A month before Ferguson erupted, an old white man in Mississippi, famous for his shrine to the King, shot and killed a young black man. Police cleared him. Two days later he was dead

Paul MacLeod may very well have been the most famous Elvis memorabilia collector of all time. He was certainly the stuff of regional legend, a gun-toting, mile-a-minute talker with a questionable relationship to the truth. In his early 70s he was still an imposing man, with slicked back white hair and a gleam in his blue eyes that let you know he had long ago lost his mind, or at least wanted you to think he had. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he offered tours of his home, Graceland Too, an 1853 antebellum house at the corner of Gholson Avenue and Randolph Street in Holly Springs, Mississippi. He did not have the vintage Elvis memorabilia necessary to be taken seriously by other collectors, whose circuit of conventions he shunned. The real draw of Graceland Too was not the Elvis-themed rugs, mugs, calendars, curtains, videos, limousines, and trading cards that he had spent a significant portion of his life collecting. It was Paul MacLeod himself.

Paul wore several dense rings on his large hands as he gave the $5 tours and left the impression that he was not above using them in a dust-up. His charm melted away at the edges of a subtle menace he exuded. If he caught a visitor staring off into space as he was talking, he would often grab their shoulder forcefully or pound on it twice with a backhanded closed fist, saying “Yo, yo!” until he was confident that he had regained their attention.

Paul often told stories about his famed patrons. Muhammad Ali had been there, he said. So had Bill Clinton. Clinton was always visiting Graceland Too. He had always been there just two weeks ago. Paul kept a seemingly comprehensive set of visitor pictures in the “guest room”, a hallway decked floor to ceiling with photographs of visitors. Neither Ali nor Clinton could be found. In the pictures, people stood in front of the Elvis shrine in the “shrine room” or posed wearing a jacket that Paul claimed Elvis once owned. He claimed he had a lot of things Elvis once owned. Rugs and guns especially.

Paul was not bashful about brandishing guns among the unsuspecting. He used the term “half-nigra President” in the most neutral of ways. Paul openly referred to women and black people in derogatory terms, a gun by his side most of the time. “If by taking my own life I could bring back Elvis Presley for his millions of fans across God’s green earth I would shoot myself right now in front of all of you here tonight,” he exclaimed about halfway through my initial tour. The muzzle of a gun was pressed to his temple. I didn’t know if the weapon was loaded, but Paul didn’t look like he was lying. He was an interesting man.

On the morning of 17 July 2014, Paul was found dead, slumped in a rocking chair on the porch of Graceland Too, the door locked behind him. An air of mystery immediately surrounded his death. No foul play was detected. The local coroner, who suggested initially it might take up to six months to get autopsy results, owing to a backlog of bodies, claimed that Paul died of natural causes. Some people came and took pictures of his dead body before officials were notified. A picture of his fresh corpse, taken early that Thursday morning, circulated through the town in the weeks that followed, peeked at on smartphones in bars and on street corners.

There would have been nothing too mysterious about all this had not it been for the fact that two nights before, on the same premises, Paul MacLeod had shot and killed a man named Dwight Taylor.

* * *

On 15 July last year, some time around 11 o’clock at night, Paul Bernard MacLeod, aged 71 and Caucasian, and Dwight David Taylor, aged 28 and black, found themselves on opposite sides of Paul’s front door. Dwight had been seen on Paul’s porch earlier in the evening, agitated and chain-smoking, by a man named Tyler Clancy who lived across the street.

Dwight Taylor was shot dead at Graceland Too by Paul MacLeod. Photograph: WREG

A distraught Paul told local law enforcement that Dwight, whom he knew and who had been in his employ from time to time, tried to force his way into the “museum”, possibly over money he thought he was owed. A glass pane near the base of a door leading to the foyer had been kicked in. An altercation ensued. Ostensibly fearing for his life, Paul shot Dwight in the right side of the chest, killing him. Less than 24 hours later, the case seemed as good as closed. The mayor and acting police chief, Kelvin Buck, a sharply dressed, smooth-talking African-American politician and former member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, believed that Paul MacLeod had acted in self-defence. That was the official line.

Some members of the community, even before the local police had made their announcement, were not satisfied that justice had been done. The afternoon following the shooting, when Paul had secluded himself inside Graceland Too, various people drove past the property and yelled accusations from their cars. Dwight’s mother Gloria told Channel 3 news that no one had been in touch with her from the police department about what had happened and why. “All we want is justice for our son,” she said.

