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Eric Pape| The Atavist Magazine |March 2023 | 2,005 words (7 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 137, “Sins of the Father.”
A small, good-natured boy named Pierce O’Loughlin was growing up between the homes of his divorced parents in San Francisco. Nine-year-old Pierce was accustomed to custody handoffs taking place at Convent and Stuart Hall, the Catholic school he attended. On changeover days, one parent dropped him off in the morning at the hilltop campus overlooking the bay, and the other picked him up in the afternoon. The parents avoided seeing each other. Their split had been ugly.
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On the afternoon of January 13, 2021, Lesley Hu, Pierce’s mother, arrived at Convent and Stuart Hall for a scheduled pickup. Hu planned to take Pierce to a Coinstar machine to exchange a small bucket of coins for a gift card he could use to buy toys. Then they would go to dinner at a restaurant called House of Prime Rib, because Pierce loved to eat meat.
But Hu’s son wasn’t waiting for her at the school. Staff told her that he had been absent that day. They didn’t know why.
Another mom might have assumed that her child had a cold or that his dad had let him skip school and taken him somewhere fun for the day, but not Hu. She wondered if Pierce had been kidnapped—not by a stranger but by his own father.
Over the course of their marriage, Hu had watched as her now ex-husband, Stephen O’Loughlin, became obsessed with pseudoscience, self-help gurus, and conspiracy theories, spending long nights watching videos online, then sharing the details of fantastical plots with Hu, their friends, and people he barely knew. The COVID-19 pandemic had only made things worse. O’Loughlin huddled for hours at his computer streaming YouTube clips and poring over right-wing websites—what he called “doing research.”
One of O’Loughlin’s fixations was vaccines. He believed that Pierce had been damaged by the routine inoculations he received as a baby. O’Loughlin was adamant that the boy be given no more shots—not for COVID-19, when a vaccine was eventually authorized for kids, nor for any other disease.
In 2020, Hu had filed for the sole legal right to make decisions about her son’s medical care, which would empower her to vaccinate Pierce regardless of what her ex wanted. She felt good about her chances in court. On January 11, as a condition for a continuance he had requested in the medical custody case, O’Loughlin suddenly agreed to let Pierce receive two vaccinations. In retrospect, according to Hu’s attorney, Lorie Nachlis, “it all seemed too easy.”
When Hu discovered that Pierce wasn’t at school, she wondered if O’Loughlin had agreed to the vaccinations only because he was plotting to steal Pierce away before their son could receive them. To Hu it wasn’t improbable—her ex seemed that far gone.
Hu and her boyfriend, Jim Baaden, had recently decided to move in together; Hu was planning to tell Pierce the news that evening at dinner. Now Baaden picked Hu up at Pierce’s school, and together the couple sped to O’Loughlin’s home in San Francisco’s posh Marina District, trying not to dwell on worst-case scenarios.
When they arrived outside O’Loughlin’s Mediterranean-style apartment building, they noticed that the blinds in the living room, which was on the ground floor of the unit, were drawn but disheveled. For a moment, Baaden recoiled. O’Loughlin was a gun owner. What if he’d barricaded himself and Pierce in the apartment? Baaden imagined O’Loughlin aiming the barrel between the blinds, ready to shoot.
Baaden and Hu approached the building’s intercom and buzzed O’Loughlin’s apartment. No one answered. Hu began banging on the door to the building and screaming. She considered breaking in, but Baaden told her to call 911 instead.
Hu could not fathom how someone like O’Loughlin—a man of means and privilege—had come to believe outrageous lies. She knew that various misinformation networks and snake-oil salesmen had facilitated her ex’s paranoia and exploited his psychological fragility. But Hu had always stayed focused on what she considered her most important task: raising and protecting Pierce.
There would be time in the future to consider, almost endlessly, what happened to O’Loughlin. For now, in a panic, all Hu could do was wonder: Where had he taken their son?
Adozen years earlier, Stephen O’Loughlin was a very different man. At least he seemed to be when Hu first met him at an Italian wine bar. O’Loughlin, then in his mid-thirties, with a strong jaw and a slightly crooked smile, started chatting her up. He said that he was in finance and that he worked out. Hu, 28, wasn’t interested in his advances. She considered herself an independent woman. She worked in midlevel management and had served as the executive director of the Hong Kong Association of Northern California, a business group. The child of immigrants, she had aspirations to achieve more, to make her parents proud. Besides, she had gotten out of a long relationship recently, and she wasn’t at the bar looking for a date—she was there to cheer up a friend going through a tough time.
