To anyone who lives south of the Arctic Circle the problem can seem abstract—another distant note of sadness in an era heavy with extinctions. But this is not how it appears in the far north.

In small communities scattered along the tree line or set in the open tundra, towns such as Anaktuvuk Pass that are often isolated, often Indigenous, where imported food and gas can be astronomically expensive and hunting caribou is often the cheapest and fastest and certainly the most satisfying way to provide for a family, the decline brings a peculiar dread. An Inupiat elder in a coastal town told me it was like feeling the symptoms of a cold coming on. The cold arrives, and it lingers. You don’t get over it. Then it worsens, until you become gaunt and haunted, until you’re afraid it isn’t a cold at all but something deeper. Something that’s shot through your whole system.

This is how the caribou problem feels to many Native people in the north, including the Nunamiut. Their name means “people of the land,” but anyone will tell you that they are, most of all, a caribou people. They are also sometimes called America’s last nomads, because only in about 1950 did the Nunamiut give up a mobile life, a life spent hunting and following caribou. They chose to settle in Anaktuvuk Pass exactly because the herd poured through it like a river. The name Anaktuvuk means “the place of many caribou droppings.”

One night after I’d gone out hunting with Clyde Morry, his father, Mark, made a quiet comment about the choice his people had made. Mark Morry was a veteran of the Vietnam War. Thick gray hair, thick old glasses. He sat in a recliner by a window in the house he had built, watching his family eat caribou that Clyde had brought home.

“It was a big gamble for them to settle down like that,” Mark said of his own father and mother and uncles and aunts, the generation who gave up nomadism. “They figured the caribou would always be here.”

*This story is only accessible to National Geographic subscribers.

Katya Cengel | The Atavist Magazine |November 2023 | 1,709 words (6 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 145, “The Truth Is Out There.”

Bruce Champagne stood in a small clearing next to a stump. It was mid-November 2022, and snow was already visible on the nearby mountains. All around Bruce were stands of reeds known as phragmites, some so tall they reached well over his head. Just a short walk away, through a swampy area, was the western edge of Utah Lake.

Bruce, a retired cop in his sixties, had come to this no-man’s-land to research a mysterious sighting. A few years back, an elderly couple living in a house on a nearby bluff saw something they couldn’t explain. The couple refused to recount their experience over the phone, so Bruce visited them at their home in Saratoga Springs, about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City. They told him that they went into the backyard one day because their dog was barking. Not far away, near a stump in the field behind the house, they saw a figure. A creature.  

It appeared to be six or seven feet tall. It was dark, hairy, and humanlike. The creature stood up, paused, then walked away, disappearing into the reeds. The whole thing lasted three or four seconds.

After he heard the couple’s account, Bruce measured the distance between the backyard and the stump. It was 60 yards, a range at which, Bruce knew, the couple would have been able to see the contrasting shades of clothing or skin. But they said that the creature was uniform in color. Bruce also noted that it was May when the sighting happened, which is when carp spawn in Utah Lake. Perhaps the animal, whatever it was, had been feeding.

Now Bruce was weighing whether it was worth placing game cameras in the area. He’d installed them at dozens of sites over the previous decade; a blue dot marked each location on a map on his computer. He told me that retrieving data from the cameras, usually after 30 days or so, felt like Christmas morning. Except in this metaphor, Bruce’s gifts always turned out to be socks and underwear. He spent a lot of time watching footage of deer and squirrels, because the cameras never caught what he was looking for: the relict hominoid Sasquatch, popularly known as Bigfoot.

Bruce considers himself a cryptozoologist, someone who searches for and studies animals whose very existence is disputed. Unlike some of the more eccentric types in the field, Bruce is organized and methodical. He has published papers every bit as dry as those in other areas of study—they just happen to be about relict hominoids, sea serpents, and lake monsters.

His specific obsession with Bigfoot began when he was a kid, more than 50 years ago. In fact, it was right around the time his father disappeared. Bruce is reluctant to allow that the two things might be connected, but it’s hard to see it any other way.

Bruce hasn’t looked for the truth about what happened with his father nearly as hard as he’s looked for Bigfoot. Still, the truth keeps finding him and his family. Over the past five decades, revelations about a man who left home one day and never came back have taken Bruce and the rest of the Champagnes by surprise—again and again and again.

1.

