Journalism
TEEN MISSING AFTER NIGHT OF UNDERAGE DRINKING, read the headline. Jennifer Moore’s picture appeared on the July 25, 2006, cover of the New York Daily News. Two days later the teen’s body was found in a Weehawken dumpster and a pimp and prostitute had been arrested. The photo of the alleged perpetrator, Draymond Coleman, age thirty-six, was tucked inside the paper while Krystal Riordan’s frightened twenty-year-old face emblazoned the newspaper’s cover. HOOKER WATCHED BOYFRIEND KILL TEEN.
Before Krystal Riordan’s thirty-year sentence and incarceration at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton, New Jersey, before Draymond Coleman and the murder of Jennifer Moore, and even before the prostitution, there was the notorious Élan School.
* * *
Krystal has been waiting for Draymond all night in their shabby rent-by-the-week room at the Park Avenue Hotel in Weehawken, New Jersey. At last he arrives broke, high, and with Jennifer. He’s been drinking and snorting cocaine, and the white burst of anger inside him simmers, ready to boil over. He orders Krystal to go pay the cab fare, and she does after telling him again she’s leaving him. Step by step, the duo climbs the stairs, Jennifer unsteady and helped up by Draymond. She is tiny and petite; Krystal later remarks on her small size. They tell the drunk girl there’s a charger for her cell phone inside, and so she follows the tall blonde who wears a long wraparound skirt into the repellent room, and the man with the black goatee and ox-like shoulders closes the space behind her. The door clicks. Locks. The dawn peering in the window is hot—the flaming orange of a stone crab. The drapes sagging, the bed unmade. Heaps of dirty clothes, take-out containers, Coke cans, cigarette butts, the air fouled by fighting and sex.
* * *
Jennifer uses the community bathroom in the hall, the one in which two hours later in the unimaginable future, the two Good Samaritans will clean her lifeless body with bleach. He starts kissing Jennifer as soon as the door closes, and she pushes him away. Maybe he doesn’t kiss her but lifts up her halter. His face in the blue cast of the TV, the sound of sirens and gunfire from inside the screen. He’s loopy on cocaine, no sleep, and alcohol. “Come on, beautiful,” maybe he says, almost lovingly. Or maybe the anger already boils. Rage soup, swimming with animal fat and marrow, rage simmers in his blood vessels. The heat-clotted room ignites the scalding cauldron of a childhood in foster care. Jennifer scratches him. The first time her nails rake him, she must know she’s trapped, that it’s hopeless. You don’t attack a violent man, otherwise. Above her the shaved head, the bow lips on a savage face.
* * *
The street cart Big Fat Gyros is parked outside, already seeping the oily smell of grilling lamb.
* * *
The beating starts, blood squirting from Jennifer’s nose, but this soccer star, this lissome girl is a fighter. Jennifer scratches him, and he hits her. More scratching, more punches. Her fingernails are her only defense, and she uses them fiercely. He hits her again and again. “Lie still,” he orders. Her soccer game is running down the field without her. He starts to strangle her, wanting to quiet her. Krystal freezes. She remembers Draymond’s fingers around her own neck, squeezing, how she couldn’t breathe and it felt as if she was drowning. Like his thumbs were forcing water into her lungs and pressure’s fat thigh lay over her chest. Jennifer rises up from the bed and down she is pushed. Her eyes have swollen shut. Sun dances in the cracks of the ceiling. Her fingernails rake his hands. A fingernail breaks. He rips Jennifer’s mini off, then grabs her wrists, tries to tie them with her halter. Blood everywhere. “I’m doing this to prove my love to you,” Draymond hisses. The words ripple through Krystal that he is strangling Jennifer, the girl she is jealous of, to prove his love for her. Like he proved his love by fighting for her.
* * *
Krystal Riordan at her bail hearing after being arrested.
* * *
The ur-question—the one anyone studying the Jennifer Moore murder asks and the one hardest to answer—why doesn’t Krystal come to Jennifer’s rescue? Why doesn’t she stop Draymond Coleman from killing?
“Dray snapped,” Krystal said. “It was a combination of cocaine and me saying I was leaving him.”