But O’Loughlin was persistent, and after several glasses of champagne, Hu decided that he was funny. He asked her charming if oddly specific questions: What was her favorite kind of wine? What sort of bottled water did she drink? As Hu prepared to leave, O’Loughlin asked for her number. She hesitated but gave it to him.
He texted to ask her out. She had a busy work schedule at her family’s company, which leased shipping containers, but O’Loughlin insisted that they find time to meet as soon as possible. When they did, he picked Hu up in a brand-new car stocked with her favorite water. A bottle of sparkling rosé she liked was waiting at the restaurant where they’d be dining. “He remembered everything I said the night we met,” Hu explained.
They began going out with friends for fun, alcohol-infused nights at clubs around San Francisco. O’Loughlin often brought Hu flowers. He was generous, picking up the tab on club nights and when dining out with Hu and her parents. “He was like that for months,” Hu recalled. “He said that he’d talked to his Asian friend and that he should be generous with my family.” Reaching for his wallet at the end of a meal, O’Loughlin would insist, “No, I’ve got this.” (Hu later learned that he’d been using his professional expense account.)
Early in their relationship, O’Loughlin, who grew up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, painted an incomplete picture of his parents and sister. His mother, he told Hu, was “the greatest person in the world.” He was more reserved when talking about his father. He said that he adored his two nieces, and when he and Hu visited the girls on the East Coast, O’Loughlin took them to Toys “R” Us and bought them whatever they wanted. “They were elated, so surprised,” Hu said. She told O’Loughlin she wanted kids of her own. He said he did, too.
Still, when O’Loughlin proposed after about a year of dating, Hu wasn’t sold on the idea. She didn’t like the way O’Loughlin, an arch conservative, got blustery when talking about politics. Hu, a Democrat, didn’t feel like he listened when she spoke about serious issues. O’Loughlin projected such certainty about their future as a couple, however, that Hu found herself saying yes to marriage.
Almost immediately after the engagement, O’Loughlin changed. The flowers, gifts, and other gestures of affection disappeared. He stopped paying for meals with Hu’s parents. Hu realized that O’Loughlin’s generosity had been transactional. He was a salesman by trade, peddling financial services for the firm Eaton Vance, and he brought the strategy of his job to his personal life: Once he landed a deal, he stopped spending time and energy on it.
Hu’s parents were concerned. Her dad took O’Loughlin out for a drink and suggested the couple at least wait a while to get married. “Steve came back really angry,” Hu said. After that, O’Loughlin attended gatherings of Hu’s family only begrudgingly. He wore what Hu called his “shit face,” looking bored or angry. He urged Hu to quit her job at her family’s company.
The situation became so bad that Hu gave her engagement ring back. “I can’t do this,” she told O’Loughlin. “It’s really hard.” As both of them wept, O’Loughlin promised to do better. Hu wanted to believe him. In return, she agreed to leave her job. “It was the only way it would work,” she said. O’Loughlin couched distancing Hu from her family and their business as an opportunity: He suggested that she could find employment in fashion retail, a field he knew she was interested in.
Figuring out a new career path, however, took a back seat to wedding planning. Hu threw herself into designing a celebration in Italy, until O’Loughlin nixed the idea. Instead, they reserved space at a resort in Santa Barbara. They were married in front of 150 guests on October 10, 2010.
For their honeymoon they traveled to the Maldives, the tropical archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Hu described it as “paradise.” The newlyweds stayed in an elegant cabin suspended over pale blue water alive with stingrays and other aquatic life. They were supposed to be spontaneous, to relish nature, to jump in the water whenever they felt like it. But O’Loughlin was hardly in the moment; he took part in a single activity with his wife each day, then went back to their room to immerse himself in self-help books. He complained to Hu and was rude to hotel staff, especially waiters. When he learned that most of the employees, like nearly all residents of the Maldives, were Muslim, he seemed disturbed.
Hu noticed something else: O’Loughlin wouldn’t walk beside her. He was always a few steps ahead. “Anywhere we went,” Hu said, “I was secondary.”
It was all enough to make her contemplate a quick divorce right after the honeymoon. But when they were back in California, Hu was hit with waves of nausea. A test confirmed that she was pregnant. She decided it was no time to break up the marriage.
