Part 1 of 2
CHAPTER SEVEN: TERROR CAMPAIGN
WHEN THE STORY BROKE, I had been in the cottage -- in my wonderful, secluded piece of heaven -- for about five months. My safety had never been an issue. I had never felt unsafe there when I was alone. But I suddenly felt very vulnerable in my own house. And when that happens, it is terrible to live without a sense of security. And it happened constantly. A lot of it was little stuff, but some of it got very scary. Through a series of what some consider minor events, my sense of safety eroded.
After Drudge ran my story, it was on television and everything hit the fan. After a few days, I finally called the sheriff because people were knocking on my door and I felt defenseless. Once the deputies got out there and saw where I lived, they realized that I could have a problem because they were not close. The sheriff's office was fifteen miles away from my house. Because they were so far away, the deputies drove by at night to check up on me.
I was new in Powhatan and didn't know anybody, but I started to hear that, after I would leave a store, strange men would walk in after me and say, "You know who that was, don't you?" They would ask the merchants what I bought and how I paid, looking for any information they could find. The merchants did not tell me right then because they didn't know me. But the next time I came in, or if I ran into them a couple of weeks later, they would say, "Oh, did I tell you ... ?"
Since I had moved into a smaller house, I was trying to make room in closets, cleaning things out and organizing my little cottage. I took some clothes to a consignment shop in town. Less than a week later, I went back in and the woman in the shop said, "Boy, you should've seen the guy who came in after you left." She thought it was weird that somebody would walk in and ask her if she knew who I was and what I bought. But she didn't know about everything else that was going on, so she didn't do anything about it until she saw me again. I told her my FBI guy would be calling her.
Things like that started to happen a lot. I sensed I was being followed and started looking in my rearview mirror, asking myself if a car had been behind me a while, or thinking I recognized a person from earlier in the day.
The Mechanic
I'd sold most of my furniture with the other house, and was starting to decorate the cottage. I had ordered a rug and was heading out to pick it up. I was excited and in a hurry. My little white Subaru Outback was parked in my driveway at the top of the walkway steps, forty feet from my kitchen door. I hopped in and took off. The dirt road seemed extra bumpy, but I was in a hurry and distracted, so I didn't think much more about it. But when I got to the paved road, my car made a lot of noise. I got out and looked, and one of my tires was pretty flat. I decided to just drive it to the tire shop. I know it can ruin the rim, but it was only a few miles away and I thought I could make it.
When I pulled in, the men at the shop rolled their eyes. "You drove it here?"
"Well, yeah," I said. "What else am I going to do?" After all, I was in a hurry.
The mechanic went to work on my tire while I waited for my car. It was late in the morning on a sunny September day, and I sat out in the sun reading the paper. Finally, the guy came out and said, "Can I show you something?"
I followed him to my car. "Have you been anywhere, like in a construction area or anyplace like that recently?" he asked me.
I wracked my brain. What have I done the last couple days? "No," I said.
We stood under the lift and he showed me my tire. "I've never seen anything like this before," he said. "There are a lot of nails in these tires, especially the sidewalls."
I was trying to think of where I might have been where someone had dropped nails. People have been known to do things like that. But I clearly remembered where I'd been and I hadn't been near any construction.
And then he said, "It's just got to be a nail gun that did this. It looks like someone has punctured your tires with a nail gun. They are full of nails."
Only one tire had already gone flat, but three of them were punctured, full of nails.
He said to me, "Do you have any enemies?
"Well, possibly," I said.
As I left, I thought, What the hell is this all about? The best I could figure was that it had happened at my house. Somebody had come down in the middle of the night and shot my tires full of nails. And that was only the beginning.
I later found out that at about the same time that my tires were punctured, my best friend's tires were also punctured. She lived in Richmond, on the other side of town, so we didn't see each other often, but we talked on the phone all the time. Now and then we would get together for long visits. Either I was followed to her house in town or she was followed home from visiting me. Either way, "they" knew who she was and where she lived. And presumably, they hoped that terrorizing her would send me another message. To this day, she believes that, as my friend, she was also a target.
