Chris Marquis was a 17-year-old Vermont hustler running a small-time scam online. His virtual business was going great – until somebody killed him.

On the afternoon of March 19, 1998, a UPS driver named Armand Gevry delivered a cardboard box to the pea-green house at 3 Washington Street in Fair Haven, Vermont. Gevry lives two blocks away, and when Sheila Rockwell opened the door, she recognized him as the deliveryman who often brought shipments of citizen's band radio equipment to her son.

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It was a cold, gray day outside – light snow changing to sleet changing to rain – so she quickly took the package from Gevry, thanked him, and shut the door. Rockwell, a weathered woman of 52 with hard blue eyes and wispy brown hair, carried the box down the hallway of her modest home.

Chris Marquis was talking on his new Ranger RCI 2990 radio with his girlfriend, Cyndi McDonald, when his mother brought the package into his wood-paneled bedroom. His 6-foot frame was hunched over the microphone on his desk, his dirty-blond hair was swept forward across his forehead, and a thin mustache fuzzed his upper lip.

Rockwell handed the 2-foot-long box to her son. She didn't recognize the return address, so she sat down on Chris's bed, curious to see what was inside.

Chris continued chatting with Cyndi. The name and address on the box – Samantha Brown, 1863 South High Street, Bucyrus, Ohio – didn't ring any bells for him either.

"I got a package in the mail," Chris told Cyndi. He'd met her two years earlier as a quiet, sweet voice on Channel 1. Cyndi was now in the 11th grade, a year ahead of Chris, but she attended school in Whitehall, the next town over. Their favorite date was a meal at the McDonald's on the far edge of Fair Haven.

"What is it?" Cyndi asked. "Who's it from?"

"Hold on. I don't know," Chris answered, as he grabbed his jackknife from the holster on his belt and slit the box open. Inside was a slightly smaller box made of styrofoam.

"Well, it's probably a bomb, then," Cyndi joked.

The explosion knocked Chris and his mother to the floor.

To his acquaintances online, Chris Marquis wasn't a teenager living with his mother. He was 27 years old, a father, and the proprietor of a Vermont store called the CB Shack. That was the identity Mark Sischo encountered earlier this year on the RCI Federation Web site, where CBers post messages to buy or sell the well-regarded brand of radios – RCIs – made by Ranger Electronic Communications.

"Chris had a message up," Sischo, who lives in Michigan, recalls. "It said, 'Anybody looking to buy, sell, or trade radio equipment, email me.' I had some stuff that I couldn't sell around here, so I was gonna do a trade." After corresponding by email, Chris taught Sischo how to use Mirabilis's ICQ software so they could chat in real time. They discussed the relative merits of Rangers and Unidens and Cherokees and Cobras. Chris, who used "Psycho" as his email name and CB handle and dubbed himself "PhantomOp" on ICQ, revealed his real name to Sischo. He also griped about his wife, sent a digitized picture of his daughter by email, and pointed Sischo to a Web page he'd set up to advertise the CB Shack.

Eventually, the two began trying to work out a trade. They agreed that Chris would send Sischo a Galaxy Saturn Turbo worth about $700, a couple other radios, and a few microphones and accessories. In return, Sischo would send three radios and microphones to Chris. Since the gear that Sischo was sending Chris was of lesser value, he also included a check for $100.

After exchanging tracking numbers with Chris so each could verify that the other had, indeed, sent the equipment, Sischo shipped his box by UPS in early March. But when Sischo visited the UPS Web site and punched in the 18 digits Chris had given him, he got the message "Unable to track shipment." He checked the number and tried again. Same thing.

Certain that Chris had intended to con him, Sischo called UPS and stopped delivery. He spoke to a representative of the company's security department, who asked whether Sischo knew anyone else who'd been burned by Chris Marquis. Sischo said he didn't but promised to see whether he could find others.

Sischo began posting messages around the Web and on Usenet groups. "Everyone who has been ripped off by Chris Marquis Email me immediately!!" he wrote to the readers of rec.radio.cb on March 14. The responses came quickly. Sischo heard from three or four people who had lost radios and money to the "proprietor" of the nonexistent CB Shack. One of them was NCTomCat, an America Online user who reported that he'd sent $25 to Chris to cover the shipping costs of a radio that never arrived.

