Young Lords of Chaos
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There's one theory that says that when we're born we're a blank slate and we're shaped by the world around us. And there's another theory that we're really little savages when we're born and that the job of our parents is to tame us. I have come to believe very much more strongly that we're savages that have to be tamed. Evil is very much closer to us than many of us would like to think.

How close was evil now? It clung to him like sweat as he ran, like the memory of that first murder, the anticipation of the next. Here he was, an adult, in thrall of the mere boy locked in a cell. Would he do the boy's bidding like the others had done? Could he kill? His name is Jim Greenhill.

He had run once before, but purposefully that time. When he left his native England and wound up in Fort Myers, Florida, he landed a job as a town's crime reporter, the chronicler of evil. It was a grueling existence, a long string of yellow crime scene tape. The reality is you're always right up against a deadline. There are always too many stories. There are always too few reporters. It was a grind.

what idealism he once had had long since faded away. Gone was that naive sentiment that inspired him to name his dogs Woodward and Bernstein in honor of the reporters who broke Watergate.

So, at night, he'd escape to the indigo room, the cottage, the gator lanes, and the French connection. One Scotch drowning another. It's a constant cycle of caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. Too much caffeine, too much nicotine, too much alcohol, and too little protein and carbohydrates. He had just entered his 30s. He was jaded, numb, and alcoholic. Strange, isn't it, that when you least expect it,

Do you come across the thing that changes everything? For Jim, it was him. And who was he? He was the wild boy. Tough, masculine, a leader and a bully. Kevin Foster. He was magnetic. For him, kids would throw their lives away. But what about Jim, the adult? Could he resist the boy man, Kevin, and his own demons too?

It all started in April 1996. Last day of school was just around the corner at Riverdale High. For the senior class of 96, these were the nostalgic moments, those final glory days. That is for almost everyone. Pete Magnotti, a brilliant, talented artist who dreamed of designing animation or comic books. But he was small, weak, ostracized by the in crowd.

He poured his anger into violent sketches, his netherworld of fantasy. His companion on the fringes of high school society, Chris Black, a chunky computer geek, just as smart, just as angry, just as lonely. They were seniors, good students who never got in trouble. Graduation was less than a month away, but these two would never make it. Within three weeks, there'd be a story for Jim Greenhill,

from promising college material to Fort Myers' most notorious criminals. I think I want you here. They recalled those days before graduation later, from jail. All of us were pretty much at an impasse. Just such a time of indecision there. Nobody really knew where they truly wanted to go. Everybody was trying to search for it. So everybody was just in sort of like an intellectual limbo. They were isolated.

High school society can be cruel. But then there was Kevin, who seemed to know what they were worth, who could make their fantasies real. He's really smart.

He's murdering a lot of time. Pete and Chris worshipped Kevin Foster. He was a dropout, had given up on school. And yet, to these boys, he was everything they could never be. His house was a gathering place. Outcasts were welcome. Kevin's mother was more like a friend. She and her son took the boys in like family.

Pete wrote in his journal, if you're a person of small stature like me, it helps to have big friends that have bigger guns that have a history of mental illness. Don't do it, Pete! Don't do it, man! Go, Kevin! Kevin was strong. Kevin was wild. Kevin had guns. His parents had owned a pawn shop, so lots of guns. He's been around the guns for his whole life.

It was like toys to him. How many did he have? No, he had lots. I don't know specifically. 20, 25? Probably more than that. In home videos of Kevin at 13, he could be seen holding a Christmas gift from his mother. A 12-gauge pump-action Mossberg shotgun. As he grew older, his mother's pawn shop became a kind of private arsenal. He drove that further step.

He was just that much more exciting than everyone else. He's prepared to be a little bit more bad, a little bit more dangerous. And that draws kids. At least us. Yes, and the adult, too. The reporter. But not yet. At the time, Jim Greenhill was busy covering accidents on the interstate. It all changed on Friday night, April 12th. Kevin ordered Pete and Chris in his truck, and they went driving. We stayed out all night, drove around in Kevin's truck.

Whenever the opportunity arised, we took it. Devil's night. Yeah. Just a random spectacle, just destruction. In the dark woods, they smashed car windows, broke into a gas station store, set a bus on fire. In the back garden of a restaurant, they found two birds and burned them to death.

A few days later, they reconvened at Kevin's garage. But it wasn't just the three of them anymore. Word had spread. They were six now. Kevin, the leader, decided to make order in the ranks. He gave them all one-syllable code names. There was Slim, Fried, Mob, Red, Dog, and then he named himself. He was God. Yeah, thought it up himself. Was it appropriate?

That's the way he thought of himself. He pictured himself in that context. He was an all-powerful, mighty being. Someone came up with a name for the group, Lords of Chaos. Pete sketched a logo. They typed up a manifesto brimming with adolescent machismo.

During the night of April 12th, they wrote, the Lords of Chaos began a campaign against the world. Be prepared for destruction of biblical proportions. The games have just begun and terror shall ensue. As luck would have it, on those very same days, Jim Greenhill was working on a related story.

Some school principals had met and talked about what would happen if they had a gang problem in the schools and how might they prevent that and how would they deal with it. It was dry academic. A far cry from the declaration of war brewing in Kevin's garage, the Lords of Chaos went unnoticed. Oh, they did send the manifesto to the newspaper, but it never made it to Jim's desk.

Only a small community paper noticed the vandalism at all, which had diminished as the acts of less-than-average intelligence carried out by pea-brained vandals. A little average intelligence. Yeah, running around. Unorganized. Pretty insulting. Yeah, we were really hurt by that. Hurt? You take a shot to the ego. So, the following Friday, the Lords of Chaos decided to show the unsuspecting town what they could do.

Organized vandalism, we'll give you some organized vandalism. We can do something that'll take a little bit of brains. On one of the town's main roads stood a historical monument, an old Coca-Cola plant. The Lords of Chaos broke into two nearby hardware stores, stole propane gas tanks, opened them, and then lit a fuse. It was really theatrical, the whole angle that we were watching it from. How'd it feel? Oh, it was majestic.

It's like, look at us, we can wreak loads of destruction on whatever we want. I'm coming home from a friend's house. I've been out late, I've been drinking. And as I drive up McGregor Boulevard, there is thick smoke hanging over the boulevard. And I go to where the smoke's coming from, and it turns out that the Coca-Cola building, which was a historic building in Fort Myers, has just, it appears, blown up.