Despite what he’d said while courting her, O’Loughlin didn’t seem excited by the prospect of having a child. According to Hu, he acted as if she wasn’t pregnant. He didn’t ask how she was feeling and didn’t want to put his hand on her belly when the baby kicked. He took Hu on a babymoon to Australia, only to reveal that the trip coincided with an installment of Unleash the Power Within, an event organized by self-help guru Tony Robbins. Among other things, O’Loughlin was drawn to Robbins’s idea that nutrition was an essential building block of self-improvement. He started eating dressing-free salads and supplement-filled health shakes that he insisted Hu prepare for him.
O’Loughlin also became convinced that Eaton Vance was swindling him. He talked Hu in circles about how he should have been earning far more money through commissions than he was, and he became argumentative with his bosses. Late in Hu’s third trimester, O’Loughlin sat down with colleagues for what he thought was a regular meeting. Instead, they took his work computers and informed him that he was fired. As Hu’s due date approached, O’Loughlin became preoccupied with the idea of suing the company.
Hu went into labor on July 27, 2011, nine months and 17 days after her marriage to O’Loughlin. It was a difficult birth. Hu, a petite woman, had to deliver an 8.3-pound baby. She was in such tremendous pain that doctors pumped her full of medication. “I couldn’t push the baby out, so they used a vacuum [extractor],” Hu said. Once Pierce arrived, there were more complications—his oxygen levels were dangerously low.
Rather than express concern for the baby or his wife, O’Loughlin seemed put off by everything that was happening. He had expected a cinematic birth. “He kept saying, ‘That wasn’t normal,’ ” Hu recalled. “He was so obsessed with the birth not being right.”
Nothing, it seemed, was ever right for O’Loughlin.
The Delphi murders is a case that every true crime commentator has jumped on; analyzing the eerie footage of the suspect captured by Liberty German on her phone before her tragic murder. Huge public interest has done little to find definitive answers for the murdered girls; instead operating as a catalyst for this vast amount of content. Aja Romano details this disturbing case, thus adding to the glut of information, but Romano at least uses this poster case of the true crime genre to question the ethics of this growing industry.
Nine days after the murders, police released an audio recording of Bridge Guy, now officially named a suspect, saying, “Down the hill.”
This was arguably the moment when Delphi stopped being solely a hometown tragedy and entered the annals of true crime fame — when the eerie disembodied audio, complete with the pixellated image of the killer, swept across media outlets nationwide, galvanizing interest in the tragic story of two young friends who died brutally, side by side.
Narratives that feature the history and intrigue of Black Southern culture draw me in. De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s 2019 debut novel In West Mills featured characters mining the untold to understand their place in their small town and the world. The book gave a multigenerational look at secrets and revelations, and his second novel, Decent People, adds the urgent draw of an unsolved crime with a sleuth driven by love and a sense of justice.
A character in his first novel refers to another character as “blood but not family,” a clear insight that echoes through both books. Winslow likewise builds the bonds that are family but not blood, showing how people find and create kinship and support.
Decent People begins with Jo Wright, set to retire in West Mills after decades in New York. She is on the verge of completing the dream, finally sharing a home with her long-distance love, Olympus Seymore. That plan is upended when Lymp is accused of the murder of his three half-siblings. Their estrangement seems reason enough for the sheriff to assume Lymp’s guilt and stop investigating. This is where Jo begins the challenging task of finding the truth.
Winslow sets the story in the 1970s. The official markers of Jim Crow are gone, but the West Mills canal remains the divider between the Black and white communities, a parallel to so many remaining divisions. The town is a junction point that features Black characters seeking exodus, those returning, and many making do where they are. Queer characters search for community amid judgment. The reckoning between unacknowledged children and their parents becomes central. Adult friendships and intimacies are solidified. The family tensions coexist with the solace of chosen kin and unlikely allies.
We spoke via telephone and email about distance, unknowing, and returning to a complicated home.
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The Rumpus: While reading Decent People, I thought about the literary and mystery bones of novels by Walter Mosley and Attica Locke. In addition to Black Southern settings and migration, they show characters finding answers that can be hard to reconcile. In In West Mills, a central character wants to “unknow” what she has just heard. How does the desire to “unknow” work as an idea in Decent People?