In addition to emailing Sischo, TomCat was posting threatening messages on rec.radio.cb. "He ripped me off too," TomCat wrote on March 16. "I am posting ads about that crook all over the internet… the address I have is Washington St. Fairhaven Vermont… DONT MAIL THIS LIAR ANY MONEY OR YOU WILL BE POORER BUT WISER!!!!!! If I can find someone to pay the 2 way airfare, I will go there and collect everyones money back, and give him some severe dental problems to deal with… Are You listening Chris?? When You see a 6 foot 5 inch dark haired man at Your door, You better duck 'cause I will be about to drop the maul… on You noggin dude……."

"I got a package in the mail," Chris told his girlfriend, Cyndi, on the CB. "It's probably a bomb," she joked. The explosion knocked him and his mother to the floor.

"I could feel the building and windows vibrate," says Raymond Viger, Fair Haven's chief of police. Viger was on the phone when he heard the boom, and he slammed down the handset and rushed out the front door of the town's red-brick Municipal Building. The Korean War veteran knew it had been a serious explosion – the force was too powerful to have been a car backfiring or some kid lighting an M-80.

Standing on the front steps of the Municipal Building, which contains Fair Haven's town offices, its volunteer fire department, and its three-man police force, Viger faced the town common. On the left side was the Fair Haven Library, the Merchant Bank, and a row of shops. On the far side was a gas station, the Mallory Funeral Home, and the First Baptist Church. The right side was lined with big houses built in the 1800s.

It took about three minutes for Viger and Sergeant Jeff Lusk, who was riding in a patrol car at the time, to determine that the noise had come from Sheila Rockwell's aluminum-sided house, at the back left corner of the Municipal Building, not 20 yards from Viger's office.

"I could see fire," Sheila Rockwell recalls. "I was trying to put out these fires. There were disks on fire, and a lot of plastic. I was trying to find the telephone. Chris got up and ran for the bedroom door, but he just fell on his face."

Chris had several holes in his abdomen and burns and shrapnel wounds all over his face and neck. Most of his upper left thigh had been blown away. "I tried crawling over toward Chris and I couldn't," Rockwell says. "Every time I'd try to get up on my right knee, I'd collapse." Rockwell noticed that her knee was bloody and that most of the fingers on her right hand had disappeared. She asked her son how badly he was hurt, but he didn't reply: "Chris was moaning. He wasn't answering me. Just moaning."

When Chief Viger and Sergeant Lusk stormed into the smoke-filled bedroom, they found Chris and his mother lying on the blood-soaked carpet. Chris was face down and unconscious. A cardboard box half-filled with styrofoam peanuts was nearby. Above Chris's computer station, a hole had been blown through the roof, and below it, a matching crater was carved into the floor. The plastic cover of his inkjet printer had been melted away.

Rockwell was coherent enough to tell Lusk that Chris had been standing right over the inner box when it exploded. While they waited for Fair Haven's volunteer rescue squad, Lusk asked Rockwell whether she or Chris was having problems with anyone. Rockwell told him that there was a guy in Indiana who was mad at her son, and who had been threatening to come to Vermont that weekend to collect some money Chris owed him.

There was silence on Cyndi's end after Chris keyed off his radio mike to open the package. She waited 20 minutes, but Chris never came back on.

She was distraught, because they'd been inseparable – on and off the air – since they'd met one day two years before, when Chris was asking for a radio check and Cyndi gave him one. He was Psycho, and she was Schoolgirl. They talked every day for a year. Then Chris asked when he'd be able to meet her. She said, "Whenever you come over," and he came over. Cyndi remembers the date: June 27, 1996.

"On the radio, he was laughing all the time, but he was quiet when I first met him in person. Shy, but nice," Cyndi says.

Five days before the explosion, according to an FBI affidavit, Chris Dean said he "was going to send the guy a package, and, boy, is he going to be surprised."

They'd set a different channel to meet on every night and chatted for hours about music, movies, school, parents. They talked about Chris's dream of opening up his own computer business. When Chris and his mother had to run errands, he and Cyndi would keep talking on a mobile radio in the van until he drove out of range and Cyndi's voice grew faint before disappearing.

Mark Cutsinger was the closest thing Chris had to a friend, aside from his mother and Cyndi. ("Everyone hated him," says Jeremy, a Fair Haven teen who knew Chris. "He was a punk. All he did was talk shit on the CB, just trashing people. He got beat up a lot.") But Cutsinger, who runs a radio/computer shop in Middlebury, a college town about 30 miles north of Fair Haven, shared Chris's passion for hardware. "Chris guided me through a lot of computer stuff, and I taught him about radios," says Cutsinger, a lanky, mustachioed biker who uses Gonzo as his CB handle. Gonzo would answer Chris's million and one questions – and Chris constantly hailed him on the air, by phone, by email, and over ICQ. He had grown up without a father figure, and he seemed to think Gonzo would do nicely. Occasionally, Chris's unending queries would grate on Gonzo's nerves, and he'd stop responding, but he had a soft spot for the kid.