The fire made headlines. But who did it? That remained a mystery. Alone in his house, Kevin, the mastermind of destruction, collected the articles Jim wrote. Police would later find them on his desk. He liked them. He told his followers, it was time for something bigger. Time to target a human being.

One of the boys knew about a diner where every night at closing, the owner carried a bag of money to his car. Kevin made a plan. The Lords of Chaos would ambush the man at gunpoint, steal his car, and take his money. The heist didn't go quite as planned. There was no bag of money, and Kevin forgot Pete's coat name as he screamed at him to get in the car and drive off. Frustrated, their anger quickly turned to violence.

What'd you do to his car? We trashed it. Beat it down for a while just to entertain ourselves. Get it out of our system. Made some dents in it. We made more than dents in it. We totaled it. But you weren't there. No. What did you do? I went home. Had a little curfew restriction with my parents. I had to come home before 10. Super criminal with a curfew.

Night was falling, and the Lords of Chaos had to go back to being teens again, obeying parents and curfews at bedtimes. For Jim, it was another night at the Indigo Room, the cottage, the Gator Lanes, and the French Connection. Another night of escaping. Still outside the orbit of that dark magnetic power. But in four days, someone would die.

And Jim would find himself in that elastic border between reality and the fantasies of a teenage killer. It was Tuesday, April 30th. Jim Greenhill was out on his beat. A highway accident this time. Another sad story. More police tape. More hours to kill before the bars opened.

But fate is a strange business. As Greenhill stood there by the highway, not far away a murder plot was forming. In a few hours, one man would be dead, and the reporter would begin his strange tryst with evil. Young boys, just weeks from graduation, would have thrown their lives away, all because of the actions of one young man. Barely a year older than them, but with the authority and charisma well beyond his years,

Kevin Foster. What sort of a person is he? Double personality, the way I look at it. In front of most people, he looks like an innocent little kid, you know, with intelligence and all. And then if you see the dark side, he's a psycho. Derek Shields is in prison now.

But on that Tuesday afternoon, he was an all-American boy, a member of the high school band, his ambitions still intact. But he was shy, too, an outsider, like his friends Pete and Chris, and like them. In thrall of Kevin. And by day's end, his dreams would be over.

It was early evening now. Riverdale High was alive. Mark Schwebes, the school's music teacher and band leader, was holding an open house, greeting next year's freshmen and prospective musicians. Mark grew up here, went off to join the Marines, came back to teach. It's all he ever wanted. He liked his kids. He loved his music. But as the event was winding down...

The Lords of Chaos circled the school. There was a whole big knot of people that night. Yeah, we had about eight or nine of us that night. We decided when we go back to Riverdale and break some of the windows out, it didn't seem like a really big, you know, big production. We had parked the cars across the street and we were walking up to meet the rest of the group when, uh, Shweebies had, uh, pulled up and confronted Chris. Everything went downhill from there.

The teacher had been heading home when, in the empty schoolyard, he saw them. Chris and one of the others, looking suspicious, wearing latex gloves, carrying heavy tin cans. What was going through your mind when you came up? Everything's screwed up now. Everything's all screwed up. Everything's all messed up.

The teacher confiscated the latex gloves and the cans and told the kids to expect a call in the morning. He threw the evidence in the back of his truck. Then he drove off. Nobody knew what to do. So, threw something out there in the open, an idea, everybody latched right onto it. That the man should be killed. No one disputed it. Everybody went for it. Group decision. You said he has to die. Yes, sir.

Do you think about it before you said it? No. You were upset? Very angry. In a rage? Oh, yeah. But Kevin was excited. A process had begun. He and Chris called information and got the teacher's home address. But now it was getting late. Murder was in the air. But remember, these were boys. It was time to be home. Did you have a curfew that night? Yeah, it was 10 o'clock. But I stayed out. I didn't follow it.

You decided I'll brazen this one out because this is important. Because, I mean, how many people can say, you know, we killed a guy last night? Some of the teens did leave. Out in the night, Pete and Chris went with Kevin to his house. Where were his parents at that hour? Out there, really social.

Derek, on the way to Kevin's house, had a crisis of conscience. What was he doing? He drove home, pulled into his own driveway, turned off the car, and sat there. To go or not to go? Mark Schwebes was his music teacher. He liked Mark Schwebes. To go then, or not to go? Derek pulled out of the driveway and headed to Kevin's. Did you take him seriously? A little bit, but not all the way.

Not until we got to his house he started pulling out the guns. From the arsenal of guns in his bedroom, Kevin picked the gun he got for Christmas when he was 13. The Mossberg 12-gauge pump shotgun, and a silencer, and a map. Once we got the idea in our heads that we were gonna, you know, kill somebody tonight, this is just gonna happen. Derek watched, excited or anxious. Why didn't you leave then?

I mean, if there was ever a red flag, for God's sake, you go to some guy's house and he starts pulling out guns and talking about killing a teacher who's your teacher. Why didn't you leave? I stayed to try to talk him out of it. But he wasn't paying attention to that, was he? No. Eventually, Kevin just blew up at me one time. And just grabbed his shotgun, told me, shut up now. Someone's got to die tonight. If it's not going to be him, it'll be you. So I shut up. How were you feeling at that point? Very scared.

That night, as the reporter was filing the story about the accident on the interstate, on that very same road, four boys were in a car on their way to commit murder. Didn't take four people to do it. No, of course not. So why'd you all go? Kevin needed an audience. That's the way I see it. If he was by himself, he wouldn't have done it. He needs to assure everyone how tough he is, all the really bad things he can do and not get caught. As they approached the house, Kevin finalized a plan.

One of them would knock on the door. When the teacher opened it, Kevin, hiding in the bushes, would shoot. But who would be the one to knock? No one wanted to. Kevin gave the order. "Derek will do it." Mark Sweebies would recognize Derek from band practice if he looked through the peephole. But Derek couldn't move. You didn't want to go to the door? No. You really, really didn't want to do it. But Kevin ordered again. Kevin and Derek got out of the car. Me and Chris, we waited in the car.

