* Illustration: Riccardo Vecchio * The celebrated career of French Anderson collapsed suddenly in July 2004. That month, the 67-year-old scientist, famously known as the father of gene therapy, was arrested on charges of molesting the daughter of a colleague. According to the claim, Anderson molested the girl, Mei Lin (not her real name), from 1997 to 2001, starting when she was 10 and he was 60.

Anderson, former director of the University of Southern California's Gene Therapy Laboratories, insists he is innocent. A mentor to Lin, he admits pressuring her, sometimes aggressively, to do well in school. If the relationship was unusually close — over the years, Anderson treated Lin to fancy dinners, coached her to a karate national championship, and even took her shopping for a prom dress — it had not seemed troubling to outsiders until Anderson was arrested.

The trial that followed was sordid and dramatic. Lin, then 17, claimed that Anderson had crawled under the desk and sucked her toes as she played videogames at his multimillion-dollar home in the tony town of San Marino. He would conduct fake medical exams and thrust against her while she lay on the bed in her underwear reading comic books. "He'd say, 'Please, I need this,'" Lin testified.

The case against Anderson was compiled in thousands of pages of court documents. Emails submitted by the prosecution showed Lin blaming Anderson for the abuse, and Anderson appearing to apologize. The key piece of evidence was an audiotape of Lin, secretly wearing a police wire, confronting Anderson in front of the South Pasadena public library. In one exchange, widely reprinted in newspapers, Anderson calls his actions "indefensible" and adds, "I can't explain it. It's just — it's just evil." This February, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Since his incarceration, Anderson has continued to maintain that he is the victim of a false accusation. He has fired his attorney, celebrity defense lawyer Barry Tarlow (last seen defending Mel Gibson) and is in the process of appealing his conviction. His supporters include a coalition of highly placed scientists, the "Friends of French Anderson."

I knew Anderson by reputation, and last spring I began to look into his story. I tried contacting Lin, who didn't want to talk about the case. Her mother waved me away when I knocked on the door of her South Pasadena home. Then, in April, Anderson learned of my interest and began writing me from jail. "I need an objective professional to take up my cause," he wrote. "For you to do that I would think that you would want to convince yourself firsthand of my innocence. Therefore, please feel free to ask me anything you want in any way you want in order to convince yourself. If you want to hit me with some ‘trick' questions to test me, that is fine. I am innocent and I have no problem with you challenging me in any way you want."

Anderson's letter reached me through his wife. Born in north England, Kathy Anderson is petite, with short gray hair and a precise British diction that creates an impression of finely wrought steeliness. "When this began, I had faith in the essential fairness of the courts," she remarked darkly when we first met. "I believed that justice would be done."

When I pull up in front of Kathy's house for the first time, two blond cocker spaniels peer out the window through the blinds. The Andersons were forced to sell their San Marino home to pay the $2.3 million in legal fees incurred during the trial, so for the past nine months Kathy has been living alone in a San Gabriel rental. Seated under a charcoal drawing of a pigtailed Chinese girl, she looks tense and worn. "The whole thing has been a fiasco," she says, as one of the dogs drapes its jowls across her knee. "The actual story is very different from the one presented in the trial."

The Andersons have been married for 46 years. Until retiring recently, Kathy was surgeon in chief at Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles and also president of the American College of Surgeons — the first woman to occupy that post. French Anderson's career was even more luminous. A fervent believer in the potential of gene therapy, in 1990 he gave the world's first experimental gene treatment to Ashanthi De Silva, a 4-year-old born with a rare genetic disorder. Ashanthi grew stronger, and Anderson was hailed as the hero of a new age in medicine. He and his wife were invited to dine at the White House. In 1995, he was runner-up for Time's Man of the Year, losing to Newt Gingrich.

In the months since Anderson went to prison, Kathy has continued to defend him and fight his conviction. She describes him as brilliant but naive and socially awkward: a scientist who tried to help a troubled teenage girl, only to become a target of her rage. "She showed him these cuts she'd made on her arm and said, ‘What are you going to do about it?'" Kathy recalls. "It was frightening. He just wanted to get away."