Bruce’s parents met in the Navy. Alan Champagne, the oldest of five from an East Coast family, joined up right out of high school. Lynn Marie Brown enlisted after a brief stint in college studying art. An eccentric young woman who loved science fiction, especially Ray Bradbury, Lynn was 19 when the couple married. After several more years in the Navy, including a posting in Japan, Alan and Lynn settled in Bakersfield, California, a sprawling city of oil wells and orchards populated by the descendants of dust bowl migrants. It was where Lynn had grown up.

Alan found work in the communications sector and then as a probation officer. He attended and graduated from college while working. Lynn took care of the children. There were four boys—Bruce, Brad, Brian, and Barry—and one girl, Deirdre, whom everyone called DeeDee. The boys all had the same middle name: Alan.

Bruce was the oldest. His dad took him shooting, and Bruce used his father’s Winchester 12-gauge. Once when they went fishing at a bass pond, Alan oared out in a rowboat to dislodge a fish his son had caught when it became tangled in some underwater weeds. He could have cut the line, but Alan wanted to make sure Bruce saw the fish he’d caught.

Alan also liked to fish in the ocean. Bruce didn’t go on longer fishing trips, like the one his father scheduled in the late winter of 1972. On Friday, March 10, Alan drove two and a half hours from Bakersfield to Morro Bay, a small community about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was meeting a group of friends who worked in law enforcement; they would be gone for the weekend.

Morro Bay got its name from the 576-foot volcanic plug sitting at the mouth of the narrow channel connecting the bay to the Pacific—morro means “snout” in Spanish. The harbor, completed in the 1940s, was a popular launch point for recreational fishing and boating. But there were times, especially in winter, when big swells made navigating the foggy channel treacherous.

According to the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol logbook, word that Alan’s fishing trip was in trouble reached shore at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday. Someone reported that they’d heard a voice calling out for help from a sandspit stretching like a spindly finger up the bay’s western edge. The voice belonged to 15-year-old Steven Stranathan. The boat he was on that morning had capsized.

Steve had been excited to embark on his first fishing trip with a group he called “the guys.” It included Steve’s stepdad, Jack Stranathan, 58, a deputy sheriff and veteran of the Navy and Coast Guard; Joseph Boydstone, 64, a doctor at a Bakersfield jail; and Harry Morlan, 58, and Irlan Warren, 39, both probation officers like Alan, who at 32 was the youngest of the adults aboard.

Steve would later remember kneeling next to Alan just before the accident happened. They were on the cabin deck of a boxy, 28-foot leisure craft made by a company called Land N’ Sea. It was part boat, part travel trailer. It belonged to Jack, who was down below steering. The vessel was more than a mile south of the entrance to Morro Bay and a few hundred yards from the sandspit. The seas were rough. As the boat battled the waves, Steve joked to Alan, “Well, if we go, at least we’ll go laughing.”

The next thing Steve knew it was dark. The boat had split in two and capsized, and he was in the water trying to swim. The cowboy boots his stepdad had mocked him for wearing on the boat were dragging him down. Steve kicked them off, then wriggled out of his Levi’s, flannel shirt, and parka—everything but his underwear. He swam toward the surface. The water got brighter, then brighter still. Steve wondered if he’d make it. Just as he felt sure his lungs would explode, his head burst out of the water.

Steve saw his stepfather floating lifeless nearby. He also saw Harry Morlan clinging to the engines at the stern of the overturned hull. Steve and Harry managed to swim to the sandspit, where another body had washed up: It was Joseph Boydstone. Steve dragged him from the surf.

Soon a Harbor Patrol boat arrived. By 9 a.m. the Coast Guard cutter Cape Hedge was conducting a shoreline search of a five-mile area. Rescue personnel found debris from the boat: two fenders, a canopy. Irlan Warren was also found, alive. Irlan said that after being flung into the water, he swam to the surface. Sometime later, he was able to grab the boat’s propeller shaft and wait for rescue.

The only man unaccounted for was Alan.

At 10:57, an Army helicopter was dispatched to the scene, followed by one from the Navy. By 11:05, a Coast Guard plane had arrived. The pilots made low passes along the ocean side of the sandspit but found nothing.

Meanwhile a dozen firefighters and harbor patrolmen headed toward the white and yellow hull, which by then had beached. Scattered among the driftwood and kelp on the sand were ripped sections of fiberglass, a yellow seat cushion, and a paper plate. Using axes, a crowbar, and a power saw, the men cut a hole in what Land N’ Sea claimed was a “virtually unsinkable” boat. Someone reached into the boat’s cabin and pulled out a leather sandal and a gray plastic box. The crew shone a flashlight inside but couldn’t get a clear view. A rescuer was lowered headfirst into an opening, but if Alan’s body was inside he couldn’t see it.

