own the olde main street inn." "Chuck James, I'm a retired sergeant from the chadron police department." "My name is Amy stone." "I'm a stay-at-home mom for the moment." "I'm in third grade." "Right now, I'm a grad student at the college here." "I'm Richard dabney and I graduated from the university of Kentucky, went to work for NASA's martial space flight center in huntsville, Alabama doing guidance and control and robotics for the space program." "My name is Robert downey Jr." "Alias Kenny Rogers." "Some people think it's Willie Nelson but I paid my taxes." "And, uh..." "Prairie this way all the way to Canada." "Prairie this way all the way to Valentine or so." "And then, you know, you got prairie all the way across Wyoming that way, and you got prairie to, you know, practically Egypt this way." "I thought I'd landed on the moon when I got off the plane at rapid city." "This town, this area, it's like a vortex of..." "Timelessness." "It's like got this base of sort of old conservatism, what I'd call good conservatism." "My word and my handshake, you know, there's still some honor out here, so." "All right, uh, this is where I live." "This is my little house." "This one was dragged in from the country circa 1920." "It's a real ranch house brought in from a ranch." "Uh..." "I think the motto was small enough to serve you" "Or big enough to serve you, small enough to know you, and this kind of sums it up." "It's a friendly, quiet little community, lot of farmers, lot of ranchers, lot of cowboys, good people." "It's a nice town." "It's nice to raise your kids." "You know, all the little league sports and the grade schools, and the hometown environment has been really good." "I just wish it could have a little something else, more things to do, you know." "Or maybe a little bit bigger." "They don't believe me when I tell 'em there's one stop light in three counties." "That's westco the propane company." "We always take our visitors to see the most exciting sights." "Of course the propane company would be the first place we'd go." "There's something kind of-- I'm not gonna say mysterious, or-- or magical, but there's just something about this place that keeps people here." "You know, like, fucking stonehenge or something." "You know, where they keep building these fucked up religious sites in the same place, you know, century after century," "I don't know, there's some weird energy here, man, but I don't" "And I don't know if it's necessarily good." "So we're dealing with despotism we're dealing with tyranny, control, all the things that we're seeing today..." "Throughout our society." "And now we even have it in chadron, Nebraska." "Right here, you know, in chadron, there's not a whole lot of secrets." "The first time I heard or read the names Steven haataja was when he applied for a job to teach math." "Our math department at chadron state had been looking for a theoretical mathematician." "You know, chadron state's a fairly small community, somewhat remote, a couple of hours to the nearest mall, and not too often do you find phd mathematicians that would like to settle in that kind of a rural environment." "When he came in for the interview he was a little shy, but very polite and very nice and well-spoken, answered questions well and so forth, but seemed a little bit introverted, not unusual for a math Professor." "First thing I remember is that they hired a person with a real phd in math, which is difficult to do because of the money." "I was working at safeway at the time." "I've heard that he came into safeway." "He would shop there." "Safeway closed at 10:00 and I'd get in there at 9:45 and there wouldn't be anyone else, you know, the place would be empty, except I'd often see Steve there." "He was a late-night grocery shopper, too." "Intelligent, but introverted, really hard to get much out of him other than, "boy, it's hot today."" "Yeah, I'd never even really spoke to him." "You know, he wasn't really a personable guy that stopped and visited." "We would sometimes have a drink down at the bar, you know, have a beer or something like that, a little bit of casual conversation." "We made him his first Martini, and he didn't know how to drink it." "He didn't know what to do with it." "He took his first sip and he liked it, and I think I said something" "I'm always making these grandiose stupid claims you know, just for fun, and I think I said something this is as close as you're gonna get to God without dying." "I'm sure that when he first came he must of had a few bumps." "You know, he didn't just leap out on stage singing "hello, Dolly" when he arrived here." "You can imagine having finished a very stressful several years getting his doctorate and then stepping into an undergraduate program where he is teaching college algebra, that would be a heavy adaptation for anyone." "I came to chadron in 1994 and filed up there, got employment." "Put my application in at all the restaurants." "I think there were six non-fast-food restaurants at the time, and, uh, jeanie hired me for $4.25 cents an hour." "I don't like to brag, but..." "I met ed when he was back cooking at the olde main street inn." "I was trying to hook up with a waitress down there, so I was down there a lot, and, uh, we just hit it off." "You know, started reading his books." "You know, we just eventually became friends." "I sat down with him in our corner booth in the saloon and went over his resume and asked him why he was in chadron, Nebraska?" "Oh, well, you know, um, to be Frank," "I was looking for a place to kill myself." "I didn't want to live anymore, so I got a motel, and I was gonna do myself in." "I'm reading the book" ""the best American short stories,"" "and he says, "while cooking at the olde main street inn, and deeply depressed and suicidal,"" "and I went, "oh, my God."" "Uh, cooking was what I did more than any other job." "You know, there were about 18 restaurants, I guess." "It's the most interesting thing to talk about." "How much can you say about a radio antenna factory, or chemical warehouse, or a transmission factory, or pest control?" "There's just not much you can say." "He said he would be here six months to a year." "He told me he was here because it was a small town." "He didn't have a car, and he needed a good library." "He says, "I'm a writer." "I use this to support myself and these jobs provide material for my writing."" "I-- you know, I didn't expect to come out of this trek to Western Nebraska alive." "I didn't want to live anymore." "Things just weren't-- Things weren't going right and I didn't see any changes ahead." "But" " I" " I got-- I kinda got cheered up when I came into chadron." "I don't know, it was may, but it was cold and there was snow on the ground, like I say, and people were nice and the motel that I got had, you know, little doilies all over the place" "and a handmade counterpane." "Ed's a much more worldly person than I am." "He's been around, and he's done a lot of things, and I respect that immensely." "It's so much easier to sit back and say" ""man, I probably could have done that,"" "than to go out and say," ""man, I'm gonna try and do that."" "I don't know." "I just got re-encouraged." "I got invigorated about the possibility that something might turn my way again." "But it didn't, and I was gone in six months." "Usually I would stick a place out through the winter if I could, 'cause I don't like to travel in winter." "Here I only saw two seasons-- One merciless summer and a fairly pleasant fall, fairly pleasant fall." "That's good, I like that." "That's what it was, too." "I just would get aggravated, you know." "Uh, I would get too busy and I just don't handle that well, so, anyway-- And so I would lose my temper and the first thing that would happen is a waitress would come right around the corner" "with a glass of wine." "And they would stick it in there, and get away you know, and I would drink that glass of wine." "And they'd probably bring me another one." "So I drank a lot here." "It didn't help." "In the paper I found the police beats." "And they made me feel good, you know." "I call them the textual antidepressant." "The police beat is the column that we have of the logs that the police receive" "The calls that they receive on the 911 emergency system." ""1:26 A.M.-- caller from the 300 block of lake street advised he just got home from the bar and his truck had been wrecked." "Caller stated he didn't drive tonight because he knew he'd be drunk."" "And it's a favorite part of our newspaper." "It's one of the most popular parts because of the strange calls that come in to the police." ""9:36 A.M.