Young people in a Missouri college town kept killing themselves. A parent of one victim is convinced that her son’s friend encouraged the deaths. Has a sinister figure been exposed, or is it a case of misplaced blame?
Truman State University, in northern Missouri, is sometimes called the Harvard of the Midwest. For the past twenty-four years, U.S. News & World Report has ranked it as the top public university in the region. “I love the atmosphere here,” a student named Deanna commented on Unigo, a Web site that evaluates colleges. “I love that my professors actually care about me as a person and know my name. I love that I am challenged every day—even if it means losing some sleep or passing on an opportunity to hang out with friends. I don’t want to be anywhere else.”
Other students feel stuck at a provincial grind school, and jealous of peers attending more glamorous universities. Truman State is in Kirksville, a faded town with seventeen thousand residents. St. Louis and Kansas City are each three hours away. Johanna Burns, a 2018 graduate, told me that the school “is the best for those who can’t afford the best.” Many students receive scholarships based on merit, but they must maintain high grades, and it often seems to recipients that they’re about to be thrown off a treadmill. “You’ve heard of the Typical Truman Student?” Alaina Borra, a recent graduate, asked me. “Truman students are high-achieving in high school, and they get to college and they can no longer compete with everyone here, and they get depressed. Whoever can say ‘Everything sucks’ more is the better Typical Truman Student.”
The university, which has about the same number of undergraduates as Princeton and an endowment that is more than five hundred times smaller, offers counselling services, but many students have found them inadequate. Four years ago, a sophomore named Max Copeland interviewed students and alumni about their experiences with school counsellors, and delivered an informal report on his findings to the administration. One student told Copeland a Truman therapist had said that anxiety was “all in their head.” A student who spoke of possibly being trans was advised that “they were, perhaps, a ‘butch lesbian, like Ellen DeGeneres.’ ” Tristen Weiser, who was overwhelmed by her course load, says she was told that her real issue was an incident of abuse from her childhood. “It felt like they weren’t really trying to help so much as blame it on something else,” Weiser told me. (The university said that it was not aware of such stories, and emphasized that its counsellors are held to the highest standards.) To cope, Weiser turned to heavy drinking. “My entire friend group straight up became alcoholics,” she said. “We all kind of just sat around and were, like, ‘Truman did this to us.’ ” Weiser eventually dropped out and left the state.
In an eight-month period that started in August, 2016, three members of a fraternity and a young man who was close to some of its members killed themselves. Truman State put out a notice stating that students with complex mental-health issues should consider going somewhere with more resources, as they “may not find the expertise or availability of services they need at Truman or in the Kirksville community.” Melissa Bottorff-Arey, the mother of Alex Mullins, the first of the students to die by suicide, told me she read the notice to mean, “If you’re suicidal, basically don’t come to us—we can’t help.”
Mullins, a twenty-one-year-old rising junior, had returned to Kirksville partway through the summer, to prepare for the school year. He lived a few blocks from campus, in a house belonging to a chapter of the fraternity Alpha Kappa Lambda, at 918 South Osteopathy Avenue. (Osteopathy was pioneered in Kirksville.) Mullins came from the Kansas City area, where he had been a standout in high school, completing a rigorous International Baccalaureate diploma program and playing varsity baseball. But he had struggled at Truman State, and during his sophomore year he was put on academic probation. Mullins briefly saw counsellors at the mental-health clinic, then stopped.
Still, he was known as a promising, gregarious young man; his mother compared him to the affable Finn Hudson character in “Glee.” She also told me that, when he returned to campus that summer, after five weeks with his family, he had seemed in good spirits. If not, she would have sensed it. “I was very—I am very—close to all my kids,” she said.
On a Saturday before the start of the semester, Mullins played video games with a good friend and then went out to a local bar. According to a police report, he bumped into a young woman he had been involved with, and they hugged and exchanged texts. Around 1:30 a.m., Mullins texted his stepfather, Phillip Fees, asking if he was still up; Fees attempted to get in touch with him but received no answer.
Around noon the next day, a rising sophomore in the fraternity, Brandon Grossheim, tried Mullins’s door and found it locked. Grossheim, who had transferred the previous winter from Lewis & Clark Community College, in Illinois, once referred to himself as the Peacemaker, because he prided himself on helping people get along. A friend of his noted, “He almost always started a conversation with a question about my mood.”
Mullins had been the fraternity’s house manager, and Grossheim was his successor. The house manager’s job was to make sure that the lawn got mowed and the toilets continued to flush, and that if someone vomited it got cleaned up. Alpha Kappa Lambda was a rowdy place, but Mullins took pains to remind his fellow-members of the fraternity’s commitment to public service, and Grossheim saw him as an exception to the house’s culture. “I thought people were being very negative in general,” Grossheim told me, in a conversation at a café in Kirksville, not long ago. “I thought, Why not be nice and support each other rather than be assholes.” Grossheim liked to get high with Mullins and watch him play the video game Overwatch.
The fraternity was in a nondescript two-story building that had been erected, in the nineteen-nineties, to withstand the carousing of young men. The house manager had keys to all the rooms. But Mullins had changed the lock on the door of his room, No. 105, after it broke, so Grossheim went outside and peered in Mullins’s window. The blinds were partially raised, and he could see his friend’s body hanging from a wardrobe.
Grossheim shouted for help, and someone called the police. When they arrived, Grossheim took an officer to the window and removed the screen. The window was unlocked. Climbing inside, Grossheim went over to Mullins’s body and lifted it, to relieve the compression around the neck, but he was too late: his friend was dead.
A few hours later, Mullins’s family arrived in Kirksville. They went to the fraternity house, where they were allowed into Mullins’s room to collect his belongings. Except for Grossheim, the members seemed uncomfortable and oddly distant.
Bottorff-Arey, Mullins’s mother, felt consumed by the loss of her son. She thought about how close Mullins had been to his two siblings, and began to panic that she might lose them, too. She told me, “When you’ve lived through your child dying who you thought was O.K., you can never look at your other children again and say, ‘They’re O.K.,’ because that floor had fallen out from under me.” At one point, someone commemorated Mullins by putting a large “7”—his lucky number—in an upstairs window.