The Navy tried to flip the hull upright. A rope was slipped under the bow and the other end was attached to a chopper. Three times an attempt was made to lift the wreckage, without success. Shovels came out, and men loosened the sand around the hull. On the fourth try, the helicopter was able to lift the hull and then slam it back down, right side up.

It was now 12:40. The tide was coming in, the ocean lapping at the men’s ankles. From the hull they pulled a waterlogged suitcase, a pillow, and a dented teakettle. Scouring the beach once more, they found a sleeping bag and a tabletop. But there was no body.

There never would be. Which was strange.

“We do have probably a disproportionate amount of accidents out here just because the coast is rough,” said Eric Endersby, who recently retired as director of the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol. Endersby didn’t work the 1972 rescue, but he knows the history of the bay as well as anyone. He said that boating accidents resulting in death are rare. But what’s even more unusual is someone disappearing after a wreck. “If somebody’s lost in the surf, even if they sink, they eventually wash in just because all the wave energy pushes them,” Eric said.

“In my thirty years,” he continued, “we’ve never not recovered somebody.”

I felt caught in a peculiar quandary. If I repeated details that G had already written down, was I relying on a primary source or appropriating what my peers in creative-writing workshops would call her “lived experience”? The tautology maddened me. I had lived the experience, too, yet I felt like either a mimic, reciting my family’s recollections, or a fabulist, mistaking my imagination for fact. My ignorance isolated me from G and our mom. I had a sense that I was hammering on a bolted door, begging them to admit me to an awful place. And why would I want to get in? Well, because they were there.

So she and her colleagues climbed one more flight of stairs, to a door that opened into the sixth and top floor. She remembered that this was where the older military records were kept, the ones from World War I, World War II, and Korea, but she hadn’t been up here since orientation. Now, as she pulled open the door, she saw the cardboard boxes neatly stacked on metal shelves as far as the eye could see.

They were on fire.

Had the group gone up a staircase on the periphery of the building and not the central one, Trieschmann likely would have seen only a thick cloud of smoke. Instead, she witnessed the earliest stage of a blaze that would occupy hundreds of firefighters for days.

Even now—years later—Orlando still hears rumors about what may have been concealed in the truck’s cargo, including guns or even up to $2 million in cash hidden inside pieces of furniture. If that much money had gone missing, though, Orlando doesn’t think he’d be alive—or that he’d have been able to negotiate his release for such a comparatively small sum. While his kidnappers originally asked for $15,000, Orlando says he negotiated it down to $7,000 by telling his captors they could keep the school bus he’d driven down to sell in Guatemala. Only in retrospect does it appear that some outside factor—perhaps his family’s calls to local Guatemalan police—saved him from a shallow, unmarked grave.

When I visited Ramón in a small penthouse apartment in Barcelona, he recalled once finding a pistol in a house where they were staying. He and Ricard started playing with it on an outdoor staircase. Ramón pointed the pistol at his brother, then turned away and pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled as he fired a real bullet. He explained with photographic exactitude the shape of the staircase, the white outside wall and a garden below. “My father was furious,” he told me.

He remembers, too, his father driving them to a beachside restaurant and leaving the engine running while he went inside. They waited a few minutes before he reappeared, bleeding from a badly beaten face. “I recall the tension in the car as we drove off,” Ramón said. Ricard’s memories are fewer, but also vivid: his father parking the black Porsche above a vertiginous cliff; a wood-lined Paris apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower; visiting his father in a hospital room. They seemed like scenes from a French noir gangster movie.

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Dan Hernandez | Longreads | February 28, 2023 | 16 minutes (4,503 words)

When a criminal defense attorney warns you not to view something — in this case, a suspicious VHS tape — it’s probably wise to listen. Dread filled my gut as I slid the tape into the VCR and pressed play. My car had been stolen in October 2022, and after the police recovered it, a lot of stuff belonging to the thief remained inside, including the VHS tape. 

