Myers described the night in question clearly:
Myers stated he and Jerry had just finished a workout and went into the shower area to shower and leave. “I would usually work out one or two days a week, but this particular night is very clear in my mind. We were in the shower and Jerry and I were slapping towels at each other trying to sting each other. I would slap the walls and would slide on the shower floor, which I am sure you could have heard from the wooden locker area. While we were engaged in fun as I have described, I heard the sound of a wooden locker door close, a sound I have heard before. I never saw who closed the locker. The grand jury report says Coach McQueary said he observed Jerry and I engaged in sexual activity. This is not the truth and McQueary is not telling the truth. Nothing occurred that night in the shower.”
A few weeks later, however, Myers signed up with a lawyer who represented a number of alleged Sandusky victims. Myers then made a statement to police in which he completely changed his tune. He was one of Sandusky’s victims, he now said.
You can be forgiven if you find this confusing. The boy in the shower was the most important witness in the whole case. Prosecutors had been searching high and low for him, because he would be the final nail in Sandusky’s coffin. So finally he surfaces, denies anything happened, then almost immediately flips, saying actually something did happen. So did Myers become the key prosecution witness in the Sandusky trial? That would make sense. He was the most important piece in the whole puzzle. No! The prosecution left him at home because they had no confidence in his story.7
The only time Myers ever appeared in court was to testify at Sandusky’s appeal. Sandusky had asked for him to testify, in the vain hope that Myers would revert to his original position and say that nothing happened in the shower. Myers did not. Instead, as Sandusky’s lawyers read back to Myers each of the statements he had made less than a year before about Sandusky’s innocence, Myers sat there stone-faced and shrugged at everything, including a picture of him standing happily next to Sandusky. Who are the people in the photo? he was asked.
Myers: That’s myself and your client.
Defense: And when was that picture taken? If you know.
Myers: That I do not remember.
It was a picture of Myers and Sandusky at Myers’s wedding. In all, he said he didn’t recall thirty-four times.
Then there was Brett Swisher Houtz, a Second Mile child with whom Sandusky had been very close. He was probably the most devastating witness at Sandusky’s trial. Houtz told of being repeatedly assaulted and abused—of dozens of lurid sexual encounters with Sandusky during his teenage years, in showers and saunas and hotel rooms.
Prosecution: Mr. Houtz, can you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury approximately how many times the defendant in either the East Area locker room or the Lasch Building shower…put his penis in your mouth?
Houtz: It would have to be forty times at least.
P: Did you want him to do it—
Houtz: No.
P: —on any of those occasions?
Houtz: No.
Then Sandusky’s wife, Dottie, was called to the stand. She was asked when she and her husband last saw Brett Houtz.
D. Sandusky: I think it was three years ago, or two years ago. I’m not sure.
The stories Houtz told of his abuse were alleged to have happened in the 1990s. Dottie Sandusky was saying that two decades after being brutally and repeatedly victimized, Houtz decided to drop by for a visit.
Defense: Can you tell us about that?
D. Sandusky: Yeah. Jerry got a phone call. It was Brett. He said, I want to come over. I want to bring my girlfriend and my baby for you to see. The baby was like two years old. And they came over and my friend Elaine Steinbacher was there, and we went and got Kentucky Fried Chicken and had dinner. And it was a very pleasant visit.
This is a much more perplexing example than Trinea Gonczar in the Nassar case. Gonczar never denied that something happened in her sessions with Nassar. She chose to interpret his actions as benign—for entirely understandable reasons—up until the point when she listened to the testimony of her fellow gymnasts at Nassar’s trial. Sandusky, by contrast, wasn’t practicing some ambiguous medical procedure. He is supposed to have engaged in repeated acts of sexual violence. And his alleged victims didn’t misinterpret what he was doing to them. They acted as if nothing had ever happened. They didn’t confide in their friends. They didn’t write anguished accounts in their journals. They dropped by, years later, to show off their babies to the man who raped them. They invited their rapist to their weddings. One victim showered with Sandusky and called himself the “luckiest boy in the world.” Another boy emerged with a story, after months of prodding by a therapist, that couldn’t convince a grand jury.
Sexual-abuse cases are complicated, wrapped in layers of shame and denial and clouded memories, and few high-profile cases were as complicated as Jerry Sandusky’s. Now think about what that complication means for those who must make sense of all that swirling contradiction. There were always doubts about Sandusky. But how do you get to enough doubts when the victims are happily eating Kentucky Fried Chicken with their abuser?
6.
So: McQueary goes to see his boss, Joe Paterno on a Saturday. An alarmed Paterno sits down with Tim Curley and Gary Schultz the following day, Sunday. They immediately call the university’s counsel and then brief the university president, Graham Spanier, on Monday. Then Curley and Schultz call in Mike McQueary.
You can only imagine what Curley and Schultz are thinking as they listen to him: If this really was a rape, why didn’t you break it up? If what you saw was so troubling, why didn’t anyone—including your family friend, who is a doctor—tell the police? And if you—Mike McQueary—were so upset about what you saw, why did you wait so long to tell us?
Curley and Schultz then call the university’s outside counsel. But McQueary hasn’t given them much. They instinctively reach—as we all do—for the most innocent of explanations: Maybe Jerry was just being goofy Jerry. Here is the Penn State lawyer, Wendell Courtney, recounting his conversation with Gary Schultz.
Courtney: I asked at some point along the way whether this horseplay involving Jerry and a young boy, whether there was anything sexual in nature. And he indicated to me that there was not to his knowledge.…My vision, at least when it was being described to me and talking with Mr. Schultz, was that it was, you know, a young boy with the showers on, a lot of water in the shower area, group shower area just kinda, you know, running and sliding on the floor…
Prosecution: Are you sure he didn’t say slapping sound or anything sexual in nature at all?
Courtney: I am quite positive he never said to me slapping sounds or anything sexual in nature that was reported going on in the shower.
Courtney said he thought about it and considered the worst-case scenario. This was, after all, a man and a boy in the shower after hours. But then he thought of what he knew of Jerry Sandusky “as someone that goofed around with Second Mile kids all the time in public,” and he defaulted to that impression.8
Schultz and his colleague Tim Curley then go to see university president Spanier.
Prosecution: You did tell Graham Spanier it was “horseplay”?