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Let's play a game. It's called Guess the Assassin. The assassin is either "Audrey" or "Jim." You decide.

"AUDREY": When Audrey was a child, her parents took drugs. When she was 8, her father had her mother declared unfit by the state for drug abuse and check-fraud convictions. The mother kidnapped Audrey and went on the road, moving frequently, evading bill collectors, running out of food at times. At one point, Audrey couldn't go to school because she didn't have shoes; Audrey frequently survived on one meal a day, and often that meal was begged from a neighbor. At age 13, Audrey was arrested for selling prescription drugs at junior high school. At 15, she was suspended from high school after she declared herself a member of the Manson family and carved an X on her arm. Until she was 22, Audrey proudly declared herself a "Radical Anarchist Feminist" and advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government.

"JIM": By contrast, Jim was a bright and well-behaved student at school. He read voraciously. He painted loving portraits of his step-mother and other members of his extended family. Though Jim grew up underprivileged and surrounded by violence, he was only known on a few occasions to lash out against others. In high school, Jim lived in one of the most gang-infested neighborhoods in LA. While almost every other teenager of Jim's race and socio-economic background joined a gang, Jim resisted the temptation. As a young adult, he became involved in charity work and environmental causes.

One of these two people became a political assassin at 24 years old. Will the real assassin please stand up?

Well, it's not me. I am "Audrey." While the biography of me above is accurate, I have since shed my youthful "Radical Anarchist Feminist" bent (actually, that's what a boyfriend once labeled me, and I adopted it ironically for awhile) and have stopped advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. I work as a proofreader at a magazine and, except for the occasional parking ticket, have never had a brush with the law as an adult.

The real--well, at least accused--assassin is "Jim." "Jim" is Alek Hidell, the man who according to authorities fired the shots that killed Bill Gates. Surprised? Most people know little about Hidell except that he was fingered as the assassin of Gates. If they know any more about Hidell, it's that he had a turbulent childhood and is seen on a news videotape demonstrating with "anarchists" in Seattle. Ask the average person about Hidell and words such as "malcontent," "loner" and "career criminal" are likely to be heard. That's because virtually all media reports begin with LAPD and L.A. County District Attorney's Office sources.

Now You See It, Now You Don't

The human mind has a remarkable ability to see what it wants to see. If the TV news shows a picture of a man with the caption "Alleged Rapist," we immediately say to ourselves, "Yes, you can see in his eyes that he's a rapist--thank God such an obvious menace was caught." When informed by the news anchor that the picture of the man was mislabeled due to a technical error (oops!), and that the man is actually the subject of another story--that of a charity worker who gives blankets to the homeless on cold winter nights--we correct our impression without blinking. "Oh, yes," we say. "Now I can see it. Obviously a kind-hearted man. I can even see a bit of myself in him."

Experienced prosecutors know that the human mind is malleable in this way. They know that jurors, no matter how independent-minded or intelligent, cannot help but have their impressions of a defendant colored by the fact that the defendant is accused of a crime. And prosecutors follow up on the impression created by the "Accused Criminal" label by selectively choosing facts about the defendant that make him look even more guilty. That's the way our adversarial system of justice works--it is the prosecutor's job to slant all information to the state's advantage, and the defense attorney's job to do the opposite.

But Alek Hidell had no defense attorney. Dead men don't get trials, fair or otherwise. From the moment he was shot dead by Officer Jacob Powell in the basement of the Park Plaza Hotel, Alek Hidell had his public image formed almost exclusively by the LAPD and the District Attorney. There was no advocate to provide balance, no defense lawyer to point out that police and prosecutors are trained to make any accused person look like a criminal. And thus Alek Hidell, helpless to defend himself, had his widely publicized biography written by Gil Garcetti and the LAPD.

Buyer Beware

The Garcetti Report, officially known as the "Report of the Los Angeles County District Attorney on the Murder of William H. Gates III," is misleadingly labeled. It is not merely a "Report" but a prosecutor's brief. "Buyer beware," we are taught as children, to protect us from advertisers with a narrow agenda. "Reader beware" should be stamped on the cover of the Garcetti Report.