-- Caller from the 200 block of west third street advised that John Lennon was at the bank yesterday three times." "And he's already come once this morning." "Caller stated he told her today that he's the ruler of the world."" "It's a common feature of community weekly newspapers across the country." "But some of ours were unique enough that we attracted a New York times reporter to do a whole story about the police beat in "the chadron record."" ""1:20 P.M.-- Caller from the 200 block of morehead street advised a man was in front of their shop yelling and yodeling." "Subject was told to stop yodeling until oktoberfest."" "The way that we put the police beat together is simply by verbatim reporting of what the police calls are." ""9:20 P.M.-- caller from first and maple street advised there was a dead cat in the road." "Unable to locate dead cat."" ""Caller from the 200 block of morehead street advised that a known subject was raising Cain again."" "Well, I" " I'd say he was to me he was a shy, um..." "Interesting guy." "Had kind of all the ticks, of lack of better word, in the positive way math nerd." "He had tennis shoes and slacks that were too short and real thick glasses." "And-- but after I got to know him, he's a really neat guy to talk to." "When he got his bachelor's degree at black hill state, his major was math." "But he had, I think, three minors" "Theater, psychology, and political science..." "Something like that." "So he was almost a renaissance man in a way that he could talk intelligently just about any topic you brought up." "He liked chess and he was in the choir." "Biking, walking, music, solving math problems of course." "Sports-- Baseball in particular." "I'm sure he was attracted to the statistical nature of that sport." "I have an interest in foreign films, especially eastern European films, and so did he." "And so uh, we started talking about different filmmakers like tarkovsky." "I mean, I quickly realized he was really smart, and I'm drawn to smart people 'cause I want to find out what-- what's all in there, you know." "One time, one time, we talked about the fibonacci sequence with my limited mathematical knowledge..." "And a little bit about fractals." "But he-- he was..." "I have not, uh-- frankly," "I probably could not have understood his dissertation." "He was a genius." "He was thinking way out of most people's realm of possibility." "I mean, way-- He was up there." "And a lot of people that are that way get a little eccentric, and they don't always see things the way we see 'em." "It's not really mental illness." "Maybe it's the mental advancement that we don't know about." "He is obviously an intelligent man..." "And in the know." "Some of the people in the class that used to joke that, um, maybe he used to work for the government." "'Cause of how his brain worked, you know, little conspiracy theories." "He was extremely brilliant." "I was in such bad shape after I left here, and I was surprised that I was still alive," "I went to live with my parents." "I thought about killing myself a million times a day." "I read "tolstoy's confessions"" "and everything I could get my hand on that was spiritual." "After I'd read tolstoy who was an adulterer and a warrior and a murderer and a bon vivant, and he was unafraid of death, but in his mid-40s, he just suddenly had this, you know, existential crisis" "and he faced the fact that he was gonna die." "He knew all the great men in the days of Russia and all over Europe." "He knew all the theologians and all the historians and all the philosophers and he went to talk to them and he found out that not a single one had an answer for him." "They weren't answering the question." "Where do we come from?" "Where do we go?" "What is our purpose here?" "And at the same time, he was a man of great wealth and he had a number of servants, and he noticed that the servants were always happy and then he started just hanging around with them and he realized that they were all religious," "that Christ was their savior." "And so he became a Christian until his death in 1910." "And so I began to pray, and Christ, you know, appeared and saved me." "And I stopped wanting to kill myself." "And then when I got enough money together," "I left home at the age of 40 or whatever it was and... uh, and ended up in a residential motel in Kansas and got a job at a radio antenna factory, and for about a year, I was a devoted Christian." "Not a devoted Christian, I didn't go to church or anything, but I read the Bible." "Prayed every night." "Christ was right there." "I could see him." "Because, you know, as Cohen says" ""only drowning men can see him."" "And then of course, like-- All the other ones before me," "I sort of left christianity behind... * ..." "Knew for certain * only drowning men could see him * and things didn't get easier for me." "I mean, that-- that year was sweet, that year when I just was working at the radio antenna factory, and I was writing really well." "I mean, things just started coming together for me." "I won a best American short story for blue-- "devils of blue river Avenue"" "shortly after that," "I was signed to a multiple-book contract with houghton Mifflin." "I didn't want to go out there into the world again but I realized I had to." "Well, I'd been hankering to go to Mexico." "Before I would have had to have worked to make a living, but I didn't have to work with my advance, so I was able to go to Mexico." "Your visa's good for six months, and I think I was down there for five stints or so." "The first two were easy because I was a writer with a contract with the largest publisher, and the blabitty blah blah." "And I basked in that a little bit too much, I know." "Because I had struggled for so long and that was my triumphant moment, and trying to extract pleasure out of that was another source of another collapse." "The book deal fell apart." "I argued with my editor and I just" "I forfeited the contract eventually." "Long story short, I had to work, but I was lucky, I was sitting in the hotel one day, and tito, Robert tito, whose wife ran the language school up the street, stuck his head in the door and asked" "if any of us gringos wanted to teach English." "And Christina was one of my students." "I always wanted to learn to speak English." "So he was" " I was taking some English classes, uh, the same time I was working as a dentist." "She was gonna take her..." "Final exam or something that would qualify her for the next level." "She couldn't-- I said "hi" to her, and she-- she didn't know what I was saying." "She had no" " I said, "you got no chance here."" "He offered to help me with my final test." "I said, "well, yeah, that's fine, yeah."" "So he says, "okay, I wait for you until your class is over." "And then I realized, are we going out?" "I mean, I was attracted to her immediately, but we started going out ostensibly, an I mean, seriously, to help her with her exams which" " I didn't think she had a prayer." "We went to have a cup of coffee and, um, we talk and talk and talk and it's how we met each other and how that relationship started." "She had these very simple dreams." "Three dreams-- she wanted to learn to speak English, she was a dentist, so she wanted her own dental practice, and she wanted to see America." "She'd never been to America." "I said, we can do that." "Said, "let's go, babe." "Let's just rock,"" "'cause I got nothing better to do." "Before I die, why don't I do one decent thing for another human being?" "I thought about it and I says, well, I think it's time for me to have an adventure and meet some different places, different people and let's go, yeah." ""6:11 P.M.-- caller advised he and his friend would be out at second and chapen with a werewolf." "6:15 P.M.