Three weeks after Mullins’s death, Alpha Kappa Lambda threw a party. That night, Jake Hughes, a frat brother who had been a good friend of Mullins’s, got into an argument with his girlfriend: after drinking too much, she had accidentally broken his bong. Hughes was the secretary of the fraternity, a popular young man who played the guitar and liked to draw.
Outside the house, Hughes ran into Grossheim, who hadn’t been drinking, and asked him to drive his girlfriend home. The two men had recently become close. “Alex’s death hit Jake really hard,” Grossheim told me. “We started hanging out almost every day.” They would order Domino’s pizza and watch “South Park” or “Family Guy.” According to Grossheim, he and Hughes, who were both psychology majors, rarely talked about Mullins. Grossheim told me, “We tried to remember him the best way possible, and accept that he’d committed suicide, and that there was nothing we could do.”
Grossheim agreed to take Hughes’s girlfriend home, and said to him, “I’m here for you, if you need to talk to someone.” Hughes mentioned that other friends were going to be around, and he promised to call Grossheim later.
Grossheim returned to Alpha Kappa Lambda after dropping off Hughes’s girlfriend at her place, and the party was still going. He talked with a friend for a bit, then realized that he had forgotten to check on Hughes. He went to Hughes’s room and knocked, but got no response. Remembering that he had a key, he unlocked the door and entered. For the second time in three weeks, he found a friend hanging from a wardrobe. He yelled for help. A fraternity member, Logan Hunt, later told the police that he’d seen Grossheim “kind of like caressing Jake” as he lowered him down to perform CPR. A woman who was at the frat house that night remembered seeing Grossheim with a strange look on his face and Hughes’s blood all over him.
The cops recalled that Grossheim had been at the scene of Mullins’s death, too, and told him how sorry they were that he was going through this again. Grossheim confirmed that he’d found both bodies: “Jake, I took down. Mullins, I didn’t. Mullins was there longer. . . . His body was stiff.”
One cop said, “Do you know—”
Grossheim interrupted: “Are you going to ask, like, if it’s a copycat?”
When the cop hinted instead at the possibility of autoerotic asphyxiation, Grossheim told him, “I know what you’re talking about,” but said that the notion was off base.
The police, the administration, and the students assumed that Mullins’s suicide had triggered Hughes’s. It is well established that if one person in a community kills himself acquaintances sometimes follow suit, often using the same method. When three or more such deaths occur in short order, it is usually considered a “cluster.” In Palo Alto, California, six teen-agers died by suicide between 2009 and 2010, followed by four more between 2014 and 2015; most of the deaths occurred on a stretch of train tracks in the city. In 2019, there were three student suicides at Rowan University, in New Jersey, in a single semester.
Suicide is often a response to extreme personal struggles, but the immediate catalyst can be little more than a bad grade on a test or a weekend when a student’s friends have gone out of town. A widely cited 1978 study of some five hundred people who were stopped from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge suggests how impulsive the urge to kill oneself can be: only about five per cent of the subjects later died by suicide. (Studies such as this helped lead to the now ubiquitous signs on bridges with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number: 1-800-273-8255.)
In the past two decades, the suicide rate in the United States has risen by some thirty-five per cent, and the problem is especially acute among the young. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by 2018 suicide had become the second most common cause of death among Americans between the ages of ten and twenty-four, exceeded only by accidental death. Experts describe as precipitating factors everything from mounting economic pressures to the broadcasting of distress on social media. At the University of Pennsylvania, more than a dozen students have died by suicide since 2013, and in late 2019 the director of the school’s mental-health services jumped from the seventeenth floor of a building. A 2018 study by researchers affiliated with Harvard University found that one in five American college students had had suicidal thoughts the previous year. Will Newman, a professor of forensic psychiatry at Saint Louis University, told me, “The percentage of freshmen seeking mental-health services is on a steady incline, and universities have to quickly adjust to keep up.” Meanwhile, the covid-19 pandemic has deepened the isolation of many Americans. More than ten per cent of respondents to a C.D.C. survey last June said that in the previous month they had seriously considered killing themselves.
After the deaths at Truman State, fraternity members and other people on campus became particularly concerned about Grossheim’s welfare. It was horrific to find two friends’ bodies, and to hold them in your arms. “I just want to get away from all this,” Grossheim told a fraternity brother. He began to get drunk and high constantly; he became evasive and withdrawn. “The second one just broke me, to say the least,” he told me. “I had P.T.S.D.” His grades, which had never been stellar, got worse. The professor of a psychology course that Grossheim took remembered him mostly for his failure to show up for office-hours appointments.
At the fraternity, Grossheim was allowed to have two cats, as emotional-support animals. He saw a university counsellor, but found her questions “repetitious, like when you go through a checklist.” After a few sessions, he stopped. He didn’t have the money to spend on that, he said. Shortly after Hughes’s death, the fraternity held a secret midnight meeting and decided that members should follow Grossheim around, to insure that he didn’t harm himself.
Grossheim’s expressions of grief struck some classmates as creepy. He had begun wearing Hughes’s dress shoes and one of his T-shirts. Hughes’s signature outfit had included a pair of gold and silver chains; Max Copeland, who had been Hughes’s freshman roommate, told me, “Brandon started wearing two chains himself.” (A friend of Hughes’s, who remains in touch with his family, told me that his mother had asked for his belongings to be distributed to “people who were close to him.”)
Hughes had a particular way of becoming still and fixing you with his eyes. A close friend of both men told me, of Grossheim, “What really shook me was seeing an unmistakable expression on his face that was one of Jake’s—a look in the eyes that was uniquely intense and simultaneously devoid of feeling.” She added, “I think Brandon had shifted into that behavior to ‘comfort’ me, but it was highly unsettling to see the mannerisms of a dead friend painted across the form of a living one.”