Because the LAPD and district attorney have decided in advance that Alek Hidell is, without question, the gunman in the Gates assassination, they have created a biography of Hidell that has the appearance of prophecy. No brush with the law, Freudian reading of childhood events or slanted interpretation of typical behavior escapes mention in the Garcetti Report's version of Alek Hidell's life. But if you read between the lines of the report, you see how the Garcetti Report is often as misleading as my comparison above of "Audrey" and "Jim."

Hundreds of pages could (and should) be written about the various misleading techniques of the authors of the Garcetti Report. However, in this essay I will limit myself exclusively to addressing those elements of the report that have to do with Hidell's biography. (Future essays will deal in more depth with the report's questionable interpretations of Hidell's political beliefs--another key area of dispute.)

Based on independent research done by myself and other members of Citizens for Truth, I will examine the ways in which Garcetti and his team used distortion, omission, irresponsible speculation and button-pushing pop psychology to paint a portrait of a murderer when they could just as easily have portrayed an innocent victim with the same set of facts. I will also employ the statements of newly discovered witnesses and opinions of experts who I consulted in the process of assembling this essay.

My hope is that a more complete and nuanced picture of Alek Hidell will emerge. While it still remains within the realm of possibility that Alek Hidell may indeed be the real assassin of Bill Gates, nobody should be convicted in death based on a distorted and prejudiced assessment of his life.

The Early Years

Alek Hidell was born on July 4, 1976, in Alton, Illinois. Alek Hidell's mother died when he was two years old, and, according to the Garcetti Report, police suspected at the time that Alek's father, George, may have killed her by pushing her down a flight of stairs. George Hidell was a frequent forger and sometime drug dealer who had served many short stints in jail. When Alek was taken from George's custody and put in a state-sponsored foster home following Alek's mother's death, George kidnapped Alek "by force" (actually he just visited Alek and walked away with him) and moved to Seattle, Washington. Celia Mayer, a prostitute and unofficial stepmother to Alek, would look after him there.

In reviewing Alek's early childhood, the Garcetti Report focuses on the hardscrabble life of Alek and his family, quoting liberally from government child-welfare agency reports of "unsafe conditions" and police reports listing George Hidell and Celia Mayer's convictions for minor crimes such as forgery and soliciting. While the report does mention that Alek often did well in school, the overall impression given by the heavy concentration on the criminal records George Hidell and Mayer is of a young black male being steeped in a world of crime.

What the report does not delve into is the simple fact that children can survive immense challenges, especially if there is a parent or parent figure who takes care of him. Yes, Alek's father and stepmother made their living in an illegal manner. The fact remains that Alek had a guardian looking after him, who truly loved and cared for him, for his entire childhood. Celia Mayer, by accounts of all who knew her, loved Alek Hidell as intensely as if she were his biological mother. A sometime prostitute who had lost the ability to have her own children because of a botched abortion, Mayer found an outlet for her maternal affections in Alek. As one reads the Garcetti Report, one senses that the criminal prosecutors writing it see nothing but a long rap sheet for solicitation and fraud in Celia Mayer. But the bare facts reveal that even when Alek presented a burden to this financially struggling woman, she always cared for him and did her best to see him get an education. The mind boggles at the audacity of this blonde-haired, pale white woman walking into the administrative office of a school to register her "son," Alek Hidell, an obviously African-American young man. (Throughout Alek's school career, Mayer would pull this stunt four more times at four different schools, knowing every time that if Alek's records in the state of Washington were discovered, she would once again be in trouble with the law for posing as his legal parent.)

"There is no way to underestimate the nurturing power of parental love," says Barbara Ellis, a clinical psychologist who works with underprivileged children and teens in Detroit, Michigan. "Case after case, [parental love] turns up as the determining factor in a child's development of self worth and stability." Ellis asserts that children are born with the ability to withstand hardship as long as they have a sense of being loved and cared for. One out of five children in the US grows up in poverty; many more grow up in single-family households. Alek Hidell's circumstances were, sadly, not unusual for children--especially black children--in our culture. Says Ellis, "Love and attention are the decisive factors in childhood, not necessarily income and family station. It does not surprise me that Alek Hidell was a good student in his early years, and that he went on to nourish his high IQ by reading and becoming self-educated. That was a positive outcome of a child who enjoyed the one critical childhood need of parental love."