Later, when the FBI got involved, I told them about my tires. "The tires went to a recycle center and were ground up before we could recover them," said FBI agent Dennis Alvater. "However, in talking to the professionals in the tire shop, they'd never seen anything like that." Alvater said that, in one of the front tires, there was a grouping of approximately nine nails in an area the size of a fifty-cent piece. In the other front tire, there were approximately four nails in a similar grouping. A rear tire had approximately three nails. "All of the nails were consistent in size and type," he added. Based upon the description and grouping of the nails, the investigators speculated that the person had used an airless, portable trim nail gun. The agent also noted that some of the nails punctured the sidewalls of the tires. "You just don't pick up nails in the sidewall of a tire," Alvater said. "The number of nails, pattern, and consistent nail type suggested that the damage was deliberately done. It's not like somebody threw a bunch of nails on Kathleen's driveway and hoped they would puncture her tires." [1]
Telephone Men
I started to hear all kinds of clicks and interference on the phone. Out where I turned off the main highway onto the dirt road, I noticed a telephone box. And all of a sudden, I saw a lot of activity at that box.
Finally, I stopped and asked the telephone repair man, "What are you doing here? Why am I all of a sudden seeing people here?"
''I'm just working on the lines."
I said, "Are ya'll doing something, because I'm getting all kinds of noise and clicks on my phone."
He just said, "No."
I was exasperated. I never told people who I was but, finally, I said, "Let me show you something." The local newspaper ran an article about me that morning. I said, "Look, that's me." I showed him my picture in the paper. "And I'm getting all kinds of interference on my phone. Now, do you need to tell me something? Who are you? What are you doing here?"
"Ma'am," he said, "I don't know what you're talking about." There was a Verizon truck parked there, so I decided to let it go.
Shortly after that, I sat in my office writing bills on a really hot, humid afternoon. The phone rang and a number came up on caller 10. I answered and the man said he was calling from my power company, VEPCO.
"Is this Kathleen Willey?" he asked me, verifying my address.
And I said, "Yes."
"We're getting ready to turn your power off to work on the line," he said. "We just want to make sure you don't have any invalids or seniors or infants in the house before we turn off the power."
"Nope," I said. "It's just me here." Just cats and dogs, and they were all lazing around in the afternoon heat.
"All right, then, we're going to cut the power off in a few minutes," he said. "It'll be off for about thirty minutes or an hour."
"Okay." I didn't think twice about it.
As the afternoon went on, it got hotter than the hinges of hell and I thought, I wonder when they're turning the power off After a while, I realized the power was never turned off. Finally, I thought, All right, this is bogus.
I looked up the number that had come up on caller ID. I called the number and it just rang and rang. Then I called VEPCO to check, but it wasn't them. So I called Dan and I said, "There's something weird going on here ... "
Bullseye
On Election Day in November, a month before I was to give my deposition, I opened my front door and let Bullseye out. A sweet old cat, he was thirteen years old. He didn't go out much anymore and, when he did, it wasn't for long. He never went far and he always came right back. But not that day. That day, I watched Bullseye jump off the porch and I never saw him again.
I watched election returns and wondered where he was. The next day, I called a few neighbors to see if they'd seen a yellow tabby, a big guy with a red collar. If you lose an animal, the people around here will look. We're all animal lovers, and they knew how I felt. But all the homes were spread far and wide, surrounded by many acres of woods. No one had seen my cat.
I felt bad for Patrick, because he always thought of Bullseye as his cat. Eventually, I had to tell him and he got really angry at the thought that someone had harmed our old cat.
I was shocked when people later mocked me for being upset about Bullseye. People made terrible jokes about him, as if a cat isn't just as much a family pet as a dog. People would have been outraged if he had been a dog! Lucianne Goldberg, for one, made a really snotty remark on a talk show. I was incensed. I tracked her number down and called her. "You know, you don't have any right to make fun of my poor cat like you did today," I said. "Really! He was our pet!" She backed down and apologized right away.
Judge Merhige
My deposition was coming up on December 5. I was scared. I didn't want to give it.
Adding insult to injury, I had a herniated disc in my neck that had bothered me for years and was exacerbated by the stress in my life. I was going to have surgery about a month later, but on the evening of December 3 my neurosurgeon called with a sudden opening in his schedule. I could have my surgery on the morning of the fifth. I told my doctor that I was supposed to give a deposition that day, but he advised me that I should have the surgery. So I agreed.