Other people in Grossheim’s circle felt that he had become intent on pursuing women who had dated his two deceased frat brothers. (He denies this.) Women were drawn to Grossheim, who had an empathetic demeanor, mild blue eyes, and sandy hair. A female friend of his recalls, “He told me he had a really high I.Q. and wanted to do writing.” He talked candidly about struggles with anxiety and depression. In his room, Grossheim liked to listen to tuneful old songs like “Palisades Park,” by Freddy Cannon. He had a vintage Diavolo phonograph on which he’d play records by Fun and by Mumford & Sons.
When he had been pledging the fraternity, brothers had instructed him to ask members of a sorority to name something that they loved; he’d asked them to name their favorite flower. One young woman said that he had shielded her from a male student who kept hitting on her at a party; they went to Grossheim’s room, and, after she deflected an invitation to share his bed, she slept on the couch with his cats. Tristen Weiser sought him out after seeing his profile on Tinder. “There were pictures of him with his glasses and without his glasses,” she remembers. “I was, like, ‘Oh, cool, you’re kind of a two-sided guy—I can be who I want to be around him.’ ” Grossheim could be discomfiting, though. As Weiser remembers it, one night they were doing homework together and she suddenly felt Grossheim’s hand on her stomach. “I just wanted to feel you breathe,” he told her. Weiser says, “I went with my heebie-jeebie feeling and was, like, ‘No more.’ ” Grossheim doesn’t recall such an interaction.
In the fall of 2016, Josh Thomas, an eighteen-year-old freshman at Truman State, rushed Alpha Kappa Lambda. He was a straight-A student with a large group of friends, but he also had a history of depression and was finding college a bruising experience. Thomas was gay, but, according to a friend, when he’d visited mental-health services a counsellor encouraged him to think of himself as bisexual. He later told a campus adviser that he felt insulted and did not want to continue therapy. Thomas had rushed the fraternity in part because, after the suicides of Mullins and Hughes, it was known to be attentive to signs of depression.
Grossheim got to know Thomas when he was a pledge and advised him not to join. “I understand that you want friends,” Grossheim remembers telling him. “But these may not be the right friends.” He noted that the initiation process could be cruel and included “blindfolding, walking in a line, and getting punched in the dick.”
Grossheim himself was growing more withdrawn. He stopped communicating with his parents, who lived outside St. Louis, except for occasional Facebook messages. He told me that he was trying not to stress them out. “I didn’t want to drag them through what I was going through,” he said. His abuse of drugs and alcohol intensified. The close friend of Grossheim and Hughes told me that, one night during this period, Grossheim laid his head in her lap and suggested that if she didn’t sleep with him he wouldn’t have anything to live for. “I had sex with him so I wouldn’t lose another friend,” she told me. “He took advantage of me.” A friend told her that the same thing had happened to her. (That woman did not want to comment.) Grossheim acknowledges having used sex “as a coping mechanism” but denies manipulating either woman. Of both cases, he said, “I thought we were hooking up.” The woman who spoke to me was sympathetic to Grossheim’s distress but said that it didn’t excuse such behavior.
In September, 2016, Ian Rothbarth, the fraternity chapter’s president, and another student contacted the police to say they thought that Grossheim was going crazy and required intervention. Officers came by and told him that he needed to be evaluated. Soon afterward, Grossheim was asked to leave the house. As he understood it, the fraternity was “worried about the worst and decided, ‘Let’s get him out before he does it.’ ” Shortly before his departure, he took three tabs of acid. “I totally blacked out and tore apart my room,” Grossheim said. A fraternity brother recalls hearing later that Grossheim had stripped naked and delivered “a stream-of-consciousness speech about death and also the nothingness that came after.” Grossheim remembers the acid trip as a “hell loop.”
He moved into an off-campus apartment. Several months later, Josh Thomas, who remained grateful that Grossheim had been compassionate about his troubles, brought him to an Alpha Kappa Lambda party, but the fraternity wouldn’t allow Grossheim to stay. Later that evening, Thomas became acutely distressed and begged his brothers to let his friend back into the fraternity. Grossheim remembers being called and told, “Brandon, you need to get here, you’re the only person he wants to talk to.” Grossheim said, of Thomas, “He loved that so much, that I just accepted him.”
A month later, early in the morning of April 6, 2017, a fraternity member got up to shower for a shift at Home Depot, waking his girlfriend, who noticed a folded napkin under the door. Forty-eight dollars were wrapped inside, and the words “Smoke a bowl in my memory” were written on the napkin in Thomas’s handwriting, in pink highlighter. The member and his girlfriend found Thomas’s laptop in the building’s library, playing music. On top of it was another note in pink highlighter: “Read Me.” On the laptop screen was an essay that Thomas had been writing about how the trauma of a sexual assault in his high-school years was destroying his life. “You know what they say: What doesn’t kill you, just isn’t finished yet,” he had written. Thomas had just added a few lines, under the heading “Update 4/6/17”: “The virus. It just became too strong. . . . I’m so sorry. I just can’t do it anymore. I love you all. But I lost.” The time stamp on the document was 4:12 a.m.
The fraternity member continued searching, and he soon found Thomas hanging in a storage room where spare mattresses were kept. Near Thomas’s body was a small piece of paper that he had apparently unfolded and dropped. On it, Grossheim had written his e-mail address.
This time, the police brought in outside mental-health counsellors to help them interview anyone who, after the three deaths, seemed especially fragile. Grossheim was now considered to be even more at risk. But the police also had begun to wonder about this young man who seemed to be connected to crime scene after crime scene.
One of the officers involved told me, “There were a lot of red flags—Brandon’s name came up a lot.” The day that Thomas died, a police officer and an outside counsellor went to the apartment where Grossheim now lived. The officer made a note that a vein on Grossheim’s neck was pounding, describing this as a telltale sign that Grossheim “knew something was wrong.” Grossheim told me that he had been tripping on acid and was desperately trying to hide half an ounce of weed. After the officer and the counsellor left, Grossheim remembers going to a friend’s apartment and getting drunk. He had successfully kept the weed out of sight. “I celebrated not getting arrested,” he told me.