Alek's father could have left him in foster care; it certainly would have been easier than caring for him. And Celia Mayer would have had a less risky, more financially comfortable life had she not assumed complete responsibility for Alek Hidell when he was 7. Love, and not obligation, drove them to care for Alek.

The Middle Years

The Garcetti Report correctly states that after Alek's father was sent to prison for murder, when Alek was 7, Mayer took Alek with her to New Orleans, where they lived until he was 14. During that time, Alek's otherwise perfect school record started slipping, and he would skip class to go to the library or zoo. He started showing behavioral problems, acting up at school and possibly participating in the killing of a cat and leaving it on a rival teen's doorstep.

It is not surprising that Alek Hidell's school records from New Orleans document behavioral problems. The Garcetti Report makes much of Hidell's truancy and his feeling that teachers and students were "out to get him." What child hasn't skipped school, and what child has not felt at some point that other people were out to get him? Considering that Hidell was determined by a test to have an IQ of 140 or more, it is to be expected that Hidell could not stay interested in class and observant of school rules. His ability to keep up good grades in middle school despite his irregular attendance point to the fact that he was more advanced than the other students. "It's obvious that he was bored and restless," says Barbara Ellis, who has examined copies of Hidell's New Orleans school records, including teacher evaluations, which Citizens for Truth obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. "He needed intellectual stimulation, and since he wasn't getting it at school, he took it upon himself to get it." Hence Hidell's refuge at the public library and the zoo.

The Garcetti Report discusses the possibility that Alek Hidell and two other boys may have killed a cat and left it on someone's doorstep, and that Alek was arrested for running numbers at the age of 13. Given his socio-economic background, family milieu and life history, it is utterly amazing that these are the worst incidents Hidell is associated with up to this point. And what Garcetti neglects to mention in his report is that the cat incident and the arrest occurred after Hidell had been warned not to come to the library or zoo any longer without a parent or guardian. (Sources: Fredell Bishop, a librarian who retired from the New Orleans Public Library in 1990, and Lee Hermes, still a cashier at the Audubon Park Zoo. Both quoted in New Orleans Time-Picayune, December 10, 1999.)

Finally, the Garcetti Report dwells rather perversely on the "living conditions" of Alek's home in New Orleans during these years. A child-welfare report states that "interviews indicate subject and her son sleep in same bed except when subject is 'entertaining.'" The not-so-subtle inference of this quote is that Alek was sexualized at an early age. Other passages in the Garcetti Report slyly imply that Celia Mayer had sex with clients while Alek was in the same room--although absolutely no evidence indicates that Mayer was anything but scrupulous in insulating Alek from exposure to her work.

Veteran prosecutors know that child sexual abuse is often present in the biographies of violent criminals--and they know that we know this from exposure to that fact via talk shows and various other media. However, given the total lack of conclusive evidence that Alek was ever abused as a child--and especially given the ample evidence of unqualified love and support by Mayer--this underhanded implication by Garcetti and his team is shameless. If they tried this technique in court, they would rightly be blocked by any judge. But, of course, the standards of a fair and impartial trial to not exist when one is assassinating the character of a dead man.

The Teenage Years

The Garcetti Report states that after an argument with Mayer, during which he struck her, Alek left for Los Angeles at the age of 14. There, he was taken in by Clay Ferrie and David Shaw, a gay couple, who enrolled him in Hollywood High School. Given an assignment to write a fictional story for a class, Alek turned in an account of a boy named "Alek Hidell" who bludgeons to death a man to death named "David Shaw." Later, David Shaw turned up missing on the same day that Alek Hidell allegedly stole Shaw's car and was arrested by authorities after a high-speed chase. Shaw remains missing.

