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the middle of a tug-of-war, pulled in one direction by Ron, who wanted to live the life he’d been accustomed to, and in another by Jason, who needed his mother. It soon became obvious that it was Ron who had won the contest. “I can’t let this ruin my marriage,” Susan told one co-worker. “I’ve got to put Ron first.”
    “It wasn’t that she ignored me,” Jason insists, maintaining he understood the conflict in his mother’s life. “She did all she could, took me places, she wanted us all to be a family. But me and Ron, we just never got along. It just didn’t work.”
    As a result, it was Jason whom neighbors gossiped about over shopping carts at the local grocery store, or standing in line waiting for a teller at the bank. He was alone, often late into the night, they said. One neighbor noticed the boy walking the darkened streets well after midnight. Tom Roy sometimes found the twelve-year-old sitting alone, smoking a cigarette on the curb at 4:30 when he and Lorene took their morning walk.
    “It was a sad situation. I think Susan meant well, but she just didn’t have much time for the boy,” Roy says. “Sometimes we’d bring him home and feed him. We took him shopping with us, tried to help out. He always had this dog with him, a mutt, part golden retriever. He took that dog everywhere, like it was his only friend. Then the dog died and he was all alone.”
    When the Roys and others approached him on the street, Jason responded politely, peppering the conversation with “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir.” Yet the boy made few friends in his new neighborhood; instead, hetook to playing with children half his age, a situation that prompted more gossip.
    “We all pretty much felt sorry for Jason. He seemed lonely. He told all of us his father didn’t want him anymore, he had a new wife and son,” recalls Kim Millikan, who lived with her family next door. “We thought the boy was redeemable, but then, after many incidents, we decided he wasn’t.”
    The incidents are still legend on Valley Bend, like the time he convinced their then preschool daughters to dig tunnels, burying themselves under a pile of soil delivered for the garden. “By the time we realized what was going on, one of them could have died,” remembers Kim. “Jason was a real Eddie Haskell kind of kid. He’d say, ‘You make the best cookies’; then he’d get my daughters to do something they shouldn’t.”
    Occasionally one neighbor or another made his way to the Whites’ house to voice a complaint. It rarely resulted in satisfaction for the complaining party.
    “If Ron answered the door, he’d just say, ‘You need to talk to Susan,’” says Kim. “If Susan was there, she’d get this blank look on her face and then deny that Jason could have done anything wrong. You could tell Susan loved the boy, but she couldn’t see he was in trouble. She always defended him. Nothing was ever his fault. It was always ‘Poor Jason. Poor Jason.’”
    Susan eased her conscience by making sure Jason never wanted for anything. She bought him new clothes, a bike, and, say neighbors, padded his adolescent palms with cash. “We’d take him to the mall and Jason would have twenty-dollar bills stuffed in his wallet, once more than a hundred dollars,” remembers Tom Roy. “I’d say, ‘Jason, where do you get all that money?’ He alleged that his grandmother had sent it to him, but we knew that wasn’t true. It came from Susan.”
    It was the “jewelry incident” that convinced the neighbors Jason was “beyond redemption.” One afternoona neighborhood woman returned from work to discover her home ransacked and her husband’s gold chain missing. Her five-year-old daughter and her housekeeper said Jason had pushed his way into the house and rifled through the drawers. Irate, the woman stormed down the block to the Whites’ house and knocked on the door. Jason answered, wearing the chain around his neck. Furious, she yanked it off.