They walked around to the front of the house and they walked out of our viewpoint. Kevin hid in the bushes. Derek approached the door and knocked. He turned around. Kevin's gun was pointed straight at his face. I basically came face to face with the barrel of the shotgun. That's when everything, it just felt like time slowed down, everything got cold. My mind just went blank. At the same time, it was only a matter of seconds, Sweeby's was undoing the locks on his door.

And that's when I spun back around and as soon as he opened the door, he was like, "Yes, may I help you?" or something like that. And that just totally flipped me out and I ran. And then bang. Yep. Two bangs from the gun. Chris, sitting in the car, staring at the dashboard, heard the first shot, then the second. Why two? Could Kevin have shot Derek? But then two silhouettes came running frantically toward the car.

Derek came first. Derek was really screwed up. Yeah, Derek was shaking. The car took off. Kevin dropped silent. Pete and Chris asked him, what happened? He was being real quiet because he didn't want to disturb Derek. He put his hand, you know, up in the midsection of his face and he swept to the right. And then he said, just gone. You know, he was implying that he just shot off the right side of the man's head.

Kevin told them the first shot hit the teacher in the face. He fell to the ground in a fetal position. Kevin aimed again and shot the buttocks. How did you feel sitting in the car there once you'd come running out and sat down and Derek was there shaking like a leaf and you're driving off? It didn't even really seem real to me. It seemed just like I was watching myself from outside.

Driving into the night, Kevin handed out cigarettes. He was elated. He was so proud of himself, so full of himself. He was like king of the world on top of the world. He could do whatever he wanted now. He just got away with the worst thing you can do. When Pete came home, his mom was waiting, angry. The boy missed his 10 p.m. curfew. But that night, Pete was no longer a child. He walked past his mother and went to bed. ♪

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If you've ever felt like the auto repair business is broken, you're not alone. Everybody's over it. From talking down to selling up to car-splaining mechanics, you're just done putting up with BS. Bad service. Stop!

At Midas, we're on a mission to redefine car care, where, get this, we talk to you like a real person, helping you plan for today and down the road. Imagine that. We're driving forward with this in mind. Reroute to Midas, where we're putting an end to BS. If you know about homicides in a community like Southwest Florida, then you know that almost no one ever dies randomly.

People die in murders because they're selling drugs, buying drugs, selling themselves for sex, or staying in an abusive relationship where there have already been calls to the police. That's why people get killed in this region of the country. They don't die because they go out and answer their front door to someone and get shot dead. That doesn't happen. Every crime reporter will tell you about that one defining case of their lives. The night it happened for Jim Greenhill. He was drunk in a bar.

911, what is your emergency? Yes, two shots just fired near Park Meadows Drive. Two people had called 911. At 11.35, a sheriff's deputy was dispatched. A crowd had gathered. The body of a male Caucasian in his early 30s was lying in the doorway, welcome mat soaked with blood, shotgun pellets everywhere.

The investigation began. Why two shots? Why in the buttocks? There was cash in his pockets, so robbery was unlikely. In the back of his truck, deputies found latex gloves and an assortment of tin cans. Strange. Yes, but not much of a lead. Name of the victim? Mark Schwebes, a teacher. That night, his sister in Atlanta was awakened by a phone call. My dad was crying and said...

Something's happened to Mark. And I asked him what. He said, Mark's dead. And I tried to figure out. I asked him, was it a car accident? What was it? And he told me he had been murdered in his house. At about the same time in Fort Myers, another phone call was made to Chris Burnett's house. Chris Burnett was one of Kevin's closest friends, unlike Pete or Chris or Derek.

Burnett was Kevin's peer and equal, not a follower. They learned together about cigarettes and cars and girls. He was there with Kevin earlier that night when Mark Sweeby's caught the Lords of Chaos by the school. But unlike Kevin's followers, Burnett was one of the boys who decided to leave. Now it was Kevin on the line. He told Burnett it was done. Reporter Jim Greenhill arrived at the scene of the crime early the next morning.

I had gone to the house where the band director, Mark Schwebes, had been killed. For a few seconds, it had crossed my mind, what if it was kids from his own school? And I laughed at myself. I remember laughing out loud because it just seemed so incredibly improbable. John McDougall, sheriff at the time, headed the investigation. With little to go on, his deputy zeroed in on the pellets lodged in the victim's pelvis. We call it a signature.

When there's any sexual connotations in a homicide, we try to look at why is that there. Was Mr. Schwebes involved in some kind of a love triangle? That theory was the subject of Jim's front page story the next day. Gossip from the teacher's lounge leaked out. Mr. Schwebes was growing close to a teacher who was breaking up with her boyfriend. The boyfriend didn't have an alibi.

Kevin, the real killer at home, followed the coverage. He called his close friend Burnett and the other teen who bailed out before the murder. He laughed. Everybody in town is so far off. Then Kevin called to brag to two more boys. Told them what he did. Told them to keep it secret. Foster got it to his head that we can't be touched. We're free. There's nothing else. No one can stop us. No one even suspected you? Nope. Mm-hmm.

But Kevin was wrong. Four boys had committed a murder. At least four others knew about it. Who would be the first to break? A few days after the murder, you got a big boost. Yes, we did. What happened? It was the girlfriend of one of the members of the Lords of Chaos that had called us and said that her boyfriend had told her that he had killed Mark Schwebes. And he said...

"Well, I need to tell you something." He's like, "That was us, or me, or whatever. We did it." And I'm like, "We?" I'm like, "We who?" And he's like, "Me and Kevin." That is the voice of Julie Chouchard. Two days after the murder, her boyfriend confessed to her that he killed the teacher. She told her mom. She just stood still with, like, no expression on her face. Like, you know, she didn't know what to say.

Mother and daughter went to the sheriff, and before long, Julie's boyfriend was hauled to the station. He was Craig Lesch. He was one of the boys who heard about the murder from Kevin. He wasn't even there. In the interrogation room, he quickly confessed he had nothing to do with the murder, but he knew who did. Pete Magnotti, Chris Black, Derek Shields, and Kevin Foster.

Kevin, the mastermind at home, oblivious to all this, decided it was safe. He would strike again. Bigger. He wanted to do some kind of... Commando Delta Force kind of thing. His plan? An armed robbery of the fast food restaurant where Pete and Derek worked. And so the night arrived. Friday. Fort Myers was quiet. Unusually so. The murder of the teacher was now 72 hours old.