Dan informed Judge Merhige and the Jones attorneys, asking to reschedule my deposition for January 10, 1998. The Jones attorneys arrived on December 5 anyway and accused me of performing a stunt to avoid the deposition. Did they actually think I would invent a ruptured disc? Did they think I fooled the chief of neurosurgery at the Medical College of Virginia into performing invasive surgery on me just so I could get out of giving a deposition? Judge Merhige called Dr. Young, who satisfied him that I needed the surgery. The judge postponed the deposition. I had another month.
Patrick surprised me and came home for Christmas. We didn't have a Christmas tree or a single decoration, but I was happy and it hastened my recovery. It was my first Christmas in my little cottage in the woods and, although Bullseye was gone, I had Patrick there. For a while, there was peace on earth.
The Jogger
It was Thursday, two days before my deposition. I'd had a fitful night and awoke very early. Still recovering from surgery, I suffered from insomnia. I had to wear a cervical collar around my neck and was always uncomfortable, so I had trouble sleeping and was often awake at first light. A longtime runner, I felt lethargic and out of shape. My surgeon agreed that careful and moderate walks would help my recovery. I started walking in the early morning, sometimes just as the first hint of daylight broke the night.
I walked about an eighth of a mile up my driveway to my gate, where my mailbox had been, and passed my closest neighbor's house. Through the forest, the house is about five hundred yards from mine and in the winter, when the trees are bare, I can see its lights at night.
I walked along the road, the dirt crunching under my feet. It was still early and quiet. The bats and owls finished their night chatter as my dogs and a rambunctious puppy rambled along with me through the cold morning. Just up the road a piece, I turned right, taking a road that had a few houses on it, maybe one every hundred yards or so. I usually walked to the end of the road where it came to a dead end.
I was about half a mile from home when a hint of light softened the eastern sky through the foggy, gray morning. In the distance, I saw a man jogging toward me from the dead end of the road. As I was relatively new to the neighborhood and still hadn't met all my neighbors, I assumed he lived somewhere around there since he approached me from the cul de sac. Dressed in dark sweats, running shoes, and a plain dark baseball hat, he slowed as he got near me. We walked nearer to each other.
"Hey, Kathleen, how are ya?" He stopped before he reached me. My dogs milled around, sniffing the ground.
"Good," I said. We stood talking, several feet apart.
"Hey, did you ever find your cat?"
"No, he never came home and I still look for him all the time. He was a member of the family and I really miss him." Then I stopped and added, "Why, have you seen him?"
"Yeah, that Bullseye, he was a nice cat." He said, "He was a really nice old cat."
"Yes, yes he sure is." I said.
I started to wonder how this stranger could have known my cat's name.
"It's a shame, and I just have no idea what happened to him," I added. "Well, did you see him?"
I started to feel uneasy. How would he know he was a nice cat?
So I asked, "Who are you?"
He didn't answer. His eyes were fixed on me and he looked serious. I felt more uncomfortable. After a moment, he spoke again.
"Did you ever get those tires fixed?"
Whoa -- how did he know my tires had been vandalized a few months back? I didn't think I'd told any of my neighbors. I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and a sickening feeling welled up in the pit of my stomach.
"Who are you?" I demanded.
"And how are your children doing? How are Shannon and Patrick?"
I got chills, felt a lightness in my head. I thought, Where are my damn dogs? They were just milling around, oblivious to my sense of danger. And I was so far from home. Where was the nearest house? It was about six thirty in the morning and still quiet. I stepped back from him.
"My children are fine. What's it to you?" I tried to sound assertive to hide the fear in my voice. I didn't want him to know that I was scared.
He continued, seeming a little more at ease. Then he asked about good friends of mine and mentioned their two children by name.
Oh God! The realization suddenly exploded in my consciousness. He means me harm! He means my loved ones harm!
"Who are you? What do you want?"
I backed away, trying to be careful not to trip and fall and reinjure my neck. I called the dogs. I was shaking from fear. My legs felt like they were frozen in place. They wouldn't move. A flurry of thoughts clogged my mind. Did he have a gun? Oh my God, this guy is going to shoot me! And who would know? He might even hurt my dogs! Where could I go? Was anyone awake nearby? Would anyone hear me scream?
