The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 by Jeffrey Toobin Page B

$325, taking a $900 loss. Molly even bought a new stereo for the Jeep and had it installed for him.
    But then his luck ran out. A few days after he put the Jeep in his name, he got busted drinking beer in it one night with his friends. Given his prior record, he was sure the judge would throw the book at him and send him to jail. Molly assured him that he could get the hearing delayed until after the holidays, but he took little comfort in her advice, telling his friends that he secretly feared she was planning to take the Jeep away. “He thought she was going to punish him,” Dallas recalls.
    In private, feeling alone and desperate, he wrote out a suicide note. “Nothing ever seems to work for me. And I know that nobody will ever really understand. I am always in debt, and I probably always will be. I’m not going to lie and say I’m not afraid. But whatever happens I know it can’t be too bad when you die.” Then he closed by begging whoever found his body to hide his suicide from Kaci. “Just please, I don’t want Kaci or her family to know what I’ve done.”
    But instead of acting on the note, he shoved it in a bookcase in his bedroom at the Marucas, where it would not be found until two weeks after the shooting.
    Then things got even worse. A few days earlier, he had gone on a date with a co-worker at McDonald’s, where he was working the night shift. The date set in motion a chain of events that pushed Rob over the edge. When Kaci found out that he hadtaken the girl home, she confronted him. At first he acted guilty and distraught, but he was soon alternating between begging her forgiveness and angrily demanding that she understand his need to spread his wings. When he went to his mother for advice, saying he felt horrible for cheating on Kaci, she counseled him not to take it so seriously.
    “I don’t view it as cheating,” she told him. “You’re not really expected to be monogamous when you’re 19. You’re young—things are forgivable.”
    Emboldened by his mother’s words, Rob called Kaci and told her that he was going to keep fucking the new girl. “She’s a nasty bitch,” he bragged. “I fuck her all over the place, and she’s good to me.”
    Kaci burst into tears. “How can you be so mean to me?” she sobbed. Rob apologized. “This is a weird time in my life,” he told her. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around.” He explained that he planned to kill himself.
    It was not the first time he’d said that, and Kaci was especially sensitive to the threat, since her last boyfriend had hung himself over a staircase one day after school. As it happened, this boyfriend had been the third friend of hers who’d taken his own life; suburban communities like Bellevue are the hardest-hit by teen suicides in Nebraska. But instead of confronting Rob, as she always had, she let it go. “I always used to talk him out of killing himself,” she recalls. “But this time, I just didn’t. I was so mad at him for breaking my heart.”
    That was on Tuesday afternoon, December 4th. A few hours later, as the sun was setting on the Nebraska plains and workers at Von Maur were turning on the Christmas lights at the mall, Rob drove to his mother’s for dinner.
     
    H E WAS LATE , as usual, and dressed like crap, but Molly was too overjoyed to see him to comment. So great was the gulfbetween them, and so thorough was her misunderstanding of his condition, that she couldn’t see he was depressed when he shuffled through the front door that evening. In fact, she thought he was “doing pretty well.”
    Molly was in a good mood that night. She had just finished writing her autobiography, a strangely graphic confession of her sexual adventures, and she felt like celebrating. But as the dinner wound down, the conversation turned to Rob’s breakup with Kaci. When he said he felt guilty about the whole affair, Molly replied, “Well, if you feel bad about it, maybe you shouldn’t have done