Pete and Chris filled a car with guns and drove to pick up Brad Young, who heard about the murder and wanted in on the gang. We pulled up to his house. We walked around behind his house and the cops jumped down on us. That was it. It was over. End of story. No siren, no pull over now. No siren, no warning. Flashlight in your face, gun to your back of your head. Face against the wall. That's, you know, when reality intrudes and, you know, you can't deny me anymore. Here I am. Live with me. You're screwed.

In fact, deputies had been following Pete and Chris that entire evening. Shortly after, the sheriff's men picked up Derek as well. And a snake of deputy cars in the night zeroed in on the mastermind. Kevin, with his best friend Brunette in the car, was heading to the meet point when at 8.45 a sheriff's car signaled, Pull over. What to do? Brunette asked. Pull over, I guess, Kevin answered. In his last seconds of freedom, Kevin turned to his friend and said...

See you in hell. Seven young men were brought to interrogation rooms. Deputies raided their homes, confiscated their computers, took their notebooks, and from Kevin's house, more than 20 guns and rifles. The telephone rings. It's the sheriff. Jim, I've been trying to reach you. I've got this story. He never does this. I mean, he never does that. The sheriff told the reporter, you should see the gun show we've assembled down here.

But when Jim arrived at the station, it wasn't the 20-odd guns that struck him. It was a single photo of the young man who had collected the guns. Something happens the moment I see the photograph of Kevin with the gun. Because when I see the expression on Kevin's face, I recognize someone. It was a surprisingly pure, lonely memory. And it flooded Jim. That picture reminded the jaded alcoholic reporter...

How in his youth, he says, he was pulled into strong friendships, followed charismatic boys, boys like Kevin. Since my early teens, I had a tendency to be pulled towards kids who had a certain charisma to them, who perhaps could fulfill some things that I felt were a little lacking in my own life. Of course, that was long ago.

Jim wasn't thinking that an image like that could ignite passions long laid to rest, stir up emotions long drowned by the bottle. Among those arrested that night were three who never made it to the teacher's door. Brad Young, the new gang member, was quickly released. He had nothing to do with the murder. But then there were two other boys. They could spend years in prison for just having been involved in the murder's planning.

One of them was Kevin's best friend, Chris Burnett. And now he had to choose, freedom or friendship. When he talked to me, he said, yeah, I went home. So Burnett turned on Kevin, his close friend. He told investigators everything. This is part of his statement. He was saying, oh, it was cool. He says the side of his face just blew off.

That testimony opened the door to more confessions. Right away, the second boy who left before the murder took place agreed to implicate Kevin Foster. Did Foster describe how he shot him? Yes. You know how you hold a gun, and he just showed us like that. Boom, boom, boom.

In return for testifying in full against the others, the two were promised lenient sentences. In fact, they were out of custody soon after. In the paper the next day, Jim quoted extensively from their confessions. Their betrayal, as Kevin saw it. Derek, who stood closest to Kevin when he pulled the trigger, now saw Kevin's anger in jail.

Did you ever hear Kevin say, "Somebody is gonna pay"? Yes. What did you hear? Right out of Kevin's mouth telling me about how his mom was gonna get some connections done to have Burnett, Terone and Young murdered. Those are the three people who he thought as ratting you out? Yeah. They were the first ones to turn state. And they didn't have to go to jail? No. So he was gonna see them killed? Yes.

Were the seeds planted for another murder? Chris Burnett, once Kevin's close friend, was out now. A teen free to start living his life all over again. The price handing over his best friend to authorities. Perhaps Burnett could forget the man he helped put behind bars. But behind bars, could Kevin forget the man who was first to turn on him? It would become Fort Myers' next murder mystery. But Jim Greenhill wouldn't report that story.

He was about to live it. In sunny Fort Myers, the wheels of justice ground slow. It was almost two years before the Lords of Chaos went to trial. Reporter Jim Greenhill kept in close touch with the lead prosecutor in the case, Randall McGruther. McGruther was pursuing the death penalty. It was a huge story for Jim's newspaper.

Jim had always been a good writer, pretty factual. He took great pains to confirm things before he would put them in a paper. He called me several times on articles he was writing about the Lord's chaos to make sure that things were accurate and he wasn't overstating. As the trial loomed, parents and lawyers persuaded Pete, Chris, and Derek, one by one, to testify against Kevin and plead guilty to their roles in the murder plot in return for being spared the death penalty.

In March 1998, Kevin Foster stood trial alone. And that's where reporter Jim Greenhill saw him for the first time in the flesh. Jim Greenhill, sitting in court, was transfixed. Kevin didn't know it, but he was already under the reporter's skin.

Greenhill, no longer content to file short articles about this case, left the paper and started working on a book about the Lords of Chaos. Jim sat in court listening to the state's evidence laid out by those who once called Kevin God. The same plot repeated over and over again. Mr. Shields would knock on his door, Mr. Shreve's door. When he opened the door, Kevin Foster would shoot him with a shotgun. All the stories matched, save one.

When Kevin's mother, Ruby, took the stand, she insisted her son was with her that night and he was innocent. My son did not do this. I do not want my son to die for something he did not do. What were your impressions of somebody that was absolutely determined not to believe in her son's guilt? She had fought to have her son's trial moved, said Jim's coverage had tainted the jury pool.

It was after all her demands were denied that she finally met Jim face to face. I ran into her in the corridor and the first thing that she said to me was, I hate you. Those were the first words that she said. I hate you. I hate you. The trial was short, only three days. Kevin Foster was convicted. First degree murder.

On April 10th, the jury came back with a sentence read by the judge. That for the murder of Mark Sweeby, the defendant is hereby sentenced to death. It is further ordered... Kevin Foster, of course, was convicted of trial, sentenced to death, and is at Union Correctional in Stark, Florida, which is death row. Several months later, the three other Lords of Chaos learned their fates. Peter Magnati was sentenced to 32 years in prison.

Chris Black and Derek Shields each sentenced to life. Corrections Department vans had scattered the boys throughout Florida, and Fort Myers resumed its languid normalcy. But not Jim Greenhill. He couldn't stop thinking about the case.

He reviewed the scores of articles he had once filed about the Lords of Chaos. Still, he felt none of those, even put together, could explain what happened or why he cared so much. Personally, it ate at him. I knew there was something unusual about it to me, but I wasn't sure what it was. I couldn't put my finger on it. Jim must have assumed that the key to this story lay in the past, if only he could grasp it.