In rural Vermont, people use CB sets in their cars and homes as a cheap alternative to cellular phones or pagers. In Fair Haven, you can get in touch with almost anybody – or at least his neighbor – by putting a call out on Channel 1. During long winters, conversations on the CB become a way of keeping in touch with friends, since it's usually too cold and snowy to go out to socialize. "It's just people hanging out, like in a chat room," Gonzo says. "People have their own little channels, and they'll talk about anything from the weather to the sex they had the night before. It's just your typical rag-chewing, most of the time."

Truckers navigating the highways of Vermont also use the CB, of course, to find out about road conditions, speed traps, and directions to their next stop. They're usually on Channel 19 – what Gonzo calls "the workingman's channel." That's where they'd encounter Chris Marquis. Gonzo also first came to know Chris as a voice on the radio. Sometimes Chris called himself Psycho, and other times he went by Taz, for the tattoo of the Warner Bros. cartoon character he sported on his right bicep. "His whole goal was to get in there and destroy people verbally," Gonzo says of Chris.

Chris had one of the most powerful CB setups around. He ran a Cherokee CBS-1000 base station and Ranger RCI 2970 mobile rig that he bought from Gonzo, along with a 300-watt linear amplifier (illegal for unlicensed users like Chris) and a high-quality Antron 99 antenna mounted atop a 50-foot pole. Chris's voice was well known to CB users in Fair Haven, Castleton, Benson, and Poultney, as well as Whitehall, New York, the town just across the border, where Cyndi lives. His audio signature – a digital clip of the Napoleon XIV song lyric "They're coming to take me away, ha-haaa!" – could be heard at all hours of the day and night.

Chris would use "noise toys" that created obnoxious sound effects to drown out truckers seeking directions. He'd berate anyone who dared to challenge his dominance of the airwaves. "It went beyond teenage mischievousness," says Gary Cook, who runs the CB Connection, a shop on the outskirts of Fair Haven. "A lot of teenagers are on [the CB], but none are as abusive as he was. I would never dream of saying things like that – the language, the type of insults."

Like Sischo, Gonzo at first had no idea Chris was just a high schooler. But when Chris came up to visit Gonzo's shop sometime in 1996, he arrived in his mother's blue minivan, with her in the driver's seat.

"Chris got anything he wanted," Gonzo recalls. "If Chris walked in and said, 'I want this $4,000 radio,' Sheila would find a way to get it for him." From the start, the pair's carefree spending habits struck Gonzo as odd. Then, as Chris and his mother began to trust Gonzo more, they told him about frequent shoplifting sorties, and they bragged about doing all their Christmas shopping for free.

But Gonzo is not the type to rat on anyone – especially a customer – and so he kept their confessions to himself. Instead, he took precautions. The one time he visited their house, he kept his motorcycle gloves on to avoid getting his fingerprints on anything that might be hot. "I wouldn't touch anything, and they laughed about that," he says.

When he received the junk radio, Dean got hostile, threatening to come to Vermont to sort things out.

Indeed, based on a financial affidavit Rockwell filed in April, it's hard to understand how else she found the money to lavish her son with all the high-end CB gear, not to mention a brand-new Acer PC, a Nintendo, a Super Nintendo, a Sega, a fax machine, a professional DJ setup, and a TV and VCR for his room. On the affidavit, Rockwell states that she has been unemployed for nearly a year and that her main source of income is a monthly $548 disability payment.

The disability, though, was Chris's. He suffered from retinitis pigmentosa, a vision disorder that rendered him legally blind at night and had begun narrowing his field of vision during the day. He had a blind person's cane, which he was supposed to use after dark, but he hated the cane, so instead he'd either stay inside at night or have Cyndi walk with him.

To supplement the disability payment, Rockwell says, she cleaned houses and did odd jobs around Fair Haven. Her landlords, the Shermans, paid her $20 for mopping the kitchen and $15 for washing their dog, for example. There was also occasional income from parties where Chris and his mother would work as DJs.

With expenses that exceeded $1,000 a month, though, how does Rockwell explain all those extravagant accouterments? She says, simply, that she worked hard to give her son everything he wanted: "I did spoil him. He was the baby, and I didn't know how long his vision would last."