Dwight was a diminutive man, much smaller than Paul, with an angular brown face, close-cropped hair, and an easy smile. He was called David by his closest intimates. Unable to maintain steady employment, he was known to approach people at their homes and ask for work. He was often seen painting MacLeod’s home, which in recent years had been several different colours. Dwight was by all accounts a gifted singer; he frequently sang and played guitar for the 50 or so parishioners at the Tabernacle of Prayer.

Like his parents, Dwight was desperately poor; the local homeless shelter, a former 12-room motel in the run-down northern end of town, turned him down for residence because of huge demand for the few rooms available. But he and his parents were known to use the shelter’s food services from time to time. His parents lived on Valley Street in the impoverished northern end of town.

Less than 72 hours after the shooting, Marshall County district attorney Ben Creekmore confirmed that the investigation into the death of Dwight David Taylor was ongoing and that the results of the investigation were to be presented to a grand jury on 1 October. That grand jury, which remains sealed, did not result in an indictment.

It is not common, one imagines, for unarmed young black men, regardless of how desperate they are, to break into the homes of heavily armed white men in a place long riven by the ghosts of human ownership and the hundred-year state-sponsored terror campaign that followed in its wake. What was Dwight Taylor really doing at Graceland Too that night?

The question haunted me personally. You see, I had been there as well, eight months before. I visited with several other guests of a nearby film festival around midnight on a Sunday. Unease gripped me from the moment I stepped out of the van; the place resembled an outpost at the end of the world, the last refuge of a bygone southern gentry waiting out an apocalyptic siege. There were surely more perilous ways for a black man to spend a Sunday night in northern Mississippi, but I had not gone looking for those. I had gone looking for Paul MacLeod and his home, Graceland Too. My black mother would not have approved.

I walked around the house, looking for a dark place to urinate before entering. This proved prescient; I would learn that the joint did not have a working toilet, its owner having taken to pissing in the backyard and defecating at the local library. While relieving myself, I noticed a Confederate flag hanging from a post reinforced with rocks. It intermingled with several American and state-of-Mississippi ones. Like Chuck D of Public Enemy, I knew Elvis was a hero to some (if not, as he asserted, most), but he had never meant shit to me, and here I was, a northern negro in the Deep South in a town I knew nothing about other than that it had been developed as a site for cotton plantations, pissing on and entering the home of a man who purportedly brandished guns frequently, some of which he believed had once belonged to Elvis Presley. I was 29 years old, just a year older than Dwight David Taylor.

* * *

I arrived in Holly Springs for a second time early on the afternoon of 10 August, a few weeks after the shooting. The city of a little under 8,000 was a centre for cotton production before the civil war; later it was home to 13 Confederate generals, and then played uneasy host to General Grant’s command as the Union army invaded. It is home to one of the oldest historically black colleges, Rust, founded in 1866 to educate newly freed slaves. Today, its 70% black population lives integrated with whites on the more genteel southern side of town. Blacks hold the mayoralty and two alderman seats in the city government. On the north end of town, not far from Rust College, exists a level of poverty and disinvestment that has become forgotten America’s calling card, especially in communities of colour.

That area was once home to the highway interchange that had been moved south with a rerouted Interstate 78. Cars feed off the three-lane highway there into a busy Walmart. Houses that have stood since the Confederacy’s heyday line a street that leads from the highway into the town’s handsome square.

Here I was, a northern negro in the Deep South pissing on and entering the home of a man who purportedly brandished guns

You could not miss it, Graceland Too, perched on a corner not far from the square. A seemingly unused green ticket booth, decked out with Christmas ornamentation when I arrived and with photos of Elvis plastered on its back wall, sat near the street just ahead of a gated driveway, both enforced with barbed wire. Nearby were two statues of lions, also wrapped loosely in barbed wire and adorned with neck bows that seemed to be made of police crime-scene tape. They were perched in protection on either side of the low-slung portico. The front porch and surrounding area was adorned with hundreds of unopened cans of Coca-Cola – the beverage Paul claimed to drink 24 times a day – that had been left there by well-wishers in memoriam. The Confederate flag I had seen on the edge of the property months before had been removed.