She doesn’t understand how her words sound. Nowhere does she mention the smoky kerosene of Draymond’s lust, nowhere does she speak of his hands becoming battering rams, nor does she talk about Jennifer’s agony. Not one scream issues from her mouth. Krystal lacks something essential—perhaps it’s the ability to feel.
Krystal has been sentenced to thirty years in prison for her sins of omission. What is such a sin? James 4:17 “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.” A girl never mothered might be able to watch another girl take a beating, a girl trained in the Élan school routine might.
“Élan was a lockdown therapeutic boarding school. I was there for three years. If I’d never been sent there, I might have had a full basketball scholarship. They broke me down, but I never got built back up.”
— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387
* * *
Her parents drive her to Maine, and although there are trees on both sides of the two-lane highway, she doesn’t notice them. She sees the back of her mother’s head. The blond hair with the tight curls just below her ears, the ears that hear everything.
“White pines,” her father says, “they’re so stately. Tall like you, honey. You’ll be taking hikes through them.” They’ve been told the Élan residential school’s program includes hiking, camping, and outdoor sports.
“Dogwoods and swamp birch and horse chestnuts,” her mother chimes in, reading from a brochure they picked up from a Maine Visitor’s Center. “I envy you. Krystal, you’re going to live here. It’s like a park. You always liked to climb trees when you were younger.”
“I was in Élan from fourteen to seventeen.”
— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387
* * *
Still fourteen, Krystal has been getting into trouble, embarrassing her parents in front of their neighbors, and they have an accounting business to think of. More than that, they love their adopted daughter and want her to be helped, but it’s beyond them. She’s from a different bloodline and although they would never say so, an inferior one. Child Services calls the boarding school they’re taking her to THE LAST STOP. Krystal is seeing the trees, the white pines shaped like living pyramids. She wants to wrap herself in their bluish-green needles and gather their cones. The fissured gray trunks so still, only pretending to stand in one place but ready to move. The dogwoods with their explosion of white blossoms. Krystal hasn’t seen any towns for miles and wonders how much farther until Élan. Will she be able to run away? This is nowhere.
* * *
The Great Horned Owl lives in these forests with tufted ears and yellow eyes like a cat.
* * *
The Directors and Founder are the Great Horned Owls turning their heads a whole 260 degrees, their keen hearing and their eyesight vigilantly overseeing their isolated Élan kingdom. Today the Directors are only people and greet her parents kindly, politely, but do not offer to show them the grounds. The school costs $50,000 a year. Krystal’s parents have written a check, in full. The Founder tells them he was once a heroin addict and it was through this therapy that the addict in him was eradicated. In the bright light, Krystal can see the gleam on his hard teeth and his thin hair and bushy eyebrows. Her parents can’t get away fast enough.
“Élan is well-known even throughout the residential treatment industry as one of the few direct descendants of Synanon, a defunct cult that pioneered the use of North Korean brainwashing techniques to control its members.”
— Anonymous, I Am a Graduate of Élan School, Reddit.com
* * *
The Founder tells her there will be an outdoor gathering to introduce her to the community, but first she needs to sit down and write a letter of confession to her parents. She is told to write that she does drugs (a lie) and drinks (another lie) and that she is a whore (the last lie). The pen trembles in her hand. She’s thirsty and wants a glass of water but is afraid to ask.
Then a man and woman escort her to the gathering outside where at least a hundred kids sit in a circle. The residents have been gathered for a General Meeting.” The trees are close by—ash and quaking aspen, and she can hear the water flowing in the leaves. Krystal must stand up and tell them her name and sing “Happy Birthday” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The lump in her throat keeps growing when they make her stand and everyone looks at her. They tell her to say hello and introduce herself, but her mouth is dry and her tongue feels like wood. She can’t imagine any words ever coming out of it. She tries not to look at anyone, only stares at her sneakers and the terry cuff of her white gym socks. Already the kids are snickering and someone yells that she is fat. Worthless, stupid, a waste of protoplasm.
* * *
Krystal as a basketball player (second to the left).