The reality may be more complicated. On January 3, Chris and his mother were arrested for shoplifting at the Ames department store in Rutland. Chris had stolen $49 worth of CDs, gum, and pens, and Rockwell had taken merchandise, including 33 paint brushes and a Black & Decker drill-bit set, valued at $91.

Rockwell contends that this was the only time she ever shoplifted and that neither she nor Chris knew what the other was doing: "We were in two different parts of the store. I didn't want him to know I was stealing." But Gonzo says that when he visited their house, Rockwell asked jovially whether he'd seen them in the papers and laughed about the low fine she'd received for the offense – only $42.

Eileen Lavigne, Rockwell's daughter and Chris's half-sister, says that petty crime had become a habit for the two. "There were times I would go shopping with my mother [and] she would not only directly steal, but she'd take the tags off one item and put them on another – and Chris was right there," Lavigne says. "She's got a serious problem. And I think [Chris] got the sense that if she was doing it and not getting caught, it was OK."

On March 19, Gonzo was listening to his ham radio when he heard there had been an explosion next to the Municipal Building in Fair Haven. At first, he laughed: "I figured Chris had probably just blown up a linear." When he learned it was a package that had exploded and that Chris and his mother had been sent to the hospital, Gonzo felt sure he knew who had sent it.

Chris Dean was well known at the Little Big Horn Golf Club in Pierceton, Indiana. The burly, 6-foot-tall, mustachioed 35-year-old trucker, competitive but good-humored, held the record at the nine-hole course. He played in the Saturday-morning men's league, and a few years back he'd worked for course owner Lee Webb, taking care of the grounds, helping out in the office, and giving lessons.

Dean was also a familiar face at CB shops around Pierceton. Like Chris Marquis, he'd been bitten by the radio bug. Unlike Marquis, though, Dean was a licensed ham operator, and he was never known to be anything but considerate on the air.

Dean had grown up in Michigan, earned his commercial driver's license in his late 20s, and landed a job hauling steel out of Las Vegas. A few years later, he moved to Pierceton with his second wife, Diane. For a time, he worked for Webb at Little Big Horn. By 1995, though, he had landed a position with a distribution outfit called Sprint North Supply Company, which paid better and offered benefits. He drove a flatbed out of the company warehouse in Warsaw, Indiana, usually loaded with huge wooden spools of black telephone cable, earning $2,300 a month.

Dean was obsessively neat. Neighbors remember him constantly washing his cars – a Corvette and a Blazer. Joe Stump, his landlord, recalls that Dean kept his lawn buzzed down practically to AstroTurf length. "And the house was always spotless inside," Stump adds.

On the rec.radio.cb newsgroup, TomCat insisted he "was mad but not a killer."

He liked to hunt, according to Don Chilson, pastor at Pierceton's Bethel Baptist Church and a golfing buddy of Dean's, and he took tae kwan do lessons at an academy next to the grocery store in Pierceton. He'd also recently configured his computer to access the Net.

It was online that Dean first encountered Chris Marquis, according to Gonzo. Chris had confided in his friend about his dealings with Dean. He'd told Gonzo about a fantastic trade he'd negotiated with a guy in Indiana: a Ranger RCI 2990 in return for a Cobra 2000 CB radio. The RCI, a sleek, rack-mountable black box, was a 10-meter amateur radio that had been modified to handle CB transmissions. Another hack enabled the radio's user to "freeband" – go outside of the 40 channels the FCC allocates for CB transmissions. A compression board had been installed to boost speech levels. "It was the loudest thing on the air," says Gonzo, who estimates that all the enhancements bumped the radio's value up to nearly $800.

What was strange about the trade was that a Cobra 2000 is worth only about $400. It's an older radio – all brushed steel and simulated wood grain – an emblem of CB's 1970s heyday, when Smokey and the Bandit and C. W. McCall's populist trucker anthem "Convoy" made the once-obscure hobby suddenly hot. Gonzo was puzzled; why would someone trade a radio worth $800 for one worth half as much?

When he visited Chris, Gonzo saw the 2990 Dean had sent. Then Chris told him that instead of sending Dean the Cobra 2000 he'd promised, he had shipped a Realistic mobile radio that didn't even work just so Dean would have a tracking number as the two shipments crossed in the mail. (Apparently, Chris had learned a lesson from the deal with Sischo.) As soon as Dean had gotten the junk radio, he'd started making threatening calls and sending hostile email. In one message Dean said he was coming to Vermont to sort things out.

