Eric Brach - Double Lives: True Tales of the Criminals Next Door

Copyright 2018 Eric Brach

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover, Layout & Design: Morgane Leoni

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Double Lives: True Tales of the Criminals Next Door

Library of Congress Cataloging
ISBN: (p) 978-1-63353-780-4, (e) 978-1-63353-781-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947701
BISACTRU000000TRUE CRIME / General

Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

When a violent criminal strikes, it is human nature to seek solace in a reasona justificationan explanationsomething logical and tangible that we can grasp onto to convince ourselves that there is something that separates the perpetrators and victims in the gruesome news reports from the safety and tranquility of our daily lives, something to explain how and why someone would do something so horrific, so unimaginable. Thats what allows us to put our children to sleep at night, convincing ourselves that such violent acts could never happen to our loved ones.

Having spent over a decade as a Deputy District Attorney prosecuting some of the most violent and senseless crimes in the largest prosecutorial agency in the nation, I have found myself asking the same questions hundreds, if not thousands, of times. What is it that separates me from those criminals who sit just feet away from me at the other side of counsel table? What turn did they take in their lives that I did not? How did they end up in the same room as me but on a very different side of that table? Surely there is something obvioussome mark, some sign, some characteristicthat could be discerned by the most casual observer to explain this divergence? Unfortunately, these are questions that remain unanswered.

Double Lives brilliantly illustrates this chilling truth. There often are no signs, no obvious indicators that separate the pleasant neighbor from the sadistic murderer. As the book documents so well, the scary reality is that a criminal rarely fits the profile we have in our minds eye, and our own sense of safety and security is simply illusory.

As a prosecuting attorney confronted with this reality on a daily basis, I am often at a loss to explain such depraved acts to a jury hell-bent on finding a motive before they can understand and punish such acts of human brutality. Alas, I too often turn to the only explanation I have, which is that there is none. Sometimes people who can easily blend into your church group, softball team, or PTA meeting commit acts of stomach-wrenching depravity simply for the thrill of the crime.

It is this lack of explanation that makes the stories in Double Lives so chilling. In the end, we are left with the unsettling vulnerability of what we do not want to admit: that it could have been us.

Double Lives is a great insight into the minds of the wolves in sheeps clothing. While we arent left with an answer as to why these things happenwhy seemingly everyday people are compelled to commit unspeakable acts of evilwe are given an inimitable inside look into the minds of the criminals and the people left in their wake.

Rachel Bowers, LA County Deputy District Attorney
May 2018

Three of my friends from high school are dead. Four more are felons.

They are why this book exists. Not the dead onesthe criminals.

I imagine that in many parts of the countryincluding Los Angeles, where I now live and teachits not that crazy for any given high school to produce a few kids each year who end up in jail, and a few more who are stuck beneath the dirt before their time. Where I grew up, though, it felt impossible.

Im from central Long Island. Nassau County. The median household income there is one of the highest in the country, and the little village where I grew up is idyllic. Only half an hour from New York City, there are no stoplights, and the only business is a plant nursery.

It has its own police force, too. Theyre not that busy.

The local public high school I went to had more in common with 90210 than with the real world. There were Japanese classes, and seventeen-year-old kids drove luxury SUVs off campus to get pizza from Vincents at lunch. When I was a senior, we got written up in Newsweek as being the best high school in the country.

Crime? Death? Our school wasnt the sort of place where those things happened. The nearest thing we had to tragedy was when one kid had cancer. He beat it, of course, coming back to class in a wheelchair for months before making a full recovery and becoming the starting center on the basketball team and leading it all the way to the state championships. A few years later, another kid developed a tumor behind his eyeballhe beat his disease, too, and grew up to become one of the top wrestlers in the country.

It was like living in an after-school special. Even our hard times turned out for the best.

As for the kids who actually died, they were all good enough to wait to do so until after graduation, in their early twenties. Their deaths were sad, but also not uncommon. One had a congenital health defect that caught up to him. A second died in a car wreck, and not long after that one passed, his identical twin brother killed himself, unable to stand the grief.

In all, unfortunatetragicbut totally understandable. Explainable. Which is probably why the crimes shook me so much more than the deaths. They seemed so unimaginable, so surreal.

One guy, whod been in my classs student government, was arrested for statutory rapehe used MySpace to have sex with an underage girl. He was twenty-five. She was fifteen.

Another guy, whod been on my Little League team when we were kids, carjacked a heroin dealer at gunpoint from the parking lot of our local diner. The dealer called the cops because he didnt realize it was a setup; he thought the other people in his car were getting kidnapped along with his ride, his cash, and his stash. Every one of them ended up in jail.

A third guy, with whom Id played in a Battle of the Bands, got spotted breaking into some acquaintances apartment. (One of the songs wed played was a cover of The Freshmen by The Verve Pipe, which will explain an awful lot to other children of the 90s about the kind of teenagers wed been.) He fled, but when the burglary victims asked him to come back to talk it over, he returned to the scene of the crimeright into the waiting arms of the police.

The fourth was the kid brother of my closest friend in eighth grade. When we were little, hed hang out with us as we played basketball and street hockey. When he grew up, he took part in a scam cell phone racket, peppering Long Island with knockoff Apple and Motorola handsets smuggled in from abroad and assembled from counterfeit parts. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement bust eventually turned up thousands of bogus smartphones and hundreds of thousands of dollars in stacked and bundled cash.