At first, I figured it would contain something sentimental. Home movies of a wedding, Christmas, or graduation. It crossed my mind, too, that it might contain something intimate. A sex tape, perhaps, recorded with an ex-lover. Sensual lovemaking between two consenting adults — that would be a relief. I soon started to fear, however, that the tape would contain something heinous, something I couldn’t unsee. The man had desecrated my car; now I worried my mind would be next. But that’s also why I felt obliged to watch it. Call it civic duty, or due diligence. Call it paranoid, rubbernecking voyeurism. It was all of the above. 

It took a community effort to reach this point in my investigation. My neighbor lent the VCR. I borrowed the adapter chords from a friend’s coworker. And since I didn’t want to watch the tape alone, my friend Steph volunteered to join. Others had declined, some squeamishly, some flat out saying, “No fucking way!” 

I told myself if anything disturbing showed up on the tape, I’d stop it immediately, though I knew that just to see a face on either side of a brutal act would haunt me for I don’t know how long, and you can’t mentally prepare for something like that. Steph has a fun, laid-back energy I can count on in every occasion, but even she said, “I’m scared!” as the VCR hummed to life, its plastic gears turned, and “PLAY” appeared in the corner of the television screen. 

“Remember how as a kid, when you rented a movie you’d feel all giddy right before it started?” I said. “This is the opposite of that feeling.”

About the lawyer, the one who’d warned against viewing the tape. He’s a friend. I’d invited him over to watch basketball, Nuggets-Celtics, when this topic came up. 

“Look, if the police wanted to know what was on that tape, they could’ve taken it when they arrested the guy,” he’d said. 

I wondered if his antipathy for prosecutors and prisons had biased him against my expressed duty to review the tape. “Check this out,” I said, removing its cardboard sleeve. In between the reels was a handwritten label: Bad Tape.

“Keep that tape away from me! I don’t want anything to do with that tape!” he’d said. 

Ultimately, he’s still a criminal defense attorney, and I’m a writer and a journalist. When a mysterious tape comes into my possession in a crime, however petty the offense, I’m going to watch it, and if I find something horrible on it, I’m not going to keep that to myself. 

Recently, I had worked with a documentary team investigating a series of violent crimes in Las Vegas, some of which were “thrill killings.” In one case, a man filmed himself shooting a person asleep on the ground in a park. Days later, he filmed himself shooting a person walking their dog at the exact same location. The police gathered surveillance footage and identified him by interviewing people in the neighborhood. But the key evidence was the video content on his phone, which the police claim he recorded to relive his violence. 

The tape in my possession didn’t contain anything like that. Watching it led to a different sort of reckoning, but to explain, I have to rewind a bit. 

***

It feels almost disingenuous to say my car was stolen. It was not broken into. No one hotwired it. I was not carjacked at gunpoint. Nor was it stolen through the recent TikTok trend to boost Kias by sticking a USB drive down the throat of the ignition. Nothing so clever or destructive occurred. 

I left Las Vegas, where I live, for a work trip to Phoenix. That morning, my father flew into Las Vegas for a weekend trip with his wife and her grandson. They borrowed my car. While out to dinner that evening, my father left it unlocked with the key inside in the parking lot of the Orleans Hotel and Casino, a budget resort west of the Strip. 

I was out drinking with colleagues that night and missed a few calls. When I checked my phone, I saw my father had texted with weird punctuation and fragment sentences: “Call me It’s very important. It’s about important.” 

It sounded important. I had also missed a call from the police. I got on the phone with my father first and, with a tone of pure shame, he said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, son. Your car is gone.”

If you love your parents, and they’re still with you when you reach middle age, you must navigate the occasional senior moment that makes you want to tear out your hair and scream, Dammit, how could you be so irresponsible?!

“It’s okay,” I said. It took incredible restraint not to turn the screws on a man who has not always patiently endured my dumbass mistakes. My wife says I need therapy for how severe my father could be at times, because now I’m the same way — a shouty, reactive jerk when deeply disappointed. 

My calm response seemed to make him feel worse, knowing, as I’m sure he did, he would not be so forgiving. “I don’t know how, I just …” he trailed off, desperate to explain. “I have no excuse. I feel horrible.” 

“Yeah,” I said, agreeing he had no excuse. But to be fair, my father did pull a key fob from his pocket and press lock before walking away from the vehicle. He just happened to use his key to his SUV back in Denver. 

When I shared this news with my wife, she pointed out that our house keys were on the car key fob. We felt helpless to know that the thief could find our address on the documents in the glove compartment, drive over, and let himself in with no more resistance than a couple of barking dogs. We live about 20 minutes away from where the car disappeared. My wife was alone and, feeling unsafe, decided to leave and check into a hotel. 