According to the police report, the officer and the counsellor explained that Thomas was dead. Grossheim sat in silence for a few minutes after receiving this news, then softly acknowledged how bizarre it was that so many of his friends had died by suicide. Grossheim says that he gave the authorities permission to go through the files on his laptop—including group chats and e-mails with his friends. At one point, the counsellor asked him how he would help someone in his situation. Grossheim explained that he tried to give people “step-by-step” advice for addressing things like depression. He was, he thought, a kind of superhero in that way, though in the end people would exert “their own free will.”
After the third Truman State suicide, students were appalled and fearful. The young woman who had been seeing Hughes at the time of his death posted on the fraternity’s Facebook page, “This should not be fucking happening. Guys, please, I’m begging you.” She implored anyone with suicidal thoughts to call her—“Just one little message. Please.” Parents wondered why Truman State couldn’t put a stop to this dreadful sequence of events. Melissa Bottorff-Arey, Alex Mullins’s mother, demanded a response from the administration. She saw her son’s death as the result of a failure by the university and the fraternity. Why hadn’t counsellors at Truman State followed up with her son when he started missing appointments? They’d sent a few e-mails and then let the matter drop. With a little more oversight, she believed, her son would still be alive. “I felt like he was dealing with what I call situational anxiety,” she told me. “I felt like he was . . . in college.” (The university said that students often made appointments and then failed to show up.)
Bottorff-Arey, who is in her fifties, is a former executive chef with a commanding manner and frosted-blond hair. She contacted the other parents of the Truman State suicide victims. They, too, wanted answers. Karen Hughes, Jake’s mother, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she was “blown away” by her son’s death, adding, “He wanted nothing more than to make other people happy and to cheer them up.”
After Thomas’s suicide, Bottorff-Arey met with the Kirksville police. She was particularly skeptical of how her son’s body could have gone undiscovered for half a day. Why hadn’t someone found him sooner? She also wondered why, in some crime-scene photographs that she’d seen, the table in her son’s room appeared to have been neatened up. There should have been drugs and drug paraphernalia on it. Mullins had worked making deliveries for a local Chinese restaurant, and had kept his earnings in a box, which was now empty. Where had its contents gone? “If I had done anything besides what I did, in culinary, I would have probably gone into police work,” Bottorff-Arey told me.
Around this time, she learned that a fourth young man in Kirksville had recently hanged himself: Alex Vogt, a twenty-one-year-old student at another school in town, Moberly Area Community College. Vogt knew some of the Alpha Kappa Lambda members at Truman State. He lived across the street from the Wooden Nickel, a restaurant and bar that his parents owned. He had died in January of 2017—five months after Mullins and Hughes, and three months before Thomas.
Vogt had worked as a cook at the Wooden Nickel, where he sometimes saw Brandon Grossheim, who had taken a job there, serving and washing dishes. The building Grossheim had moved into after leaving Alpha Kappa Lambda was owned by Vogt’s family, and Vogt had lived across the hall from him. They got together to drink and talk; sometimes they played the board game Settlers of Catan. (Vogt’s family declined to comment for this article.)
In June, 2017, the Kirksville Police Department told the Post-Dispatch that it had reopened the investigation into the first two deaths but denied that any “aha moment” had spurred the decision. For Bottorff-Arey, bumping into Grossheim’s name again was enough. Vogt had hanged himself in his apartment, conforming to the cluster’s pattern. His girlfriend, Madelyn Mazurek, had discovered the body. Grossheim had passed Vogt and Mazurek in the hallway a few hours before Vogt died, and he had comforted her outside the apartment after she’d woken up to find her boyfriend dead. Grossheim had asked to see Vogt’s body before the coroner took it away, but the request was denied.
The same day Bottorff-Arey visited the police, she went to try to retrieve Mullins’s fraternity paddle, which she had heard was in Grossheim’s possession. She tracked him down at the apartment of his girlfriend—a woman who had also dated her late son. Bottorff-Arey could see Grossheim in the apartment when she knocked on the door, but he would not come out. When she started photographing his car, Grossheim rushed outside and asked her what was going on. After a tense exchange of words, she turned and left.
Bottorff-Arey kept thinking about several interactions she’d had with Grossheim after her son’s death. Grossheim had been solicitous when she’d retrieved Mullins’s belongings at the fraternity, and he had attended Mullins’s memorial service. One day, Bottorff-Arey had been poking around in her son’s cell phone, which the police had given to her. As she put it to me, she did “what many mothers would do,” checking to see what Mullins had been up to before his death. Grossheim noticed that someone was active on Mullins’s Facebook page, and he sent a challenging message to the account. Bottorff-Arey’s surviving son, Parker, characterized the message as “Who is this? Why are you on here? You’re causing me distress.” Bottorff-Arey messaged Grossheim back, explaining that she was “Alex’s mom,” and he apologized. “He kinda backed off and was all friendly,” Bottorff-Arey recalled. Shortly afterward, someone “memorialized” the page, meaning that nobody could post from it anymore. She surmised that Grossheim had made this happen. (He says that he didn’t.)
It felt awkward when, a month after the Facebook altercation, Grossheim went to a suicide-awareness march in Kansas City that Bottorff-Arey was attending. As Parker put it, “We had already known he was weird, definitely, at that point.” But “it was really weird,” he said, to discover that Grossheim had a new tattoo with a large “7”—Mullins’s special number. After the march, there was a small reception, and Grossheim stayed for it. “He acted like he had taken the role of Alex’s friend,” Parker remembers.
Bottorff-Arey had looked at Grossheim’s Facebook account, where he had posted effusive memorials to some of the victims. A few days after Hughes’s birthday had passed, Grossheim wrote, “I love you buddy, and miss you a lot. Again, happy belated birthday, Jake Allen Hughes. I hope you’re doing well.” The messages struck her as insincere—it was as if he had “wanted to be on the grief train.” Grossheim had also posted a video of himself reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales. “It’s the classical version,” he said to the camera. “It’s with all of its horrors.”
