The North Side Witch Hunt: Nabbing Two Sacrificial Lambs

This cover story first appeared in the February 2005 edition of NORTH of the JAMES.

by Charles McGuigan 02.2005

Witch-hunts are curious phenomena, and thoroughly reactionary in nature. They generally begin with an inexplicable event of one kind or other—cows unable to give milk, the outbreak of a disease. When answers are not forthcoming, authority figures, who suck the swill of self-righteousness (consider Cotton Mather or Senator Joe McCarthy), arrive with a solution. They point the finger at a member of society who lives on the edge. This person is depicted as evil, the perpetrator of a crime. A rumor mill begins grinding away truth, pulverizing it into fairy dust. And then a curious thing happens: Fiction becomes fact; superstition supplants science. And not just in the minds of the fervent founders of the hunt or in the brains of the witless. Even the well-educated, the thinkers of the time, become infected, for hysteria is a disease and it spreads like the plague. When it reaches pandemic proportions, enter the torches and pitchforks, and the town folks get ready for a good old-fashioned witch burning. The key always is to portray the alleged perpetrator as evil-incarnate, the scapegoat of all that is bad. In Europe, not during the Middle Ages, but at the height of the Renaissance, hundreds of thousands of women were tortured, brutalized, drowned and burnt alive by ardent believers, the authority figures of that time—Calvinists, Catholics, Lutherans. It was a reign of terror that lasted for nearly two centuries, affecting virtually all of western Europe, save Ireland. 

You expect that behavior in certain areas where ignorance and intolerance seem to be the general rule. But when it happens in a neighborhood that prides itself on open-mindedness and fairness, it seems out of character. 

But that’s exactly what seems to have occurred this past autumn in the neighborhoods of Bellevue and Ginter Park. From the very beginning, the corporate media got it wrong. They claimed repeatedly that the first so-called “boom” was heard on Election Night. Not so. Many residents of the Northside heard similar booms throughout September and October.  

Theories, as to the origin of the booms, were tossed around at a neighborhood meeting held at The Hermitage, a retirement community. People there were indignant and scared, and elected officials took it to heart. A solution to the mysterious booms would be found. Someone mentioned “pressure bombs”, and that soon became the buzzword. It sounded ominous. The phrase was later changed to “pressure-producing devices,” but the former term stuck. 

City public works employees checked for cracks in sewer lines and tested for natural gas leaks. When nothing turned up, one city official called the foremost authority on seismic activity in the state. Dr. Martin Chapman, who’s known as the Earthquake Man, immediately sized up the situation and suggested that the so-called “booms” were the result of seismic activity. 

That was sometime in mid-November, almost two weeks before two neighborhood boys were arrested. Then on December 7, Dr. Chapman, a professor of geophysics at Virginia Tech, trekked to Richmond and set up three seismographs in the area, with the chance that another earthquake would soon occur. And fortunately, it did. 

Dr. Chapman knows that the rock structure below the earth in Richmond’s Northside is composed of granite and there are small fractures in it. When horizontal forces put pressure on this rock structure, something’s got to give. “Stress concentration generates this sort of small magnitude earthquake throughout the Piedmont,” he says.

In fact, similar micro-earthquakes occurred in Ginter Park and Bellevue 18 years ago, a fact the city should have been aware of. Similar earthquakes have rattled the Northside for a long, long time. Several residents who lived in the area back in the 1950s remember earthquakes as fairly common during a six-month period. “There was a boom and then a rattling,” says one woman, remembering. “It happened all the time back then.”

“There are faults down there,” says Dr. Chapman. When I ask him about the booms, he tells me they are consistent with seismic activity, inviting me to imagine what happens when an earthquake occurs. “Earthquakes create elastic waves, and these seismic waves convert into sound waves at the surface,” he says. 

Those waves sound like a sonic boom at surface level, exactly like the noises that startled  Northside residents for several months. But back in November, few were putting much credence in the earthquake theory. 

And then, according to a source who wishes to remain anonymous, a nosey neighbor called police and told them that she had seen some neighborhood boys blowing up bottles on a side street in Ginter Park.

That, in some ways, was the end of reasoning. The scientific method was apparently chucked aside. Before anything was subjected to an acid test, the city narrowed its focus. Exploded plastic bottles were found, yellow police tape went up, a hastily called news conference was held, and like carrion birds, the corporate media descended.

