Bullies Mocked a New Cheerleader at School, Never Realizing Her Father Was a Member of the Hells Angels

Knowing what a defense team will do with your background? Yes. Boon said, “I’ve known what my background looks like for a long time. It’s the background I have. ” Voss set the photograph down. Looked at Marsh.

The Walt Callahan documentation is significant. Voss said it establishes a pattern of conduct across 12 years that corroborates the 1,999 incident rather than existing in isolation. Pattern evidence changes the weight of individual incidents. That’s what Ruth’s been waiting to hear for 9 years. Marsh said what she’s been waiting to hear, Voss said, is that her husband’s work mattered.

I can tell her that now. Dalton Ree walked into Marsh’s office on a Thursday morning. He came alone to the building. His mother had arranged a lawyer, a woman from Knoxville named Sandra Oaks, who had represented clients in three federal investigations and had no connections to Mil Haven or anyone in it. Sandra Oaks met Dalton in the parking lot at 8:45 and walked in beside him.

Dalton looked like what he was, a boy who had made a decision and was walking toward the consequences of it without having been able to fully calculate what those consequences would be. He was 18 years old. He held the door for Sandra Oaks without thinking about it. The automatic courtesy Ruth had noticed on Sunday mornings, the version of Dalton that existed when Pierce wasn’t in the room. He sat across from Marsh and Helen Voss and talked for 2 hours and 11 minutes.

He talked about specific conversations. He talked about specific instructions. He talked about things Pierce had said in specific rooms with Dalton present, beginning when Dalton was 9 years old and continuing until 3 weeks ago. He talked about the 2014 campaign. Pierce on the phone in his home office, a call Dalton had overheard at 13 years old.

PICE telling someone that the licensing board matter needed to move faster because the election was in 6 weeks. He talked about 2018, a man named Sam Kowalsski, who had submitted the low bid on a county road project and received a letter withdrawing the invitation to bid 2 days after publicly supporting a candidate Pierce was opposing. Dalton had been 16. He’d been sitting at the kitchen table doing homework when Pierce made the call that preceded the letter. He talked about the approach PICE had given him regarding Ren Ashford, the exact language, the objective as PICE had framed it.