What he didn't grasp was that the story was about to take a turn. It was going to change. It was no longer about the past, not about murders which had occurred, but about killings which were yet to come. The second half of this mystery was about to unfold. And the key lay in that one phrase Kevin uttered to his best friend in his last moments of freedom. See you in hell.

Jim Greenhill had no idea what was to come. The trial of the Lords of Chaos was over, but his had just begun. First trying to become an author, but harder still, getting sober. I spent a great deal of time going to 12-step meetings and just sort of decompressing and limbering up for the task ahead. And nights once spent at the Indigo Room, the Cottage, the Gator Lanes, and the French Connection.

were now dedicated to hour-long phone conversations with the sister of the murdered teacher. At some point in that, she said, Jim, this is important to you. And I said, well, yes, I'm writing a book about it. And she said, no, there is more to it than that. And I said, I don't know what you're talking about kind of thing. I'll have to think about that or something. And I hung up the telephone, and that's when I remember concretely thinking to myself, you know, she's right.

The sudden insight of a clear memory, long drowned in alcohol, lost from childhood. It occurred to him that perhaps looking into his fascination with the Lords of Chaos would mean finally looking into that dark hole in himself, confronting demons he thought he'd defeated, urges he thought he'd overcome. And I decide that...

The first person to try to talk to is Kevin. Kevin is the most important person in the story. Kevin was on death row, in the process of appealing his conviction. His mother, Ruby, was still in town. But could Jim approach her? The last time they met, she told Jim she hated him. I called Ruby up and said, "Would you and/or Kevin like to talk to me at this point?" And she said, "Yes."

And she said, in fact, that she had been trying to reach me. She had felt the time had come to talk. She wanted to convince me of Kevin's innocence. Jim met Ruby several times in that same house in which her son plotted murder two and a half years earlier. And soon, Jim started corresponding with Kevin. I went into it willing to listen to a completely different side of the story.

And so letters began going back and forth between the killer in the cell and the reporter on the outside. "'I know, and God in heaven knows, I'm not a murderer,' Kevin wrote. They wrote each other about religion, morals, driving a truck on the open road,

It was a tentative relationship, but a growing one. Finally, in March of 1999, Kevin invited Jim to meet him face-to-face on Death Row. The jaded reporter found himself feeling something he thought he had lost, excitement. There's a very idealistic and, I'm told, naive side to me still.

And I really had this idea that I could go there and he would tell me the truth, whatever the truth was. And in learning the truth, I would have a better book and it would help him somehow. Jim coordinated the trip with Ruby, Kevin's mother. He was ready but nervous. Two policemen he knew from his reporting days told him, Watch out. Kevin and Ruby come from the pawn shop world. They're manipulative. They'll get you to do things.

Yes, I had been warned. These people are very manipulative. They're people who use people. They want to use you. I was like, well, maybe, you know, I'm intelligent enough. They're not going to do that to me. But these two had an eye for the outcast, the lonely, the fallible. They knew how to draw them in. In the upcoming months, mother and son would pull Jim closer with compliments, assurances of innocence, the intimacy of little secrets and tender moments.

The reporter didn't know it then, but he was edging ever closer to a murderous plot of revenge. A scheme that had him at its cold heart. Introducing Instagram teen accounts. Automatic protections for teens, with built-in limits for who can contact them and the content they can see. Helping teens safely connect to the people and things that matter most. Plus, teens under 16 require parental approval to change safety settings.

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If you've ever felt like the auto repair business is broken, you're not alone. Everybody's over it. From talking down to selling up to car-splaining mechanics, you're just done putting up with BS. Bad service.

At Midas, we're on a mission to redefine car care, where, get this, we talk to you like a real person, helping you plan for today and down the road. Imagine that. We're driving forward with this in mind. Reroute to Midas, where we're putting an end to BS. In 1996, a teenager named Kevin Foster led a pack of young followers on a crime spree that ended in murder. Now he was on death row. Three of the boys faced a life in prison,

Three others were trying to put that episode behind them. And a reporter named Jim Greenhill believed he had a great book on his hands. How could he know that the murder of that school teacher, Mark Schwebes, would only be the first half of his book? How could he know that he was about to become a character in a new plot about murder and that Kevin would have plans for him? It's an appropriate name for the place where they keep Florida's death row.

Stark, where Kevin was brought to live the rest of his life. In March 1999, Jim met Kevin face-to-face for the first time. He was struck by Kevin's eyes. They were not cold, as he remembered from court, but rather lost, even pleading. Kevin, too, seemed surprised. He later wrote Jim,

It was a touch weird finally meeting you face to face, you know. I had pictured you as shorter and heavier than you are, most likely dressed like a preppy in dockers and collared shirts. But I have to say, I'm impressed. Kind words. Was it gentle seduction? Though initially it was Jim who sought Kevin, now it seemed Kevin took equal interest in the budding friendship. Jim's motive, at least on the surface, was his book.

What was Kevin's? He kept encouraging Jim to come back. So Jim became a death row regular, but not without commitment. It was a five-hour drive from his house to Kevin's hell. He made most of the trips with Ruby, Kevin's mother. It was on the road Jim began to feel this was not a normal relationship of mother and son. These two were a team, accomplices of sorts. They were almost like a couple.

When they are together as a pair, they have a relationship that sometimes seems more boyfriend and girlfriend than mother and son. The way that she holds on him, the way they touch each other, the way they talk and the things that they talk about. She talked about looking into his room when he was in his bedroom with his girlfriend and watching him.

Why would Kevin and his mother entertain this stranger, this reporter? Include him in their weekend events, their intimate gatherings, their family secrets? Was it to convince him that Kevin was innocent? Or was something else afoot? Kevin insisted he did not kill the teacher. He said Derek did it, or maybe Burnett, his former best friend, who cut a deal and handed Kevin over to authorities.

From meeting to meeting, Kevin's hatred toward Burnett seemed to grow. But Kevin also showed Jim a tender, sensitive side. Kevin wrote, "'Kids my age, there's a growing number of them that see life as a waste of time, a trip from womb to tomb, and no matter what you do, it will always end the same. So why bother?' He is not a simple person. He is quite a complex person."