City employees combed nearby sewer lines for evidence. A police spokesperson had told me that in addition to the two teenagers already arrested, others were being sought in connection with the booms. And, she added, “Additional charges may be filed.” But, she did not elaborate on those charges. 

Someone, somewhere must have suspected that these so-called pressure bombs—a plastic drink bottle containing aluminum foil and another substance—were probably not responsible for the loud booms heard in the Northside. After all, the city did request the help of Dr. Chapman, so they must have had their doubts.

Finally, on Christmas Day, in what may be the best gift several teenage boys will ever receive, another boom occurred and it was recorded, was definitely the result of seismic activity. The boys, in the wink of an eye, were exonerated. The seismographs planted by Dr. Chapman confirmed it.

Jane Westerkamp, a fifteen-year resident of Ginter Park, knew both boys who were arrested, knew them so well in fact that she trusted them to baby sit for her seven-year old son on numerous occasions. “Not only that,” says Jayne. “But when one of them was under house arrest we took Franklin to their house because the boy couldn’t come over to our house to baby sit. They’re great kids. I trust my own son with them.”

Like many other North Side residents she was distressed by how the boys were treated. And from listening to the stories of the parents and kids who were scrutinized for six weeks under a microscope of media and law, that treatment was wretched.

ALL THE NAMES OF THE PARENTS AND CHILDREN IN THE FOLLOWING TWO ACCOUNTS ARE FICTITIOUS AT THE REQUEST OF THE SUBJECTS

THE CONKLINS’ STORY

In early October as she arrived home from work, Linda Conklin noticed some bare spots on the lawn that runs along the side of her house, small halos of brown against the green of the grass. She asked her son, Mark, what had happened and he told her he and some friends had been blowing up soda bottles.

“Okay,” she said. “Just don’t do it on the grass, you’re killing it.  Do it on the driveway.”

Two days later she saw her son and a couple of close friends gathered on the driveway. They were hunkered down working on something. When she got a closer look, she saw they were bent over a small plastic Gatorade bottle. There was a strip of aluminum foil in it.  “What are you two doing?” she asked. Mark looked up. “We’re doing one of those soda bottle things,” he said.

Linda’s curiosity was piqued. “Can I watch?” she said. The boys nodded. She moved up as the boys capped the bottle, gave it a shake. Slowly, the walls of the bottle expanded, straining against an internal pressure. After a few minutes the plastic split and there was a loud noise not unlike a truck backfiring. The unexpected noise jolted Linda. “Mark, that’s really too loud,” she told her son. “Somebody might call the police. Don’t do it again.”

The following day Mark and a friend were standing out in the side street playing with something. She noticed a couple of Gatorade bottles, and saw one of them roll down the sewer. Linda and her husband Eric called both boys in the house and read them the riot act. “We told them never to do it again, and they were scared,” says Linda. “The bottle that rolled down the sewer never blew up.” 

That’s when it all started, Linda tells me. She discovered the other ingredient used to explode the plastic bottles and took it away from her son, then hid the bottle of fluid in a cabinet under her sink.

Toward the end of October, Mark found himself house bound. “He was grounded pretty much all of November and the last part of October,” according to Linda. “He never left the house. Every single time there was an explosion he wasn’t even awake, he was in the bed sleeping. He never himself heard one until the weekend before Thanksgiving.”

All through November, more and more of the booms were reported.  On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Linda, while at work, watched the local news. They were showing video footage of the intersection where her house is built. There was yellow police tape and scores of police officers. 

At work the next day, Linda scanned an article in the daily paper about the discovery of  “pressure explosive devices”. Police had found them the previous day in Ginter Park. One of these devices had not detonated, according to the article. Linda felt a surge of panic. She was thinking about the bottle that had rolled down the sewer. After a few minutes, she turned on the TV at work and tuned to a news broadcast. A long wave of panic washed over her when she saw her home on TV.  She called her husband and said, “Eric, they found that bottle Paul or one of the boys kicked down the sewer a month ago. I think they think this bottle is the cause of the booms. I think we’ve got a problem.”

As she spoke with her husband on a land-based phone, her cell phone began chiming. It was the principal at the high school her son attends. “He informed me that the police were at the school and they wanted to talk to Mark,” Linda tells me. 

“I told the principal not to let the police talk to Paul until I got there, but I didn’t even think about calling a lawyer because I didn’t think we had anything to hide,” says Linda. 

Linda drove to the high school. “I walked into the principal’s office and it was filled with the Gestapo,” she remembers. “That’s their strategy. Get the kids to talk without the parents around. But they were all very nice and we were cooperative with them. Somebody above them was telling them what to do. That’s the sense I got.”