As I backed up, he walked toward me. He was closer to me now. He looked at me, hardness in his eyes. He spoke deliberately and quietly.
"You're just not getting the message, are you?"
I wanted to get away. I knew I had to get away from him as fast as I could. I had to get home. I turned my back on him and ran, my neck immobile in the collar, my feet like lead. About fifty yards up the road, I stopped to catch my breath. I turned around to see if he was running after me. He was gone. I never saw him again.
As best I could, I ran all the way home, not thinking about the damage I might have done to my neck. I was desperate to get back to the house, to Patrick. Then I remembered that Patrick had gone away for the weekend.
I didn't know what to do. I brought in the dogs, dead-bolted the doors, and locked all the windows. I had resisted getting a security system, but that day I wished I had one. And I wished I had a gun. I was in danger. My children were in danger. My friends and their families were in danger.
I sat in my living room and thought, This is a whole new ballgame ... and I am out of my league. He knew my routine. I was being watched. I was frightened to death.
Should I tell? Should I be silent? Would we be harmed if I went to the police? What was the best way to keep everyone safe?
I started to understand. He was there to scare me, to let me know that I was being watched. But it was more than that. I realized that Bullseye's disappearance was part of it, that the damage to my tires was part of it. And the noises on my phone. It was all part of their message: Keep your mouth shut. Don't talk about the incident in the Oval Office.
I decided not to tell anyone, not even Dan.
Frightened beyond words, I could not sleep for two days. I knew someone was watching me because the jogger knew my routine. I felt more vulnerable than ever. I realized I had no protection. He had harmed or killed Bullseye. He had threatened my children. Who's going to protect them? Who's going to protect me?
"You're just not getting the message, are you?"
I should lie during the deposition on January 10. Go in there and just lie.
Uncle Bob
Two days later, on January 10, 1998, Dan and Uncle Bob went with me to the federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. Judge Robert Merhige told me that this was the first time in his long stint on the bench that he had opened his courthouse on a Saturday. He wanted to avoid a media event and succeeded. There was no one in sight except a marshal for security. Nobody had heard about it.
Trying to mediate a settlement, the judge sent Dan and me packing for two hours, then we met with Uncle Bob back in Dan's office for a quick lunch. The three of us sat there eating when Bennett's cell phone rang. "Yes, sir," he said. Then, turning to us, he said, "Excuse me, my client is on the phone." I thought, So, Bill Clinton is calling him down here asking him how things are going. I felt he was calling for my benefit, to let me know that I was on his radar and he was keeping an eye on things. I felt really intimidated by that. Bennett said, "Yes, sure ... Yes, sir, I will certainly give her your best."
I gave my deposition in a conference room in the judge's office suite. I had a large audience: Judge Merhige, two Jones lawyers, Bob Bennett, Dan, various law clerks, and the video camera operator. I danced the dance for about two hours. A classic hostile witness testifying under threat of contempt charges, I was as evasive as I could be. Having been a lawyer's wife, I knew how to dance around their questions, to avoid revealing what had happened. I evaded, I said I didn't remember, on and on, blah, blah, blah. Even Dan noticed it. He had never seen me so evasive. Trying to stay within the parameters of the law, I was doing anything I could think of to get out of Clinton's mess. It took the Jones lawyer a long time to just get me to say that Clinton gave me a cup of coffee in the back room. He had to ask me step-by-step questions to get me to admit that he hugged me when I was leaving the private office. He asked if there was any kissing involved.
I said, "There was an attempt." I only answered each specific question, volunteered nothing.
Finally, the lawyer thought to ask, "Did Mr. Clinton attempt to touch your breasts?"
"I think so."
So the lawyer followed up. "And what is the basis for your thinking so?"
I said, "I have a recollection of that."
"Was he successful?" the lawyer asked.
"Yes."
It went like that for quite a while.
The Jones lawyers got totally exasperated. Finally, so did the judge.
Later, even the FBI said I was very evasive. Of course, that's what I wanted to be. They said that I seemed to contradict myself, but I don't remember that. I may have a few times because I was just trying to get out of it any way I could. I did not want to have to tell the story.
Dan asked for a recess. "Let's go talk," he said. We went into the jury room and sat down. He looked at me and said, "Are you ready for this?"
"I don't think I have a choice here," I said. "So I guess I'm as ready as I can be."