On May 7, 2018, he posted a video of himself caressing one of his cats, which had just given birth. In that video, he was wearing a white shirt printed with an image of bright Popsicles. The shirt looked familiar to Bottorff-Arey, so she brought it up with Hughes’s mother, who confirmed that it had been her son’s. Bottorff-Arey scrutinized Grossheim’s Facebook photographs. She asked herself, “Why is it that he looks so different in all of his pictures?” She toyed with the idea of moving to Kirksville, to see if she could crack the mystery. In the meantime, she contacted people in Grossheim’s circle, trying to learn more about him. What, exactly, did Grossheim talk about with his depressed friends? What did he know about what had happened the night her son died? She pressed him on Facebook, and Grossheim seemed curt in his responses to her.
Other parents got involved. Josh Thomas’s mother wrote to the Kirksville police about her son, saying, “I know the newspaper and tv media would love to have my story.” Some of the bereaved saw the parents’ effort as ill-conceived. When Bottorff-Arey contacted Mazurek, Vogt’s girlfriend, on Facebook, she answered warily, feeling that Bottorff-Arey was misplacing blame. Mazurek said, “I can think of so many better ways to honor her son rather than investing time and energy into wounding that son’s friend with hurtful accusations. It makes it seem like the takeaway from the Truman suicide cluster is ‘Oh, watch out for your kids’ friends! They might encourage suicide!’ instead of ‘Let’s prioritize mental health on college campuses and find ways to better support students.’ ” But Bottorff-Arey was convinced that Grossheim, instead of helping his friends, had persuaded them to end their lives. She told me, “I feel he took advantage of their being in a weak emotional state, and sought out people who were struggling.”
Some time after Bottorff-Arey spoke with the Kirksville police, she met with Nicole Gorovsky, a former federal prosecutor specializing in crimes against children, who now ran her own law firm focussed on victims’ rights. Gorovsky, who had once sued the Archdiocese of St. Louis on behalf of someone who alleged that she had been abused by a priest, was inflamed by Bottorff-Arey’s account. In my conversation with Bottorff-Arey, she teared up when she told me about Gorovsky’s agreeing to take the case.
On July 31, 2019, Gorovsky, on behalf of Bottorff-Arey and Thomas’s parents, filed a civil suit alleging that Alpha Kappa Lambda and Truman State had been negligent in their sons’ deaths, in part because they had known that Grossheim posed a threat to other students yet had done nothing to stop him as he “aided or encouraged the deaths of multiple young people.” (The Hughes family, who declined to participate in the suit, chose not to be interviewed for this article.) Grossheim, the petition asserted, had committed voluntary manslaughter under Missouri law, for “knowingly assist[ing] Mullins and Thomas in the commission of self-murder.” The suit asked for a jury trial.
Suicide was once considered a crime. In England, until the nineteenth century, a suicide was buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through the heart. Over time, a more enlightened view took hold, and nowadays a person who dies by suicide is seen as a victim of mental illness, not as a felon. Yet, if the taking of one’s life has been essentially decriminalized, the act of abetting or facilitating the action has become more prone to prosecution. Laurie Levenson, a professor of law and an expert on ethical advocacy at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, said, “It’s a way of saying, ‘This is horrifying what happened, and someone needs to be blamed.’ ”
Some cases involving alleged facilitation of suicide have been clear-cut. In 1957, a Massachusetts man named Ilario Persampieri goaded his wife into killing herself. The state court found that he “taunted her, told her where the gun was, loaded it for her, saw that the safety was off, and told her the means by which she could pull the trigger.” He was ultimately convicted of involuntary manslaughter. In 2017, a teen-ager named Tyerell Przybycien bought his girlfriend a rope, fashioned it into a noose, and filmed her death. A Utah jury convicted him of child-abuse homicide.
Beyond such extreme behavior, the crime is much trickier to define. In most states, a therapist has a legal obligation to contact law enforcement if a patient talks credibly about killing herself. But is a friend required to report a suicide risk? And what if someone encourages—even inadvertently—another person to commit the action?
In legal terms, it’s difficult to define what it means to encourage a suicide. Few people would consider it criminal to not actively try to stop a person who threatens to kill herself, even if it feels unseemly. And have you encouraged the deed if you say that you understand the impulse, or that everyone deserves an end to her pain, or that her family and friends will forgive the act in time? Body language and context can be as important as words. To acknowledge to a friend that she has much to be depressed about may mean different things, depending on whether you are sending her a hotline number or a link to a Web site that spells out the lethal doses for various barbiturates.
Will Newman, of Saint Louis University, told me that the lawsuit targeting Grossheim was unusual. He could think of no comparable accusations “of large-scale, face-to-face efforts to facilitate other people’s suicides,” other than lawsuits involving cults. He cited the Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate mass suicides. In some ways, the allegations in Bottorff-Arey’s suit resembled those in the case of Michelle Carter, a Massachusetts teen-ager who, in 2017, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for having urged her boyfriend to asphyxiate himself with the exhaust from his truck. In multiple text-message exchanges in the course of several weeks, she pushed him to make the decision. Most disturbing, when Carter’s boyfriend called in the middle of the act, saying that he was scared, she told him to complete the suicide. The petition filed on behalf of Bottorff-Arey and the Thomases contained no evidence that Grossheim had gone as far: it quoted no texts, conversations, or e-mails between him and the victims. But it characterized the “step-by-step” counsel he had offered to depressed friends as “advice on how to commit suicide.” Bottorff-Arey told me she was certain that Grossheim had psychologically manipulated his friends. As she put it, “Alex would still be here if it wasn’t for Brandon.”
When Gorovsky filed the lawsuit, she sent out a press release. CNN, the Post, and BuzzFeed all ran stories, each of which followed the lead of the press release in portraying Grossheim as a charismatic sociopath. The headline in the Daily Beast called Grossheim a “Death-Obsessed Missouri Frat Brother,” and the article claimed that he “had keys to the rooms or apartments of four of the young men who died.”