Along with a couple of acquaintances, I was given access to the premises that Sunday by Philip Knecht, a local lawyer who was managing Paul’s estate. A stout man in his early 30s, he was dressed as if to parody the image of a genteel country lawyer from yesteryear; his white, balding pate glistened in the heat.

We walked around the house, taking photographs, listening to Knecht recite various aspects of Paul’s legend, digging through Paul’s belongings. In a closet we found a pink shotgun and several other weapons; the police had only taken the weapon Paul used to kill Dwight, and his ammunition. Behind the house, Paul kept a makeshift electric chair he claimed was from the movie Jailhouse Rock, as well as a couple of limousines, including a pink one he claimed had belonged to Presley but that he had actually acquired from a local used-car dealer.

Paul slept on a rectangular storage box in the “shrine room” of his museum, above which hung a portrait of his idol. A bank of six or so TVs stretched along the far wall. On these televisions Paul, who owned the largest collection of TV Guides I will surely ever come across, for many years recorded any mention of Elvis Presley on network television he could find, just a few feet away from where he slept. Paul claimed to have more than 300,000 photos of Presley, along with every conceivable type of memorabilia one could imagine, on display in the ground floor and backyard of his home. As at Elvis’s home, Graceland, the upstairs was off limits; Paul had erected a chain-link fence around the stairwell.

Was it OK for us to be there, rummaging through a dead man’s belongings, through a space that had recently seen so much tragedy and dread? “My position has always been, as the attorney for the estate and the attorney for the house, and the person with the keys, I want as many people in here as possible recording, filming, getting his name out, because I am first and foremost Paul’s attorney,” Knecht said to us. He had issued a press release three weeks earlier, stating that “Graceland Too, in partnership with the City of Holly Springs, was excited to announce a Memorial and Celebration of the Life of Paul MacLeod on Tuesday, August 12, 2014, during Elvis Presley week.” It went on to state that tours of the premises led by “family, friends and lifetime Graceland Too members” would be given that day for $5 each, even to other lifetime members accustomed to paying nothing, in order to raise money for Paul’s “funeral and burial expenses, as well as the expenses and costs of his estate”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Graceland Too, the Elvis Presley themed home where Paul MacLeod lived in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Photograph: Rogelio V. Solis/AP

Yet this was still, in many ways, a crime scene. Knecht, despite having a law practice that was only a few blocks away from Graceland Too, first talked to Paul at length the day after he shot Dwight. They spoke at the behest of the local pharmacist and town alderman at large Tim Liddy, who implored Paul to get legal representation. Paul was mainly interested in giving Liddy and Knecht yet another tour of his Elvis museum, even as Knecht suggested that he could be charged with murder. “In a way, I got the last tour Paul ever gave of Graceland Too,” Knecht reflected in his nearby office later that day.

Knecht knew Dwight as well, better than he knew Paul. “He would come by and offer to wash my truck. I usually didn’t let him,” he said. “I’d let him do a little something and give him some money. Most of the time I would go to the store and buy him food. A lot of people did that around town. They were basically drifters, he and his wife Cindi.” Knecht, who has a gallows sense of humour and a nervous laugh, had known Cindi longer than he had Dwight. He was friendly with her for the most part but was upset about rumours he claimed she had been spreading. “She’s been saying some things to other people that were racially insensitive, trying to make it a race issue.”

He claimed to have helped both Dwight and Cindi out with legal issues, pro bono. They were both sent to jail for six months in 2013, almost simultaneously, Dwight for grand larceny after he allegedly stole a grill and Cindi for reneging on back child support payments from a previous marriage. They both faced fines they could not pay. “His family isn’t acknowledging this but a lot of people knew Dwight, a lot of people had interactions with him. In the last two weeks of his life, they weren’t very good interactions,” Knecht said.

Knecht alleged that Cindi had filed charges against her husband, whom she had married only months before, claiming he had been abusive toward her. She left him and returned to her family in nearby Ashland. Dwight had told Knecht he was desperate, given that the potential new charges could put him in jail for a long stint. A silver chain and an iPhone charger were stolen from Knecht’s truck a few days later. The last time Knecht saw Dwight, he says Dwight admitted to stealing them.