There is one level to him that is a sort of knee-jerk, adrenaline-fed, impulsive, teenage vandalism, things for kicks. And then there's another level that is extremely uncomfortable with the society that he sees around him. In tender letters, Kevin asked Jim about missed opportunities.

Girls he wanted to kiss but didn't. Authority figures he wanted to confront but hadn't. Did Kevin realize how things he said just kept echoing in Jim's mind during those five-hour-long trips back from prison each week? Could he tell just how much Jim grew to relish these weekend visits? Did Kevin know that on weekdays between visits, Jim would go visit all those places Kevin rattled off in their conversations?

Did Kevin realize Jim was now trekking as far as Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, like a disciple doing his homework? Each location, each visit, drawing him closer to the young man on death row. Meticulously, perhaps, Kevin was building a bond and drawing Jim in. Kevin has been raised to kind of form these very tight relationships and bring people in and call them family members.

So that's one of the things that he does. Kevin told Jim how, for one summer, he took care of a neighbor's son who was dying of cancer. Kevin wrote, I only regret I didn't have a chance to do more for him. A good kid died for no reason. True, Jim was Kevin's senior by more than a decade. But it was in these moments that it seemed he came under Kevin's wing, like so many others before him.

He told me that he saw himself as a protector sometimes, that he liked to look out for, well, specifically for Pete. Kevin wrote, Pete didn't have many friends. He didn't want to be the small scared kid anymore. Kevin made Pete feel bold all the way to murder. Was he preparing Jim for a mission too? Readying this former alcoholic to join him in friendship in some fantasy?

They were still distant at age, but in spirit they grew closer and closer. When you are a recovering alcoholic and addict, you are to some extent frozen at the age that you were at when you really started using heavily. I'm still a little back there in certain ways. And Jim found it easy, even comforting, to spill the intimate details of his life and explain to a man just barely an adult why when he was that age, he started drinking.

I grew up in Britain and I had parents who I believe by American standards would be very strict. And I won a scholarship to go to college in the United States. When I got to college, I had no parents, no strictness at all, no structure.

and I sort of devolved into substance abuse and delinquency. It all just poured out, stories he buried in the back of his brain during all the years of drinking. There were incidents that, in retrospect, I can only describe as just purely sociopathic incidents. I mean, just really, really appalling behavior on my part.

He told Kevin that one time he stood drunk just before dawn on the five-lane highway going through his college town and fired an AK-47 into the air and loved it. So there it was. Kevin managed to draw out of Jim confessions long drowned in alcohol, long dormant through adulthood, that Jim was turned on by violence.

I told Kevin there were times when at a younger period in my life, I liked to go out and vandalize things. That I would just go out in the middle of the night and vandalize things just for the fun of it. And I didn't need an audience. The day that I told him that, he jumped up from his seat and he goes, yeah. And he's like really excited. Yeah, you too. I like to do that too.

Kevin wrote, "I have very few friends. I can count them all on one hand and for them I would do anything. You're one of them now. For my friends I would die." What would Jim do for his friend? How could he know that Kevin may already have hatched a plan for revenge? And what would happen when Kevin found out about the woman who would get in his way? Jim Greenhill, once a crime reporter,

Now a man obsessed by a killer, roamed and wandered, drawn to someone else's world. His nights at the Indigo Room, the cottage, the Gator Lanes and the French Connection now replaced by pilgrimages to places on the dark side of town. I had to walk in Kevin's footsteps as far as I could in order to understand Kevin. There is no other way to do it.

These were Kevin's footsteps, but where were they heading? Who was leading the way? Was Kevin upping the ante now with gifts he gave Jim? Items of clothing to make him look more like Kevin. A gold chain, a hoop earring, a black leather jacket. You wore a leather jacket he asked you to wear? Yes. That, I still don't really understand that. He asked me to...

wear this jacket and I did and I still don't really get that but I did. Kevin encouraged Jim to send photos of himself from the road. There were those who felt as if you were falling in love with him. That you were just falling for the guy. Was that a good ad? I haven't heard that and I wouldn't share that opinion.

Perhaps not as lovers, but it was a tight bond Jim knew well. He had somehow become, in his own words, a follower. There is a chemistry between somebody like Kevin and his followers that can be mistaken by people viewing it from a distance as perhaps rather like an amorous relationship or something. But I think it's psychological. I think it's a psychological attraction.

But in Fort Myers, Florida, there was something and someone who could have stood in the way of Kevin's plans. At the Fort Myers morgue on a warm spring night in 1996 came the body of Mark Schwebes the night the Lords of Chaos came knocking on his door. And there, death after death, worked a woman named Dr. Carol Hoosier. She was district medical examiner and testified against Kevin in his trial. She was also Mrs. Jim Greenhill.

Did she realize that night after night her husband was pouring his heart out to a young man on death row? Was your husband falling for a psychopath? Jim has an attraction for Kevin. I can understand that. I've had powerful attractions to people, though not a person like Kevin. I think we all have different triggers. We all have different...

things that appeal to us. I think what you're looking at here is the dark side of falling in love. Jim never told Kevin about his wife. It was Kevin's mother who found out and told her son, who, furious, demanded an explanation. He got it, privately, far from his wife's domain at the morgue.

Jim told Kevin that his was a loveless marriage. She who must be obeyed, as he called her, was oblivious to the secrets the two were sharing. She was authoritarian, possessive, rigid, and corporate. Jim spent hours complaining about her. It was as though Jim wanted to tell Kevin all, as though it were liberating. There is this side to me...

that is impulsive and wanting to do all these things and go out and be a certain kind of person. How Kevin will help me is by bringing this out of me. Was Jim becoming a character in his own book? Did he realize it? Did Kevin? Following in Kevin's footsteps meant roaming from gun show to gun show across the South. It wasn't long before he bought a gun.

It had been years since his college days. He liked how it felt in his hands. I was interested in what the attraction was, what the appeal was. Kevin had guns from a very young age. He loved them. He loved them, yeah. In the field behind his house, he shot once, again, and each pull of the trigger increased the strange affinity he felt for the young man on death row. ♪

And Kevin quietly encouraged Jim's newfound hobby. He arranged for his mother to lend Jim his favorite gun. In a letter, he carefully explained how to clean the prized weapon. Was he training his new recruit? Jim wrote back, I borrowed the Colt finally. I wore it. I guess this is taking a liberty maybe, bro. Several times. And it isn't uncomfortable to sit down with, nor to drive with, nor did anyone seem to notice anywhere. So, I like it.