Linda and her husband told the police everything they knew. “The kids never did anything to damage any property or hurt anybody,” says Linda. “They were in their own world experimenting with these bottles like a science project.”

But somewhere in the back of her mind, Linda suspected that things were not going to go well. “I thought this was the beginning of something really horrible,” she says. 

Her suspicions were confirmed when she and her son drove up to the house. On the side street the ringmasters and clowns of the local media had already begun pitching their respective big tops. She evaded them and instead of entering the side door, went to the front door. “A stranger answered the door,” Linda says. 

The place was crawling with police and detectives, explosive experts and forensics teams. “My whole house was filled with men and women wearing rubber gloves,” says Linda. “They went through the garage and they went into my son’s bedroom and they were in the kitchen, they were everywhere. It was swarming.  Everybody had their little job. They were all being nice to us and they all seemed uncomfortable about doing this to us because they felt like we were being very truthful with them.”

When she entered the kitchen she told a police officer that she knew what the officer was looking for. She pointed out the aluminum foil in a drawer and the bottle of liquid in a cabinet. The officer photographed the items where they were found and then carefully placed each one in a plastic bag and sealed it. “It was like something you see on television, like we had murdered some one,” she says. “I was crying, we all were crying.  We told the truth and these people believed us.” But the police were constantly on the phone with someone who seemed to be directing the investigation

Later that day, Linda returned to work and as she was finishing up with her last client, she took a call from her husband. His voice quavered. “Someone is telling these people that they have to lock Mark up for the weekend,” he said.

It was a miserable holiday. And to top it all off, the media stuck its abundant proboscis into it all. On Thanksgiving morning a television news personality knocked on the front door and Eric answered. “If you don’t get off our property right now, I’m going to call the police,” he told her. Eric and Linda visited their son in Juvenile Detention later that day. “That night somebody from the newspaper called and I just hung up on them,” Linda recalls.

Mark spent a total of five days in Richmond Juvenile Detention. His parents were permitted a two-hour visit on Thanksgiving, but were not allowed to bring food. “We spent two days freaking out and crying,” says Linda. The couple also retained a lawyer. “Mark was caught in a web,” his mother says.

The bonds of that web would hold him for more than a month. From the time he was released from Juvenile Detention until January, Mark was under house arrest. “He could just go to school,” says Linda. “He couldn’t take the dog out. He couldn’t even take the trash out. Once he entered the house he had to make a phone call.”

THE STARKS’ STORY

On October 2, Jason Stark left his home in Bellevue and walked the several blocks to the Conklin’s house. He and Mark were friends. He watched, but only watched, as Mark and another friend blew up a plastic drink bottle. When Jason’s parents, Beth and Roger, came home that night, Jason told them about how the bottle blew up. His parents thought it was kind of silly and put it out of mind.

But almost two months later, Linda Conklin called and told the couple that the police had Jason’s name.  “It all started on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving,” says Beth Stark. “I said to her, ‘What do you mean they have his name?’ And she said, ‘He was over here the night that they put one of those bottles off.’”

The Starks, who were planning a trip over the Thanksgiving holiday to North Carolina, considered their options. Says Beth, “We felt like we should just call the police and say, ‘Come and ask him what he’s done?’  He hadn’t done anything.” But a friend of the family recommended a different course of action. “She told us, ‘Don’t do it. You never know when these things start where they’re going to go. They throw out a large net and you just don’t know what they’re going to do. I would suggest you guys get a lawyer because they are out to get these kids. If you call the police now, they will never let you leave town. If the police don’t call, you just go.”

And so they went. When they returned home, they learned that two other boys, one of them being Mark Conklin, had been arrested and spent the holiday weekend in Juvenile Detention. The Starks hired a lawyer immediately.

Almost a week passed without event and the Starks breathed a sigh of relief. But then, Roger received a telephone call. It was from the assistant principal of the high school his son attends. “We’re getting ready to ask your son some questions,” the assistant principal said. “Do you want to come down and listen or would you like to just listen over the speaker phone.” Roger asked to speak to the detective. When he finally got him on the line, Roger said, “We’re not doing either one of these things. We’ll answer your questions with our attorney present.”

Thinking back on that day, Roger says this was the standard practice. “They did it with all of these kids,” he says. “They can come in legally and can take any kid out of class and ask questions.”