As Gonzo recalls it, as soon as he and Chris were alone, the teenager confessed to worrying that Dean would show up at his door. Dean had just called again, he told Gonzo, but his mother had covered for him. He asked what he should do; Gonzo advised him to give the radio back. But a short while later Chris was upbeat again. Gonzo noticed that the boy always felt sure his mother could protect him from any real harm.

Indeed, when Dean had called that day, Rockwell had blithely told him her son wasn't in Vermont – she said he had been thrown in jail in another state.

Vermont enjoys a crime rate among the lowest in the nation. The day before the explosion made news, the front page of the Rutland Herald, one of the state's biggest newspapers, featured these two stories: "Skier Cuts New Trails as Activist" and "State Has Trove of Documents on Civil War."

On Friday, in the Herald and The Burlington Free Press, the daily that serves the state's most populous city, the bombing moved center-stage, with huge black headlines, sidebars, and graphics explaining how to identify letter and package bombs. The broadcast media descended on Fair Haven; satellite trucks, with their noisy generators, lined the streets near Sheila Rockwell's house.

"It was quite a day for this little Mayberry town," says Bill Eaton, a retired schoolteacher who has lived in Fair Haven all his life. Eaton, who used to go on fishing trips with Armand Gevry, the UPS driver, had grabbed his camcorder to document the scene at 3 Washington Street. In addition to the media, agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had arrived to join the Vermont State Police in the search for evidence. Scouring the wet ground, they found pieces of debris from the explosion as far as three lots away.

On the rec.radio.cb newsgroup, TomCat was beginning to feel the heat. In a message titled "Was mad but not a killer," he said he had been fielding numerous calls from newspaper reporters asking if he was the bomber. TomCat declared himself innocent.

"I do not know anything about that incident with Chris Marquis," wrote TomCat. "I only found out about it today, and immediately called the FBI, introduced myself, and told them about his bad business dealings, and that I did in fact say ugly things on the newsgroups about him…But that is where it stopped… Just my telling the readers about his shady business practices… As I said, I called the FBI and said I will GLADLY answer any or all questions about this tragedy."

When FBI agents searched Chris Marquis's room, they found a piece of notebook paper on his desk, next to the computer his mother had given him for Christmas. On the paper was written Chris Dean's name, along with Dean's address and phone number, according to an FBI affidavit.

Investigators also eventually turned up Chris's wallet, which had been in his pants pocket at the time of the explosion. Inside, according to the affidavit, was a UPS receipt dated March 5, 1998. It detailed the shipment of a CB radio from Chris Marquis to Chris Dean at the same Indiana address listed on the piece of notebook paper. The tracking number, the affidavit stated, was 1Z 019 X55 03 1232 566 3. If you visit the UPS Web site and enter that number, you can see that the package was sent from Rutland via UPS ground service on March 5 and delivered to Pierceton, Indiana, at 1:56 p.m. on March 11.

And the name and address on the bomb package, Samantha Brown of Bucyrus, Ohio? That was a dead end. The FBI discovered that neither the person nor the street address existed. UPS traced the path of the package, and, according to the affidavit, it had been dropped off at a counter facility in Mansfield, Ohio, around noon on March 18. It was shipped next-day air.

A representative of Sprint North Supply, Dean's employer, told the Feds that the truck driver's route included Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. The spokesperson also mentioned that Dean was making a delivery to a company warehouse in Mansfield, Ohio, at around noon on March 18. (Bucyrus, Ohio, coincidentally, is a town along Route 30, a major east-west artery. A trucker would likely pass through it on the way from Pierceton to Mansfield.)

On the night of March 19, Special Agent John Hersh of the Rutland FBI office interviewed a friend of Dean's. According to Hersh's affidavit, the anonymous cooperating witness (referred to as CW in the document) had known Dean for several years and shared his affinity for CB radios. CW said Dean had been having trouble with someone in Vermont after they'd exchanged radios.

CW also told the authorities he was the one who had helped Dean configure his computer to access the Net. And he added that Dean had recently searched the Net to find instructions on building a pipe bomb. Based on the ingredients mentioned in the FBI affidavit – thumbtacks, a clothespin, black powder, and a pipe – and, assuming the friend's statement is accurate, Dean probably found an online version of The Anarchist's Cookbook, a guide to homemade mayhem that existed in print long before it found its way into digital form.

On March 14, according to the affidavit, five days before the explosion in Fair Haven, Dean had told CW that he "was going to send the guy a package in the mail, and, boy, is he going to be surprised," but Dean seemed to be ambivalent about what he wanted to do, because he also talked about simply paying Chris Marquis an intimidating visit.