Paul had also previously filed charges against Dwight, who had apparently tried to break in before and, according to former Holly Springs tourism chief Susan Williams, had beaten Paul up and stolen his car. Allegedly this was becoming a pattern for Dwight; Tom Stewart, who owns a catering company and a restaurant named Southern Eatery on the square, told me that a few days later Dwight, whom he “fed for a year and a half”, had tried to break into his home the night after Stewart had refused to deliver five meals to a local motel Dwight and some of his friends were holed up at. When I asked him what Dwight was like, Stewart, a heavyset white man in his 40s, paused and looked around his restaurant. It was full of black patrons. He clearly did not want to offend anyone who may be listening. “He was not atypical of Holly Springs.” I suggested Dwight was underemployed. “Severely. Severely undereducated, had some substance problems, fairly moody guy.”

Sitting across Knecht’s desk, I suggested that rumours had been circling that Paul owed Dwight money, and that Paul had called Dwight to come over to his house and get his back wages, only to kill him in cold blood when he arrived. “Paul didn’t own a phone, he couldn’t have called anyone,” Knecht said in rebuke. He admitted that in Holly Springs, Mississippi, it would be easy to make this case a “racial issue”, claiming that the case was being brought to a grand jury for purely political reasons informed by the racial dynamics of the town. “I think it’s political, it’s the DA’s washing their hands of it, it’s political and racial,” he said.

* * *

Shannon McNally resides in an unassumingly gorgeous white antebellum frame house, finished in 1857, which sits high up on a hill, about half a mile from the town square. “I can only afford this house because it’s in Holly Springs, Mississippi. I’m a musician. You can barter here,” she explained shortly after I arrived.She was wearing a black dress, her dark tresses tied back, her green eyes a bit sallow.

McNally was a friend of Dwight and Cindi. Cindi was currently staying with McNally, although she had gone out, spooked by the possibility of our presence. “No one’s actually talked to her yet. For multiple reasons. She’s a little skittish,” McNally said.

McNally had met the couple, as many in the community had, when they knocked on the door asking for work. Over time she began to see them almost every day. “They went everywhere together. They were clearly very in love. I would generally give them whatever work I could actually afford. Everyone else around here took advantage of them.”

No one did this more than Paul MacLeod, she said. “Paul had him paint that entire house with spray cans and then wouldn’t pay him. Dig a ditch and give him 15 bucks because you’re a junkie and I don’t want you to spend it on that. Man just worked eight hours or 10 hours, whatever he did, who are you to say what he spends his money on?” McNally said. “It’s a tough little town.”

McNally talked at length about how difficult things had been for Dwight and Cindi. They had been homeless off and on, struggling with substances. McNally took an active interest in helping the newlyweds. During the winter, she would give them socks, hats and coats. Eventually she tried to give them things to do that were enriching. She would invite them to do yoga or some leisurely gardening. Dwight’s interest in music mingled with her own; she knew that he sang at church. Eventually McNally began to try to figure out how to get them into some housing, onto food stamps and Medicaid. A month before he died, Dwight had finally got a social security card and hoped he would be eligible for disability benefits. But the couple never seemed to be able to get through what McNally described as “the incredible labyrinth of endemic poverty”. Dwight often claimed he could not get food stamps because he did not have an address and he could not get an address because he could not find enough work to afford one.

Cindi showed up not long after I arrived. She is a small woman, not much taller than 5ft 4in tall, and was dressed in a oversized pink T-shirt, shorts with a plaid design, and a baseball cap that read “Chattanooga”. We greeted each other gingerly after she climbed up the porch steps. McNally asked if she felt like talking. Mosquitoes were swarming, biting us all. “Let me go get something,” she said, before retreating to a nearby garage and blasting hip-hop. Eventually, we followed her. She’d been pacing and was clearly tense, but eventually she settled down. “I’m from the dust,” she said after we sat down to talk, referring to the dirt-floored homes she grew up in, in nearby Ashland, about 45 miles south.