At first, I presumed Kathy was fooling herself — the hoodwinked wife still in denial. But she doesn't strike me as particularly credulous. "He's really only comfortable in a scientific environment," she says flatly, adding that Lin took advantage of this: screaming accusations at Anderson, who could do little but mumble apologies. She even says Lin planted fake evidence to make Anderson seem more guilty, noting that a key prosecution document — an email from Lin to Anderson that explicitly alleged sexual abuse — existed only in draft form on Lin's computer, a point that was made repeatedly during the trial. "There was no proof that it had even been sent," she says.

Kathy isn't sure what would motivate Lin to do something so vengeful, but she suggests that the timing of the accusation is significant. Lin's mother, Yi Zhao, a hematologist, had spent 10 years working in Anderson's lab, only to have her salary slashed when the company that he founded abruptly collapsed in 2003. "Yi was enraged," Kathy says. "She blamed French." Although Kathy doesn't think that Zhao would have coached her daughter to lie, she believes there may have been unconscious pressure.

Another possible explanation, of course, is that Kathy is simply unable to face her husband's crime. When I ask how she can be sure that French is innocent, she looks startled. "When you've been married to someone for 46 years, you know what that person is capable of," she says with some asperity. "And this is not something that French is capable of."

It's not an argument that would hold up in court. But I find Kathy's straightforward account unexpectedly convincing. In medicine, the simplest diagnosis is usually the right one. Patients with sore throats tend to have colds, not cancer. By that rule, the most likely explanation for Anderson's conviction is that he is guilty. But diagnoses can also be wrong. Mistakes happen, in both hospitals and courtrooms — and a molestation claim is particularly fraught. Anderson was forced to leave USC immediately after he was charged, two full years before the trial. "It was appalling," says Leslie Weiner, former chair of the university's neurology department. "They shut down his lab the minute the accusation came out."

I agree to investigate Anderson's case. As I leave, Kathy gives me three books, including a hardback biography by Bob Burke and Barry Epperson, W. French Anderson: Father of Gene Therapy, and Altered Fates, an account of the rise of gene therapy, by Chicago Tribune reporters Jeff Lyon and Peter Gorner. "It's been so awful," she says reflectively. "Just talking with you... For the first time in months, I feel a tiny bit of hope."

Anderson after his 2004 arraignment.

AP Photo/The Pasadena Star-News, Walt ManciniBack home, I look through the books that Kathy gave me. They're intended as hagiographies — the epic tale of a genetic pioneer on a scientific quest — but what's most striking is Anderson's inescapable oddness. He was a bright but strange boy who grew up to be a bright but strange man.

Even as a child, Anderson seemed driven by some intense internal force. Obsessively self-controlled and gratingly grandiose, he charted his workdays according to how productive he had been — a compulsion that began when he was 10. Prone to rages and mocked for stuttering, he found his Oklahoma classmates stupid and often told them so. (Not surprisingly, he was dubbed "the most unpopular boy in school.")

Anderson was eventually sent to the school psychologist, who tried to teach the eccentric 10-year-old to fit in. "He would play another student who would tease me about my stuttering or would say that I thought I was too smart or whatnot," Anderson recalled during the trial. "He taught me how to respond in a nonconfrontational way." Convinced of the benefits of pro-social behavior, Lyon and Gorner write in Altered Fates, "He began to press the flesh, as if working on a five-year plan to become the toast of Tulsa." He dropped his given name, Bill, to become W. French, and began analyzing interactions for their social success. In seventh grade, he was elected class president. "He had learned to manipulate people with the same flair with which he later handled genes," Lyon and Gorner conclude.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Anderson quickly excelled, becoming a track star and publishing eclectic papers, including one outlining a method for multiplying and dividing Roman numerals. He continued to log every hour of his time. (Like a company reporting quarterly earnings to stockholders, he once sent his parents a breakdown of how he spent an average day.) During a year abroad at Cambridge, Anderson met Kathy Duncan in an anatomy class when they were assigned to opposite sides of the head of a cadaver. "He was a genius, no question about it," Kathy recalls.

The couple married in 1961, and both graduated from Harvard Medical School a few years later. Anderson took a job at the National Institutes of Health, beginning what Lyon and Gorner call an "unceasing and at times quixotic sprint" to cure disease by repairing defective genes. Anderson struggled to find a way to insert genes into cells by hand, using a process called micro injection. The approach was slow, inefficient, and only intermittently successful. After abandoning it, Anderson all but disappeared. He dabbled in sports medicine and published a handful of futuristic papers on how gene therapy might be used once certain existing technological hurdles had been overcome. He had the window shades in his NIH office blacked out and frequently sat for long periods in total darkness. At home, he would float for hours in the pool, screened by a 0-foot-high wall of bamboo.