I stayed up that night listening for doorbell camera notifications on my phone. I’m used to receiving video clips of movements outside the house — a neighborhood cat, a tree swaying in the wind, a delivery man dropping off a package. None came, though I hardly slept. And the next morning, my father went to our house and changed the locks. 

There’s a saying in South America that kept repeating in my mind: “Don’t give away the papaya.” It means, keep an eye on your shit if you don’t want it to get jacked. Mine was a 2017 Kia Optima hybrid, the first newish car I’d ever owned. My driving life up to that point had been a source of embarrassment. When I was 17, in the late ’90s, at a Catholic school where some students drove sports cars and luxury SUVs, the high school newspaper launched a series called “Hooptie of the Month,” and the columnist named my ’81 Honda coupe the inaugural winner, describing it snarkily as a rat-powered jalopy with cockroaches nested in the vents. It was all beaters, or no car at all, until the Kia, which by contrast made me proud. 

This emotional connection to the basic four-door sedan led to anger and grief that it was being mistreated. Like a phantom backseat driver, I imagined the car thief weaving through traffic and wished somehow I could intervene. 

I called a cop I know to hear what might happen next. “That’s a crime of opportunity,” he said. “Not the kind of person who takes the car to a chop shop, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s Halloween weekend. Probably someone’s out joyriding. My guess is they’ll abandon it in the next couple weeks. That or we’ll pull guns on them when we run the plates, because they don’t look like the sort of person who drives that type of vehicle. 

“If we find it, we’ll give you a call right away,” he added. “Whether it’s three in the morning or whenever, you’ll hear from us.”

This was somewhat reassuring. Somewhat, because profiling car owners based on appearance sounds like a bigger problem than the one it’s meant to address. 

For her part, my wife hoped the Kia would not be found. She had encouraged me to sell it and profit on the car shortage to pay off credit card debt, so the potential for a payout from my insurance provider sounded good to her. We began arguing, though, over shared use of her car. 

I present these frustrations and inconveniences to survey the initial impact of the crime. It upset me, it led to tension and unease, and it rattled my father’s sense of himself as a fully functioning human being — not a fun way to start a vacation! 

The experience also served as an exercise in patience and compassion, which proved important to maintain when the authorities reached out. 

Before my father left Las Vegas, he texted me a photo of him and his wife and her grandson toasting beers at the Bellagio. I had told him not to let the incident ruin their trip. That didn’t mean I literally wanted to see selfies of him partying at a casino — which seems petty, I know. The man has bailed me out so many times in my life, it would’ve been indecent to act anything other than sympathetic. He cosigned on my car loan, for example, so I could receive a lower interest rate. And the vehicle was fully insured, more reason than any to move on. I texted him back, “Looks like fun!” 

These events also reminded me of a crime that impacted my mother when I was a child, a formative episode in itself. 

***

My mother worked as a bank teller for 36 years at a branch of World Savings and Loan, in Aurora, Colorado, and one day the bank was robbed. This was before ATMs, when bank tellers, most of whom were women, handled all of the cash, and before customer service was done through bullet-resistant plexiglass. 

The man arrived on foot. He wore a hat, and according to reports he resembled Tom Selleck. He approached the counter like a typical customer — the bank was otherwise empty — and he pulled out a silver handgun and announced, “Ladies, this is a robbery.” 

My mother, though startled, calmly worked with her colleagues to give the man everything he wanted, which in the end included my mother’s car. It was a station wagon — the family car for our family of six. My mother warned, “You don’t want my car. It hasn’t been running well lately.” Which was true. The man laughed and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get it back.”

Indeed, that evening, the police found my mother’s car at a nearby shopping center, where the robber was assumed to have stashed his actual getaway vehicle. It was one many bank heists pulled by a man the FBI had nicknamed “the Gentleman Bandit” for his distinctly courteous and apologetic demeanor during stickups. He never used his weapon, and he often thanked bank tellers on his way out, leading many, including my mother, to comment afterward on how polite he was.

As a child riveted with mobsters and mafia movies, I was oddly proud of my mother’s poise and impressed by the grace she showed afterward. Her only complaint was that the FBI made a mess of our car in its search for clues. 