CW's assertions, and the Sprint log entry showing that Dean was in Mansfield on March 18, led the authorities to believe that they'd found their man. By Friday evening, the day after the explosion, an ATF agent had been dispatched along with members of the Kosciusko County Sheriff's Department to arrest Dean. They found him at a friend's house in Winona Lake, Indiana, a few miles west of Pierceton. The entire investigation and arrest took less than 30 hours.

On Saturday morning, the front page of The Burlington Free Press trumpeted, "Bombing Suspect Arrested." There was a color picture of Chief Viger standing next to the US attorney who had announced the arrest. The accompanying article noted that Dean, who had no prior criminal record, was being charged with the interstate transportation of an explosive device intended to kill and injure, and causing an explosive device to be placed aboard an aircraft, knowing that it could endanger the safety of people aboard. The article also pointed out that, if convicted, Dean could face the federal death penalty.

Neighbors say Dean led a "typical middle-class life." The FBI found evidence of a blast hole in his backyard.

Suddenly, TomCat was silent. After his "Was mad but not a killer" message, posted the same day Dean was arrested, TomCat vanished from rec.radio.cb.

What did it mean? Was he a suspect, after all? Could he possibly be Dean – and silent now because he was in custody? (Several people who corresponded with TomCat insisted that was ridiculous. And, certainly, TomCat's posted description of himself as 6 foot 5 didn't jibe.) The authorities weren't commenting.

America Online, TomCat's ISP, didn't wait to find out. The company said he had violated its terms of service, which prohibit threatening Usenet messages, and voided his account. AOL also sent out 16 "cancel" messages to the operators of Usenet servers around the world. TomCat's venomous screeds disappeared into the ether.

After his arrest in Winona Lake, Dean was sent to the Allen County Jail in Fort Wayne, Indiana. A few days later, on March 25, a US magistrate in Fort Wayne ruled that there was enough evidence against Dean to extradite him to Vermont, where he would stand trial.

US marshals escorted Dean to Burlington on April 2, and he was remanded to the maximum-security Northwest State Correctional Facility in Saint Albans, just a few miles from the Canadian border. It was that same afternoon – exactly two weeks after the bombing – that a closed-casket funeral service for Chris Marquis was held in the Mallory Funeral Home.

After protracted legal wrangling, on June 22 at the US District Court in Burlington, Dean entered a plea of not guilty on all counts. His three attorneys steadfastly maintain their client's innocence. "He has a solid and rich employment history, the respect and support of his neighbors, and the love and support of his family," says attorney Bradley Stetler. "He has lived a very typical middle-class life."

Last summer, people in Pierceton were still trying to reconcile the government's charges with the Chris Dean they knew. Dean was "personable, fun to be around," according to his landlord. "He got along with everybody."

"He was very friendly and outgoing," says a man who owns a CB shop that Dean frequented. "[The charges against him] seemed real out of character."

But in the weeks leading up to Dean's arraignment, FBI and ATF agents had been gathering more evidence. According to court documents, agents searching Dean's house found a styrofoam container – with missing pieces – that seemed to match the material used to encase the bomb mechanism. They found hex nuts that appeared to be identical to the hardware used as extra shrapnel in the bomb. They found fishing line similar to that used as part of the bomb's trigger mechanism.

In Dean's backyard, agents found evidence of a blast hole where, they assert in court documents, Dean detonated a prototype bomb. "Indeed, agents found the test bomb's end cap, which appeared to be made by the same pipe manufacturer that made the end cap for the bomb that killed Marquis," wrote Charles Tetzlaff, the US attorney in Burlington. There was also evidence that Dean purchased Bullseye black powder on March 14, the same day he is alleged to have had the conversation with CW in which he seemed uncertain about whether he should go to Vermont in person or "send the guy a package in the mail."

The US Attorney's Office argued that Dean should be held without bail, pending trial. Judge William K. Sessions III agreed, and Dean was sent back up to Saint Albans.

When Sheila Rockwell wants to get some fresh air, she asks her home health aide to help her get into a wheelchair. She still has an external fixator attached to her right knee – a blue-and-silver device like a metallic Tinker Toy that penetrates the skin and holds the bones and pins in place. As a result, her right leg sticks straight out, supported by an extension attached to the wheelchair.

Once Rockwell is situated in the chair, the aide rolls her out the back door and down a newly constructed wood ramp at the back entrance of her rented house. They pass Chief Viger's window in the Municipal Building, cross North Park Place, and don't stop until they get to the far end of the town common.