When I first began writing to Anderson, I asked whether he had lost faith in the promise of gene therapy during that dispiriting time. He replied: "Some things you just know, down deep, are correct. For me these have included such diverse areas as: belief in God, belief that Kathy would be my lifelong and eternal and only mate, belief that Roman numerals and any numerical system could be used for all arithmetic operations, and belief that gene therapy would work."

Anderson struggled until 1984, when MIT researcher Richard Mulligan devised a way to safely insert genes into cells using a retrovirus rather than a needle. At the time, no one knew what would happen to a person who had a foreign gene inserted — a complex process in which the patient's cells were "infected" by a virus that had been genetically modified to include human DNA. But Anderson believed profoundly in the power of gene therapy to cure inherited diseases and wanted to test that theory. Although experiments in animals seemed to show that the procedure was safe, regulators were wary, and in 1988, the NIH's Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee unanimously denied Anderson's proposal to begin human testing. Anderson demanded a hearing before the full committee, many of whom were nonscientists. The idea, Anderson explained after the fact, was to "change the playing field" through a "carefully planned emotional appeal."

"I was asked, ‘What's the rush in trying to get your protocol approved?'" Anderson said during the hearing. "A patient dies of cancer every minute in this country. Since we began this discussion 146 minutes ago, 146 patients have died of cancer."

Anderson's trial was approved 16 to 5, with the dissenting votes cast by the five molecular biologists on the committee who stressed the lack of good test results in animals. A few months later, in May 1989, he conducted the first human safety test for gene therapy, inserting a harmless marker gene into a 52-year-old man. A year later, Anderson took the next step: giving 4-year-old De Silva a transfusion of blood cells that had been genetically modified to include a functioning ADA gene, which helps the body counter infections. Although De Silva's immune disorder — caused by a mutation in the gene that produces ADA — could be partly controlled through an artificial supplement, PEG-ADA, Anderson hoped to create a permanent cure.

Now 21, De Silva is a senior in college. Although she continues to need PEG-ADA, her health has been fairly stable. Her mother, Van De Silva, believes that the injections of genetically enhanced blood administered by Anderson saved Ashanthi. "If not for him, I don't think my daughter would be alive," she says fervently. "He's a good man. A good man."

The scientific consensus on Anderson's experiment is murkier. The medication De Silva took throughout the trial and which she continues to take today is proven to boost T-cell count and may have been the real cause of her improvement. Amazingly, even 17 years later, it remains unclear whether Anderson's treatment actually worked.

But no one denies the impact that the trial had on the burgeoning field. Donald Kohn, who directs the gene-therapy program at Childrens Hospital, believes that without Anderson's push, it might have been another 10 to 15 years before gene therapy was tried on a person. "He had this idea of gene therapy being the future of medicine and did what was necessary to realize that idea," Kohn states.

There is a story that Anderson tells in Altered Fates about walking into his adviser's office as a freshman, carrying an itemized plan for his own future greatness. "I had my four college years all planned, my entire life diagrammed out, really, down to the last detail," he recalls. As Anderson tells it, when he ran into his adviser years later, the scientist blurted, "Hey, I remember you. You're French Anderson, the guy who had his whole life planned out. By God, you went ahead and did exactly what you said you were going to do, didn't you?"

Kathy Anderson in her Los Angeles home.

Photo: Brigitte SireMy second letter from Anderson arrived in late May. At his invitation, I had sent a list of what I felt were the most incriminating pieces of evidence from the trial and highlighted explanations in his testimony that appeared inconsistent. I also asked Anderson some questions about himself, including one about his scholarly interest in Kant.

Anderson skipped the questions about the trial, which he said he would answer separately, but chatted freely about Kant, noting that he considered the philosopher a kindred spirit. "Kant said: ‘Two things fill me with wonderment: the starry firmament above us and the moral conscience within us,'" Anderson wrote. "That is just how I feel."