In the two and a half years since Grossheim had left the fraternity, most of his college friends had abandoned him. He had withdrawn from the school, citing the mental-health toll of the suicides, and now lived in a small apartment above Pagliai’s, a local pizzeria where he had begun working. He was still grieving for his friends but couldn’t afford a therapist.
Astoundingly, three months after Josh Thomas’s death, and two years before the lawsuit was filed, Grossheim had turned up next to another body. Glenna Haught, a twenty-nine-year-old dog trainer, was found dead in the apartment where Alex Vogt had died. The current tenant was her former boyfriend, and late at night on July 4, 2017, she had asked him if she could crash there. The next afternoon, she was dead. According to the coroner’s report, Haught succumbed to a liver hemorrhage accompanied by “Severe Acute Ethanol Intoxication.” Grossheim was likely the last person to see her alive.
Grossheim had heard a thud at around 3:30 p.m. on July 5th and gone across the hall to investigate. The door was unlocked. Haught, whom he had never met, told him that she had slipped and fallen. She asked to be left alone. Grossheim returned to his apartment, though he recalled to me, “You could see that her lower lip was quivering and that she was upset.”
About an hour later, the police knocked on his door. The ex-boyfriend across the hall had come home to find Haught dead, without a shirt on, and open alcohol bottles and pill containers everywhere. What did Grossheim know about what had happened? He expressed shock, and said that he’d found her crying, adding, “I told her that, if she needed anything, I’d be across the way and to feel free to knock.” Bottorff-Arey told me, darkly, “Because, you know, he befriends everybody that apparently needs somebody to talk to.” (The Haught family could not be reached for comment.)
The police were astonished to see Grossheim yet again—this was the fifth time that he’d been involved in the report of a dead body in less than a year. Nevertheless, they were sympathetic to the fact that Grossheim was struggling himself. And he’d always been a coöperative witness, answering questions and calling everyone “sir.” This time, though, he grew frustrated when an officer asked him about some marks on his arms. The implication was that he might have engaged in a struggle with the victim. His cats had scratched his hands, he said, and the oven at Pagliai’s had burned his forearm. He allowed the cop to photograph his arms but refused to submit to a DNA swab. “I was an underage alcoholic pothead,” Grossheim told me. “I was afraid they would figure it out.”
About a month after Haught’s death, the police asked Grossheim to take a lie-detector test about all five deaths. He failed it—apparently because he misunderstood one of the questions. The police did not ask him to retake the test. The forensic reports on Haught showed that she had not been sexually assaulted. The police never arrested Grossheim or named him as a criminal suspect in any of the deaths.
In September, 2019, a Kirksville detective went to Pagliai’s for another follow-up interview with Grossheim. The detective, who often bought pizza slices from him, was apologetic. “I’m not trying to jam you up on anything,” he assured Grossheim. It was just a “C.Y.A.” (cover your ass) move by the police department, because of the lawsuit. He had brought a folder of documents with him, but promised that nothing he was planning to share would reopen old wounds. It was clear that he wasn’t sure whether to treat Grossheim as a suspect or as a traumatized witness.
The detective opened the folder and asked Grossheim for the meaning of the phrase “Die Master,” which Grossheim had written on a poster that he’d given to a friend. Grossheim explained that he was good at a drinking game called Beer Die, which “requires a lot of hand-eye coördination.” In a revision of the petition against Grossheim, the plaintiffs included the “Die Master” detail but omitted his explanation.
The detective also noted that Grossheim sometimes called himself the Animal Whisperer. What did he make animals do? Grossheim said that the nickname was merely a reference to his love of cats. The detective thanked him, and said that if he needed help “as far as counselling . . . call us.”
Grossheim’s parents had been deeply upset by the lawsuit. When it was filed, his mother had called him, frantic, to tell him that camera crews were setting up on her lawn, asking to speak with him about the Kirksville deaths. Grossheim had no money to hire a lawyer, but his family launched a GoFundMe campaign. “I am Brandon’s mother,” Jeanne Grossheim wrote on the campaign’s Web page. “Brandon has been falsely accused and is living a nightmare.” Twenty-seven supporters donated a total of nearly twenty-seven hundred dollars. Grossheim, drawing on this money and on his pizzeria earnings, retained a local defense attorney. His daily life in Kirksville soon calmed down. But on social media he was being called a “fucking shitbag” and other epithets.
I visited Kirksville several times in the past eighteen months. Even before the pandemic, it had a desolate feel. The downtown has several bars, two tattoo parlors, the pizzeria, and a dusty secondhand shop that bills itself as “America’s Oldest Record Store.” Winter drives students inside early, leaving the outdoors to fox squirrels.
A college town has a short memory, and the spate of suicides in 2016 and 2017 was no longer on the minds of Truman State undergraduates. In the intervening years, the university had announced a partnership with a nonprofit that works with colleges on mental-health issues and on suicide prevention. The effort included round-the-clock counselling, in multiple languages, and students could now select a therapist with the gender and the sexual orientation of their choice. Students were also given more time to decide whether to drop or add courses. As the campus paper noted, one of the collaboration’s goals was to redefine the Typical Truman Student.
On campus, efforts were clearly being made to lighten the school’s grim feel. In a dorm that I visited, the doors were festooned with little cutouts featuring a student’s name and an ice-breaker question: “What meal or dessert would you like to become skilled at making well?”; “If you had the time and the resources, what would be your first travel destination?” Many of the students had left the spaces for answers blank.
The administration declined to comment on the lawsuit. When Alpha Kappa Lambda learned of the litigation, it issued a statement saying that it “strongly disagrees with the allegations.” The fraternity house had been put up for sale. The façade of a dunk tank stood abandoned in the back yard. Mason Goser, who had joined Alpha Kappa Lambda the same year as Josh Thomas, told me, “Josh’s death was kind of the beginning of the end of the fraternity.” The national chapter had subsequently suspended parties at the Truman State house, and what good was a fraternity without parties?