I don’t recall my parents ever considering whether the Gentleman Bandit robbed banks out of a need for money or simply for the thrill, as in the movie Heat, where “the action is the juice.” I’ve since learned that the man, whose real name was Melvin Dellinger, had studied journalism and apparently explained his nontraditional work schedule to his neighbor by claiming to be writing a book. Now I wonder if he was motivated by monetary need and experience. He traveled well (he was a favored guest at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas) but had a modest middle-class lifestyle. Perhaps, he just had a vendetta against banks. Once, during a robbery, an elderly customer offered Dellinger the money in their wallet, yet he declined to accept it, saying, “I don’t want your money, I want theirs.” 

Ultimately, the important thing to my family was that the Gentleman Bandit exercised kindness and restraint toward the innocent people he confronted in the process of targeting wealthy institutions. 

The “victimless crime” trope may be simplistic. Having purchased auto insurance in a city with a staggering car theft problem, I know the burden is always transferred onto the consumer, punishing us all. Yet I’m still inclined to assess crimes differently when the impact is largely economic, nonviolent, and pursued more out of need than greed. 

Inequality has made all manner of desperate deeds understandable, even when the results are infuriating. 

Of course, armed robbery is always considered a violent crime, even when the people threatened at gunpoint walk away complimenting the perpetrator’s etiquette. It’s traumatizing, and my mother may be the exception for having gotten over it fast. Good Catholic that she is, she also felt sorry for Dellinger when he was fatally shot during a final heist attempt in Denver. 

Despite his reputation for nonviolence and civility, the Gentleman Bandit was not given much chance to surrender. A police officer working undercover as a bank teller shot him in the chest immediately after announcing himself, when Dellinger turned to face him. By then, he had become the third most-prolific bank robber in FBI history, having attempted 49 heists, more than half of which occurred in Colorado, where he robbed some locations more than once. 

A note in Dellinger’s pocket read: “My wife knew nothing about this. Please tell her I’m sorry. Thank you.”

***

As promised, I got a call from the police after midnight about two weeks after my car disappeared. The voicemail said it could be “recovered” at Ewing Bros. tow yard. I got a ride there not knowing whether the car would be drivable or not. The lot was north of downtown, and its office had the stagnant air of a toolshed. It felt stuffy with frustration and dread. Some customers — if one can call us that — had a car impounded for driving with expired plates. They had to renew their vehicle’s registration at the DMV before the tow yard could release it. The fee then would be $250, until 5 p.m. The price goes up by the day. 

A short woman in a velour tracksuit said her dog was in her car when she parked it somewhere she wasn’t supposed to. “Where’s my dog now?” she asked. The clerk told her the driver should have dropped it off at the animal shelter and to look there. A tall, skinny man tried to endear himself to a clerk by announcing loudly that he’d once applied for a job there. “We could have been coworkers!” he howled, to no avail.

I wasn’t the only person whose car had been stolen. While I waited for my turn to be taken into the yard to inspect it, another Kia was dragged in with its frontend smashed, shedding shards of twisted metal. 

There wasn’t a scratch on mine. Just a coat of desert dust. I got inside and caught a heavy whiff of body odor. There was clothing piled in the backseat — jeans, flannels, sweatpants. I saw loose cigarettes in the cupholder and a bottle of Smoke Blaster spray, which removes tobacco smell from hair, hands, and clothing, ostensibly to hide the habit from disapproving loved ones. On the floor lay a tray of decorated Halloween cookies. I wondered if they had a child with them. There was a box of Cheez-Its, a party-sized bag of Cheetos, and as a healthy alternative, fresh grapes. 

The license plate was pulled. I found it stuffed under the front seat. I assumed that’s how they were pulled over and arrested — driving without a license plate in what was revealed to be a stolen vehicle. I found an EBT card, a food stamp card, and the mysterious videotape.

The cardboard sleeve with Scotch branding over a column of rectangles dated it to the ’80s or ’90s. Back then, I used these tapes to record episodes of The Simpsons, and it had been decades since I’d even held a VHS tape. Immediately, I wondered what recording could be so special that the person held onto it for that long, and in these transient circumstances. Before I could find out, I had to pay $250 to get my car out. 

