Kill the Messenger (26 page)

“He didn't look good toward the end,” Webb's brother, Kurt, says. “He had gained weight. He was getting in motorcycle accidents. He had taken up smoking more. He felt that everyone was against him. He didn't realize kids grow up and want to be on their own. He didn't feel needed anymore.”

That fall, Webb's ex-girlfriend told his family that his depression had become so extreme that she worried he might harm himself. At the time, Sue and her kids thought that she was just being dramatic. But they were concerned enough to tell Webb's mother, who had recently moved from Orange County to a retirement community in Carmichael, so she could be closer to her son. “I immediately came down and tried to talk to him,” Anita says. “But he closed himself off to me. He wouldn't talk. You couldn't start a conversation with him. He looked awful.”

In early October Sue called Webb and left an angry message demanding that he start meeting his responsibilities—especially his financial ones—as a father. Webb didn't return Sue's call. Instead, on October 11, he emailed her. “I'm working on something that I think will solve all of your problems, and mine,” he wrote. “Just give me a couple of weeks.”

Three days later, Webb secretly purchased his cremation rights with a local funeral service. In mid-October he put his house on the market. “I was relieved he was going to sell it and start being able to pay child support,” Sue says. She figured that selling his house was the plan he had mentioned that would solve both of their “problems.”

Tom Walsh says Webb was slowly pulling away from his job, saying less in meetings and declining to elaborate on his
ideas for future projects. When Webb didn't show up for work for several days in a row, Walsh called him for an explanation. “He was rather vague,” Walsh says. “He said he had personal business to take care of. I called him again in a couple of days, and he said he had to sell his house and take off a couple of more days. On the third phone call, I said you have to come in and talk about this. He called me back and said he wanted to take some time off without pay. I was concerned about it and wanted to know how long he needed. He said he would get back to me.” Walsh never spoke to Webb again.

At first Webb tried to avoid selling the house by refinancing his loan. He asked Kurt, a lawyer, for contacts, but when one loan failed to go through, he told his brother he was just going to sell the house. On Thanksgiving Day, Webb spent the holiday with Kurt's family. Usually, he'd play out at the pool with Kurt's kids. “We'd always relax and kick back,” Kurt says. “He liked hanging out with my family.”

But the dinner was a disaster: Kurt's wife got into a heated argument with her daughter and then stormed out of the house. He and his brother ended up watching a movie alone together,
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
. “That was the last movie we saw together,” Kurt says. “He wasn't interested in the movie. He said he had to go.” Later, Kurt figured that might have had something to do with the fact that one of the main characters, played by Johnny Depp, was a CIA agent.

Webb didn't have enough money to move into his own apartment right away. He begged his ex-girlfriend to let him stay with her. She said yes, but Webb called Sue in early
December, a week or so before his house was scheduled to clear escrow, and said his girlfriend wouldn't let him move in after all. Sue told him he had no choice but to live with his mother. According to Kurt, that was the last thing his brother would willingly do. “For some reason, he had this animosity towards her,” he says. “He wouldn't have lasted long there.”

In the week before he had to move in with his mother, Webb said goodbye to his ex-wife and kids. He spoke to Sue briefly about taking his daughter, Christine, to the doctor. When he brought her to the appointment, he playfully offered to read her
Green Eggs and Ham
in the waiting room. When he dropped her off at Sue's house, he handed her a bottle of perfume, but refused to come in the house.

Webb then asked his oldest son Ian to help him work on a motorcycle. Ian said he was busy, but Webb insisted. The last time Ian saw his father, they hung out in the garage for a few hours as Webb tried to fix his bike. “It was amazing to watch him work on bikes,” Ian says. “I had no idea what he was doing. He was taking everything out and popping everything back in.”