After leaving Truman, Grossheim had got to know various young Kirksville residents, and some of them were willing to talk to me. Gentri Meininger, who had lived for a while in the same building as Grossheim and Alex Vogt, was sure that Grossheim bore some responsibility for the series of suicides. “It’s kind of a Ted Bundy situation,” she said. “He’s a very charming personality. He’s not a bad-looking guy. And he gets people to fall for that, and to feel sorry for him.” After Vogt’s death, she said, “Brandon went into a spout about how suicide was your own free will, and if you felt that was the best decision for your life and that’s where your life should go, then that was your own personal choice and no one should try to stop you. They should only try to understand and accept it.” She continued, “I’ve never met a single person who’s said that before. I mean, it’s true, suicide is their own free will, but that doesn’t mean you should accept it—or encourage it.”
Meininger told me about the young woman who had slept on Grossheim’s couch after he’d helped her avoid the predatory man at the party. According to Meininger, the young woman had also recalled telling Grossheim some months later that she was severely depressed; he comforted her and said that if she chose to commit suicide he would support her decision, and her family and friends would understand. The young woman responded that she was “pretty sure that they would not understand.” When I asked Grossheim about this story, he told me that his words had been misinterpreted, and that he would never condone suicide or encourage the act. But, even if the story is true, accepting someone’s suicide is hardly the same thing as encouraging it. In a Facebook tribute to Josh Thomas, Grossheim had written, “It really upsets me to lose you. . . . I’ll miss you more than you’ll ever know. I hope that you are in a better place, now, and that you’ve found a peace of mind.”
Goser dropped out of Truman State after two and a half years, with severe depression. He and Grossheim had had deep talks during bonding sessions between pledges and members. Mullins and Hughes had recently died, and suicide came up several times. I asked him if Grossheim had romanticized the notion. “I didn’t get that vibe,” Goser said. “With me, it was more that suicide is a choice, and you can make that choice, and at the end of the day there’s nothing I can do to stop you, but I would say he was very—at least in my experiences—very anti-suicidal.”
An officer of the fraternity at the time told me that Grossheim had been scapegoated. It struck him as absurd that someone could single-handedly cajole so many people into suicide: “Do I believe this emotional puppet master tinkered with people and played on their emotions? No. I can’t genuinely conceptualize him doing any of that, but I can’t really conceptualize anyone doing any of that. It sounds like some work of fiction.”
When I spoke with Bottorff-Arey, she had recently found out that Grossheim was still working at Pagliai’s. She told me that he’d grown a beard and dyed his hair, apparently in order to be less identifiable. But I had no trouble recognizing Grossheim from his Facebook photographs as he parked a pizza truck in front of Pagliai’s one morning in November, 2019. He was thinner than in pictures, and his face was harder, but he still reminded me of the actor Tom Holland. He had not spoken to the press since the filing of the suit that, as the former fraternity officer put it, had “ruined his life.” When I walked up and introduced myself, I was afraid that he might run away or punch me; instead, he teared up. “I haven’t talked to someone because I’m afraid,” he said. We agreed to chat that evening at a café down the street from Pagliai’s.
I stopped by the pizzeria when his shift ended—he had told me that he was working from “eleven to delta”—and I found him folding takeout boxes, checking the pizza oven, and working the cash register. After a few minutes, he said, “Sir, I’m off the clock.”
We went to the coffee shop, where people greeted him by name. He had a new girlfriend, who sat at an adjoining table. A psychology major at Truman State, she was working on a term paper; they had just started dating. Without my asking, she declared, “If I’d believed those accusations, I wouldn’t be with him.” Grossheim told her to keep her earphones on. “You don’t want to get subpoenaed,” he joked.
Drinking hot cocoa, he told me that he’d grown up in a large family, with an older brother and four younger sisters, whom he adored. But he’d had to change grade schools twice, and this had “destroyed my social skills a little bit.” He occasionally felt depressed, but mostly he just felt detached. In high school, his favorite subjects were math and history, and he had an English teacher who encouraged his writing.
Grossheim noted that, as a high-school student, he had been intimately touched by death. He and his mother had gone to see his grandmother, who had cancer. When they walked in, they discovered that she had died. Grossheim sent his mother back to the garage and approached the body alone. “I wasn’t quite prepared for it,” he remembered. “When a person dies, the whole process . . .” He broke off. “Have you ever seen a dead person?” he asked me, and added, “The bowels often clear.” The story reminded me of “The Bell Jar,” in which Esther Greenwood, after seeing the head of a corpse in her boyfriend’s medical-school laboratory, forever carries the memory around “on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.” I asked him why, given that the sight of his grandmother had been so upsetting, he hadn’t let someone else recover the bodies of the students. He said, “If I didn’t, somebody else was gonna look through that window and find Alex. And it would have been just as traumatizing for them as it was for me.”
Many of his memories of the Kirksville suicide victims revolved around drugs. Alex Mullins, he said, had taught him how to “roll a blunt.” After searching his phone, he read me texts that Mullins had sent to a group of fraternity brothers on the night he died: “If anyone has drugs in Kirksville that is here, please hit me up, I don’t care the price, not having a good night, just need to forget.” Around twenty minutes later, a brother wrote back, offering to smoke with him, but by then it may have been too late. Grossheim said, “If Alex had waited twenty-three minutes . . . ”
Jake Hughes had tripped with him, and acid had also been a bond between him and Alex Vogt. Grossheim became friends with Vogt at the Wooden Nickel, the restaurant that Vogt’s parents owned. Grossheim remembered his first encounter with Vogt there. In the kitchen, Vogt, who was working as a cook, had pointed at marinara and Alfredo sauces bubbling on a stove top, saying, “Hey, Brandon, this is what I watch when I trip balls.” Although stories like this made Grossheim smile, the deaths had been devastating. The memory of his friends was never far away. Grossheim told me that his phone was broken during the month before Thomas’s death, and that as a result they’d fallen out of touch. It tormented Grossheim that a paper with his e-mail address had been found near Thomas’s body: “He felt like I gave up—I wasn’t there for him.”
He could not understand why Thomas’s parents and Bottorff-Arey were suing him. “I’m still trying to figure that out,” he said. (Thomas’s family declined to speak to me.) Grossheim initially thought that Bottorff-Arey’s hostility toward him “was her way of trying to grieve and stuff, her process, and I totally understood.” But she had taken things too far.
