Folie a Deux Episode 01

Folie à Deux

Episode 1: The Breakdown

The screen is black as we hear a woman speak. Her voice is strong, certain, and decisive, her accent that of the Upper Midwest, her diction precise and educated. "Of course I remember every detail. I'll remember them until the day I die. June 18th began very happily. It didn't end that way."

The screen is taken up with a close-up of a woman against a black background. She is white, in her early 40s, and strikingly beautiful in a manner almost Classical. Her jawline is powerful and bold, tapering down sharply to a pointed and very slightly cleft chin. Her cheekbones are almost theatrically high, while her nose, though well-formed, is perhaps a touch too prominent. Her mouth is generously wide and her lips are full. Her eyes are large, dark brown, and intelligent, and her eyebrows arch imperiously. Her hair is shorter than shoulder-length and dark blonde, and hangs in unruly locks that show extreme natural waviness; it's clear that she would need to take extreme measures to make her hair obey even the slightest command. Her makeup is understated and dignified for the most part, though her lip liner is a shade darker than her lipstick and deliberately accentuates the striking arcs of her mouth. She looks her age, though she also looks well preserved. A long, graceful neck disappears into a wide-collared dark green blouse.

A subtitle appears:

Emily Larsen

.

"It was...the culmination of a series of mistakes," she says judiciously, her lips in a tight line and her eyes revealing a series of conflicting emotions that flash past too quickly to recognize them. "Some of them were made that day, some were made earlier. Some we made before the trip. Most of them we didn't think anything of when they happened. Obviously we never could have anticipated what would occur, or...the consequences. But that's always the way. One little mistake leads to another and another and then before you know what's happening you're in so deep you can't back out."

The screen goes black and the title card appears:

Folie à Deux

Episode 1: The Breakdown

The title card is replaced by a closeup on the face of a handsome young man in his early 20s. The familial resemblance to Emily is clear. The overall shape of the face is the same, with the same high cheekbones, bold jawline, and pointed and cleft chin. His mouth is narrower and his lips are thinner, however, and his eyes are a striking, almost shocking pale blue. The biggest difference, however, is his hair, which is dark brown, straight, and short. Unlike the woman, his ears are visible, and he sports a small, tasteful silver hoop in his left earlobe.

The subtitle reads

Mike Larsen

.

"We were driving from Minneapolis to San Francisco for my cousin Jackie's wedding," Mike says. His voice is deep, strong, and has the ring of youthful certainty and determination. "It was a big deal. She was marrying the son of one of the guys who runs one of the major movie studios, and there were going to be movie stars there and everything, so like third cousins were coming in from all over the country. My dad and my sister had gone out there two days before to help set things up, and because my sister had always been tight with the West Coast branch of the family."

As he speaks, Mike's face is replaced on the screen by a pair of photographs. One is of a handsome, 40ish man with dark hair and blue eyes wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt and a red tie, smiling as he stands in a group of people in a slightly shabby office ; the photograph is labeled

Bob Larsen

. The second photograph is of a lovely, slim young lady with unruly blonde hair and a huge smile, and she wears a high school cheerleader's outfit; the photo is labeled

Olivia Larsen

.

"We'd have flown out with them, but there was this party I wanted to go to -- my best friend Nick's brother Jay was going off to join the Marines, and he's a good guy so I wanted to say goodbye to him."

The photographs are replaced by a film of Emily dancing on a stage. She is tall, lithe, and trim, and her legs are long and powerful. She is wearing a dancer's leotard beneath a fringed dress, the fringes whirling along with her hair as she twists and leaps with superb grace and skill. Her voice is heard saying, "I needed to go out later so that I could be at the final performance of a show I was in. I was an assistant professor of dance at the University of Minnesota, but that doesn't pay a lot. Bob made a steady salary as a social worker for Hennepin County, but the pay there was even worse. With Mike heading off to college and Olivia still in high school, we needed every penny we could get. So I did shows with a local company, gave private dance lessons, whatever I could do to pay the bills."

Mike's smiles at the camera. "It wasn't like I was looking forward to spending three days in a car with my mom. I mean, we got along OK and everything, but not a lot of 18-year-old guys want to be stuck in a minivan with their moms visiting her friends and aunts you never heard of before. But that was what worked out for the schedule."