Ian was about to turn twenty-one, and Webb gave him an expensive watch as an early birthday present. “I was surprised because I knew he was pretty tight with money at the time, but I didn't want to second-guess him,” he says. As Ian drove off on his motorcycle, Webb stood in his driveway, watching him leave. “It didn't really strike me as odd,” he says. “He always liked to watch me drive away on the bike, but he kind of stayed there longer than usual. I guess he figured it was the last time he was going to see me.”

During the last few weeks of his life, Webb shut himself off from his family and his close friends. But he reached out to Annie Nocenti. For some reason, he felt she was the one person who could truly understand his pain. Besides being a former lover, Nocenti had worked on a suicide hotline. Webb told her that he was still in love with his ex-girlfriend and that she had refused to let him live with her. “He said he could not control his thoughts,” Nocenti says. “He could not stop thinking about her. He was driving himself crazy.”

To Nocenti, Webb seemed “situationally depressed.” She felt that if he just got his ex-girlfriend out of his life, or planned a vacation somewhere, he'd be happy again. Webb told her he was contemplating a visit to New Zealand. Nocenti urged him to come visit her. When he refused, she offered to fly out to see him. Webb turned her down. “You'd stay for a week, we'd have fun, and then I'd put you on a plane and kill myself,” he said.

Nocenti didn't think he was serious, but Webb called again and said he had decided to commit suicide. He'd already bought his cremation ticket, and told Nocenti he was holding a gun in his hands while they spoke. Webb made it clear he was speaking to her in strict confidence and that she could tell nobody about his plan. Nocenti tearfully begged Webb not to go through with his plan, and by the end of the conversation, she thought she he had cheered him up.

Just when she felt she had talked him out of suicide, Webb emailed Nocenti, saying that if she replied to his email and received an auto-reply, he was already dead. Over the next few days, Nocenti kept emailing Webb, but he didn't respond. To her horror, she got an auto-reply on Thursday,
December 9. When Webb didn't answer his phone all that day, Nocenti began obsessively typing his name on the Google search page, looking for evidence that he had finally followed through on his threats.

Webb hadn't answered Nocenti's calls that day because he was busy putting his belongings in a storage shed at his mother's house. Halfway through the task, his bike broke down, and as would later become clear, the man who gave Webb a lift home had stolen it by the time he got back with a tow truck. With his description of the man, the police were able to arrest the thief and retrieve Webb's bike three days later. Webb spent several hours at his mother's house that evening, unable to say anything except that he didn't see much a future for himself.

“He had no idea how he was going to make a living,” Anita says. “He said he couldn't write anymore. I told him he was already working for a newspaper, but he had an ego and wanted to write for very big newspapers. He was so despondent. He could see nothing at the end. I couldn't talk him out of the depths of his despair.”

Webb planned his suicide with the same attention to detail and relentless determination that he brought to “Dark Alliance.” He had sold his house, packed his belongings, said goodbye to his family, paid in advance for his own cremation, and left his driver's license next to his bed so that nobody in his family would have to identify his body. Although it's impossible to know if it was deliberate, the morning after he said goodbye to his mother, December 10, 2004—when the movers arrived at his house and found the note on his front door telling them to call the
ambulance—marked seven years to the day since Gary Webb had resigned from the
San Jose Mercury News
.

EPILOGUE

GARY WEBB'S SUICIDE
didn't go unnoticed in the industry to which he had dedicated the better part of his life. But unlike “Dark Alliance,” it wasn't front-page news. “Gary Webb, a prize winning investigative journalist whose star-crossed career was capped with a controversial newspaper series linking the CIA to the crack-cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, died Friday of self-inflicted gunshot wounds,” the
Sacramento Bee
reported in a December 12 obituary. “Three of the nation's leading newspapers, the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Washington Post
, followed up with reports questioning Mr. Webb's conclusions, and eventually his own newspaper turned on him.”