Before trying to find Grossheim, I’d reviewed the police files that Bottorff-Arey and Gorovsky had used to compile their petition, which left the impression that, the night the fraternity members called the police about Grossheim, they had done so out of fear that he might lure more men to their deaths. The petition quoted a police report saying that Grossheim had been having “dark thoughts,” and that he wouldn’t say what they were. But Bottorff-Arey and Gorovsky did not quote a passage making it clear that his brothers had called the police because they were concerned that Grossheim “might try to hurt himself” or another passage noting that Grossheim had asked a fraternity member to “check on him throughout the night.” Ian Rothbarth, the fraternity chapter’s former president who had called the cops, confirmed this interpretation: “He was acting strange, and the university was telling us we need to encourage people to get counselling.” Grossheim had complied when the police, responding to the members’ call, told him to get a mental-health checkup. The doctor who saw him that evening, Grossheim told me, had assured him that he was fine. He later told a friend that he had walked back to the fraternity in the freezing cold at “three o’clock in the morning, because the people who felt the need to call 911 couldn’t give me a ride home—all thirty of them.”
The petition also hadn’t made clear that Grossheim’s comment about offering “step-by-step” advice to friends on how to “deal with things like depression” had been made to a counsellor, in a conversation shortly after Thomas’s suicide. The police files contained two versions of the conversation, and Gorovsky had chosen the one that could be interpreted more insidiously. Grossheim told me that his advice had always been straightforward: he urged people to make connections to others and to seek opportunities for joy. Two years after Thomas’s death, the police went to Pagliai’s and asked Grossheim to help them find a friend of his who had been traumatized by the fraternity suicides and had gone off his medication. The friend’s grandfather was worried about him. This request is hard to square with the idea that the police regarded Grossheim as a danger to people prone to self-harm.
Grossheim’s “7” tattoo had been portrayed to me as something out of “Taxi Driver.” But Rose Hannon, who had been friends with many members of the fraternity, explained that he was among half a dozen people who had got tattoos commemorating the friends who had died. Hannon had inscribed her thigh with the words “Mad to Live,” in memory of Hughes.
The petition correctly noted that all four male victims had histories of depression. At an Alpha Kappa Lambda meeting in the spring of 2016, Mullins had told his brothers that although he had a good life, he felt depressed and suicidal. Thomas had tried to hang himself a few weeks before his death, while on spring break, after a romance had ended. Vogt had attempted suicide before. In the case of Glenna Haught, the petition suggested that she was another suicide, but when paramedics saw her body they recognized it, because they had taken her to the emergency room several times, for liver failure. It’s obvious that Grossheim was drawn to the wounded—a friend described him as having a “fucked-up savior complex.” It’s less clear that he toyed with people’s despair.
Grossheim explained to me that he had resolved to change his life after yet another suicide at Truman State. In October, 2018, a twenty-one-year-old student majoring in communications disorders hanged herself in her room. The student’s friendship circle had overlapped with Grossheim’s, and Bottorff-Arey had called the parents, urging them to connect the dots. But the student’s father, with whom I spoke recently, told me that when he and his wife asked around they found no meaningful links.
After the woman’s suicide, one of her best friends had asked Grossheim how to cope with the trauma. He shared with her his own experiences of grief. “Then I decided to listen to my own advice,” he told me. He leaned on people who were willing to listen. He decided to quit drugs and cut back on drinking. And he tried to come to terms with his friends’ deaths: “My friends had either a moment of weakness or a moment where they just lost everything—hope or joy or happiness. Something horrible happened when they stayed in that moment. I had no control over that moment. I just have to accept it as their choice, and I never wanted any of them to make such a horrible choice.”
For now, Grossheim just hoped to have a quiet life. Shortly before we met at the café, a young woman he flirted with the previous year had gone on local TV to say that she found him weird, and that he seemed to have been probing her weak spots. She’d heard from a co-worker that “a lot of the frat brothers think he’s guilty.”
Grossheim winced when I brought up the clip but soon regained his equanimity. The same qualities that could make Grossheim seem shifty also kept him calm. He often acted as if he were watching his life happen to someone else. This seemed to explain his refusal to fight back. I remembered a story that Mason Goser had told me about a time when Grossheim had passed out on a couch in the fraternity house. Goser had tried to get him to go to bed, and when Grossheim had resisted Goser had asked him if it was O.K. to just leave him there. Grossheim had answered, “I’ll be all right—no matter what.”
In a conversation last summer, Grossheim told me that it was hard to make any big plans with the lawsuit looming. In August, 2020, a judge dismissed the accusations against Truman State, leaving the fraternity and Grossheim as the remaining defendants. But Bottorff-Arey, who has now begun working as a grief coach, and the other plaintiffs are appealing the dismissal; a hearing has not yet been scheduled. “I’m just trying to be patient and trust the court system,” Grossheim said.
In May, Grossheim left his crash pad above Pagliai’s and moved into a house with his girlfriend. When the pandemic caused lockdowns in Missouri, they spent long hours watching “Futurama.” She would crochet and he would cook. He’d kept his job at the pizzeria, even though it left him at greater risk of contracting covid-19. He needed the money to live on, and also to help pay his legal bills. Grossheim, now twenty-four, does not expect to return to college. He thinks that he might make a good contractor. His girlfriend, who is also from the St. Louis area, has now graduated, and she told me that they would likely move back there. The ideal thing would be for all that happened in Kirksville, besides their relationship, to recede into the past. She said that she had changed Grossheim’s privacy settings on Facebook, so that strangers could no longer deface his posts.
Some people who have been touched by the Kirksville tragedies are similarly eager to move on. The friend of Hughes’s who remains in touch with his family told me that although the suicides formed an appalling narrative, she, at least, didn’t see a villain at the heart of it. “Brandon isn’t perfect,” she said. “The friends we lost weren’t perfect. We aren’t perfect, either. And that’s as close as we can get to real closure.” ♦
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