The gas tank was empty, but because it’s a hybrid the battery allowed me to drive out. The tow yard was next to the Corridor of Hope, a district of homeless shelters. Two freeways cut the neighborhood off from the Fremont Street tourism area, and even the air was gritty from the pollution. Hundreds of people were camped on the sidewalks. I had met some of them during the annual homeless count, which I covered once for a newspaper. They preferred not to sleep in shelters, they said, but still camped there to access the food banks and other social services. They called the area “The Corridor of Hopelessness.” Passing through put in perspective how lucky I was, not just to have my car back, but in life in general. 

I called my friend Kelly to share the news.

“Did they leave the Creedence?” he asked. He’s one of those Big Lebowski quoters. 

“The car seems fine, but there’s a bunch of random stuff inside and it smells pretty rank.”

“Probably a vagrant used it as a toilet,” he went on. 

“There’s a weird tape,” I interjected. “A videocassette. I have to watch it.” I was already seeking an accomplice. “Maybe the library has a TV-VCR.”

“You sure you want to play that thing in a public library?” Kelly said. 

When I got home, I threw away the thief’s clothes. I noticed a pair of children’s sized jeans and a T-shirt for an Army unit that had all the soldiers’ names on the back. I also trashed the cookies and grapes, the unopened junk food I kept. The tape would sit on my mantel for a week while I worked up the will to find a VCR and the nerve to watch it. Noticing the Bad Tape label increased my urgency, but also intensified my dread. Like in The Ring, it felt as if watching the mysterious video would doom me.

***

After I pressed play, Steph and I waited through several minutes of a blank blue screen and white noise. Fast-forwarding, I saw it continued that way for a while. I pressed stop, fast-forward, play. “Bad Tape” was just a bad tape, until, halfway through the reel, a recognizable recording appeared — an ad for Crisco. Then we saw Angela Lansbury. “Is it Murder She Wrote?” I asked. Steph was dying with laughter. It was indeed a teaser for the novelist detective show. The commercials ended and a scene from a soap opera began: A young pregnant woman discussing plans to give up her baby for adoption. The next one showed a boy discussing his father’s murder. It was The Young and the Restless. 

Through Google, I figured out that the episode aired in 1989. 

Why hang onto soap opera reruns for more than three decades? I grasped for other motives or theories the car thief may have had for the tape, because it didn’t make sense. Over the next few days, I watched the rest. There were episodes of One Life to Live, General Hospital, and the Oprah Winfrey Show — an interview with Bill Cosby.

I was reminded of how my mother used to record Days of Our Lives  during her workday. Sometimes, I’d watch it with her at night, me passively doing homework while she ironed and folded laundry. Maybe the car thief held onto the tape for similarly nostalgic reasons?

The 1989 commercials included endearing local ads for Vegas institutions like Circus Circus, the Golden Steer, and a casino school for card dealers and croupiers, suggesting that the tape’s owner was a longtime local.

“Are you sad it’s not a meth addict’s sex tape?” my wife teased.

I didn’t feel sad so much as embarrassed that I’d anticipated the most vile content imaginable when reality couldn’t have proven more banal. Two words, “Bad Tape,” had turned me into one of those people who believe that if a person has committed one crime, they’re capable of anything. 

The daily bludgeon of political ads declaring violence an ever-present hazard may have gotten to me during the recent election cycle, though I believed myself immune to such fear-mongering. Working as a fixer for a true-crime investigation had certainly elevated my concerns. More than anything, though, the sudden disappearance of my car set off a fit of anxiety and suspicion that was both stronger and more subtle than I realized. 

There was another factor I hated to acknowledge as a freelance journalist. The work biases me toward odd and surprising narratives, the more dangerous the potential story, the more powerful its draw. This sensibility can be helpful when finding and exposing wrongdoing. But there are also those occasions when I only catch myself behaving like an aggressive and mercenary cynic. 

I thought this little reckoning was the end of my stolen car-bad tape drama. But the district attorney’s office had other plans. They called a couple days after I reviewed the video. “Did you receive our subpoena?” a legal assistant said. It would arrive in the mail that afternoon. The D.A.’s office wanted me to testify against the man charged with stealing my car. “He may take a plea,” the individual explained, “but sometimes these public defenders like to play games and wait and see if the victim shows up.”

I was informed that the man had another stolen vehicle charge just a couple weeks earlier; he was out on bail for that offense when the police arrested him with my car. Later, using a court database, I looked him up and saw no other criminal offenses on his record in Nevada before October 2022. It appeared the guy was having a pretty bad month. 