Three days later,
The Bee
published a follow-up story
intending to quell rumors then spreading throughout conspiracy Web sites on the Internet that the CIA had assassinated Webb. “Such a case normally would have sparked little notice,” The
Bee
reported. “But Webb's allegations spawned a following, including conspiracy theorists who have worked the Internet feverishly for days with notions that because Webb died from two gunshots he was killed by government agents or the contras in retribution for the stories written nearly a decade ago.”

Perhaps the most absurd account of Webb's supposed murder came from
Prisonplanet.com
, an Austin, Texas based Internet radio show run by Alex Jones. Under a headline “The Murder of Gary Webb,” Jones darkly referred to “credible sources who were close to Gary Webb” and who said he was working on a new exposé involving the CIA. According to Jones' sources, Webb “was receiving death threats, being regularly followed,” and “he was concerned about strange individuals who were seen on multiple occasions breaking into and leaving his house.”

Jones claimed that Webb had recently complained about intruders “who were obviously not burglars but government people.” When Webb confronted them, these “professionals” escaped by “jumping from his balcony” and “scaling down the pipes outside his home.” The only problem with that scenario is that Webb lived in a one-story ranch house with no balcony or pipes on the wall.

Sue didn't find out that her ex-husband had shot himself twice until she got a call from the
Bee
reporter who wrote that story. She later discovered that Webb almost didn't succeed in killing himself. When the first bullet pierced his
cheek, it missed his brain, tearing only soft tissue. Webb pulled the trigger again. The second bullet barely nicked an artery, and Webb, who likely fell unconscious moments later, ultimately bled to death.

It was hardly the mark of a professional hit. Sue told the reporter she was certain her ex-husband had committed suicide. “The way he was acting, it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide,” she said, explaining that he had been “distraught for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper.”

Sue also received a call from a San Francisco-based private investigator who said he had been hired to investigate her ex-husband's death. He wanted a hair sample, explaining that there might be chemical traces in his hair follicles that would show whether he had been murdered. Sue agreed to meet the man at the mortuary, where she reluctantly provided him with a sample. Later, the investigator called her and asked if Sue would agree to an autopsy if he could raise the money. She said she'd think it over.

The investigator called back on the day of the memorial service and said he had raised $6,000. He asked for her permission to collect Webb's body. “I told him it was too late, that he had already been cremated,” Sue says. “But there was no reason to have an autopsy. I don't know what happened to that hair sample. I never got a call.”

That wasn't the last of it, however. Nearly a year after Webb's death, Anita Langley, host of Black Op Radio, an Internet radio broadcast devoted to conspiracy topics, emailed Sue. Langley claimed that Webb was in contact with witnesses to unspecified secret government operations
shortly before he died. Government agents recently had murdered some of those witnesses and their entire families, she said.

“Gary would have known that these people kill children,” Langley wrote. “If he wrote the suicide notes, I think it is possible he would have done so as a result of being given the option to spare his children a terrible fate . . . Gary learned about the worst types of crimes imaginable, and I do suppose it is possible that his death was a suicide, but in light of what I have told you, I hope you will consider the possibility that there may have been a professional hit here.”

Langley asked Sue to search Gary's records for any notes that would confirm these contacts. In an email, Langley told me she had no proof to support her suspicions, but is certain Webb was digging into a story that could have caused powerful government forces to threaten him. Sue and Webb's son Ian, however, dug through Webb's documents, and found nothing to indicate he was working on anything other than stories for the
Sacramento News
&
Review
.

There wasn't any assassin's bullet, nor was there any need for one. It was Gary Webb's controversial, career-ending story—and the combined resources and dedication of America's three largest and most powerful newspapers—that killed his career as a reporter and set the stage for his personal self-destruction. Without exception, those who knew Webb well believe he killed himself. And while the reasons they offer for that belief differ in terms of the precipitant motivation for Webb's decision to commit suicide, they converge on one point: Webb's depression may have existed for decades on one level or another, but it only
became life-threatening after his banishment from journalism thanks to the controversy over “Dark Alliance.”