-- caller advised werewolf morphed back into a human, everything okay."" "The, quote-unquote, Christmas party..." "We have the community choir concert which was in early December." "For us, it wasn't a Christmas party." "It was a, "oh, do you want to get together after the concert?"" "And it was just an impromptu thing." "Cheryl and I, we like to reach out to people, you know, that seem like they don't have a circle of friends." "And Steve was really in a talking mood so he had a couple of coronas and, um, was singing and..." "Everybody left, and Steve was last one to leave." "And we stood right by the door there." "I do remember discussing polar coordinates, of all things, but that's-- I mean, I liked to talk about that kind of thing with smart people, you know." "To think that two days later he'd disappeared, that was a pretty big shock, and I felt actually that, wow." "There was no indication." "He seemed fine, happy." ""December fifth, r.P. Reporting party advised he was informed of a missing instructor by Gary white who was the Dean of language and literature at the college." "Gary advised that Steven haataja hasn't been seen since yesterday at 4:30 P.M."" "We got a call from the college, and they said that Steve haataja who was a math Professor had not been to class all day, and it wasn't like him to miss." "He was very punctual." "We, uh, showed up to class, and there was a guy standing there that none of us knew." "And, uh, he waited until, you know, everybody got there to tell us that Dr. haataja did not show up for work that day." "We had very little information when he first disappeared." "Only that there was a person missing from the college under extremely strange circumstances." "The general inclination I got as a faculty member was that he must have run off." "I didn't understand that at all." "He disappeared, but there wasn't this immediate, like," ""what the fuck?" "Professor missing."" "If it would have been a fucking football coach that disappeared for more than 24 hours, they would have called in the fucking national guard." "He had just came here." "Maybe he didn't like it, you know?" "People pack up and drive back out of this town every single day." "And so people stand around the water cooler, try to piece together from what they know what they think may have happened." "It was what you read in the newspaper or heard on the radio or if you were in conversation with somebody like in Walmart." "Especially those people who were in his classes wanted to kind of share their angle, talk about how maybe he was gay, maybe he was a little effeminate." "Or maybe it was because he was a little socially awkward or something, but there was no way to avoid the story." "Just before he disappeared, he was planning for the next semester and so he was asking me about books." "What kind of a college algebra book I thought would be an improvement perhaps on what he'd been using, and so there was no sign whatsoever that would have led me to believe he was thinking of leaving." "Perhaps, this guy might have just walked off the face of the earth." "Who knows?" "It's not a crime to walk off the face of the earth." "Well, here's one..." "Actually this is-- This is the primary one." "I had seen the potential for a long treatment of chadron for many reasons but there just wasn't a story." "So when Steven haataja the math Professor disappeared," "I began to take notes and I was conceiving," "I couldn't help not-- On my mind," "I think on sheets of paper." "Every time something happens to me, it's a potential story." "Every time somebody says something" "I see it typed, and if I have a thought" "I have to run into the room and write it down." "So naturally, this was more alluring than your typical hike in the hills." "It evolved all by itself into a 80,000-word story." "Now true, I'm not just writing about him," "I'm writing about my many, many years of wanderlust and how I finally settled down here and I'm writing about my life." "From an early age I was convinced that I was from somewhere else." "I didn't" " I don't have any sense of direction." "I always had this whistling in my head." "I just didn't relate to people very well." "And even when I did," "I just didn't understand what they were doing and why they were so cruel to each other." "I read so much when I was a child." "I read things I didn't even want to read." "I was reading, so I was convinced at some point that-- that I'd been put here as a sort of a conduit for another planet, you know, and all these things that I was learning about" "The earth where I didn't belong, someday they were gonna come back and pick me up once my head was full enough of all these earthly things." "And my parents were so nice." "They were just wonderful to me." "I thought, "well, God, this is a good set of surrogate parents I've been assigned to from my home planet."" "Maybe it's one of the reasons I kept traveling trying to find that place where I belonged, you know, I'm trying to find my people, waiting for that ship to land." "I began to write because it was one way to feel like a human being and to accomplish something that might go beyond my years and it was one way to connect, I hate that word, but it was a way to make people feel something." "The writers that I admired were the ones who worked and lived among the people that they wrote about." "You know, the steinbecks and the Jack londons and all these." "So I set out with a backpack, and I just stuck my thumb out." "I was 18." "I wanted to find out what was going on." "You know, when you write the great American novel which is what we were all gonna do at some point, you had to know about America, so that was my first order is just to get a broad exposure to America," "and not a stock market America or a franchise America, but, I guess what they're calling the underbelly of America now." "But how do you find out?" "You surely don't find it at that state university." "How long did you go to that school of journalism?" "Three years." "Three years down the drain." "Me, I didn't go to any college, but I know what makes a good story." "Because before I ever worked on a paper," "I sold 'em on a street corner." "You know the first thing I found out?" "Bad news sells best." "Because good news is no news." ""9:45 A.M.-- Suspect at p.D. Stated that she thought she saw our missing Professor." "At Hammond and canal street, number 32 in hot Springs near the boot sign." "Caller requested an officer to go check if he's there."" "After he had been missing probably a day and a half, the temperature dropped down to" "I believe it was below zero." "And if you go behind the college there's a trail that is for biking and also for walking, and it's quite steep, and I know that he used to like to ride his bike back there and he also used to like to walk back there quite a bit." "So we took the paths that go behind the college and just called him." "And, you know, looked in the bushes, looked in the trees, looked around the pond." "Looking in all the gulleys and things, but... nothing." "I guess, the disturbing thing was feeling, at that time, that he might possibly be out somewhere injured in that freezing cold that nobody was really gonna survive for very long." "Sergeant James was in charge of this investigation, supposedly, although he told me there's never been an investigation." "He never had an investigation." "I don't think a lot of people knew anything, or if they did, it was very little what they knew about Steven." "It was kind of hard you know" "Where do you start looking for a stranger?" "First we checked his apartment." "This is Steven haataja's apartment." "He lived in the basement." "There was nothing that stood out." "It was just sort of a typical bachelor's quarters." "I mean, typical, bachelor maths Professor quarters." "There was food in the refrigerator." "There was milk in the refrigerator, things that would have spoiled." "Uh, so it didn't appear that he was planning on going anyplace." "It was very neat but sparsely furnished, a mattress on the floor, a lot of books stacked up." "I remember-- His sock drawer" "His socks were stacked, the colors, just perfectly." "His shirts were hung kind of-- the blue ones and the reddish ones." "They're all plaids but they were kind of in an order." "I talked to a couple of people at the college to some of the professors who knew of him but not very well because he was relatively new to chadron, and no one had any idea where he might have gone." "I don't remember that anyone talked to the math department people back when he disappeared." "I'm not aware of anyone unless somebody maybe asked the people whose offices were adjacent to his when they had last seen him." "I think that might have happened." "I was never interviewed, and I'm one of about five or six math department people, you know?" "The state patrol called chadron p.D." "And offered the services of a airplane and some search dogs." "The chadron pds told them no." "I don't recall it at all." "I can't imagine turning down an offer of an airplane because the burn area being so barren after the fire, it'd be easy to spot something." "Through this process I wanted to publish photographs." "'Cause a lot of people didn't know who he was." "I was getting ready to put all that stuff out, and I got a message that said" "I could not use any college printing services or any paper or anything else from the college to do this." "Like, God, that's really weird." "It looked to me as though there were a lot of mistakes being made by the authorities and not a whole lot of things being done the way they should be." "But that was an outsider's opinion, getting bits and pieces of information, which, a lot of the information I got and everybody else got might have been incorrect, too." "Chuck Robert didn't have the experience." "I don't know, and I don't blame him." "I don't fault him for that." "Yeah, Chuck had a ton of experience." "Chuck was more than, yeah, capable of the missing person." "We did what we could as soon as we could." "And that was about it." ""9:03 P.M.