Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari Read Free Book Online

alike—both brunettes and slim—that a few years later they were able to share a fake ID to buy booze because nobody could tell them apart. They smoked weed and partied together and shared everything. Even their names sounded similar. Leigh comes from a strict military family—her dad was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. She left home when she was eighteen to marry a jerk, mainly to anger her parents—but when she did it, Lisa was there as her maid of honor, just as she was always there for her.
    While Lisa studied chemistry at Salisbury State University, Leigh was working as a cocktail waitress and a pizza delivery girl, but they stayed in constant contact. In June, during Lisa’s first year at college, the girls met up in Ocean City, and they spent the day on the beach, talking and tanning. Lisa wore a white one-piece swimsuit with the stomach cut out; Leigh wore a similar black-and-gold number. A couple of photographers came up to them on the sand and told them they could be models—a cheesy pickup line but one that made them laugh. But Lisa, lovesick for her new boyfriend John, decided she just had to see him and couldn’t wait. She didn’t have a car and she didn’t have the money for a bus, so she decided to hitchhike to his place in New Jersey.
    Late the next day, Leigh got a call from Lisa’s sister. She hadn’t heard from her. Oh, there’s nothing to worry about, Leigh said—she’s only gone to see John.
    The next day, Leigh received a knock at her back door. It was hot and she had no air-conditioning. Through the door she could see the silhouette of John standing there. “Leigh, she never made it to New Jersey,” he said.
    The police came and asked some questions and concluded that Lisa had run away. Leigh told them it was impossible—she had left her makeup bag behind, and “girls don’t run away without their makeup bag.” But they refused to investigate. The murder investigator assured Leigh “she’ll pop up sooner or later.”
    She didn’t. The summer passed, and nobody heard from Lisa. Leigh prayed a lot, and told God if He got Lisa out of this, she would dedicate her life to doing good. She marched up the steps of the state police barracks and demanded an application to join. One evening, she was working as a cocktail waitress at the Sheraton Hotel in Bloomsbury while her application was being processed when she saw a headline on the TV news. “Body of missing woman found,” it said. “My whole life stopped,” Leigh would say, years later, “and all these people were still partying and having a good old time, and I was just standing there.”
    Once she graduated from the police academy, she climbed to the third floor of the Salisbury state police barracks where the files were kept and forced herself to read every document on Lisa and look at every photograph of her, to try to find out what really happened.
    Lisa had stopped by her mom’s house and asked for some money, and they’d had some kind of argument, so she started to walk back to her dorm room a mile away. She never made it. She ran into a drug gang—a group of at least ten young men. Lisa was sexually assaulted by all of them, and at the end of it, she was stabbed thirteen times and left for dead in a wooded area directly across the street from the university. Years later, after Leigh had worked in policing for a long time, she would come to believe this gang was bonding itself together—establishing its reputation for terror—with a gang rape, as part of its initiation rites.
    The woman living in the house across the street from the university couldn’t understand why her dog had been barking incessantly all summer. Lisa had lain there all season rotting, and animals started eating her. When they found her body, her ankle was missing. Only one person was ever arrested and charged.
    So Leigh became a state trooper to honor Lisa. Nobody had a better reason to hate the drug gangs than she did. Nobody was more