A key indication of the slanted nature of the Garcetti Report is this account of Alek Hidell's joyride at age 15. The Garcetti Report directly claims Alek was headed for Mexico. There is no proof for this claim; in fact, Hidell had never been to Mexico before and tended to stay within the same five-mile radius of his home in Hollywood. So why does the report make this suggestion? Because the ever-zealous prosecutors are trying to lead readers to believe that Hidell killed Shaw. The Garcetti Report's logic: Hidell must have wanted to kill Shaw, because he wrote a short story about bludgeoning him for a writing assignment; Shaw goes missing; thus Hidell must have killed him; and Hidell was trying to escape to Mexico, because he was headed south in Shaw's car and tried to elude police. Such circular logic is so preposterous and unfounded that it would be laughed out of any court. And yet the Garcetti Report clearly tries to point the selected "facts" in this direction.

To put the disappearance of Shaw and Hidell's joyride into perspective, let's look at some other facts of Hidell's years in Hollywood: Hidell, at the vulnerable age of 14, had been taken in by a known child molester (Ferrie). Ferrie and Shaw were pandering young boys out of the guest house of their home at the time that Hidell was living with them, according to James King and Michael Garrison, who are both currently serving prison sentences for lewd behavior with a minor and admit they were clients of Ferrie and Shaw's service. Neither remembers for sure if Hidell was among the exploited boys. William O'Keefe, who now lives in Orlando, Florida, was among Ferrie's harem. "I was hustling on the [Santa Monica] Boulevard around '90, '91, and Shaw was a regular," says O'Keefe, who would have been 15 or 16 at the time. "He said he would let me live in his guest house if I gave him, you know...and that's how they would get guys to start working for them." O'Keefe remembers Hidell was exposed to the operation but was too "independent and willful" to become exploited.

This new information better explains Alek Hidell's short story about beating up Shaw. Barbara Ellis says children use fantasy as a self-protection reflex with which they can escape the trauma of oppression and abuse. There is no evidence or suggestion--even by Garcetti--that there had been any physical violence in the Ferrie/Shaw household. Whether or not Alek Hidell was used sexually by Ferrie or Shaw, his story about hurting Shaw may simply have been a healthy outlet for his natural feelings toward a predator. And as far as David Shaw's disappearance goes--might Shaw simply have feared that Alek Hidell would expose him to the authorities? Needless to say, this clear possibility is not mentioned by Garcetti. We get instead a salacious, TV-mystery-style narrative designed to imply what can't be proved via a selective list of loaded facts: A homosexual household ("Eek!" says mainstream America), veiled threats of violence, an unsolved disappearance, a high-speed chase.

Why does the district attorney go to all this trouble to arrange a set of shaky facts to try to present the tantalizing possibility of murder and intrigue? Perhaps because there is significantly less violence attributable to Alek Hidell than is common for African American males of his age and background. The Garcetti Report has to all but manufacture a supposed crime when it can't turn one up a real one. Without this potential murder, the report would bring Alek Hidell all the way up to the age of 16, and it wouldn't yet look like he was destined to become an assassin. No veteran prosecutor worth his salt would allow that to happen.

The Adult Years

Here's a fair brief on Hidell's short adult life: Just before he turned 16, Alek took Shaw's car and evaded police in a high-speed chase. After he was apprehended, he was sent to a youth correctional facility, where he turned his attitude and life around, responding to therapy and showing respect for others. Following his release from juvenile hall, Hidell held several working-class jobs in Los Angeles and Seattle and engaged in non-violent political activity such as anti-nuclear demonstrations, workplace picketing, and public outreach for the Worker's Socialist Party. He was arrested once inside his apartment for possession of marijuana and once in Seattle, Washington, four days before the Gates assassination, while protesting the World Trade Organization conference.

Of course, the Garcetti Report, while mentioning all of the above information, doesn't quite give this impartial overview of Hidell's life. Instead, the D.A. concentrates heavily on the fact of Hidell's incarceration (including still more implications of sexual abuse), his associations with "fringe radical" groups and his arrests for pot possession and protesting--is if smoking marijuana and demonstrating against clear-cutting of forests would inevitably lead someone to shoot Bill Gates with a rifle.

