Lunar Descent by Allen Steele Read Free Book Online

Globe Magazine, September 16, 2024):
    It took a long time for the authorities to catch up to Willard DeWitt; by the time they did, he was already plotting his escape.
    In that sense, he was a master criminal; he had the ability to slip in and out of his carefully selected aliases as easily as a great actor can assume different roles for the stage. Indeed, one of his high school teachers in his hometown of Albany, New York, English instructor and theater coach Paul Caswell, recalls when he took the role of Sergeant Gregovich in a school production of Teahouse of the August Moon . “Will was a natural for the part,” Caswell says today. “Gregovich is a minor character in the play—he does little more than answer the phone and fall down drunk—but Will was able to make the role his own. In fact, he stole scenes from the leads. I would even say that he was a natural actor. He had the ability to make an audience believe in him.” Yet the next semester, when Caswell offered to cast DeWitt as Stanley, the lead male role in A Streetcar Named Desire , DeWitt turned down the role flat. “He didn’t say so,” Caswell observes, “but I had the feeling that he thought theater was a waste of his talents.”
    Willard DeWitt obviously was already finding other uses for his talents, ones that did not limit themselves to acting. By the time he was ten years old, he had learned how to use computers; his mother, Jean DeWitt, remembers her son spending his after-school hours on his father’s home computer, conversing on several different networks. It wasn’t until George DeWitt, a telemarketing manager for General Electric, ran across a handful of prototype computer games in his PC’s hard drive—“beta test” games as yet unreleased to the public—that his parents found out what young Willard was doing: hacking his way into the mainframes of software manufacturers and downloading their experimental programs.
    Willard was given a spanking for his thievery and the software companies declined to press charges, but that didn’t deter him in the long run. When he was sixteen, Pinkerton Investigations caught him writing phony checks. Creating phony checks, actually. The teenager would take a part-time job at a local company long enough to get one paycheck—which he would never cash—then quit. With that check as a template, he would then use his dad’s desktop publishing system to produce a handful of new checks indistinguishable from the original, all drawn to phony aliases for which he had also created fake ID’s. He had managed to steal about $2,000 from several Albany businesses this way before a department store chain who had employed DeWitt as a stockboy for a little less than two weeks put the Pinkerton people on to him.
    Even then, DeWitt was only sentenced to two years in an Ithaca, New York rehabilitation school. It was a light sentence; he could have been tried as an adult, in which case he would have faced at least three years in prison for computer theft. “He snowed the juvenile court judge, plain and simple,” says Marjorie Bennett, an Ithaca social worker who was DeWitt’s guidance counselor at the school for two years following his conviction. “He was an attractive kid, and he made that judge believe that he was just a mixed-up young man instead of the cunning little hustler he really was.
    â€œIn hindsight, maybe he should have been sent up the river,” she adds, “but I doubt it would have done any good. Willard was a born liar.”
    Bennett arranged for a standard IQ test to be administered to DeWitt, and was not entirely surprised to find that he scored 150 on the test—Willard wasn’t a genius, but he had better than average intelligence. There was also his obvious charisma. Bennett says that he looked older than his age—“like a young Paul Newman”—and used his looks to good advantage.