-- caller from north main street advised she thought she needed to go to the looney bin."" "There had been a couple of incidents that took place shortly before the disappearance of Professor haataja that had kind of led the department to lose credibility with the citizens." "One of the officers had her father with her and they got a report of a vicious dog." "She claimed the dog was attacking or at least so vicious that she couldn't get out of her car." "And she ended up having her father shoot the dog who was riding with her in the police car." "The people were quite incensed, of course, because it was someone's pet, and they didn't believe that the action was justified." "That was followed up by the bank robber that wasn't caught in town and left the bank on foot, and then followed up by the two cops that hit each other on the corner trying to go to the same call." "Two different officers responded and two different patrol cars and the two police cruisers actually crashed right out in front of the office of the chadron record." "It became a... comedy of errors that was going on." "Oh, you want to make a chilatta?" "Yeah, let's make one." "A lot of tabasco." "These are garlic-stuffed olives and I like putting a little of the juice in there." "In the construction of this book, there was the story of Steven haataja and the book wouldn't have been written if that were not at the center but if I'd wrote exclusively about that, then it would be a heartless book." "So I have to write about other things, more human things, so I have these other arcs." "Oh, a little añejo." "Just a little for flavor, and whatever kind of beer you like" "I buy these keystone lights." "Now I'm mocked for that, but, you know, I want something that's, uh..." "I want a neutral medium and my marriage and my wife's struggle, that's another dramatic arc." "Compound the language problem, the cultural adjustments, um, living with a strange guy like me, um, she was just socially awkward, and this was the way Steven was described over and over again even by the people who were close to him." "And this is just, you know, those millions of things I've told you about" "Worcestershire, balsamic vinegar, um, mustard, thai fish sauce." "It's probably gonna be atrocious." "Yeah, something's missing." "But I don't think" "It certainly-- it still isn't easy for Christina, and I don't think it was ever easy for Steven" "For Steven either." "Maybe I don't have enough of that." "There go all the capers." "It seems like all the things I learned in mex" "There in the class, it was nothing once I got here." "I mean, you see all these places on TV and all these big buildings and of all these beautiful places and everything, and I think it took me quite a little time to get all the pieces together and simulate, oh, this is United States." "I didn't know how to speak any English at all." "I couldn't understand any conversations, and I spent a few days just-- He was working, cooking, and I stayed pretty much in the room all the time." "And now she understands the reality of America." "It's just as difficult as Mexico." "She'll tell all of her relatives, you know, you have to work harder here and the pressure is much greater." "I didn't realize how hard it was going to be, and it still is." "She's made a huge jump for such a sedentary child." "I mean, she was born and raised in the same house, lived with her parents until I took her away, but it was fun." "It was fun, as nervous as it made her." "He changed my life, I mean, in all ways, you know?" "I mean, now I have my boy, I have my family." "I have my house." "I have a job." "So, yeah..." "Two cars?" "Yeah, I have two cars, too, yeah, sure, but..." "Oh, I have a fish and my dog, yeah." "I always looked forward to the time when I could settle and have a house and have neighbors and so people would know what a wonderful guy I was" "Honest, firm handshake kind of a guy with the hair parted in the right place." "And, uh, you know none of that really happened, not the way I idealized it, but I know a lot of people here, and it feels good to belong to a community and have a child," "you know, to belong somewhere." "I still think I don't belong here." "If I get old, I mean, if I live, and I get old," "I want to go back to Mexico." "I want to back to Mexico, yeah." ""5:23 A.M.-- Caller from the 400 block of west third street advised that he was at the above location at noon when a man came in who looked a lot like the missing Professor." "The caller stated the man was wearing a black leather jacket."" "Uh, loren Zimmerman was teaching criminal justice here." "He'd been here for a couple of years." "For his forensics ii class, he would lead mock searches for staged and invisible corpses to show students the particular procedure." "At the time that Steven haataja had disappeared he was doing one of these searches." "So there was quite a bit of confusion about that and suspicion about the similarity, and of course, loren will admit himself that, uh, that, uh he was..." "I forgot what the hell I was talking about." "Oh, Mr. Zimmerman?" "Oh, one of my favorite people." "Is Karl a good sheriff?" "No." "He wants to be a big shot around here really, really bad." "He ran for sheriff, uh, this last go around." "Obviously he didn't win 'cause I'm sitting here talking to you." "I've had my issues with Karl as has everybody else in the state of Nebraska." "He's a legend in his own mind." "Um... he was I believe l.A.P.D." "And I believe he was a homicide investigator for l.A.P.D." "So I went down to the police department and I talked to the acting chief of police." "I said, "if this guy's missing, I can mobilize 50, maybe 100 criminal justice students."" "I said, "it'd be a great opportunity for them."" "He sort of organized a search." "When I tried to tell people how to search and to stay together and not touch anything if they found something, he kind of butted in and took over." "Which is fine." "It's his class." "But he kind of acted like" "I didn't know what I was talking about." "Well, I had a lot of experience searching for people in Wisconsin." "I wasn't new to this game." "So sergeant James called me and said, "you know, we got a good handle on this." "We know what's going on." "We don't need your help anymore." "I go, "okay, fine."" "Certain parts of the investigation were not told to everyone." "You know, apparently Mr. Zimmerman had had access to a lot of the information somehow." "And after the president at the college emailed me and told me that I was not allowed to talk to anybody anymore," "I emailed her back and I said," ""well, as far as I know, the first amendment in the U.S. constitution is still alive and well." "I said, I'm not part of this investigation." "I can talk to whomever I want to at any time."" "Well, that's what got me fired, uh, from the college." "And then he came out in the paper and said that I had refused his help, which is not true." "I had encouraged his help." "I didn't want to lose him, but I didn't want him going to the press either." "He was not asked to assist, but he stuck his nose in, and he got it bloodied a little bit." "He came real close to going to jail." ""7:13 P.M.