When I told my buddy Kelly about the subpoena, he said, “If someone stole my car, I’d go to court and demand the death penalty!” Kelly lost a truck recently in a hit and run, and he doesn’t have the means that I do to pay tow yard fees and car insurance deductibles. Nor does he have a partner who can lend him their vehicle, or a job he can work from home. So, I get it. (Well, not the death penalty part — I get the attitude.)

But I also understand through friends who were on the other side of these proceedings how a felony conviction can haunt a person for the rest of their life, impairing the ability to find work and housing. I’ve seen that derail addiction recovery as it sabotages hopes and dreams to overcome past mistakes. 

A few days before the court hearing, I called the district attorney’s office to say that while I intended to honor the subpoena, I was not a tough-on-crime person, and if I could have it my way, the charges would be dropped. I’d gotten my car back undamaged — no harm, no foul, I figured. However, as I began to ramble on with my righteousness, the legal assistant cut me off. 

“Let me make sure you understand how this works,” he said. “You’re not the one pressing charges. We are.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “I just want you to know, I’m not showing up to make sure you throw the book at him or whatever. For what it’s worth, I’d prefer the opposite.”

The legal assistant let me know that if the hearing went on as scheduled, I would have an opportunity beforehand to express these feelings to the prosecutor. I doubted that my opinion mattered. They subpoenaed me to confirm in court that the defendant did not have permission to take my car, even though I’d said that much already to the police. There also seemed to be an element of stagecraft going on by which my appearance would spook the defendant and his attorney into accepting a deal that they had thus far resisted. For the purposes of that negotiation, I had already notified a contact in the public defenders’ office that if pressed to speak in a trial as the victim, I would advocate for leniency. Now, the D.A. knew where I stood as well.

On the night before the court hearing, I called a hotline to check if the case was still on the docket. It was not. I assumed they had reached a plea agreement. However, when I looked it up a few weeks later, on that date it showed the case had been “continued for negotiations on possible dismissal.” 

What led to that result? I would hope that for something as minor as a property crime, the victim’s preferences would be secondary to sympathetic or “mitigating” factors, as the attorneys put it, such as duress in the man’s life and that he had a clean record until October, when he apparently decided to steal and live out of cars. 

In any case, I was happy to see it moving toward leniency. 

My wife pointed out that I had a harder time forgiving my father than the man who actually stole my car. “Well, I don’t know him,” I said. I’m not sure what that suggests about my relationship dynamics, but it can’t be good. For his part, my dad seems humbler and more passive since the incident occurred. We spent time with him and his wife in Denver over the holidays. He did not bring up the car theft, nor did I, but it hung in the air like an object lesson. 

At one point, after I borrowed his SUV and refueled it with regular unleaded instead of premium gasoline, he started yelling at me. But he quickly caught himself and muttered something like, “Oh well, nothing to do about it now!” 

This was progress. Ever since this all happened, we’re both getting better at letting petty stuff go. 

Dan Hernandez is a writer based in Las Vegas. Links to his fiction, essays, and journalism can be found at danhernandez-writer.com.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Soon, I was watching Lora Lee’s films, excavating archives, sifting through old movie magazines, reading newspaper clippings, obituaries, county clerk records, letters and court filings. Like an anthropologist, I began tracing genealogy reports and tracking down anyone who crossed paths with her, trying to understand what they might tell me about who Lora Lee Michel was and what happened to her. Eventually, I discovered the many hidden threads of her life. 

Late at night, he’d open the scans of Michael’s brain on his computer. The right and left hemispheres glowed like the phosphorescent wings of a Luna moth. He would flip through the images one by one, exploring the mysterious topology of the brain. He was searching for anomalies, for answers. He was looking for his lost son.

But Scott stood his ground. He knew his son couldn’t wait for a clinical trial that might take five years and tens of millions of dollars. He embraced the PANS roadmap, believing that Michael’s physicians were ignoring clear evidence that there could be an infectious trigger to his illness. Whether or not it was ultimately the correct diagnosis, it seemed obvious to him that the doctors weren’t exploring every possibility in treating his son. This was yet another avenue they hadn’t explored—one that seemed like a promising fit. He couldn’t rest until he’d seen it through.

It was after 10 p.m., and Derek Broaddus was alone. He raced around the house, turning off lights so no one could see inside, then called the Westfield Police Department. An officer came to the house, read the letter, and said, “What the fuck is this?” He asked Derek if he had enemies and recommended moving a piece of construction equipment from the back porch in case The Watcher tried to toss it through a window.