We returned to the conference room and Dan asked Judge Merhige to ask all the interns and law clerks to leave.
I did not cave. I told my story.
The judge grew pale. He couldn't believe it.
I looked at Uncle Bob. He was dumbstruck. Totally blindsided. He looked as if someone had kicked him in the gut. He had no idea of the actual facts. Until that moment, he never knew what Clinton had done to me. His face turned red. His eyes narrowed. He began to perspire. The worm had turned. No more Mr. Nice Guy, no more "Uncle Bob." I had broken the code of silence. It was war.
Bennett had the opportunity to cross-examine me and he could hardly collect himself. His re-direct was brief and pained. "Well, so, what you're saying, Mrs. Willey, is that the president made a pass at you? It was really just a boorish pass, wasn't it?"
I gave him an icy glare. "Hardly."
The judge put everyone under a gag order. "This better not leave this room," he said.
But the session had been videotaped. Each of the parties -- Bennett, the Jones lawyers, the judge, and Dan -- would get a copy of the videotape. And the video operator was sworn to silence under penalty of death.
My brilliant lawyer said, "Your Honor, we don't need to look at it. We'd like you to keep our tape in your safe, with yours."
The judge looked at everyone and said, "This tape better not see the light of day or else I'm coming after people."
After my deposition, I got home when it was getting dark. I'd been invited to my first party in the neighborhood and I found the strength to go. It proved to be a good distraction. Everyone was very casual and welcoming. I liked them. That was the first time I met everybody and actually had a conversation with my next-door neighbor. I had been staying to myself after everything broke in July and I think a lot of my neighbors didn't know who I was. They didn't connect my face with the pictures and didn't know my last name. So I didn't mention the remarkable events of my day and it turned out to be a relaxing evening. I almost felt normal. After all, doesn't everyone swear under oath to a devastating story about the president of the United States before going to a neighborhood party?
"Once Kathleen was deposed in the Paula Jones case," Dan said, "we made every effort to keep information from her deposition away from the media." But Judge Susan Weber Wright, who presided over the Jones case in Arkansas, allowed certain information to become public if filed with other pleadings in the case. According to Dan, "We were notified that substantial portions would be attached to a motion for summary judgment filed by Don Campbell on behalf of Paula Jones," and this meant that the information was going to be made public the following week. [2] The video was attached to the documentation that was going to be released to the public.
It was on the street in seventy-two hours.
After my deposition, Uncle Bob was no longer my friend. In fact, he was clearly my enemy. I never spoke to Bob Bennett again.
Skull
On Monday, two days after I was deposed, I was home alone. Just as the sun was coming up, I opened my front door to let my dogs out. On the porch in front of me was a new horror. A small animal skull was lying on the bricks staring at me. It was bare bone, empty, dry, sitting a few feet from the door. It was the size of a cat's skull.
I thought of Bullseye. Had they had killed my wonderful old cat?
It was payback.
I didn't know what to do with it, and I thought, "I just can't deal with this." I got so mad, I went around to my backyard and I threw it into the woods as far as I could throw. I was really angry -- about the cat specifically, but generally about the scare tactics. I thought, I will not give in to these people!
But I was afraid to tell anybody. I was fearful that it was Bullseye and I didn't want to know. I didn't want to think that somebody would kill a cat -- kill my cat -- to intimidate me. So I didn't tell any officials about the skull right away.
When I finally did tell them about the skull, the FBI came out and found it. "We looked for shoe prints," said FBI investigator Dennis Alvater. "We looked around in the woods for any evidence of people watching the house. I wasn't able to find anything ... " But they did learn that the skull was not Bullseye's. It was a raccoon.
Cats, of course, sometimes drag small rodents to the porch, or bring home similar little gifts. But before this incident and since, not one of my animals has ever brought home any animal bones, and a dog or cat certainly couldn't present a raccoon skull with its face perfectly facing my front door. Besides, my habit is to have all the animals inside the house with me at night. I knew my pets did not put it there.
Later, I watched The Insider, a movie about a witness in a case against "Big Tobacco" and the reign of terror aimed at getting the witness to back away from testifying. The witness opened his mailbox and there was a bullet sitting there. It was a constant campaign of weird things going on. The witness felt like he was being watched. He just knew it. Jack Paladino, one of the Clintons' infamous private investigators, played himself in that movie, doing background research on the witness. I watched that movie with the hair standing up on the back of my neck and thought to myself, Boy, do I know about this!