-- caller from the 500 block of king street advised that somebody cut his clothes line in his backyard and hung a scarecrow on it." "He also advised that he was going to keep the scarecrow if nobody claimed it."" "Well, tom was four when Steven disappeared, and, um, he was in kindergarten at that time." "He'd been-- thank you, he'd been red flagged already for autism, but, anyway, he was my detective." "He was my partner." "And everywhere I went, asking about Steven haataja, he was with me." "I was reading a great deal about autism and the a.S.D., the autism spectral disorder." "I had had small interactions with Steven, but I began to wonder if he wasn't autistic, mildly autistic." "It's not uncommon at all for very bright mathematicians to be bunched in larger proportion along that spectrum." "That's fantastic." "There's tom." "We were here in April 2001, and Thomas was born in 2002." "From the beginning, he was rocking." "And he rocked and rocked and rocked and he had tactile fixations and he was hypersensitive to stimuli and he was extremely finicky." "He had slow verbal development." "He would sometimes go away, you know, he would get this blank glassy stare, and he would just go away and I could" "I could almost always rescue him with spidey and whitey." "Oh, they're both spiders, puppets, spider puppets." "He would make them sandwiches, and he would take them to spider church." "And they-- spidey and whitey would get lost in the forest." "And we'd go look for him." "And we'd build a tent." "But right now, they're in Wyoming." "Well, their grandma died." "They buried them in Wyoming in a graveyard." "But now they just hang out with their selves." "And spidey and whitey were his only friends outside of his parents, really." "Within the first week he was enrolled in kindergarten, his teacher confronted us and she seemed very worried." "She called a conference with the school counselor, school psychologist, occupational therapist, principal, teacher, the whole team was there and they had these really morose expressions on their faces." "Well, they didn't use the word "autism."" "It was plain what they were saying and we just finally got around to using the "a" word." "I like chess." "I like numbers." "I like clocks." "We were crestfallen, but we began to make adjustments." "I didn't believe that psychological intervention was gonna do him a bit of good." "I thought that his only real chance was the personal attention that I could give him." "And love, I guess, is what you'd say, a pretty simplistic answer but..." "And then as the days wore on, again, it just seemed like there wasn't any urgency to see if there had been something done to him or if he had been hurt somewhere out there." ""11:58 A.M.-- subject came into the police department and requested to talk to an officer, and he also gave a statement about seeing Steven haataja hitchhiking out of town the day he supposedly disappeared."" "He was seen in rapid city." "He was seen at sioux falls." "I got a call from the sheriff's department in the county that the golden gate bridge is in." "They've had a jumper off the golden gate bridge that fit this man's description." "I called the guy and he described him as an African-American male and Steve, obviously, was Scandinavian, very un-dark." "So we knew that wasn't true." "At one point, I'd gotten a call from a psychic in Iowa who told me that she had a vision that a disgruntled student had run him down with his car and that student had gotten scared and hid his body in a basement." "So the police, having nothing else to go on, they started here because of the proximity to Steven's house, and they looked in the basement, and they, you know, proceeded west all the way" "to the rv park there, looking in basements." "I asked Chuck what he found, he just kind of slapped the back of his neck and said, "mice."" "I actually also had sent an email to one of the editors at the chronicle of higher education, and, uh, I got this kind of strange email back from him that said that "this happens all the time." "We get emails like this all the time." "And they usually just show up, so, right now, it's not news for us."" "I was kind of shocked by that... a bit." "See, there's one thing I like" "Elevators." "Yeah, I like elevators." "I-I like these mechanic rides" "These escalators, the spin doors that goes this way... yeah." "Every condition that I've run into with tom has had this sort of vague symptomatology with the word "disorder" slapped onto it." "That we don't know where in the brain it is." "We don't know the cause." "We don't know the cure." "My mom doesn't enjoy working." "She's sometimes bossy." "Well, guess what?" "She's working for me." "Well, he's my miracle." "Yeah, he knows I love him." "Even though he say something mean to him and I'm very hard on him, you know," "I'm doing all these things for him." "I mean, I have to protect him." "He's my only one." "What's your favorite food?" "Oh, chicken McNuggets." "What else?" "Let's see." "I had" " I had another..." "Oh, yeah, at the golden corral at rapid city..." "Those rolls are so delightful." "I'm not used to vegetables." "I'm not" " I'm not-- I'm not" "I'm not an animal." "I'm" " I'm just a human." "The less he's like me, the happier I am." "But he's definitely somebody who has a different way of thinking and he's an outsider." "He's not uncomfortable by being an outsider yet." "What can I say?" "He's my boy." "I mean, as a mom, you do everything for them." "I mean, for your children, so, yeah." "I count 20, 30, 40." " Whoa, good-bye." " Bye." "Happy interview." ""8:21 A.M.-- caller from the westroads mall in Omaha advised that he was at the above location yesterday and swears that he saw Steven haataja." "Caller stated that he was tall with thick round glasses and he had the, quote, deer in the headlights, unquote look."" "I got a call from a Tim." "He knew Steve pretty well and said he was kind of emotionally fluctuating." "He'd be up, he'd be down." "He'd be-- he thought he'd tried to commit suicide about a year before that, but he was caught and saved and unsuccessful in his suicide attempt." "Well, that threw a whole new light on things." "Okay, this thing has to start in 2005 when he's ice skating at an ice skating rink in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he's trying to get his phd, hasn't got his phd." "He's 45 years old, and he falls down, and he breaks his hip." "He's in a wheelchair for three months." "His phd is postponed again." "He's on crutches for three months more." "He's been recently divorced." "Things are stacking up against him." "He doesn't see a future." "He decides to take his life." "So he overdoses." "And he doesn't take enough or somebody rescues him." "I don't know the circumstances." "But then, you know, he's diagnosed and he's put on this regimen, and he straightens out to a great degree, and I guess he finishes his phd and then lands a job, wanders out here." "He's starting over all over again." "I know what that's about, and, uh, but then people start befriending him." "Um, I think actually that was a big part of us being able to open up to each other, 'cause you know it's" "Depression is a really hard thing to live with." "It really is, even when you're on medication." "I've been on mine for..." "Probably eight or nine years." "But he didn't-- He seemed like-- for one, he seemed like the meds were working pretty good, I thought." "You know, I was pretty invested in the whole thing and, uh..." "Bothered by it." "And we were on our way to rapid city, and our car started overheating." "There's two gas stations, we always go to the one on the left." "Instead, because we were about ready to blow up, we limped into the one on the right." "And we went in there, and I saw a woman messing around, and I saw it was a picture of Steve haataja and I saw that she was messing around with it and I went up to her and I said, "what are you doing?" "Leave that alone." "He's a friend of mine."" "And she's like, "oh, no, I'm putting it up,"" "and it was his sister who I had no idea who it was." "And that was really nice that we, I mean..." "I mean, I just feel sad for her 'cause she was so" "You know, you could tell she loved him." "It was really sad seeing her in town an hour away from here putting up posters and, you know at-- You know, 7:00 at night." "For her brother and..." "Yeah, so." "He has a stroller with no child?" "He's kind of a disheveled-looking fellow, bald with a long ponytail." "The only thing I'm scared of is... storms." "Yeah, this is what I think about chadron." "It goes to extreme to extreme from one day to another." "Dark clouds, lightning, scary." "After the winds came down and we knew something bad was gonna happen, my wife and I were out there on the porch, and she said," ""I just saw a baseball-size piece of hail."" "And I didn't-- I just didn't believe her." "Hail clouds?" "It was just like being in a tornado, except it's all white." "Oh, my God." "It was very nasty." "I couldn't see a thing, not even a mile, not even till Ann street." "The West Side of every house in town was just strafed." "I mean, windows shattered out, siding completely shredded." "And of course my car" "Those subarus, though, they hold up really well." "My car has been obliterated on several occasions." "And the mirror's been broken out and things like that." "Just the sound is just really" "Oh, man, this is just when you say, oh, we're in trouble here, yeah." "Its-- something is going to happen, yeah." "Oh, my God." "Please God, no!" "Oh, my God!" "It was spring and it was march" "I think it was march 9th if I'm not mistaken, and a ranch