Mike's face is replaced by a photograph of a white 1999 Chevrolet minivan sitting in a driveway in front of an open garage on a sunny summer day. Emily stands next to the vehicle wearing shorts that show off her legs and a baggy old Minnesota Twins tee shirt; she is laughing as she runs a soapy sponge along the hood.

"Mom drove this old Chevy Lumina," Mike says in an amused-sounding voice-over. "And she

loved

that thing. Olivia and I used to joke she loved it more than she loved her kids. She never let anybody else drive it, not even dad. She babied it, she even named it -- 'Lou,' short for Lumina, right? She'd have actual conversations with it and everything. We used to tease her about it all the time, but it was her thing."

"I did love Lou," Emily admits with a smile as her face returns to the screen. "He was a faithful old guy. He was the first new vehicle I ever had and I treated him right. He was reliable and I loved driving him." Her smile falters as she adds, "But the GPS didn't work."

"Olivia broke the GPS," Mike explains as we see him again. "She was in the passenger seat, on the phone with her boyfriend, waving her arms around, and she hit it. Knocked it off the dashboard, busted it. Dad said we didn't have money to get it replaced then."

"I didn't think we'd need it," Emily explains seriously. "Most of our trip was going to be on freeways. It didn't seem like a big issue at the time."

Emily's face is replaced by a map of the northern Plains states as a red line begins to trace from Minneapolis, first south along I-35 and then west along I-90. "We left early on the morning of the 16th," her voice continues. The line terminates in Rapid City, South Dakota, at the edge of the Black Hills National Forest, and then the map disappears and is replaced by a picture of Emily sitting at a kitchen table with an elderly woman, both smiling brightly. "The first thing I wanted to do was visit my Aunt Penny. She's a wonderful person and Mike had never met her, so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity. She was...I think 82 then, but she made a lavish dinner for us and we spent the night there. She didn't want to let us leave the next day, she just wanted us to stay and keep visiting."

"We left early again on the 17th," Mike picks up as the screen shows a succession of photographs: the Black Hills, dark and brooding; Mike and Emily standing shoulder to shoulder in front of Mt. Rushmore, smiling at the camera; a scattering of tombstones on a barren hillside. "We saw Mt. Rushmore, which was okay, but I loved the Custer Battlefield. It was a really hot day and there wasn't a breath of wind. The air was just hanging there heavy, like a blanket. I remember standing on the top of that hill and looking down into the valley, past the tombstones to where the Sioux had their camp back then. The heat was making everything shimmer. It felt like I could almost hear the screams and the shots, like the place was haunted."

The map resumes as the red line picks up again, traveling south and then west from the Black Hills on State 18, then west on State 20 until it hits I-25, which it follows to Casper, Wyoming. At Casper it strikes out on a series of state and county highways at it heads south and west: 220, 287, 28, and then finally northwest on 191 toward Pinedale before finally turning off into ranchland. "Our next stop was my friend Corinne's house," Emily says, "and we got completely lost. That should have been a warning, but we finally found her place. I assumed we could retrace our steps."

Now there appears a photo of a large ranch house with impressive mountains in the background, and then another of Emily smiling as she stands next to a shorter, slightly plump woman about her age. "I went to college with Corinne," Emily explains. "We were both going to be dancers, and then we both got pregnant. I went back to school after the babies, but she married a rancher in Wyoming. They have a huge spread and I don't even know how many cattle. I hadn't seen her face-to-face since her wedding, so of course I enjoyed sitting down with her again, meeting her kids, having her meet Mike. It was good."

Against a black screen, we see another title card:

June 18th

Emily reappears. Looking pensive, she opens her mouth to speak, closes it again, takes a deep breath, starts and stops again, and says, "It was my fault. I'd gotten lost on the way to Corinne's house so I'd had her write out very explicit directions back to the highway. It was almost a page long, handwritten, extremely detailed...and then I forgot it and left it sitting on the kitchen table. It was my fault."

Mike's face replaces his mother's. He is looking off to the side, his expression a mixture of emotions in which regret and irritation feature prominently. He doesn't look at the camera as he speaks. "It's my fault. I

saw

the instructions on the table when we were leaving. I thought mom was just being nervous when she asked for it. I thought we could find our way back to the road with no problem."