Cindi confirmed that she was still in touch with her family there and had been in Ashland when her husband was killed. They were at least temporarily estranged, although she would not discuss the details. None of their problems dampened her feelings of loss. “I miss my husband. Whatever he done, I miss him,” she said. “What brought me here was Dwight. That’s my best friend, my lover, my husband. Me and him had a connection that didn’t no one else have in Holly Springs.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Some of the Elvis Presley memorabilia at Graceland Too. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

Cindi had come to town to be with Dwight in 2009, only a month after she had met him, after many late-night phone conversations. She thought she had just come for the weekend, but she never went back. She referred to herself and Dwight as the “Bonnie and Clyde of Holly Springs” without irony. They would coordinate their clothing in order to seem more like a unit. She is a Christian and believes that Dwight is now watching over her and that he has no worries. “Every day that we wake up, we got problems. Good, bad, problems,” she said, smiling, as if to reiterate that she was almost happy for him not to have to struggle so much any more. “The average person wouldn’t want to live how we live for seven days. You’d want to kill yourself.”

Dwight and Cindi met Paul in 2011. He was having trouble digging a ditch on his property as they passed by on a hot day. They offered to help him. Cindi spoke about him with great affection. Her grief was not limited to Dwight. “People never knew our struggle. That’s how we ended up meeting Paul. Paul has pictures of us on top of his roof all over his house. We took care of Paul when Paul got sick,” she said. Paul had fallen off a ladder and broken one of his legs shortly before they met him. “Maybe God put us in that man’s life for a reason, me and Dwight. We stayed down in Senatobia Hospital a week with that man.”

“Me, Paul, and Dwight, we was like this,” squeezing her fists together. “He was a funny guy, but he was crazy too, but he was a good person, Paul,” Cindi claimed, trying to hold back tears. “I lost two people. We developed a friendship that nobody knew about, for real.”

Paul was a funny guy, but he was crazy too, but he was a good person Cindi Taylor

They had painted the house blue, they had painted the house grey. “We painted that house from roof to bottom,” she remembered with fondness. “We just happened to come into his life when he wanted it moody blue.” When Paul was in pain and hardly able to give the tours, they would help him out. They provided security when an especially rowdy group would visit late at night. He often would pay them only in Coca-Cola and Budweiser. For a time, they didn’t mind. “He was cheap, but he would help us,” she said.

Paul and Dwight had fallen out two years before. Cindi was not forthcoming about what had compelled Dwight to go to Paul’s that night. I asked her if she thought Paul was capable of shooting someone. She said she never had a doubt he was. He would tell everyone who entered the home that he was carrying weapons. She said he was worse when he was drunk. Cindi suggested that Paul could go through a case of beer before 12 in the afternoon. McNally, who was sitting with us, asked Cindi why she thought Paul had shot Dwight.

“Let me tell you somethin’, Paul opened the door for Dwight because he knows him,” she began. “For real. It was a reason that Dwight went there, that only I know, but I won’t say right now. I just want you to know about Dwight and Paul. My best friend and his associate. Paul would never have done that. No, Paul’s not the bad guy. And [Dwight’s] not the bad guy either. Whatever happened God intended to happen. He never would have hurt him, no sir.” Her voice began to raise a few octaves as her hands trembled. “We stayed at this man’s house. Only a few people got to see the upstairs. We got to see what downstairs and the upstairs was like. We had it all. Literally.”

Cindi, increasingly emotional, assured us that no break-in had taken place, that the story the police were telling was surely inaccurate. McNally suggested that maybe Paul didn’t recognise Dwight and that is what caused the shooting. Cindi shook her head. I asked if he had simply gone to Paul’s house to talk. She didn’t respond to either question.

“It killed Paul. Reality set in that he killed his friend, Dwight D Eisenhower. He had nicknames for both of us. He called me CC Rider,” she said, the tears finally escaping down her face. “There is more to this story than people will ever know.”

* * *

Paul MacLeod wanted to be buried in a gold suit. It didn’t happen. He never got life insurance and died with a $17,000 lien on his home that he had taken out just months prior, so his remains ended up in an urn, one decorated with the visage of Elvis Presley. Only about 60 people turned up for his funeral on 12 August, three weeks after his death, at Christ Episcopal Church. His two daughters were in attendance; his son Elvis Aaron Presley MacLeod, who tended to the museum with his father for many years, was not.

Reverend Bruce D McMillan, who had been Paul’s preacher for many years, presided over the service. Annie Moffitt, Paul’s purple-haired black friend, sang show-stopping versions of Amazing Grace and Walking Around Heaven for the attendees. Mayor Buck was there too, as dapper as ever. The entire thing lasted less than an hour.

