The Best American Crime Writing 2006 Read Free Page B

in-the-knowness.As for the teachers, Lessig says, "Hanson was the boss.What was going to be said?"
    Sometimes on trips home, Lessig felt faint stirrings of unease. But it never occurred to him to tell his parents. His relationship to Hanson, unlike Hardwicke's, was tender, sustaining; his parents would never understand. "Like all pedophiles, Hanson was really good at connecting with kids," Lessig says. "You just felt you were together; there was no ambiguity about it. He was a friend. A deep, close friend.We talked about everything. He told me about music. He told me about the world…For a kid cut off from everyone else in this weird universe, to have the most important person in the world give you love and approval is the greatest thing you can imagine. What else is there?"
    On some level, Lessig realized that the relationship was "fucked up and shouldn't happen," he says. But he also had a precocious fourteen-year-old's exaggerated sense of his own maturity. "I felt that I could handle it," he says. "That everything was under control."
    There were moments, however, when reality came crashing through. In Lessig's final year, he found himself gripped by "an insane depression," he says, over "the insanity of what was happening." In his closet he'd found a hatch in the ceiling that led to a crawl space above. He climbed up there and crouched alone for hours in the dark.
    One evening near the end of Lessig's final year at the school, he went with Hanson for a walk around the grounds. As darkness descended on Albemarle, Lessig finally, tentatively, gave voice to his gathering misgivings about Hanson's behavior.
    "Is this really right? Should you really be doing this?" Lessig asked.
    "You have to understand," Hanson replied, "this is essential to producing a great boychoir." By sexualizing the students, he explained, he was transforming them from innocents into more complicated creatures, enabling them to render choral music in all its sublime passion."It's what all great boychoirs do," Hanson said.
     
    After Lessig moved back to Williamsport for high school, he brooded on what had happened in Princeton. Two years later, he contacted the boychoir's headmaster, Stephen Howard, and persuaded Howard to appoint him as the alumni representative to the board of directors. Then Lessig went and told Don Hanson that what he was doing was wrong-wrong for the kids, wrong for the school, even wrong for Hanson.
    "It's harmful, it's destructive, you'll get caught, you'll get hanged," Lessig said. "It's really got to stop."
    Hanson didn't argue. Instead, he told Lessig that he had a boyfriend now, a former student who'd left the school with whom he was carrying on. All of his needs were being met.
    Lessig wasn't satisfied. "You should recognize that I'm now on the board," he said. "If it doesn't stop, I'm going to out you."
    "You're right," Hanson said. "Absolutely, I promise, it will never happen again."
    Lessig believed Hanson utterly. He had yet to learn that pedophilia is an illness, an all-consuming compulsion. At seventeen, he was flush with the sense of his power to defuse such a delicate situation. "I knew all these things that nobody else did," he recalls. "I was keeping the institution together. I really wanted it to succeed. And the picture of the institution succeeding with Hanson continuing as choir director was really what I thought should happen."
    But in the fall of 1981 Lessig got a call from Stephen Howard: Hanson had been accused of molesting two students. Lessig by then was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, studying economics and management with an eye to following his father's path and going into business. Lessig drove up to Princeton for an emergency board meeting, where he learned that Hanson had tried to kill himself by putting his head inside a gas oven. Lessig thereupon told Howard everything he knew about Hanson's history of abuse.
    In March 1982 Howard sent a letter to the school's parents, informing