hand who worked for Andy curd on Andy curd's ranch at the time, there had been a stray steer that was lost, and he just went down into this little ravine" "and, uh, he knew what he was looking at wasn't his stray steer." "I was out of town." "I was on my way back, heard some radio traffic in my cruiser about a 1065, which in Nebraska, means a dead body." "I got called out of the high school to secure the road to restrict any kind of unlimited access." "You know, it wasn't easy for law enforcement to get there." "It wasn't" " I don't suppose it would have been easy for him to get there either." "Jeanne called me, jeanie who runs the olde main street inn." "I call that one of the grapevine substations." "If you want to find out about somebody in town, you just go ask Jeanne or somebody that's sitting at the bar, and they'll be able to do that." "You can do that in a small town." "But she was the first one to call me, and she said," ""they found a body," but she said," ""I'll call you back," and then she called me back and she said, "they don't know who it is." "The body was so badly burned, that they couldn't I.D. It."" "Of course, we all thought, okay, well, that's probably Steve." "I mean, there's no other missing person, uh, in chadron that I knew of." "All the people who came who stumbled on that body had to look at it for a long time to realize what it was." "Especially since he was face-down and completely, I mean, burned to the bone, completely incinerated." "Uh, pretty much 98, 99% burned." "Um... blackened, charred." "Uh..." "Had been eaten on by bugs and animals." "He had an electrical cord wrapped around him and then wrapped around a small tree." "And his feet were bound with an electrical cord." "All of us, the state patrol investigators, the chadron police officers and myself and others, you know, we thought we had a homicide." "When I learned-- Heard on the news that Dr. haataja's body had been found," "I was sickened, quite honestly." "I felt very sad." "Very heartbroken." "Oh, you know, it's a mixture of shock and, uh... and sorrow and exhilaration." "You know, it's exhilarating because it's so horrible and we're attuned to that thing in an animal way, it's exhilarating because it's, uh-- it looks like an end to the story, an answer." "I just remember over the course of the next few weeks all sorts of hints and rumors and innuendos about him being bound with barbed wire or" "And burned." "You know, of course, everybody has their opinion about it." "And I probably got more opinions about things than most people, 'cause I got an opinion about everything." "My immediate reaction about how they found him in the circumstances was like, somebody has made a fucking mistake." "That cannot be right." "It made me very suspicious, very... uh, you know, incredulous." "And it was amazing, within a week, you know, big foot was out here eating babies." "I mean, it was like unbelievable what came out of this initially." "State patrol called me, asked me if I would come down for an interview." "One of his first questions was he said," ""if this guy was murdered, who do you think would be the primary suspect?"" "And I said, "me."" "And he said, "yeah, why?"" "And I said, "well, motive, opportunity."" "I said "it would have been a great thing for my students, you know, to find his dead body out there somewhere."" "You know?" "And, uh, we laughed about that." "I said, "but," I said, "I didn't do it."" "I said, "I don't know anything about it."" "There had been some reporters in town who had come up with a theory that possibly this might have been some kind of a hate crime." "Professor haataja might have been perceived as being gay." "Now I do know for a fact that the FBI was here." "If somebody told me that I'd say," ""well, maybe they're just blowing off,"" "but I saw the FBI vehicles." "To be fair, there was a great deal of excitement and, you know, this is like a carnival had come into town." "People were running all over the place, and they were just peeing themselves, and they were running up into the hills seeing if they could locate the spot." "There were a lot of media people" "Associated press, Omaha world herald" "That were coming here and trying to get information, but the police department wouldn't release any information." "College wouldn't release any information." "Silence Seemed to be the main culprit in that particular case." "Mum was the word." "So we were left to our own devices." "And our own raw fear and what most of us did was just compose false stories." "As a result, imagination ran riot." "The absence of anything you could see on Venus led some scientists and others to deduce that the surface was a swamp." "The arguments went something like this" "I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus." "Why not?" "Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds." "Well, what are clouds made of?" "Water, of course." "Therefore Venus must have an awful lot of water on it, therefore the surface must be wet." "Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp." "If there's a swamp, there's ferns." "If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs." "Observation-- You couldn't see a thing." "Conclusion-- Dinosaurs." "This is-- this is natural this is just a mechanism to try to understand what happened." "We're so sophisticated now." "We're so jaded from our endless television viewing." "But when you have something like this happen, the circumstances, everybody just went into a total panic." "We found out really the details of what they had discovered only after the investigators did a full public conference." "Which was probably six weeks, maybe," "I can't remember when it was, but it was long after the body was found." "Good afternoon, I'm vance haug." "I'm the dawes county attorney." "The purpose of this press conference today is to provide the public with some information regarding the investigation of the disappearance and the death of chardon state college Professor." "Dr. Steven haataja." "This of course is December 4th 2006, he arrived at work at chadron state college at approximately 8:00 A.M." "His first class was at 9:00 A.M., he did attend and teach that class." "In fact, he attended into all of his classes that day as he always did." "At approximately 3:30 to 4:00 P.M., he talked with a student at his office about taking a makeup test the next morning at 8:30 A.M." "The next morning, of course, Dr. haataja did not appear." "4:30 P.M., he spoke with a colleague at chadron state college in his office and indicated that he would see the colleague the next day." "He was later seen about 5:00 P.M." "By a student walking downtown here in chadron near a pizza hut." "6:00 P.M., he was seen back at chadron state college by another colleague working in his office." "At 8:24 P.M., $100 was withdrawn from an atm first national bank of chadron on Dr. haataja's account." "Then he went and bought a 7-pound bag of charcoal." "It was said that he'd bought accelerant." "He did buy accelerant." "Then he went and bought himself a bottle of schnapps." "Between 9:00 and 10:00 P.M., another local citizen walking her dog saw him leaving his apartment." "At 11:41 P.M., he accessed his computer, his chadron state college computer from his office, that was the last contact we have with Dr. haataja in this specific timeline." "He left his office with his bag of goodies, it was probably somewhere around, I'm guessing," "5 or 10 degrees when he left." "The low that night was 5 degrees below zero." "And my opinion is he's going straight up this hill here, which crosses the football field and gives him access to basically two routes." "There are reports by some people that he did have a hip problem, but there's also been a number of reports of people who knew him who said he was a regular Walker." "Even though he was not afraid to walk in rough terrain," "I'm suggesting that he wasn't exactly in olympic shape with a titanium hip replacement, installed a year and a half before." "I had heard that he did a lot of walking out at the state park and up into n.C. Hill in the area." "He liked to get out in the outdoors." "I think he liked to walk, but he walked on paths that were smooth." "He didn't go tramping through the yucca and sagebrush or whatever else is up there." "But it was dark, cold, windy, and he's navigating terrain that from what I understand most people can't navigate." "That hip didn't seem to bother him all that much." "So he could have easily walked to where he was found." "I have no problem with that." "There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate Dr. haataja was homosexual or bisexual." "Maybe he