* * *
Quickly she learns that the residents run everything—kids who have proved themselves worthy monitor your sleep. Every ten minutes your blanket is raised and a flashlight washes over you. The Night Monitor always stands guard. The nights stretch endlessly, sleep comes, the brown blanket is comforting, a warm silty soil, then the flashlight moon shines over her body. Every ten minutes until the sun begins burning in the dawn sky.
“We all went to static group therapy to talk about this stuff. That was where you could sit and no one screamed. It got to the point I actually started to believe I’d done all those things they said I had.”
— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387
* * *
She’s told not to look directly at a member of the opposite sex by Yasmin, the resident hall monitor, who marks down infractions. Punishment for looking at a member of the opposite sex might be washing a toilet with your bare hands. Flirty behavior would be worse. The halls are patrolled by Judith and Christian, Tod and Melissa.
It’s already dark when school classes begin after dinner at 7 p.m. Krystal sits in a rickety desk where an open book has been placed in front of her. An algebra book with marks made by others erased and she wonders if any message has been left for her by the ones who came before. She can trace the not-quite-invisible river the pen made, its indentations—at least no one is shouting. The teacher, a bearded, slope-shouldered man, chalks something on the blackboard, the kind Krystal’s never seen before—not a green board but an actual black one. The teacher tells them to copy a page from the book and hand it in. No exams. No homework.
After the algebra teacher leaves, the history teacher shuffles in. Short, her small face lost in black frame glasses, she says hello to the class and seems to smile at Krystal, singling her out. She dares not smile back at the teacher because one of her classmates would tell. When classes end at 11 p.m. she files out of the room walking down the thin halls. The teacher’s smile lingers. “You’re beautiful,” she imagines the teacher whispering.
“I was one of the last people to get a ring. I fought two huge girls and a boy for one minute each. It may not seem like a long time, but when it’s happening it is.”
— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387
* * *
The ring is the crown jewel in Élan’s brainwashing wizardry. Krystal has not eaten fast enough in the eight minutes she’s allowed, plus her scrubbing of floors is deemed lackluster, and her waxing suspect. During her phone call home her voice trembles and she tries to tell her father to come get her. Melissa, her Support Person, cuts the call. Melissa is a STRENGTH and Krystal, a NON STRENGTH. In the Isolation Room they bring in the residents who will fight her. She watches the huge girl, tall like Krystal but built like a refrigerator with bologna arms and legs, stuff her hands into boxing gloves. Tod tosses boxing gloves at Krystal and tells her to put them on fast. Show us how tough you are, non-strength flirty nobody, show us. He pushes her into the room’s center. One, then another, then another.
The Directors discover her fear of being alone in the dark, which they mistake for a fear of the tall trees, the rustling and whispering. They blindfold her and stand her beside a tall tree where she waits for the owl to seize her with its talons and crush her skull. She listens for the batting velvety fringes of their wings.
“The people who run Élan are not dumb. Since there was constant screaming being done, at times they would come to the house and order all the higher residents to transform the house to quiet mode. We would draw all the shades and temporarily suspend all dealing crews and General Meetings, etc. … Usually a 20/20 news team was afoot.”
— Anonymous, I Am a Graduate of Élan School, Reddit.com
* * *
The trees have to come to Krystal when she closes her eyes. You are never allowed to be alone here (ever), yet she is filled with the loneliness of animals abandoned by their mothers. You go outside only during gym class once a week. At night under her lids she can open doors that are always locked, she can go outdoors and walk in the maples, red and orange leaves crunching. You can breathe any weather, clothe yourself in a hot summer afternoon. At night when her empty stomach rumbles, the girl in the next bunk giggles. Krystal closes her eyes and sees herself eating shrimp heaped on a bed of yellow rice, fluffier than the one she lies on. The shrimp are slippery and light, one after another they swim into her mouth.
* * *
Krystal has to train herself to use the bathroom in the Élan way. In the morning when the sun muffled by the thick shades still manages to shine inside, she stands idle for a few seconds next to the window to drink in its heat. Four kids attack her for that, shouting and spitting. LAZY, SLOW-MOVING, SELFISH, UGLY. She loses bathroom privileges until mid-afternoon. She learns you’re allowed three bathroom passes: morning, noon, and midnight. She learns about the Support Person who goes into the bathroom with her. Judith, her bathroom SP. Judith, the watcher, has curly dark hair and goat eyes that sometimes glow yellow. She learns you can’t shut the stall door. Those first weeks she only pees; she can’t do the other with Judith staring at her.
