5.
Bo Kern, on the other hand, was a suspect.
He had graduated from the Perkins School, but just barely, the year before the crime. He was well known around town and, with his unsettling harelip and crew cut, immediately recognizable. Teenagers and school friends knew him as the guy always willing to go one step beyond what any of them dared to do and, as such, he was the wild card of every social event. House parties screeched to a halt when Bo Kern knocked over some antique table in a fit of dancing. Young hostesses cried when he dented a parent’s car hood while wrestling and drunk. He was the guy who would publicly accept any challenge volleyed forth, trying desperately to impress girls the world knew had no interest in him.
The football coaches at the Perkins School knew Bo Kern as the slow-witted boy who had ballooned into a formidable blocking back in the summer before his senior year. This was the only position he could play, fullback, or blocking back, as it requires zero agility. The sole purpose of this position is for the athlete to turn himself into a missile, a battering ram, and destroy whatever obstacle steps in his way. His sacrifice makes room for the more skilled running back to show his stuff and light up the scoreboard. It is a position of little reward, fullback, yet Bo Kern had so distinguished himself in the first few games of his senior year that he drew the attention of scouts from Millsaps and Belhaven College, a pair of Division III rivals in Mississippi. This was big news. Banners that read Bo Knows Blocking and Geaux Bo were written by pep squads and taped up around the chain-link fencing of the football field for the game the scouts were attending. It was October and still warm.
Before this game was finished, Bo Kern had committed two illegal procedure penalties, three personal fouls, and had been ejected for fighting with a player from our opponent, Dutchtown Catholic. Parents and fans alike looked over to explain to the well-dressed scouts that this was surely the product of nerves, some unfortunate anomaly, but they had seen enough. So, kids my age thought about Bo Kern whenever we flirted with failure. The notion was that if he could graduate, there was hope for us all, and he was a legend in this capacity. He was therefore a guy that many people pretended to know all about, as people do, if only to nod gravely at his name.
As far as the neighborhood was concerned, when it came to Lindy’s rape, he was also a person of interest.
The fact that physical abnormalities were so rare at the Perkins School, so rare in Woodland Hills, didn’t help. There were no disabled children that I remember. There were no wheelchairs or deformities. We were all middle-to upper-class white kids, all the products of our parents’ success, and when we played with one another at school we played in the mirror.
In this environment, Bo Kern’s harelip rattled you.
He was a stocky guy, impossibly so that senior year, and the jagged turn of his lip bared constantly the gums above his front teeth. He rarely smiled, and even when he did you couldn’t be sure. So, I have to wonder about people like him, about children perhaps doomed from birth by circumstances beyond their control. What chance did he have among us? How early is the future defined?
I can think of others like him as well, such as a boy named Chester McCready.
Thin and pale and a classmate of mine, Chester did not shave the dark hairs that appeared on his upper lip in high school. He wore shirts with stains on them, sneakers that stank up the classroom, and had the look of some apprenticing con man, a boy who would rather be left alone in the dark. During our sophomore year, a girl named Missy Boyce claimed that Chester tried to feel her up at the concession stand during a football game that previous Friday. Desperate to be desired as well, other girls soon pretended the same, and the name Chester the Molester followed.
When we originally asked him about this Missy incident, Chester told us, “Some guy pushed me into her. It’s not my fault Super Bitch was there.”
He was emphatic about this and, I believe, honest.
Regardless, many of us who knew him began to pretend that we didn’t, and he was known only as Chester the Molester throughout the rest of high school, a time that must seem to him like an excruciating string of years. Even at our ten-year reunion, his name was still on our tongues, as he had recently been accused of sexual harassment at a local sandwich shop where he worked. This didn’t strike me as irony, as it did some of the other people at the reunion, but rather as the inevitable end we had sent him to in our youth. Even as children, you understand, we set our paper boats on a stream. We watch them go.
After hearing about this, I went to the public library to look up the newspaper article about this event. I stared at Chester’s picture when I saw it, pasted among the other criminals’ photos in the Metro section, and I barely recognized him. He had a goatee now, sharp and trimmed, and his hair was thin and brushed forward. His mouth was small. The article said the girl was sixteen at the time of the incident, and it struck me that this was likely Missy’s age when this whole thing began, as if his troubles had never matured. I felt an accomplice to the words as I read them that day and a surprising pity for the man he’d become.
Still, it was hard to feel sorry for Bo Kern despite the hand he was dealt.
Unapologetic and mean, Bo took his anger out into the streets beyond Woodland Hills, even in high school, and had a reputation for violence. One time, Bo was brought home by the police for assaulting a boy at Highland Road Park with a stop sign he had pulled from the ground. He was let off with a warning. Another time I saw him put his fist through the window of a car in the school parking lot for no discernible reason.
After gym class one day, all the talk at school was about a brawl that had taken place in the Taco Bell parking lot the night before, where Bo Kern had beaten a boy from across town so badly that he had to be hospitalized. My friend Randy told me that after this fight, he heard that Bo had tried putting the unconscious boy in the back of a friend’s pickup truck before the cops showed up and he fled. This was only a rumor, he admitted, but it stuck with us.
“Where was he taking him?” Randy asked me. “Where the hell was he taking him?”
We shuddered to think.
Yet in the year after he graduated from Perkins, Bo grew even wilder.
He had not been accepted to any colleges, had no athletic scholarship offers, and instead worked nights as a bouncer at Sportz, a local eighteen-and-up club near the LSU campus. He still lived at home in these months and would drunkenly return down Piney Creek Road at three and four a.m., squealing around the curve in his father’s ’57 Chevy. After only two months of employment at this place, Bo had a restraining order issued against him by a college girl, an English major, who was a regular at the bar. She won the case and he was fired.
In the court document, a public record, she described Bo Kern as “a menacing figure” and complained of having nightmares about his face.
She summed it up for all of us.
The evidence mounted.
In the months immediately before the rape, Bo Kern totaled his father’s ’57 Chevy in broad daylight. He broke the finger of a boy in the next neighborhood who pointed at him and accused him of cheating at basketball. He gave his own brother a black eye on the front lawn. He told us stories about breaking into cars at LSU football games and stealing credit cards. When anyone else in the neighborhood spoke, Bo Kern asked them, “What the fuck are you looking at?”
Where were the consequences? Where was it all leading?
I imagine this must have been the worry of our parents, as well, when the news spread about Lindy’s rape. So, recently, when I began revisiting all of this, I asked my mother if she had originally suspected Bo.
She told me that after the police had gone door to door asking people in the neighborhood if they had seen any suspicious activity, Lindy’s parents had themselves gone from house to house. She said they were teary-eyed and supportive of one another. She said they looked tired and old. The story went that Dan Simpson, Lindy’s father, was particularly suspicious of Bo, despite the fact that he had an alibi and witness to say he wasn’t home that night, and when the Simpsons finally visited the Kern house, Betty Kern, Bo’s mother, sat down with them in the kitchen. Then, before Mr. Simpson could even mention that he wanted the police to question Bo again, Betty Kern burst into tears.
She was inconsolable.
“I’m so sorry,” she cried. “I know what you’re thinking. It kills me. He was the first person I thought of, too.”
So, “Yes,” my mother told me. “We all did.”