was kind of effeminate." "But he" " I mean, there's a lot of effeminate people here." "There are a couple of, uh..." "Very flaming people in town, and they are accepted." "People like them." "So that seemed to be a dead end, too." "So he walks out-- you know, he just walks out the door and then he goes up here." "And he just goes over this little hillock here." "It's pretty even footing." "Yeah, I-- it's just hard again, it's hard for me to imagine if you're going to do yourself in to do-- to go through this much work." "But by the time I got to the top of this thing, and I saw where he was," "I said he didn't come this way." "Yeah, well, we just keep on going over the Ridge there and a long way to go." "Thus far, there is no evidence of any other person present at the scene of Dr. haataja's death other than himself." "95 days of a Nebraska winter, you're not gonna find much evidence of other people other than what's left there, which was him." "That I'm sure that after snow and thaw and snow and thaw get warm and cold." "Animals and the normal decay, all of those things played such a role." "There was really no evidence." "Everything was really quite thoroughly burned." "There was some snaps and zippers, things left in the ash, uh, to give you a description of how thoroughly everything was burned." "So, to me, that was what first indicated to me that the idea of to have a complete a burn as you had with so little peripheral damage, you're looking at wick effect." "Well, the wick effect is a very rare occurrence." "Bodies have been found and on very rare occasions, when almost the entire trunk has been incinerated, but the rug upon which the body is lying or the chair upon which the corpse is sitting is not burned." "Body fat will work like wax in a candle." "And if you have a wick of some kind, clothing, whatever" "The body burns inside out on its own fat, like a candle, like an inside-out candle." "And it burns very slowly and very hot." "And this explains why we don't have roaring flames, no plumes of smoke, no cries, nobody's smelling anything burning." "That theory fit the facts very nicely." "Well, certain people within the investigation they didn't want to hear that." "They've never told me, and I've never asked, but I was never invited to another meeting, and I know they had several meetings after that." "If it gets hot enough, fatty tissue can be made to burn, but to get it that hot..." "Um..." "Didn't seem logical." "You just have to understand that when we crossed the football field there he could have-- He had two basic choices" "One was to go east and one was pretty much to go due South." "And this time we're going east and we're following, you know, an established road." "So, you know, but I mean this is what he's walking on, right?" "He's not on-- we're not there yet, but this is what he's walking on." "Okay, so you can see-- There's math and science there you can see him cross" "I think he crosses the football field and he makes a choice." "He takes either that route we took the other day, or he goes this way." "He just takes a really easy road, but he's in full view of everything, the whole town can see him." "Okay, well, there's the ranch." "But you get the general idea and the kind of prohibitive feeling of this whole thing." "I mean, just picture yourself you've got that bag of charcoal, and perhaps extension cords and water and a flashlight and that peppermint schnapps, and you're gonna do something." "And you're gonna do something you don't want anybody to know about, and so obviously, when I come out here and I say, okay, this is the route he took, I don't see him by himself." "I don't see him going on there by himself." "I don't see him with any interest at all in going out there." "I think he's with somebody." "And whether he went voluntarily or not, that's the question that may never be answered." "There was a partially consumed liquor bottle, that was a 375 milliliter bottle of peppermint schnapps." "His b.A.C. Or blood alcohol content was tested as well." "It was extremely elevated." "Steven was a large man, and a pint of peppermint schnapps" "And this is obviously just my opinion, but a pint of peppermint schnapps would not to that degree affect or intoxicate a man of that size." "I have heard that in time levels will rise on their own due to decomposition and things like that and chemical changes in the body." "Whatever the b.A.C. Is which has been consistently described as extremely elevated, uh, unless he's just immediately chugalugged that thing and lights himself up, he's been drinking beforehand, perhaps he's been drinking with someone else." "I'm almost convinced of that." "Because his hands were not bound, that has been discussed and it would have been possible..." "For him to bind himself." "There's no suicide note." "There is no, um, indicators at this time that he was thinking of suicide." "Um, as I indicated, however, all possibilities are still being considered." "I wrote a letter to his long-term friend of about 15 years who lives out in sioux falls area, and I said that I don't think it was a suicide, and he wrote back to me and gave me" "three or four reasons why he did not think it was either, in fact, he went so far as to say that he thought the issue of Dr. haatajas's depression some time before clouded this issue." "I think, uh, that America's a very depressing place to live, even if things are going well for you." "It's a highly stressful, demanding, competitive place to live." "And I've been depressed on a number of occasions, just, you know, walking down the street." "We live in a world where everybody from your parents to religious figures to political figures tries to find different ways to label you a loser." "And it's easy to feel this way when people are telling you that that's how you feel." "I felt that I was manic-depressive, and um... just, man, biochemistry's off." "I got to do something about this 'cause it's not my fault." "The reason I was depressed is 'cause I was poor, I was alone," "I was unable to have a functional relationship with the opposite sex and the area that I cherished the most, literature, the thing I was struggling for," "I was just completely striking out at." "That was why I was depressed." "That's why I wanted to kill myself." "There's no cure for the human condition." "Other than endurance, I guess." "You just..." "That's what life is, man." "It's not easy." "People are sitting in front of the television they're gaining a little bit too much weight." "They're seeing all of these glamorous people and all of these products that they should have." "They're getting force-fed the news which is a concentration on triviality and whatever-- whatever garbage they can scrape up to make you feel bad so that you buy more products." "I suggest to you that if you take 100 people who've been diagnosed with some sort of depressive disorder, and you take away their friggin' television sets, you're gonna see a vast improvement in their outlook." "It's an audience that's raised on television." "Their standards have been systematically loaded over the years." "These guys sit in front of their sets and the gamma rays eat the white cells of their brains out, you know" "And of course there's more than that." "It's-- we're all-- you know, we're all under the gun." "It's, uh... relationships are harder than they've ever been, making it in your chosen field, getting educated." "There are fucking reasons to be depressed." "You should be depressed sometimes." "Fuck." "People are being burned alive!" "Now looking back..." "You know, you always wonder, did I see anything?" "And I have thought about it." "Now I've had friends and acquaintances who have committed suicide, and, uh, every single case, I can look back and say I could see this." "I wasn't sure, but I think I could see it coming." "And other friends of those friends thought the same." "I can't lay my finger on a single thing in Steve haataja's life or my weekly and sometimes daily discussions with him, that would have indicated any sign of that kind of unhappiness." "I've-- last year I had a friend of mine kill himself, shot himself." "And he displayed quite a few of the warning signs before he did it." "Dr. haataja, as far as I know, really didn't." "Seemed to be out of the woods." "Everyone agreed, almost two a man, everyone agreed that he was happy those last few days before he disappeared and... took that long last walk into darkness." "It just is not a casual or a random trip." "It's also possible that he could have been with somebody else." "Now I know he's not going on this." "I don't think he's going on this." "Well, obviously