It would seem to be a spot with sad associations for Rockwell. She's parked right in front of the Mallory Funeral Home, near the place where, in winter, Chris and Cyndi would lay down on the ground, sweep their arms and legs back and forth, and make snow angels. But perhaps in a town as small as Fair Haven, it's not possible to avoid all the painful places.

She and her son were very close. Not only did they DJ together at parties and dances, they also enrolled in a program to raise guide dogs for the blind and attended training classes together every two weeks in Rutland. Rockwell drove Chris everywhere because his retinitis prevented him from getting a license. And since Chris hadn't been going to school during the months leading up to the bombing, he was home with his mother most days.

She claims she knew very little about her son's Internet and CB dealings. She says she had no idea that anyone other than Dean was complaining about being cheated by Chris and that even when Dean began calling the house, she was unsure about "the severity" of the threats.

Chris's mother acknowledges she knew her son was buying and selling radios, and she says that profits from the transactions were one of the family's sources of income. She regularly drove Chris to CB shops and tag sales, where he'd purchase used gear and accessories.

She also drove her son to the UPS station in Rutland to mail a radio to Chris Dean on March 5. "I knew it wasn't the radio he was supposed to send this guy," she remembers, "but Chris said, 'If I don't get him a tracking number, he's gonna kick my ass.' He said he needed to buy some time." She says Chris told her he had actually ordered the Cobra 2000 he'd promised Dean from one of his suppliers, a Kentucky outfit called Copper Electronics; it just hadn't arrived in time, and Chris needed to send something. Rockwell adamantly insists, "I don't know where the scamming idea came from."

But Copper doesn't sell the Cobra 2000, a discontinued model. And her daughter Eileen Lavigne claims that Rockwell "was very aware of what was going on." (Lavigne and Rockwell weren't on speaking terms at the time of the explosion, but they reconciled briefly afterward. They were estranged again when I spoke with Lavigne in August.)

"She put up the money to buy the radios," Lavigne says, "and she knew he was getting on the Net trying to sell these radios."

The CB shop owner in Pierceton felt terrible when he ran into Diane Dean at Wal-Mart a few weeks after her husband's arrest. She seemed to need money, and she asked him – without her husband's knowledge – if he would come to their house and take a look at the equipment there.

When the man arrived to appraise the radios, he was astonished by what he saw. His shop had been burglarized in January, and the police had never found the culprits. As he evaluated Dean's collection of radios, trying not to betray his surprise to Diane Dean, he estimated that about half of the equipment that had been stolen from his shop was in Dean's house – roughly $5,000 worth of merchandise. (Eventually, this equipment was seized as evidence.)

The store owner also believes that the RCI 2990 Dean sent to Vermont was stolen from his shop. "If I'm guessing right," he says, "[Dean had] taken all this hot stuff and was laundering it through the Internet." So while the radio he hoped to receive from Chris Marquis was worth only about half as much as the 2990, "he'd be getting a Cobra 2000 that wasn't hot."

Gonzo says the Pierceton man's story makes sense to him. Not only does it explain the uneven trade, but it explains "why [Dean] didn't go through the proper channels, reporting the scam with Marquis to the police."

But despite the Pierceton shop owner's certainty that Dean was somehow involved with the burglary, he still can't believe that Dean built a pipe bomb and mailed it to Chris Marquis, as the government alleges. "Chris Dean is a fairly smart individual, and I can't see him doing it as it's portrayed, leaving such a clear trail," he says.

Maybe a fluid sense of identity made both Marquis and Dean feel invulnerable. Catch me if you can.

Maybe Chris Marquis never understood that his actions could have consequences. Perhaps he thought his online identities would somehow shield him from real-world harm. He was Psycho, or Taz, or PhantomOp. He was also proprietor of the CB Shack, 27 years old, married. If no one could figure out exactly who he was, then how could they get to him? His fluid sense of identity may have made him feel invulnerable.

Even when people like Mark Sischo and Chris Dean began closing in on the real Chris Marquis, the teenager still felt he was in control. When Sischo began sounding the alarm on rec.radio.cb and the RCI Federation site after he'd been burned by Chris, the youth had countered with a message of his own. Sischo was simply upset, Chris explained, because the CB Shack wouldn't sell him a radio he wanted badly. Even when an angry Dean started calling, started threatening to come to Vermont, the teen never felt he was in serious danger. If all else failed, his mother would handle it for him.

