A bright but troubled Caltech student is about to be sentenced for helping damage 125 gas-guzzlers during a midnight vandalism spree in 2003. Psychologists think they may know why he was there - something the jury that convicted him did not.
By Vince Beiser
Los Angeles Times Magazine
April 10, 2005
There are a lot of stories about Billy Cottrell.
They're pretty much all true, though the details sometimes get a bit
exaggerated.
Cottrell himself, now 24, likes to tell the one about how he escaped
from the juvenile boot camp where his exasperated parents sent him when
he was 14. It was way out in the Idaho desert, in the middle of winter,
and the staff took away the teenagers' boots at night. One counselor
bragged that the place was as escape-proof as prison. Just to prove him
wrong, Cottrell bolted. Wearing only boot liners, he walked through 17
miles of rock and scrub in the freezing cold to the nearest town.
His mother prefers to tell how Cottrell, after finally scraping together
the credits to finish high school with a dismal GPA, wrote an
application essay so compelling that the elite University of Chicago
accepted him - and later awarded him its top math and physics honors.
Beverly Reid O'Connell, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, has a story
about Cottrell, too. In November, she told a jury that on the night of
Aug. 22, 2003, Cottrell set fire to a small fleet of SUVs and Hummers,
destroying millions of dollars' worth of property.
There's a critical piece of Cottrell's life story, though, that no
one-including Cottrell-knew until his trial. He has Asperger's syndrome,
a form of autism that almost certainly is part of what makes him so
brilliant and so erratic. But the jury never heard that piece. And now
facing an April 18 sentencing, Cottrell's future hangs in the balance.
Asperger's syndrome-a neurologically based developmental disorder named
after the Austrian pediatrician who first recognized it in 1944-often is
a strange sort of double-edged sword. It impairs a person's ability to
interact with others, but often comes coupled with powerful, if narrowly
focused, intellectual gifts. People who are born with it generally just
seem odd, not obviously impaired. As a result, it often goes
undiagnosed. Estimates of its prevalence in America range from two in
every 10,000 people to one in 250.
Its most obvious symptoms crop up in social interactions. People with
Asperger's tend to not understand facial expressions, body language and
other nonverbal communications, and thus take statements literally,
missing implied meanings and subtexts. They often lack empathy, blurting
out truthful but unvarnished statements. Once set in a course of action,
they are slow to process new information that suggests they should
change what they are doing. And they typically fixate on very specific
interests-anything from baseball stats to movies to refrigerators. For
the main character in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time," Mark Haddon's 2003 hit novel, it was mathematics,
especially prime numbers.
"You look at a picture of Billy in the first grade, and you just say to
yourself, 'This kid is going to get beat up,' " says Michael Mayock, one
of Cottrell's lawyers. Peering out at the world through thick glasses
that eclipsed half his face, Cottrell never fit in with the other kids
growing up in Concord, N.C. He was too smart, for one thing. He started
reading Carl Sagan's books about the universe at age 7, recalls his
mother, Heidi Schwiebert. She and her then-husband, anesthesiologist
William Cottrell, bought their son as many science books as they did toys.
Cottrell also never understood how to behave with other kids-or anyone,
for that matter. He spoke too loudly, interrupted conversations with
fact-laden monologues and talked back to teachers whenever he thought he
knew more than they did, which was often. "He was a social retard,"
Schwiebert sighs. As a result, Cottrell was shunned and picked on as a
child. Other kids would grab his books and throw them around the
cafeteria as he sat reading alone at lunchtime. When his mother picked
him up after school, she would find him sitting alone on the monkey
bars, watching the other kids play.
Things got no better when Cottrell moved to Gainesville, Fla., with his
mother and two younger siblings after his parents split up. "I'd always
get into arguments with the teachers. They would be complete idiots
about it, and I'd get in trouble," Cottrell says over a visiting room
phone in the San Bernardino County Jail, a hulking pile of gray concrete
where he is being held until his sentencing.
Handsome, fit and white, with big, long-lashed eyes, Cottrell looks
almost comically out of place in his orange jumpsuit among the
shaved-head gangbangers and weathered jailbirds flanking him behind a
shatterproof window. The din of phone conversations, overlaid with the
relentless squalling of visiting infants, reverberates off the ceiling.