“I was in a chair made to face the corner with someone watching me. If I got up I would be tackled and restrained. So if I had to use the bathroom, I had to wait for a staff member to say I could go. Which could take hours. I was sent to the corner if I didn’t want to get up in front of the house and sing. If I didn’t get on my hands and knees and properly scrub their floors. If I didn’t want to participate in their groups when I was supposed to yell and curse someone out.”
— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387
* * *
Facing the corner, Krystal keeps her eyes open, must keep them open and stare straight ahead. Her face must line up with that corner crack, no looking up or around, no slouching, her hands on her knees always where the watcher can see them. Her ears are still hers and the quaking aspen takes her. She follows the bits of light sparking through holes in the leaves, a private speech.
“I always said that I would rather be here in EMCF than at Élan. When I try to explain it to people they think I’m lying. That’s why I wanted to show some people the papers you’re sending me.”
— Krystal Riordan, Inmate #661387
* * *
The chilling thing Krystal said about Élan is she would rather be in prison than there. Her parents refuse to believe her when she describes conditions. Why should they believe the daughter gifted with their name that they’ve fed and loved, only to be lied to and sparred with?
Fifteen-minute calls to parents allowed once a week while another student listens hardly serve as warnings.
Stephen Smith, another Élan graduate who did time in a maximum security prison, has said, “Élan’s much worse. Here there’s a lot of shit but I get a chance for some solitude, to read, and I’m going to college. At Élan there was nothing positive—it was pure hell. You know the worst thing is, the judge who sentenced me here lectured me, telling me I blew the opportunity I had at Élan.” He goes on to describe a punishment. “Anyhow I got a cowboy ass-kick then. That was when they took you and threw you from room to room bouncing you against the walls. All the residents would drag you around, digging you with their hands, punching you, and spitting in your face.”
* * *
During Krystal’s sentencing, Jennifer’s mother also mentions the opportunity of Élan that she’s forfeited. After forty-one years of operation Élan closed in 2011. Survivor reports continue circulating on the internet—stories of student abuse, almost unbelievable corruption. Tuition of $42,000 to $56,000 a year purchased a student-to-teacher ratio of forty to one.The students who committed suicide or went to prison after Élan—countless.
* * *
Krystal, early on in her sentence at EMFC (Edna Mahan Correctional Facility).
* * *
Age 18, she signs herself out. She’s of age and Élan can’t legally keep her, although she never becomes a Strength, a Support Person, a member of a Dealing Crew, never climbs the shouting and screaming ladder. After Élan, what next? Her adoptive parents will pay for her to go to college but after the strict regime she’s lived under she wants her freedom. How can anyone graduate from four years of Attack Therapy and a thicket of restrictions and rules and humiliations ready for college? Krystal calls a girl she knows from Élan who shares an apartment in Manhattan with her boyfriend/pimp. Yes, Krystal can stay with them under the condition she’ll work as a prostitute for the girl’s boyfriend too.
* * *
Eighty dollars a blowjob seems a high price but her friend’s pimp and now hers says, you’re eighteen and men like teenage tongue. She loves walking through Times Square to the hotel where she sometimes meets men. The first man she has sex with for money she hooks up with there. After Élan’s “haircuts,” when four screaming residents attacked her for complaining about the food and made her wear a diaper over her jeans for a week, a sign hanging from her neck read: FEED ME PUREED PUKE. I AM A BABY, it was easy to sit on the edge of a bed and wait for the man in the fake leather jacket to unzip and free his organ, long and narrow like a taper candle, and lick it like it was the sweetest best-est ice cream.
Having money is freedom, and she sings to herself among the towers of lights: the Gap Jeans girl’s flowing hair is a forest. MoneyGram. Second Stage Theater. Bread Factory. Disney. B.B. King’s. Then the taxi she’s waiting on pulls up and she vanishes, leaving behind the puddles of overripe perfume.