The screen is taken up by a montage of rolling Wyoming scrubland, hill after nearly-

identical hill of low brush interspersed with stunted trees. The footage is slightly grainy and much of it is taken from a vehicle, with the overall impact being that the land in the area is dreary, intimidating, and very confusing in its relentless sameness.

"I got lost," Emily says in voiceover. "And it wasn't just that I couldn't find the road. When I realized I couldn't find the road, I looked for the directions and realized I'd left them at Corinne's." Her face appears again with a rueful expression. "So we tried our phones. And, of course, there was no signal. We were miles away from anywhere, so there were no wireless towers. And, as I mentioned, the GPS was out, which would have saved us has it been working. I was irritated, but I didn't think we were in trouble."

Cut to Mike, who explains, "And, like, three hours later, we're still driving. Like, in circles. It was weird, because we kept seeing the same damned rock fence" -- and here we see a grainy film of a crow sitting upon a dry-stone wall along the side of a dusty dirt road, surrounded by scrubby hills, with the Rockies looming ultramarine in the distance -- "and we kept saying, 'OK, now we've seen this before," and then half an hour later we've somehow looped around and we were seeing it again. It was kind of funny. I mean, you can't get mad about that kind of stuff, can you?"

"When the accident happened," Emily says, "we were driving along side of a little stream, just a trickle of water coming down from the hills. There were thick trees and undergrowth between the stream and the road. I didn't even know the deer was there until it was jumping right into the front of my minivan."

We see a slideshow of the Larsen minivan after the accident. The front passenger side is dented, the windshield is a spiderwebbed mess of broken, bloody glass, and the front axle has been ripped off as the van rolled over a rock.

"It committed suicide," Emily explains calmly in voiceover. "It purposefully threw itself into a moving vehicle. It was a stupid, stupid animal."

Pictures of the wreck are replaced by a brief clip of a pronghorn antelope looking stupid.

"We didn't even have time to realize what it was," Mike explains. "There was a tenth of a second of movement flashing in and then there was this crunching thud as we hit the thing. It flipped up off the front end -- I remember seeing it almost upside down with those spindly legs up in the air -- and then we hit it again with the windshield, and the whole thing just shattered."

"I lost control of the vehicle," Emily says in voiceover as we again see a closeup of the wrecked front axle, "and lurched off the road. I think I was going about 30. I couldn't have been going faster on that road."

Mike is looking amused. "We felt the axle rip off, right? And we came to this sudden stop, and the airbags didn't even go off. And then mom starts swearing. I mean, she never swears, but all of a sudden she's saying words I didn't even know she knew, this string of absolute filth just gushing out of her mouth for like three straight minutes."

Cut to Emily, looking as innocent as a lamb, saying, simply, "I didn't swear. I don't swear in normal conversation."

Back to Mike, "So she's just ripping it. 'Motherfucking deer cocksucker piece of fucking idiot shit deer!' and on and on until it became just a string of swear words that didn't even make any sense. And I start laughing, because I'd never, ever heard her swear. Once I saw her hit her thumb with a hammer so hard she split the nail, and she was all, 'Oh gosh darn it.' But wreck her favorite minivan and she'll swear like a sailor."

Cut briefly to a silent Emily, so prim that butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

"So," Mike continues, "we started walking."

"We had to walk," Emily says. "We had no idea where we were or how to get to the road, and we hadn't seen another soul since we left Corinne's. For all we knew we could sit there a week and nobody would come by, and we weren't getting any cell signal. We had no choice."

There is a grainy clip of a long, lonely road leading into the rolling, scrubby hills.

"It was hot," Mike says in voiceover. "It was like 90 by that point and getting hotter, not even a breeze. There were no clouds. We had a little water but no food because we'd expected to be eating our lunch in some roadside diner, not trudging through the middle of nowhere. So it was pretty wack."

Cut to Emily, looking troubled. "I think we'd been walking for about 30 minutes when I looked over my shoulder and saw the dust cloud rising from the hill we'd just come over. I pointed it out to Mike, and I think we both had a surge of excitement and hope. It didn't last."

"It was way too big a cloud to be raised by one vehicle, like a pickup," Mike says. "And it didn't take 30 seconds before we were hearing the motorcycle sounds."