And what of the man authorities say murdered him? If the criminal charges are true, Dean made and mailed a bomb, taking no other precaution than making up a name, Samantha Brown, the girl from Bucyrus, Ohio, from whom no one would expect to receive such a nasty surprise.

Maybe it was easier to imagine killing someone he had never met. He tangled with Chris on the phone, by email, and over ICQ. But he never saw the teenager's face. Maybe his fluid sense of identity also made him feel invulnerable. Catch me if you can.

Could he – would he – have done the thing the authorities say he did if he knew that the person who'd conned him was a 17-year-old kid with failing vision, a mama's boy who spent his days on the Net and his nights on the radio talking endlessly to his devoted girlfriend? You have to wonder when it was that Dean first fixed his eyes on a picture of Chris Marquis – perhaps on TV, or in a Fort Wayne newspaper. You have to wonder what he thought.

Of course, it's possible, as golf course owner Lee Webb puts it, that "they got the wrong guy." Webb and others in Pierceton point out that if the government's accusations are true, then Dean learned how to make the bomb, tested it, and sent it all within seven days of receiving the worthless Realistic from Chris Marquis – a pretty short span of time. They argue that the government's lightning-fast investigation and arrest – 30 hours, remarkable for a bombing case – was slipshod and rushed. They want to know who doesn't have some thumbtacks, a clothespin, and fishing line around his house.

Dean's attorneys spent the better part of the summer trying to convince the US Attorney's Office in Burlington and the Department of the US Attorney General in Washington, DC, not to seek the federal death penalty for their client. They searched for every scrap of mitigating evidence they could find. The last execution in Vermont was in 1954 (the state has since abolished the death penalty), and Dean's legal team didn't want their client to be the state's first test of the 1994 federal death-penalty statute, which allows the federal government to seek execution in certain cases, regardless of state law.

On October 7, Dean's attorneys presented their findings before a Department of Justice committee in Washington; if it is the committee's judgment that the death penalty should be sought, then the recommendation is passed to Janet Reno, who makes the final decision.

"If the government seeks the death penalty, the likelihood of a trial is greater," says Greg Waples, an assistant US attorney in Burlington working on the case. But with or without the death penalty, he points out, a pretrial settlement could result, as happened in the Unabomber case.

It's September, and Cyndi McDonald is back in school, starting the 11th grade again. She dropped out last year after the explosion and barricaded herself in her room for three weeks. She's trying to put together enough money to buy Chris's DJ equipment from his mother. "I want to continue doing it, go on with the business," she says. Chris was her first real boyfriend. She doesn't think she's ready for another just now.

Diane Dean flies into Burlington once a month and then drives up to Saint Alban's to visit her husband, who, from all reports, is handling his ordeal as well as can be expected. When she visits, they can sit together in the same room and hold hands – there's no glass wall dividing them, no telephones they must use to communicate from either side of a partition. After the visit, though, Dean is strip-searched for contraband before he is returned to his cell.

The Reverend Don Chilson has been writing to Dean and encouraging his congregation to do the same. "I tell him man's gonna let him down and our government's gonna let him down," says Chilson. "They're out to hang him. But I keep encouraging him spiritually to place his hope in the Lord – even if they give him the death penalty – because I know where he's gonna go."

Gonzo has testified before the Burlington grand jury that indicted Dean, but he sounds annoyed about his role in the legal process. He says it has taken up his time and hurt his business. He wishes he wouldn't get called up to Burlington again to testify once the trial starts. But he knows it's inevitable, even though no trial date has been set.

Sheila Rockwell has enlisted an attorney to find out whether Chris Dean has any assets she might be able to seize in a civil trial. Before school started again this fall in Fair Haven, she helped organize a Teen Appreciation Celebration on the town green, in Chris's memory, to benefit the Vermont Youth Development Corps. She brought Chris's CD collection over, and the music boomed out as the town's teenagers – all those kids Chris had not gotten along with – played volleyball, bladed, skateboarded, and hung out. She hopes it will become an annual event.

Every few weeks, she has to visit a doctor in Rutland to have her knee checked out. To get there, you head east on Route 4. About halfway, you cross a set of double bridges near West Rutland. Rockwell remembers that when she would drive into Rutland with Chris on errands, he'd always lose radio contact with Cyndi on the bridges.

Now, another memory crowds in: A few days after the explosion, when she was still in the hospital, she asked someone on the Fair Haven Rescue Squad when it was, exactly, that Chris had died. And she was told that he'd been alive in the house, and alive in the ambulance, but that he only made it as far as the West Rutland double bridges before they lost him.

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