Cottrell doesn't seem especially troubled, though. He answers questions
straightforwardly and in detail, his brow occasionally furrowing in
concentration.
Cottrell explains that his early fascination with science evolved into a
physics and math obsession. He devoured textbooks like candy, learning
so much that his teachers couldn't believe it. In sixth grade, he handed
in an extra-credit paper on quantum mechanics. His math teacher gave it
an F, accusing Cottrell of plagiarism.
After getting that F, Cottrell gave up on school, though his love of
physics never faltered. "I figured if I couldn't impress the teachers, I
would impress the other students," he says with a smug half-grin. And
the way to do that, he figured, was not to ace tests, but to break rules.
"He learned that if you go a little crazy, you get a lot of attention
and admiration from some people," says his 23-year-old brother, Dustin.
"He chose that over rejection. I think he was very wounded early on, and
has always been trying to deal with it."
In the eighth grade, Cottrell was suspended for publishing an
underground newspaper that described various teachers, as his mother
delicately puts it, "doing something anatomically impossible." He got in
trouble for showing up in a kilt and in even more trouble for
spray-painting "Get an education-drop out of high school!" on the gym wall.
His grades plummeted. At home he was obnoxious, stubborn, relentlessly
nasty to his brother and sister. All of which drove his parents to ship
him off to the tough-love, Outward Bound-type wilderness school in Idaho
from which he took his nighttime hike.
Whether because of his innate distaste for authority or because of his
disorder - or, most likely, a combination of the two - Cottrell's irreverent
attitude kept him bouncing from school to school. As a senior he
returned to public school in Gainesville and supplemented his schedule
with advanced math and physics classes at a local community college and
the University of Florida.
In his application to the University of Chicago, Cottrell explained his
checkered transcript. "I can't really say that I regret my years of
rebellion," he wrote. "If there's one thing that trouble does, it allows
one the freedom to question the standards and purposes of the
institution by which one's status is defined. It has thereby instilled
within me a firm resolution to live by my own set of impermeable standards."
In college, Cottrell blossomed. Surrounded by other brainy oddballs, he
made friends easily, including his first serious girlfriend. He joined
the cross-country team and took up rock climbing. He graduated with the
highest honors in both math and physics. In 2002, he was accepted into
the top-ranked graduate physics program at Caltech in Pasadena.
On its tiny, bucolic campus, Cottrell was in heaven. "Caltech was the
perfect life," he says over the jailhouse phone. "I had the perfect
girlfriend, the perfect job [as a teaching assistant], and lots of friends."
Still, he sometimes rankled people. He would carry arguments too far,
bluntly dismissing others' opinions. But all through college, Cottrell
compensated for his social deficits with madcap stunts. At the
University of Chicago, he and a friend would rappel down campus
buildings at night, once chalking equations on the clock tower. At
Caltech, he stripped naked and streaked across campus when a camera crew
from "The Tonight Show" offered students $5 to do something crazy.
By Cottrell's reckoning, he had only one friend at Caltech whose
appetite for adrenalin-inducing pranks matched his: a shaggy-haired
physics undergraduate named Tyler Johnson. The two of them would scale
buildings together, affixing "Go Metric!" stickers in hard-to-reach
places. Once they doctored a Starbucks sign to give it the predictable
expletive.
Johnson also was known for his fiery anarcho-leftist political opinions,
according to Cottrell and two other former schoolmates. Johnson
stridently denounced America as the cause of most of the world's
problems, says Scott Payne, a friend of Johnson's roommate. And
Cottrell's friend Jesse Bloom remembers Johnson speaking admiringly
about radical activists who had burned down some buildings in the name
of protecting the environment.
One day, Johnson came up with a new idea. This is where Cottrell's
serious troubles began.
In early August of 2003, Cottrell e-mailed several friends, announcing
that he and others planned to print bumper stickers reading "My SUV
Supports Terrorism" and slap them on oversized vehicles to draw
attention to America's dependence on foreign oil. The stickers, however,
came back with "terrorism" misspelled as "terriorism."
In testimony at his trial in downtown Los Angeles' federal court, this
is how Cottrell explained what followed: Around 1 a.m. on Aug. 22, 2003,
Johnson and his girlfriend, Michie Oe, knocked on Cottrell's door. Their
car had run out of gas a mile away, and they needed a lift. When
Cottrell told Johnson about the spelling screw-up, Johnson got angry.