It was Elvis Presley week in nearby Memphis. Every August, in the runup to the anniversary of Presley’s death on 17 August, the town plays host to parades and conventions, to impersonator contests and singalongs. The goings-on in Holly Springs proved far more telling, however. A spectacle of simultaneous remembrance and denial was in store for all of us. It was in the air. Half a country away, that very same week, Ferguson, Missouri had become a police state because an unarmed black man had been struck down by an armed white one; in Holly Springs it was just an opportunity for commerce.

If paying off Paul’s outstanding debts meant luring some of those who had converged on Memphis to take a posthumous tour of his home or buy a Graceland Too shot glass, so be it. One cannot say the man would not have wanted it that way, that he would not have indulged in the opportunism that would inevitably come with his passing. T-shirts and plastic cups were sold at a tent outside Paul’s home, dilapidated male and female mannequins displaying the pastel blue and pink T-shirts while various “lifetime members” of the museum gave tours of the space.

I passed Cindi a few blocks from the house. She was distraught and said that she had been drinking. She had been walking around the neighbourhood, working up the courage to go over to Graceland Too while all those strangers were there, touring the place where her husband and her friend had died. Eventually, she was given a tour by one of the “lifetime members”. She broke down about halfway through.

That evening, there was a larger public memorial at the town’s multipurpose centre. As the light died around the town, the college students that often made up Paul’s customer base began to show up. Alcohol flowed freely. Elvis songs blared from a PA set up in the middle of the street. Tyler Clancy, the owner of a barbecue joint and cafe in nearby Red Bank who lives across the street from Graceland Too, set up a stand in his front yard where he sold “The Paul MacLeod”: a deep-fried version of the peanut butter and banana sandwich that was Elvis’s favourite. A screening was held just after midnight of various short films people had made about Paul over the years. And then the place thinned out. Paul MacLeod had received a hero’s send-off, no questions asked.

* * *

“What I can’t get Cindi to tell me is, why did he shoot him? I don’t know,” McNally said to us a few days later. She was in between blues sets at a fancy wine bar in nearby Oxford and was having a rough day. We shared some whiskeys.

“David was bipolar. He had some kind of bleeding ulcer or stomach cancer, he had something going on in his gut, I don’t know what, but it was untreated and it was bad,” she continued. “He was suicidal. He was ready to die.” Cindi had gone home, leaving him for a couple of weeks because the stress level, exacerbated by their poverty, had got out of control. McNally confirmed Knecht’s assertion that Cindi had filed domestic violence charges against Dwight. Given Dwight’s previous record, he was facing a longer prison term than he had ever known. According to McNally, Cindi immediately regretted doing that, knowing it would trigger his frequently unhinged emotions. “He really didn’t want to go back to jail.”

David was bipolar. He had some kind of bleeding ulcer or stomach cancer. He was suicidal. He was ready to die Shannon McNally

While Cindi was at her parents’, McNally had fed Dwight every day and eventually started putting him up. He stayed with her for the three days and nights before the shooting. When he came around that Tuesday night, ostensibly after being on Paul’s porch earlier in the evening, McNally could tell something was amiss. “There was a lot going on with him and his energy. I knew if I brought him in my house and anything went wrong …” she said, before trailing off.

McNally offered to get Dwight a room at the Holly Inn, the $45-a-night motel on the increasingly destitute north end of town. She asked if he wanted to go to the emergency room, but he seemed more concerned with the $40 he owed to someone he had been staying with off and on. The person had held on to his belongings and would not give them back until he paid them. McNally gave him $20. “I just didn’t have that much cash on me,” she remembered. “I said, ‘David [Dwight], I need one more day. I’ll get you squared away in the morning,” she said.

“I trust you Ms Shannon,” she remembered him saying. He was worried about facing five years in jail because of the domestic violence charge, if it went through. McNally knew she could not help him fast enough. “As though he was in a hospice, I knew he was dying. I knew he was dying that night.”

When McNally saw a text from Tim Liddy the next morning, she already knew. She had warned Dwight away from suicide; she feared he might try to provoke a police officer or jump off a nearby bridge. She told him that if he wanted her to take him to the emergency room, to call. Before he left, Dwight said to her: “It’s going to be big, Ms Shannon.” And then he was gone.

Soon after, Paul MacLeod was gone too.

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread

This is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in n+1. To find out more, visit nplusonemag.com