In a letter, Jim told Kevin about a violent dream he had just had. In it, Jim walked into a Victorian house and slaughtered everyone inside. I have vividly killed every single person in the house in their beds. I am going to escape scot-free. Here's the kicker. I do not experience this as a nightmare. It is just a dream. This was something Kevin seemingly wished to explore...

"What if you could pull three or four capital cases in one day, with no chance of getting caught?" he wrote. "What if you could get away with murder?" And this was Jim's reply. Murder would excite him sexually. There's a quivering in my crotch. I stir down there, involuntarily, just contemplating the question, and I'm quickly aroused. But it's more than that.

I feel something in my arms, in my hands, in my chest, in my whole body, and I recognize it as adrenaline. It's so strong. I actually have a slight tremor at first. My pulse increases. My breaths shorten. Most interesting to me, I am about as fully aware of all around me, the light, the breeze, the feel of life as I ever get.

"Now, this is not normal, bro. I know it ain't. I have lived with it and repressed it and pretended it isn't there since before my teens. And the only person I've ever told is you." They loved the same gun. They exchanged similar violent fantasies. They even shared the same clothing. Was it time now for Kevin to launch the final salvo in the battle for Jim?

The subject of killing, of murder, was discussed often and freely. But that one murder, the one that landed Kevin on death row, was still taboo. That is, until a meeting 13 months into their relationship when, Jim says, Kevin told him a secret he had never told another adult before. He conceded that he killed Mark Shreve. How did he put it? He started talking about the murderer. He didn't say...

I killed, not Schwebe's. It wasn't quite like that. It was a given. He just started talking about the murder. But immediately after, Jim says, Kevin told him another secret, even darker. This was not something that had happened. This was something that was going to happen. A plan. Jim says Kevin wanted to silence those who betrayed him after that murder. He wanted to punish them.

especially his former best friend, Chris Burnett, the first to hand Kevin over to authorities. But how could Kevin do it from the depths of death row? Did you go out and buy guns? Yes. Did you tell Kevin you would be willing to kill another human being? Yes. Did you tell Kevin that you would probably find some sexual satisfaction from killing another human being? Here was a reporter who was writing letters of fantasy about killing...

saying he was a downtrodden husband, confessing violent dreams, a follower with a loaded gun. Did Kevin believe he'd groomed the perfect accomplice? Was Jim ready for murder? Introducing Instagram Teen Accounts. Automatic protections for who can contact teens and the content they can see. Learn more at Instagram.com slash teenaccounts.

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If you've ever felt like the auto repair business is broken, you're not alone. Everybody's over it. From talking down to selling up to car-splaining mechanics, you're just done putting up with BS. Bad service.

At Midas, we're on a mission to redefine car care, where, get this, we talk to you like a real person, helping you plan for today and down the road. Imagine that. We're driving forward with this in mind. Reroute to Midas, where we're putting an end to BS. I wish you were out. I was born at the wrong time in the wrong place. It'd be awesome, though, if I could pick up the phone and say, Hey, bro, I've got some ideas for tonight. Let's go get it on. They ain't seen nothing.

The wishful thinking of a friend that Kevin believed he could get out. He was waiting for the results of an appeal, hoping for a new trial and possibly even acquittal, but for one serious problem. Six witnesses. In a recorded conversation in the noisy reception room of Death Row, Kevin told Jim that he should have taken care of his accomplices, Pete, Chris, and Derek, long ago.

right after he killed the teacher. Yet, why worry about them now? Locked away for life, what could they gain by testifying again in a new trial?

But then there were the other boys who had heard from Kevin personally about the murder. Three of them made deals to testify against him and were rewarded for their treachery with freedom. How sweet revenge could be! On June 11, 2000, his voice sometimes muffled by the clatter of death row, Kevin laid out for Jim a plan to kill the three who had betrayed him.

Tell them you're an author, Kevin said. They would meet in an empty parking lot, one at a time in hourly intervals. There, Jim would zap them unconscious with a stun gun, drive them to an open grave, and shoot them.

Most of Kevin's hate focused on his former best friend, Chris Burnett. Kevin's last words to Burnett when they were caught were, See you in hell. Now he seemed intent on carrying out that promise. He planned Burnett's execution down to the last detail. Jim would shoot Burnett with Kevin's favorite gun, a Colt Combat Commander.

And Jim would have to wear Kevin's favorite necklace. And he wanted me to say, see you in hell, because he wanted Chris to know that it came from Kevin. On the night of June 25th, Ruby called. I know what's up, Kevin's mother said. He told me everything. She was in on the plan. Ruby and Jim met in his truck outside a fast food joint. Did he say anything about me borrowing his necklace? Yes, he did. So he told you everything? Yes.

But there was a problem.

Ruby said Kevin's favorite gun would be traceable. She came up with a better plan. My problem with this gun, I don't know. That's my biggest worry. I will give you an unregistered officer. Well, that's what I was going to ask. The following Saturday, Jim says Ruby invited him to her house and gave him a Remington Model 31 16-gauge shotgun. In this tape, you can hear them finalize the plan. Well, let me tell them that, sir.

Craig Lesh was the teen who, by confessing to his girlfriend, brought down the Lords of Chaos.

In a meeting in Jim's truck in an empty parking lot, Ruby was adamant that this crime, unlike the teacher's murder, remain unsolved. She repeatedly told Jim to dispose of any forensic evidence before leaving the murder site, things like shell casings. I don't care if you have a gun for it, I'm willing to go, too. Okay, you got it. You're absolutely right. Way to go.

She also told Jim to sprinkle a powerful chemical on the bodies. And so the deal was done. The crime reporter had turned partner in crime. Yeah.

As the summer of 2000 was nearing its end, Jim drove up to death row for the last time. In more than 17 months, he and Kevin met 25 times, spending over 150 hours together.

Over that period, Jim wrote Kevin 62 letters. Kevin wrote Jim 53. Now, in what would be their final moments together, Kevin promised Jim that once the second trial was over, once he was free, they would team up again, outlaws on the open road, and these three killings coming up, these paltry necessity killings, they would be only the beginning.