But he offered to forget about the $200 he had invested if Cottrell
would come with them and help spray-paint slogans on SUVs.
Cottrell didn't have the money to pay back Johnson, and he wanted to do
something memorable for his friend's last night before Johnson left
Southern California for grad school. So the three drove to a gas station
in Cottrell's red Toyota Camry, filled a couple of detergent bottles
with gas and returned to Johnson and Oe's car and poured some into its
tank. Then Johnson and Oe loaded two large paper bags containing cans of
spray paint into the trunk of Cottrell's car, and they set off.
The first stop was a Mercedes dealership in Arcadia, where the trio
slathered eight SUVs with slogans, including "SUV=Terrorism" and "I
{heart} pollution." They rolled on to Monrovia, pulling over on a
residential street chock-full of SUVs. Cottrell was spraying one vehicle
when he heard glass shattering and saw Johnson throw a Molotov cocktail
made from a beer bottle through the side window of a Ford Expedition.
The car's interior roared up in flames.
"I was kind of shocked and upset when he did this," Cottrell testified.
"As we were leaving, we had a debate about it. I told him it was a bad
idea. He basically agreed with me and said it wouldn't happen again."
The trio moved on to Duarte, where they sprayed dozens of SUVs at a pair
of dealerships. Then, at about 4:30 a.m., they hit the capacious lot of
Clippinger Hummer, just off Interstate 10 in West Covina. The
spray-painted slogans got wilder - "Fat Lazy Americans," "Earth Murder,"
"Is Your Penis Really That Small" - and so did Johnson, Cottrell said in
court. Once again, as he spritzed slogans, Cottrell looked up to see
Johnson trying to fling a Molotov cocktail through a Hummer's side
window. The bottle bounced off, though, and hit Cottrell, burning his
shirt. "I was mad," Cottrell testified.
He said he immediately headed back to his car and sat there while the
fires Johnson and Oe were starting lighted up the dealership. Fourteen
Hummers and an adjacent parts building were torched. All told, the
anti-SUV spree damaged about 125 vehicles and inflicted nearly $5
million in property damage.
Of all the dumb things Cottrell and his companions did that night, one
of the dumbest was emblazoning "ELF" on a number of cars. Those are the
initials of the Earth Liberation Front, an amorphous eco-radical group
that in recent years has claimed credit for burning housing
developments, car dealerships and a ski resort. The federal government
calls the ELF, along with the Animal Liberation Front, "the most active
criminal extremist elements in the United States." Invoking the ELF
brought the FBI into the case within hours.
Ironically, an FBI mistake led to Cottrell's capture. Three weeks after
the arson spree, agents arrested a peace activist named Josh Connole.
Reporters covering the case received a series of pseudonymous e-mails
saying that the FBI had the wrong man, and offering exclusive details of
the crime. FBI agents eventually traced the e-mails to Caltech
computers, and to Billy Cottrell's log-on.
Cottrell had not exactly been clever about covering his tracks. People
knew about his plans for the bumper-sticker escapade. After news of the
fires broke, he dropped hints. "There was a point when Billy recognized
he could get a lot of attention by talking about the night of the
arsons," Bloom says. "He never told me he'd done it, but he definitely
alluded to the idea that he'd been involved."
In due course, agents arrested Cottrell at his girlfriend's apartment on
March 9. By that time, Johnson and Oe had vanished. The FBI believes
they have fled the country. Assistant U.S. Atty. Beverly Reid
O'Connell's team charged Cottrell with conspiracy to commit arson, seven
counts of arson and one count of using a destructive device in a crime
of violence - a charge that carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 30
years to life. O'Connell declined to comment for this story.
The prosecution's position was simple: Cottrell was a fire-starting
eco-terrorist who planned and executed the arsons along with the other
two. His lawyers had a more complicated case to make. Yes, they said, he
had spray-painted the SUVs, and he was there when the fires were
started. But, they insisted, he didn't know about the arsons in advance
and took no part in them. Cottrell, they said, had been duped into
becoming an accomplice to arson, and was now the victim of friends who
abandoned him and of a government desperate to put away anyone it could
label a "terrorist."