"Corinne had told us there were outlaw biker gangs in the hills," says Emily. "We...didn't think we'd meet one of them."

"My first reaction was to, like, hide or something," Mike says, looking pensive. "But there was literally no place we could hide. There's nothing on those hills but foot-high scrub. We were going to stand out no matter what we did."

"I thought hiding might make it worse," says Emily. Her face is a carefully-composed mask that shows no emotion whatsoever. "I've always heard that if one meets a bear in the woods, one isn't to turn and run. Running triggers the bear's predator instinct and it begins the chase. Instead, the way to escape a bear is to show no fear and to slowly back away. I thought that was the best policy."

"And that," Mike says matter-of-factly, "is how we met the Visigoths."

Cut to a middle-aged man with an olive complexion, strong features, receding dark hair, and a mustache. He is neither handsome nor ugly, but rather has the sort of face that one might reasonably expect to forget almost immediately. He is wearing a medium-gray suit over a light blue shirt and a dark tie. His subtitle reads

Milo Hernandez, Senior Special Agent, FBI Field Office -- Denver.

"The Visigoths Motorcycle Club is a one-percenter biker gang operating in the central mountain region of the western United States," he says in a clipped, professional tone. "They focus on meth production and distribution and prostitution, for the most part. They're one of the smaller outfits out there, but they're very aggressive in defending their territory." As he's speaking, the screen shows a shot of the Visigoth logo -- a menacing human skull with red eyes, wearing a steel helmet with a nasal piece above the words "Visigoths MC" written in Gothic lettering. "They're smarter than a lot of their peers because they don't make trouble where they're based. In fact, they often have arrangements with city and county law enforcement that involve the law enforcement laying off of them in return for the Visigoths not committing crimes against citizens of that jurisdiction. Local sheriffs find it easier to ignore them, take a bribe, and let someone else deal with the problems they cause."

The image is replaced onscreen by shaky phone-cam video of a brutal brawl between what appears to be rival motorcycle gangs; the footage gets granier as it zooms in on the Visigoths threads of some of the fighters as they wield baseball bats with tremendous effectiveness, and as two hold a rival biker while a third beats him remorselessly with a length of chain. Hernandez says, "Two years before the Larsens' encounter with them, this chapter of the Visigoths was involved in an attack on a bar in Cheyenne, Wyoming run by another gang that was trying to edge in on their meth distribution racket. This attack led to over a dozen hospitalizations, including one where the victim was in a coma for over three months, and the burning of the bar."

Next we see home-movie footage of an American Indian man playing tag football in a backyard, and then a still photograph of that man smiling as he's surrounded by friends. Hernandez continues, "Six months after that event, they were implicated in the disappearance of Andrew White Feather, a businessman from Colorado Springs who apparently was planning to go to the police with information about the club. No body was ever found and no charges were ever brought because evidence was lacking, but police never had any other suspects."

We were alarmed," Emily says as we see her again. "They were dressed...well, like outlaw bikers, obviously. Those sorts of people dress to frighten people like us, and they succeeded."

"We stepped off the road as they came up," says Mike, "like maybe they could pass us by if they wanted to. But they didn't. Of course. The came up us and sort of circled around us, close in but staying on their bikes. Mom was squeezing my hand so hard it hurt."

"I was terrified," Emily says simply. "We both were. I'm not ashamed of it. Anyone sensible would be frightened in that situation."

We see the mugshot of a white man who could have been an extremely weathered 35 or a rather-weathered 50. He sports a full beard and a long mane of light-brown hair; tattoos are visible on both sides of his neck. He stares at the booking camera with insolent contempt, and the look in his eyes is unsettlingly predatory. "The leader of this chapter at the time was Douglas Hounslow," Agent Hernandez says in voice-over, "better known as Petey to his friends. He'd spent time in prison in four different states as well as the Federal Penitentiary system for crimes ranging from solicitation and drug offenses all the way up to assault with a deadly weapon. He was implicated and held in two murders, but never charged," and here the screen shows two side-by-side photographs, one of a lovely young woman with the subtitle

Victoria Reese

and the other of a man in biker leathers with the label

Edwin Fewkes

. We see Hernandez again as he says, "Witnesses disappeared or changed their stories, evidence came up missing, that sort of thing. He was a very resourceful and violent man."