Four years earlier, a ring of murder tightened around a teacher named Mark Schweepies. Now it was tightening again. The plot had been hatched. Revenge was in the air.

Everything was in place. But who would the victim be? Behind the pale green barricades of the penitentiary. From his cell on death row, Jim says Kevin was cooking up a hit list. And his mother was helping him. And now the reporter himself was involved too. Marked for death were the three key witnesses who had betrayed Kevin. But they weren't the only ones. Also on Kevin's hit list, the judge,

the prosecutor, a defense lawyer, even the sheriff. What did they want to do to the sheriff? Kevin said that he would like to gut him. With a knife? Yes. What did he want to do to your wife? He said that if I would like it, he would like to go into the morgue and conduct a live autopsy on her and perform sexual acts on her. On your wife? Yes.

What did you do when he said that? I actually didn't react. What did you think? Sick. Very sick. That's what I thought. Jim still liked Kevin. Kevin was his friend. But these were concrete plans for real murder. This was not abstract fantasy anymore. Kevin said that he was going to blow up a historic building. He did it.

Kevin said in the presence of a fairly large group of teens who should have known better and some of whom went home and did nothing that he was going to go and kill their band director, Mark Schwebes. He did it. Now Jim found himself in exactly the same spot as those boys who had gotten in a car alongside Kevin on their way to murder. Would he go along too, surrendering his judgment to follow Kevin? What I came to realize working on the book is that I could have been sitting in the car.

There was a period in my life when I could have been one of these kids that got alongside a kid like Kevin Foster and went along and watched somebody be killed. But what to do now? Jim thought of Derek, the one boy who almost grudgingly walked up to murder's door and knocked. The night that Mark Shreves was killed, Derek actually drove home and he sat in his car

at the end of his driveway and he thought to himself, "Am I going to go to this murder scene? Are they really going to kill my band director? What should I do?" For some reason, Derek didn't pick up a telephone and talk to someone. For some reason, he didn't go to his house and wake his mother up and talk to her. But Jim was not a teenager, not a juvenile delinquent, and not a killer. Jim picked up the phone.

He was obviously concerned, I could tell by listening to him. He called Randall McGruther, the prosecutor in the original case, and told him everything. He said that Kevin and his mother, in fact, had plotted out a scheme to take care of some of the witnesses in the case, along with other people, including the prosecutors. That, of course, got my attention.

And so Jim Greenhill, a reporter turned author turned perspective hitman, agreed to turn state's witness and help investigators unravel the plot ripped out of his own book. I'm thinking I've been doing this 21 years and I thought I've seen it all, but I guess I haven't.

And that is why when Jim met Ruby next in his truck outside the Walmart where she worked, he was wearing a wire. She suspected nothing, presuming the conspiracy exclusive to their little group, like the Three Musketeers. The Three Musketeers know what's going on and everyone knows what's going on. Her son was on death row. How far would she go to free him? The plot was about to collapse.

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Jim Greenhill was about to hand over his friend to authorities.

I did not talk to them after Kevin suggested this to me. I talked to them after his mother suggested this to me, and that's different. Why? Because it is one thing for a 23-year-old

convicted murderer on death row in conditions of very high security to talk about doing something. And it's another thing for a person who is free, who is a 50-year-old adult, who is supposed to be a responsible member of society to talk about doing something like that.

But didn't Jim confess to having murderous fantasies himself? Now he claims he never intended to carry out any of those dark plans. Today, he says he was always in control. That character who seemed to be teetering on the edge of murder was just that, a character, a fiction created by the author to get closer to his subject, a literary trick.

It was a plot which wound up undoing Kevin, the master plotter himself. He does not open up to authority figures. So I felt that it was important to show Kevin that I could be on his level. Do you feel guilty? No, I don't feel guilty. Kevin made his choices. Kevin showed himself to me. And Kevin tried to use me. The chips fell off.

where they may. Which are using each other.

In retrospect, I think that he was using me as much or more than I was using him. But what would the woman scorned in letter after letter say, the woman on whom Kevin wanted to perform what he called a live autopsy as a gift to his friend? That she supported her husband all along and knew about the whole thing. He denigrated you at every turn. He vilified you. He demonized you. I thought he did it pretty well.

How do you come by this willingness to allow yourself to be used that way? I don't really feel that I was used. I feel that I was a participant, a willing participant, even a partner. Ruby Foster was arrested near her workplace. The alleged plot made the front page of Jim's former newspaper. The reporter was not writing the story this time. Now, he was one of its main characters.

The day the news broke, Kevin was moved to even more strict confinement. He had no idea why. He wrote his friend Jim what would be their last exchange. I don't know what's going on. I got transferred and don't know why. Placed in this maximum management lockdown. This is a cage in a box, in a huge box, in a huge cage. Stay out of trouble. I'll catch you next time. See ya. Several days later, he found out what was going on.

he'd be facing the same charges as his mother: conspiracy to commit murder. How do Kevin and his mother feel about you now? I don't know. I haven't talked to either one of them. You must know. You know them pretty well. I imagine that I'm on top of the list. The kill list? Yes. Ruby Foster was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. She was sentenced to five years in prison and was released in 2004.

Peter Magnati, the young man who once dreamed of designing animation, was released in the summer of 2023. And Jim, the reporter-turned-hitman-turned-witness-finally-turned-author, his book, Someone Has to Die Tonight, was published. It would be up to the readers to decide who used whom, was it the reporter in control or the killer or both, and who, if anyone really fell for the other.

But in making your decision, consider this: When we first spoke with Jim, as he looked back on the final chapters of his tale those about the author who inserted himself into his own book he said he still wished he could have changed the ending. In my fantasy world, frankly, I would have liked to have stayed in touch with Kevin. I would have liked it if the book had come out and I had portrayed him in such a way that he could recognize himself and at least know that it was fair.

Jim used to have guns all over his house, and always within reach, just in case Kevin tried somehow to seek revenge. He expects that one day he'll hear that Kevin has been executed for the murder of a teacher named Mark Schwebes. Jim opposes the death penalty.

But he told us in 2024 that if he were invited to be there for the moment they pulled the switch, he would go. Not for revenge, not for anger, not for the friendship he once felt. He is not a journalist anymore. But he would go, he told us, for the spirit of journalism that still lives within.

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