That position, though, entails answering a tricky question: If Cottrell
really did object to arson, why did he continue on with Johnson and Oe
after they torched that first SUV? Michael Mayock and Cottrell's other
lawyer, Marvin Rudnick, believe they found the answer in their pre-trial
preparation. Struck by some of Cottrell's odd conversational manners,
Rudnick called in a psychologist. Gary Mesibov diagnosed Cottrell with
Asperger's syndrome. The prosecution then called its own expert - who
agreed. It was the first time Cottrell had been diagnosed with the
condition that shaped his life.
In his diagnostic report, Mesibov wrote that Cottrell's condition "makes
it hard for him to accurately gauge others' intentions and makes him
very slow to react if he does eventually figure out that this
understanding of a social situation was in error. [He] also has much
more difficulty than the average young adult of his age and ability in
changing directions in a situation involving others, even if he is
eventually able to figure out he is following the wrong course or that
the consequences of what he is doing would be detrimental."
In short: Because of his disorder, it is possible that Cottrell believed
Johnson when he said he wasn't going to lob any more Molotovs, and
processed the information suggesting otherwise too slowly to realize he
should leave.
Two other Asperger's experts - Susan Moreno, president of an international
Asperger's support group, and Dennis Debbaudt, a consultant who trains
police in dealing with autistic people - agreed that this explanation is
entirely plausible.
The fact that Cottrell has the condition doesn't necessarily mean that
he's innocent, but it does mean that his story, which is hard to
swallow, is considerably more credible than the jurors knew. That's
because the jury never heard from the experts. In fact, they heard no
evidence about Asperger's at all. Judge R. Gary Klausner granted
O'Connell's motion to bar the presentation of any evidence of Cottrell's
condition, calling it irrelevant.
To make matters worse, Cottrell came across as arrogant on the stand,
occasionally talking back to the judge. His eyes wandered as he spoke.
The prosecution pounced on all of this, telling the jury it was "the
behavior of a liar."
It's also the behavior of a person with Asperger's. But, of course, the
jurors were never told that. After less than a day's deliberation, they
declared Cottrell guilty of all charges except the most serious one:
using a destructive device in the first fire-setting.
"There was little or no evidence that he perpetrated the first arson,"
explains Tim Allen, a retired businessman who served on the jury. "But
after that fire was set, he got back in the car. A reasonable person
wouldn't have continued on with them after they'd torched one SUV if he
didn't want to be part of it."
Cottrell was no environmental activist. He never joined any groups,
attended demonstrations or even talked much about issues. SUVs do bug
him, though. He sees them as smog-spewing symbols of a wasteful American
culture that is hurting the planet. Vandalizing SUVs also appealed to
Cottrell, he says unabashedly, because "I thought it would be something
fun and exciting."
Still, given his predicament, you'd expect Cottrell to say that he
considers burning other people's cars morally unconscionable. But during
the course of two jailhouse conversations, he sticks to a nuanced
statement of his principles. "I was against burning the first SUV
because it was a privately owned car," he says. "You can't blame
individuals - it's the corporations that sell them the cars. If you start
attacking private citizens, they'll just get pissed off.
Bumper-stickering would have sent a clear message."
Torching a Hummer dealership, however, doesn't bother him on a moral
level. "You have to evaluate what the implications will be, what public
debate will ensue. I don't necessarily think it was a good thing, but
I'm not going to say it was bad," he says. The fires were simply bad
tactics, he says, "too loud, too dangerous, too unexpected."
Regardless of what he really believes, surely Cottrell realizes that he
could help his case by saying he condemns arson across the board, right?
"Yeah, my lawyers keep telling me I should say it's terrible," he
replies. "But I want to be honest. I don't want to say one thing to my
friends, and another to a reporter. I'd just feel bad about myself."
Each of Cottrell's seven arson convictions carries a minimum sentence of
five years. His lawyers hope the judge will allow them to run
concurrently. Otherwise, Cottrell faces decades behind bars at his
upcoming sentencing. Either way, he's in for a long stretch while they
mount an appeal for a new trial - one in which they can present evidence
about the condition that both helped mold Cottrell into the kind of
person who would spray-paint SUVs in the middle of the night, and that
also may have left him unable to get out when the joyride turned into a
serious crime spree.
"Billy was convicted of the second round of arsons because the question
was whether more arson was reasonably foreseeable to the average person.
But he's not the average person," Mayock says. "The question should have
been whether it was foreseeable to a person with Asperger's."
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