His incarceration in California, far from scarring the young man, is one of the few times when the social safety net actually seemed to serve its function for Alek Hidell. Hidell turned his life around in the camp-like atmosphere of the low-security youth facility (El Paso de Robles), showing respect for others, refraining from illegal activity and continuing to feed his voracious appetite for knowledge. Removed from an unstable, exploitative atmosphere, he flowered into a bright young man. As is the case with many educated and reflective young persons, he started to look at the world around him and question its injustices. While records from the library at El Paso de Robles indicate Hidell had a typical young man's taste for adventure and spy novels, he also checked out such works as the Autobiography of Malcolm X and requested several books and documentary videotapes on the history of the civil-rights movement through an inter-library loan program. Following his release from El Paso de Robles, he lived off and on in Los Angles and Seattle, joined several political groups and contributed his time to non-violent causes, such as the Clamshell Alliance (an anti-nuclear group) and Free Mumia. (This last association could go a long way to explaining the LAPD's striking antipathy toward Alek Hidell, who they may consider to be a cop killer who worked to free another cop killer.)

The Garcetti Report all but depicts Hidell's political activity as terrorism, using words such as "covert activity," "anti-American" and "radical." Are bake sales radical? Is non-violence training anti-American? These are some of the first political activities Hidell engaged in. They are not referred to in the Garcetti Report. Neither is the fact that Hidell's "membership" in the Worker's Socialist Party consisted mainly of leading a reading group. "He was probably the best-spoken among us," says Lynette Ituralde, a Worker's Socialist Party member and Alek's girlfriend for almost a year. (Though Ituralde has been very vocal about Hidell in the media, the LAPD, inexplicably, did not contact her for information on him. This may be because she has mostly positive things to say about Hidell.) "His whole thing was, 'Don't get out there and criticize the system if you don't know what you're taking about.' So he had us read things like 'City of Quartz' and 'Bear Market Bullshit.'" An examination of Hidell's political activities and motives will the basis for a future full-length essay, so this report will not go into any more detail about the positive and completely legal nature of Hidell's political involvement, and the Garcetti Report's negative twisting of the facts therein.

Finally, the Garcetti Report's preposterous accusation that Hidell was a "drug addict" hardly deserves any mention. That Hidell was arrested inside his home for possession of less than $15 worth of marijuana would tend to indicate less that he was a dangerous criminal than that overzealous King County sheriff's deputies were keen on harassing him. "If there's one thing the cops hate," Ituralde has said in a now-famous statement, "It's an educated black man who's trying to change the system."

Conclusion

It is abundantly clear that the Garcetti Report selectively presents its information and distorts the record to make Alek Hidell look like an abused, psychologically scarred individual who from childhood on racked up one legal trouble after another on his way to becoming a violent drug addict, malcontent and murderer. The prosecutors look at the facts of Hidell's life and see what they need to see: yet another violent black man on his way to becoming a killer.

But I look at the same facts and see a strong-willed, fundamentally decent individual who overcame hardship with dignity and astonishing spirit. While society's institutions failed him over and again, Alek Hidell did not strike back with blind anger, but instead ultimately channeled his feelings into positive, constructive political work designed to effect change in those very institutions.

Yes, Alek Hidell had a hard life, one that might cause many of us to turn violently against the whole world. And, yes, from his infancy onward death followed Alek Hidell like a shadow. The Garcetti Report, in its greatest and most perverse literary achievement, manages to use the death and squalor and hard luck present in Hidell's life to make his alleged killing of Bill Gates look inevitable.

But I see that same death and squalor and hard luck and detect another pattern: Throughout his life, Alek is constantly being misunderstood by government drones, exploited by opportunists and haunted by the specter of death. And in the end, he may have been shot mistakenly by a police officer and framed as a killer to cover up the mistake, with the complicity of the police department. In the tragic context of Alek Hidell's life, that result--the ultimate betrayal and insult by society's most lethal institution--does seem almost fated.

Debra Meagher is a proofreader for Glue magazine by day and serves as President of Citizens for Truth.