he would have really had to know where he was going, which would say-- yeah, which would indicate he'd been there before." "You can see why they couldn't find him, my God." "Well, it's pretty much straight down to the house, right?" "It's very puzzling." "And it's so easy to get turned around here maybe over that Ridge?" "Wow." "Yeah, he's walking along just like this with a flashlight in full sight of the house for a long time." "He's in full view of that house." "He must know the possibilities." "Here we go, yeah, see that?" "Okay, and the house disappears." "And you're-- these are the only trees within Miles." "So if he's building a fire right in there, it's not gonna go too well unless it's a still night." "Yeah, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to me." "But maybe it's an event that doesn't..." "Make any sense." "Not everything has an explanation." "God, he must have been cold, though." "You come out to a place like this and, uh, God, it's just desolation..." "The whole thing just..." "Feels empty." "I" " I've been over this thing so many times it's sort of a symbol for the mystery that just gets deeper as you go." "There's no resolution." "There's no answers." "Um... it just..." "I just feel like going back home, you know where it's warm and where there are people, and, um..." "Somebody said that the world is not made up of atoms, the world's made up of stories." "The world is composed of stories." "I think that's true." "Stories have a multitude of purpose." "One of them is so that we can understand the world, and we want to understand the world in the easiest and most digestible way possible." "So most stories have beginnings, middles, and ends." "Some people like movies, and some people like country Western songs." "But whatever it is whether it's your own life or your family's history, or the newspaper, these stories need to be put in little packages that we can transmit so that they can be quickly understood and then assembled" "with all the other stories that aren't true." "We talked about van gogh cutting off his ear and, you know, mailing it to a prostitute or something like that." "He cut off a very small part of his ear, bled a great deal, had to bandage himself up, did a nice self-portrait." "But he didn't just cut off his ear." "This is an extraordinary thing to do." "I don't know if he would have survived if he would have cut off his ear." "But we like the story better that way." "So we're almost incapable of the truth." "I don't think history can possibly be true." "Possibly, I'll tell you why because I told a story to buck Henry last year in wemyss, and he told the story that he thought I had told him to a newspaper that I read the other day," "and it bears not the slightest resemblance to what I said." "Now that's an intelligent man a year later, meaning me well, and that's, you know, the gospel according to buck Henry." "And it's totally apocryphal." "Imagine what nonsense everything else is." "The problem with the truth is that you think you find it and you think it's an answer." "It's not necessarily an answer, you're just shedding light on things." "And you may shed light on your own despicable self, and your own despicable weaknesses, which is what happened to me." "And if you're shining this thing all over the place, you have to shine it on yourself." "And when you do sometimes you just catch a cockroach." "The case is open." "It's not closed, but the facts of the case have been put out there for the public, but, um..." "They're not sufficiently known at this time," "I think, to definitively close the case." "And after five or six years, you just resign yourself to the story that's most comfortable to you." "Honestly, I don't think it's as convoluted and as crazy and as just nefarious as some people think." "Personally, I can't imagine foul play." "It just seems-- I can't hardly imagine suicide." "If I had to go to court, raise my hand and testify," "Karl-- you know, sheriff daly, in your best opinion," "I would say it was suicide." "To this day, I don't think that it was a suicide." "It just doesn't add up to me." "Oh, I think he had a little help, and..." "I believe he was murdered." "A person of his academic prowess would certainly have an insatiable appetite to know and to learn." "It really makes you suspicious, did he die for that reason?" "What did he find out?" "What was unveiled?" "And I think that's tenable." "People do very strange and unexpected things, and sometimes they leave us with mysteries to ponder." "I think that's what they did here." "Uh, one of the tenants of the scientific method is that any theory or idea is only as valid as the latest evidence shows, and you never want to say that I'm 100% sure about something," "and then quit looking for more evidence." "Who knows?" "Maybe someday people like you, you know, they're doing documentaries and writing books and everything else, you may find something and prove us all wrong." "And cold case it and open it up again and go for it." "Who knows?" "Another thing I would add is that this story doesn't have a moral." "Most stories have morals." "But-- you can't point to anything here." "You can fabricate one." "You can invent a morale, but there isn't one that's visible to me." "It's just flat out, you know, unadulterated tragedy, whatever happened." "And I miss him..." "And quite often I wonder," "I can't help but wonder." "I kind of miss that sense of wonderment that he'd have discovering something new, like a Martini, um, which was a very joyous moment for him, and it's that-- just those small little details" "of someone's life the small gestures like that that stand out that become meaningful, and I miss that about him." "I don't know, is life as sad a moral as-- All sorrowful is life?" "You know the first absolute truth of buddhism, is that a moral?" "I suppose." "I mean, there's nothing but tragedy there." "There's just so many unanswered questions, and I think about it a lot." "Uh... and it still upsets me that no one" "No one really cared what happened to Steve haataja." "They never really cared." "I don't know that we'll ever know the truth, but I do know one thing, he was a good, intelligent, interesting man, good sense of humor." "He was very soft-hearted, very caring, enthusiastic about his work, about his students, cared about our learning." "Um..." "He wanted to be involved." "He wanted us to succeed in whatever it was that we did." "He was always there anytime anybody needed him." "That's a lot to say about a person." "It's hard to find people like that." "Yeah, and so that he didn't die" "Let's just say that he didn't die in vain, and let's say that that's the moral of the story." "That he did live a number of years, he did get his advanced doctorate, he did find a place where he belonged." "He did have friends, he did change people's lives." "And, um..." "And so maybe it wasn't all for nothing." "Course it wasn't all for nothing." "It was not-- It was not in vain." "*" "The way that this is presented just is-- Just, uh, a fabulous, um, summation." "And it's all germaine." "Oh, I got birds songbook, too." "Whoops." "I got a big book." "I don't know." "It's..." "Gossamer, man." "It's fuckin'..." "Intangible." "I don't know what it is, but it's right out of reach." "I know I shot one guy in the back." "I shot him fair and square." "Fairly fast and squarely in the back." "I rode without fear." "And if you're riding a motorcycle, you need to ride without fear..." "Only probably without some common sense, also." "So..." "You know, and as Stephen king would say, if there are alligators in your head, you know, you" "The alligators appeal to you." "But if there aren't alligators in your head, you're probably offended and turned off and horrified." "There's some people that like security." "I don't need security." "I just need freedom." "And you never know whenever you could get hit by a truck or hit by a meteoroid for that matter." "It might be out..." "Yeah, I think it's out of batteries." "It's this kinda..." "They feel that they have this power to delve into the mind of Herman melville and-- and-- And draw all these" "These connections between him and God and everything else and-- and, uh, you know, his internal turmoils and" "It's a book about a whale." "Okay?" "That's it?" "It's a book about a whale." "It kinda makes that-- Sound that I..." "Do it again." "As far as making concessions," "I've made millions of them." "I'm still sitting here with no money, you know." "Uh, so, uh, it's not like I'm..." "I'm like faye dunaway or something." "You know." "How do you mean by that?" "Well, I understand she's difficult to work with." "*"