Clinton
On January 17, Clinton gave his deposition in the Paula Jones case. It took a couple of weeks, but on March 13 portions of his deposition were released. Clinton testified that he never tried to kiss me and never touched me inappropriately. He denied all of it. He remembered that I was "quite agitated about family problems when we met" and he alluded to my financial difficulties, my distraught state, and my husband's suicide, as if it had already happened before I went to see him. In trying to console me, he said, "I embraced her, I put my arms around her, I may have even kissed her on the forehead." But he claimed that my allegations of a sexual encounter were not true. When Paula's lawyers asked him, "You deny that testimony?" Clinton answered, "I emphatically deny it. It did not happen." [3]
The Jogger
Two weeks after I gave my deposition, I told Dan about the jogger. He was shocked.
The FBI investigated it in February, after I became a cooperating witness. "I absolutely believe that the jogger did occur," said FBI agent Dennis Alvater, but he also said, "We were never able to identify the jogger." Alvater recently said he "always felt Kathleen was one hundred percent honest about that" and pointed out that I passed a polygraph test that included questions about the jogger.
Alvater's partner in the investigation, Jerry Bastin, was a retired FBI agent working for the Independent Counsel as an independent contractor. Jerry said, "We never discovered, to our satisfaction, who it could be. I suspect there's somebody else who knows the identity of the jogger that we did not become aware of, and there are probably other people who knew the identity and did not, of course, come forward."
A year after the jogger confronted me, Jackie Judd, a reporter with ABC, sent Dan a photograph of a man whom she suspected was my "jogger." A lot of people suspected him. His name was Cody Shearer.
Shearer's twin sister, Brooke Shearer, was director of the White House Fellowship Program and she was married to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. As Talbott's brother-in-law, Cody Shearer once decided he was going to go save the world from war criminal Radovan Karadzic, one of the awful Bosnians who led the Serbian bloodshed that left hundreds of thousands of people dead or missing. Cody went there making diplomatic passes and setting up meetings with Karadzic's lieutenants. Though he was just Strobe Talbott's brother-in-law, he tried to pull off the impression that he worked with Talbott and the State Department. According to an article by the Associated Press, "The Bosnian Serbs persuaded Shearer to support their goal of partitioning Bosnia." The State Department flipped and went to pains to convince Bosnia's government that Shearer was acting on his own, not for the United States. [4]
While he was there, Shearer became big news in the European press and the newspapers published his picture. Jackie Judd with ABC had a colleague in Europe who saw Shearer's picture in a paper and sent it to her.
Jackie was working on my story and had found out about a private investigator, Jared Stern, who said he was positive that I had told the truth -- that the jogger had approached and threatened me. Jackie had been talking with Dan frequently so she sent the picture to him and Dan gave it to me. He caught hell from the FBI for giving it to me without telling the investigators first, because then they couldn't have me do a proper lineup.
[b]Still, after all those months, I looked at the picture and I thought it was Shearer. I had spoken with the jogger for a few minutes, looking into his eyes when he threatened my children. I do not think I would forget such a man's face!
The man in Judd's photo was Cody Shearer, who had direct ties to the Clintons. At some point he had worked for Terry Lenzner, who owned a Washington D.C. investigation firm, Investigative Group International. The FBI investigators looked into it thoroughly. On the one hand, I was told that Shearer had an "airtight" and "ironclad" alibi but another source told me that it was "uncheckable." In fact, when prosecutors for the Office of the Independent Counsel questioned Clinton aide Sid Blumenthal on it, he said that Cody Shearer "was in California during the so-called jogging incident, had the documents to prove it." In fact, Blumenthal claimed that Shearer's seatmate on a "trip back from Los Angeles to Washington happened to be former secretary of state Warren Christopher." [5] David Schippers, chief investigative counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, said he did not think it was Cody Shearer. "I think they recruited somebody to come up from Arkansas," he said. So I do not know who the jogger was. All I know is that I was up against the Clinton machine, which had unlimited power and money. With those resources, I figured any alibi -- or any "jogger" -- could be arranged.