De’Shawn Charles Winslow: Once the person learns something about their history or a close friend or family member’s history, they have to change the way they view themselves and their personal situations. Sometimes that knowing can become work, an opportunity, or a burden to face a bunch of realities they’ve been ignoring. Well, it forces you to face the fact that they are imperfect.
Rumpus: You set this story in the 1970s, so you had characters with a backstory during Jim Crow, and they’re dealing with the aftermath of major legal changes in America. The book is in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Loving decision, but you show clearly that changes are slow and challenging in West Mills. How did you balance that will to change versus the more general idea of progress?
Winslow: There was a continuity that I didn’t realize was happening. The town and the people weren’t changing. The town was changing physically with new businesses popping up, but the people’s mindsets were very much the same. Black people stay out of white folks’ way and largely vice versa, and you have the respectability politics of it all.
My mother is the second oldest of nine children, and she and the first three or four of them went to segregated schools. When her younger siblings graduated high school, it was integrated, but I also know that my aunts and uncles, the younger ones, didn’t have close white friends. Even though they were in an integrated school, things were still highly segregated. That speaks to what you just said about the will to change being there.
Rumpus: One way to find some change was through migration, and In West Mills centered characters who migrated. You feature characters leaving for educational opportunities. Queer characters leave to find community. The reasons for leaving were always central to character development. How did that movement away from West Mills become important as you shaped identity?
Winslow: Some characters from In West Mills definitely moved away to find more people, more community, and feel less like pariahs. I know education was available, and I won’t say a lot, but I know a fair amount was available to Black people in parts of the South. But so many people went north because they felt there would be less resistance and maybe access to more types of education instead of just becoming a schoolteacher, a nurse, or a nurse’s assistant. Leaving was about trying to protect themselves and succeed in a way they felt the South wouldn’t allow.
Rumpus: On the other side of that, Decent People shows the hopes and the challenges of returning. What factors shaped this reverse migration that’s central in the novel?
Winslow: The returning is about rest in a way. I would imagine that it was also work for them, leaving to go and pursue safety, community, and higher education, moving to these very fast-paced places with a lot of competition and a higher cost of living. By coming back home with some money and some education, they felt they could rest a little bit easier.
Rumpus: The mystery in Decent People is compelling, and I don’t want to ask anything that might disrupt that reading experience, but I want to ask about the sense of truth-telling that the characters manage. Someone in Decent People says, “There was no way out, so lies would have to suffice.” Let’s talk about lies and secrets as different literary elements. I’m interested in how you used the unspoken, unsaid, or untrue and how those are so necessary to the storytelling, especially when the lies and secrets are protective.
Winslow: As a writing technique, I think having secrets gives the reader a question that’s dangling out there. If they remember that, most readers grasp that question and carry it with them. Propels them through the book. It creates that suspense, but it also creates the opportunity for more bad behavior because people are trying to hold on to these secrets or these lies. They just keep committing these acts, whether big or small, to protect the lie or protect the secret. That creates suspense and a propulsive experience for the reader.
Rumpus: Jo returns to West Mills, but her closest ally and sounding board is her brother Herschel, who supports her from New York. How did that relationship become central to the storytelling?
Winslow: I wanted Herschel to be a little bit like a therapist to Jo. I kept him in New York the whole time because he was old enough when they left to know so much, and I didn’t want him to end up becoming Jo’s co-sleuth. I wanted him to be like, “Listen, I worked hard for this life, and I have safety here in New York as a queer man. This is your battle because you want this man, and you figure it out. Here is a little bit of advice I can offer you as someone who lived there and is older.” I wanted them to have a close relationship.
Rumpus: Herschel is a gay man who found some distance from judgment and hate, and we see that harm threatening the next generation of queer children in West Mills who are too young to seek the safety of exodus. How did you define that harm in both novels?
Winslow: I was showing a combination of patriarchy and religious beliefs—and then some people would say that’s the same thing depending on the religion. In small towns that are largely Christian, people uphold these teachings, these beliefs that a man should be supreme in the home or that he should procreate so that the family name can carry on. People who aren’t even necessarily religious can uphold these ideals of hypermasculinity, and sometimes I don’t even know if they realize it. Some will try to uphold those beliefs so much that they will put their children through different types of torture, whether it’s physical or emotional, to uphold an ideal.
Rumpus: The book gives us a sense of migration and return, and I’m also interested in how those journeys work in your life as a writer. Ernest. J. Gaines spoke about living in California while writing about Louisiana. Jesmyn Ward has touched on her return to Mississippi. What was your experience writing about the South from a distance?