The Stark’s attorney filed Jason’s statement with the police, so he never had to endure police interrogation. But his parents made up for that. “Talk about interrogation,” Beth says as her son comes down the stairs and joins us in the living room. “This child was interrogated.  We went through this thing with him so many times. We even talked about lie detector tests.”

Roger nods as his wife speaks.  “The only thing I could get in my head was they must think there’s something else,” he says. He still can’t understand how any reasonable person would believe that the pressure bombs could have caused the booms. “The exploding bottles made the sound of an M-80,” he says.  “People were actually buying into the idea that this bottle thing could be shaking neighborhoods for miles but not damaging the sewers. One of our friends on Laburnum was taking a walk and saw all the police activity that day when the yellow tape was up and he said ‘What’s going on?’ and the police came right out and told him, ‘We got the kids causing the booms. Teenage boys.’”

In Ginter Park and Bellevue there aren’t all that many teenagers to begin with. Many families opt to retreat to the suburban havens of Henrico and Hanover once the kids reach middle school age. As everyone knows, Richmond’s middle schools are none-too-stellar academically. But the parents of the kids involved in the booms decided to stick it out. They were committed to the city and loved their neighborhoods. 

“We have stayed in this neighborhood and we probably shouldn’t have for a lot of reasons,” Beth says, her voice steadily rising. “And then Jason does one thing. And nothing criminal. He didn’t make the devices.  And he’s in trouble because that one neighbor decided that kids in North Side were doing something wrong. These kids are good kids. These kids can walk the streets. Their parents have said we are keeping you in a community where you can do those things and people will support you. They’re friendly people who, if anything happens to you, will come forth and help you. That is not what we saw.”

What they saw frankly surprised them. For eighteen years, the Starks have called Bellevue home. They know virtually everyone in their immediate neighborhood. These are people who watched their son grow up. A man who lives up the street from them, who knew nothing about their son’s ordeal, very cavalierly wagged his moral finger in a casual conversation. “He’s probably one of our favorite people on that block,” says Beth. “He’s one of those people who stop and chat with our kids everyday. And after the arrests were made, he said, ‘I should have known it was teenagers, you know how the teenagers are in this neighborhood, you got to watch them.’ I couldn’t believe he said it.”

As bad as the street talk was, what appeared in a certain chat room was far worse. It illustrated how perfectly suited the Internet is for circulating misinformation and gossip. To use the Internet you do not have to think, you just sound off, not worrying about the repercussions of your words. “That chatroom in Yahoo,” Beth says. “What these people were saying. It just kept escalating.”

Roger remembers the fervor following the arrest of the two boys. “They wanted answers and all of a sudden they had these two kids and everyone was so glad it was over,” he says “But it wasn’t over at all.”

The end finally came for the Conklins and the Starks on January 6 at a meeting held at Holton Elementary School. Dr. Martin Chapman, the Earthquake Man, was there and he concluded authoritatively and scientifically that the cause of the booms was seismic activity. Some there, the ardent witch hunters, insisted the exploding bottles damaged their homes. But a captain from the Richmond Fire Department dispelled that idea. It was over, in the main, but what lingered in the minds of those directly affected was just how the city and the neighborhoods handled the situation.

Beth remembers what their lawyer, a resident of Henrico, had told the family shortly after they retained him.  “This could only happen in the city of Richmond,” he said. “I wouldn’t live in the city of Richmond if it were the last day of my life and the last place to live.”

In recalling the attorney’s words, Beth elaborates: “This was all because of the political crap that goes on in the city. It’s not based on law; it’s based on some idiot downtown, who has decided that this is what they’re going to do. And your kid could be sent away for this, locked up, jailed.”  

Jason, who tells me jokingly or otherwise that he plans to study psychology and chemistry in college, says the extreme anxiety he experienced for about six weeks took its toll. “It was always lingering in my mind,” he says. “I might be going to jail for something I didn’t do. It was hard to concentrate.” What’s more, Jason became somewhat jaded about authority after the Witch Hunt. “I don’t trust the cops or the legal system,” he tells me matter-of-factly.

The two boys arrested were ultimately charged with creating an explosive device, which is a felony. But, if the boys perform community service and take part in the restorative justice program, the charges will be dismissed sometime in June. Neither will have a criminal record. 

So, all’s well that ends well. Sort of. There remain a lot of unanswered questions about how this investigation was handled, how students were treated by police and other authority figures. 

I suspect everybody learned something from all this. I know I did. Never, ever jump to conclusions, especially when they are based on stereotypes, assumptions and lies.