The prostitute/call girl is her own celebrity. She’s eighteen, tall, blond, and the men love her. She’s stretching her wings and stops for a pretzel slathered in mustard. She stops again for a piña colada pineapple smoothie. Four years in Élan, lunch and breakfast the same tasteless glop, dinner three minutes to eat before MEAL KICKS is called. STOP EATING. If you’re lifting a forkful of food to your mouth, drop your fork.
* * *
She is still a long way from rent-by-the-week hotels and windows patched with black electrical tape, lobbies with musty odor of a rabbit hutch that a slow-moving fan stirs, but this day, new to the city, to the selling of her flesh, she’s as beautiful as the model with sable eyelashes walking her doggy stroller past a man with his pants at half-mast, relieving himself.
* * *
AFTERMATH
Krystal unlocks the door to room 37 and goes in. Draymond has stripped the bedding and only the mattress remains. She walks toward it and notices the blood soaking it. The man knocks outside.
“Lisa?” Raising the mattress and flipping it over, she sees nothing. Not Jennifer fighting, arching up. Not Jennifer’s nose spouting red bubbles.
“I’m right here,” she answers in her low voice, a voice deeper than the one you’d imagine coming out of her soft face, her heart-shaped mouth. Krystal’s voice is older than she looks, husky, a little Lauren Bacall but more monotonous. Expressionless. If her voice was dough, it had been flattened by a rolling pin. The Coke can sweats, and she lifts its cold to her forehead. The carbonation stings and she treasures the prickling hurting swallow. A sob catches in her throat. I’m doing this for you.
She opens the door and invites the man inside. She offers him the $150 special. The heat is suffocating, and he too opens his mouth to breathe as if Draymond had his hands around his throat. Each time she moves she has to pull her feet or arms through the glue—the room sticks to her body, a syrupy honey bear. The air conditioner blows hot air only. She closes her eyes, and what flashes by is Draymond and Jennifer and the sun staring at them. The mosquitoes keep lighting on her shoulders all night and she feels them drinking her like they want her and would take parts of her to share with strangers.
* * *
Krystal’s lips look caught in mid-tremble as she gets into the taxi. Her frightened eyes speak their own truth or hide it. Time to leave the befouled Weehawken. The driver is a Pakistani, and Dray tells him to take them to 112th Street in Manhattan. They have money for the New Ebony Hotel. The cab’s air conditioner leaks tepid air and she buzzes the window down, watching the New York skyline rise, the tall buildings are already glowing with light. She doesn’t feel anything at all. She’s walked through a wall of jagged glass into another world—where you go when you’ve committed a mortal sin. Do you reach over and squeeze his knee or fumble a Newport to your mouth? I didn’t think I could live without him. It’s Draymond who lights a cigarette. His hands tremble. They’re gouged with scratches and he notices her staring at them. “I had to quiet her. That wasn’t me in that room.”
* * *
The detectives who first enter the room talk about the unspeakable filth and heat—almost ninety degrees, the air conditioner on the blink. The crime scene in shambles. The calendar reads July 27, Wednesday, twenty-four hours after the murder, yet it will always be a steamy July dawn becoming a reeking hot day in room 37 in the Park Avenue Hotel.
“Jennifer didn’t scream,” Krystal said. Candida Moore’s Victim Impact Statement states, “A while later, when Krystal entered the room after hearing Jen’s screams, she witnessed him violently beating her in the face.” The story is a shape-shifter, and what occurred in the room stays in the room no matter if obliterated by a wrecking ball.
* * *
Stephanie Dickinson lives in New York City. Her novels Half Girl and Lust Series are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her feminist noir Love Highway. Other books include Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, (New Michigan Press), Flashlight Girls Run (New Meridian Arts), The Emily Fables (ELJ Publications) and Girl Behind the Door (RMP). Her work has been reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories from the South, and 2016 New Stories from the Midwest. She is the editor of Rain Mountain Press. She identifies as a gunshot survivor. For the past few years she’s been researching the Maximum Compound Unit at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women and is writing a collection of essays.