Winslow: I was in New York, and then I went to Iowa. That’s where I started In West Mills. I was able to visualize my hometown so much more keenly, having not lived there in fifteen years. I believe it allowed me to write about the place with a little bit more compassion than if I had tried to write these books living there. I really do. It amazes me how vividly I was able to see the town of South Mills, North Carolina, and a lot of little details just came flooding in. I would write the name of the road down, and I’d say, “Let me change that. Let me make a name up for that because it was getting too real.” The distance allowed me to be able to write about the place with a little bit more compassion and with less tsk-tsk.
Rumpus: I’m thinking about the idea that writing and publishing mainly default to heterosexual relationships. Have you seen that at work in your experience?
Winslow: A little bit. Because heterosexuality is what’s given to us in the mainstream, sometimes I fear that if I wrote an all-out queer book, I would have a lower readership. That is a real fear that I have and something publishing needs to work on. There’s a lot of queer representation out there, but I have seen articles about how queer books by and about queer people are published at a much lower rate than books that center completely around straight people. I definitely want to acknowledge writers like Robert Jones, Jr. and his novel, The Prophets, because he took a really big leap to write about two enslaved gay men. I think that book is going to open doors for a lot of young queer writers, especially Black male queer writers.
Rumpus: The Prophets was groundbreaking work. Any upcoming releases you’re excited about?
Winslow: Maurice Carlos Ruffin has a forthcoming book, The American Daughters, that is historical and centered around Black women in New Orleans. So, I’m excited about that. Regina Porter is working on her second book, which might be linked to The Travelers.
Rumpus: You’ve shown the importance of a deep connection between place and identity, especially when we consider the historical period. In your teaching life, how do you encourage students and other writers to develop those links between setting and character?
Winslow: I advise my students who write realism to try to know a great deal about the place they are writing about. I believe that if a writer knows a place well, the characters will, too. That familiarity with place tends to guide characters’ decisions and/or the plot.
Rumpus: Do you care to share any news on the next project?
Winslow: All I’ll say for now is that I’m stepping away from the fictional town of West Mills for my next project. I’m going to use a real North Carolina town, and it’ll be set in the ‘80s. No murders this time, but there will be deaths.
Rumpus: What lessons from In West Mills were most helpful as you completed Decent People?
Winslow: Writing Decent People felt like the first time all over again, so I honestly don’t know, haha.
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Author photo by Julie R Keresztes
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Last September, a longtime Las Vegas journalist named Jeff German was shot and killed. The person charged in his death is a public official German investigated. There were other investigations German hadn’t completed when he was murdered, including one about a Ponzi scheme. Reporter Lizzie Johnson picked up where he left off, reporting a story about a scam that, as scams so often do, enriched a few at the expense of many:
Jager had told Mabeus about the opportunity to make money in August 2019, during a couples trip to Mexico, she said. She felt flattered to be included.
“We were a little nervous, but we trusted him,” Mabeus said. “Because we were friends and belonged to the same church, the red flags were heart-shaped. I was like, ‘Wow. We are really lucky to be involved in this investment.’”
The next month, she and her husband wired over $140,000. Ninety days later, the first interest payment of $18,000 arrived, right on time. The couple continued adding money, until they reached a total of $680,000, she said.
“There was never a hiccup,” Mabeus said. “My bishop was involved and invested, and so were my closest friends. A lot of people were told to keep it quiet.”
When she and her husband, a former Major League Baseball pitcher who worked for a medical device company, divorced in June 2021, Mabeus agreed to take the investment as alimony. She planned to rely on the dividends, along with child support payments, to remain at home with her daughter and three sons. A former elementary school teacher, she hadn’t worked for 13 years.
Now, Mabeus hung up the phone, horrified.
She tried to call Jager. No answer.
“Word is spreading like wildfire,” Mabeus remembered. “People are texting left and right. No one is getting responses.”
Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding, she thought. She told herself that she’d know for sure the next day, when the quarterly interest payment was scheduled to hit her bank account.
But when Friday arrived, the money didn’t. All her savings, Mabeus realized, were gone.
The shooting happened at Starts Right Here, a program for at-risk students that operates out of a business park in downtown Des Moines.
The shooting at Richneck Elementary School on Jan. 6 prompted school officials to install metal detectors at all school buildings in the district.
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