The reply did little to clarify the increasingly complicated picture I was getting of Anderson's personality. While waiting for his answers, I had met with several of Anderson's former colleagues, who I hoped could shed some light on the case — including Laurence Kedes, director of USC's Institute for Genetic Medicine. Kedes testified at Anderson's trial, and while he admits to not knowing the truth of the case — "you never really know your colleagues" — he calls Anderson "scrupulously honest."

Such rectitude could seem cocky — as when Anderson wrote to the IRS inviting them to audit his lab. More often, it was merely priggish. When I mentioned one such story to Anderson, he confirmed it with relish. "As I was munching a donut at [the Gene Therapy Institute], it occurred to me that I was receiving an unauthorized gratuity from a private company," he explained. "I therefore insisted on paying for my donut."

Kedes isn't the only one who found the allegations against Anderson implausible. In the lead-up to sentencing, more than 200 scientists and patients submitted letters testifying to Anderson's good work and upstanding character. One of these came from Weiner, the former USC neurology chair, who collaborated with Anderson on a genetic treatment for multiple sclerosis. "I have never had an instance where he did anything dishonest," Weiner says. "There are not a lot of people I can say that about."

Indeed, Anderson often seems incapable even of thinking badly of someone — a blind positivism that has led to some bizarre choices. Several associates were privately horrified when Anderson began working with Fred Hall, a controversial surgical researcher who later published a thinly veiled novel about gene therapy that featured an all-powerful villain named Dutch Henderson. For all of his trust, Anderson could also be paranoid. After receiving death threats from opponents of gene therapy — who condemned it as "playing God" — Anderson, who already had a black belt in tae kwon do, became increasingly fixated on self-defense. He took courses in surveillance, explosives, and car bomb detection, and spent hours relentlessly improving his marksmanship at the nearby shooting range. "We used to joke that you could have made a little soap opera out of French's lab," recalls Nori Kasahara, who collaborated with Anderson before moving to UCLA. Kedes agrees. "French would take anybody into his lab. No barrier, no filter." He shrugs. "If he's guilty of anything, it's being an appalling judge of character."

The Andersons on their wedding day in 1961.

Photo: Courtesy of Kathy AndersonIn 1997, Anderson's colleague of four years, a Chinese hematologist named Yi Zhao, confessed she was having trouble with her twin 10-year-old daughters, Mei and Jiao Lin, neither of whom was adjusting easily to their move from China to the US. Mei Lin, in particular, was prone to tantrums and so shy that she rarely spoke. Anderson helped her get an appointment with a speech therapist at Childrens Hospital. He also began teaching her karate.

Close to neither her parents nor her sunnier, more docile sister, Lin spent long afternoons at the Andersons' house, playing with the dogs or sparring with French in the Olympic-sized tae kwon do ring in the backyard. A photo taken in 1998 in the Andersons' leaf-covered driveway shows a young Lin, in socks and a white karate gi, playfully kicking at Anderson's head. That same year, the pair, accompanied by Lin's mother, traveled to Florida for the national championships, each winning their respective age category.

Despite her success, Lin quit karate soon after the tournament. Anderson then pushed her to try softball and soccer — social sports that were intended, he explained later, to help her make friends. He could also be stern. Anderson's 1999 Christmas gift to Lin, then 12 years old, consisted of a two-page typed letter on the subject of self- discipline. "Most of what we do in life we do because we need to do it, not because we want to," he wrote. "The saying I adopted when I was 14 and which I have used every time I do not want to do something I should do is: ‘An educated person is the person who does the thing that needs to be done at the time it needs to be done whether he wants to do it or not.'"

As Lin grew older, Anderson took an interest in her class schedule and made up paragraphs stuffed with SAT words for Lin to memorize. (One, titled "Who Is Mei Lin?," begins: "Mortified in social situations, admonished by her mother, maligned by teachers, ostracized by classmates, Mei Lin was not a happy 5th grader.") At dinners and on long, aimless drives around Pasadena, Anderson would exhort Lin to work hard, praising her abilities and intimating that she could someday carry on his research. "He told me that he loved me. That I had his brain," Lin recalled during the trial.

For a time, the results seemed salutary. Once too shy to speak, Lin did well in school and got accepted to a Johns Hopkins summer program for gifted students. She also excelled in soccer, where she began to make friends. She appeared grateful to Anderson and in a ninth-grade essay on her life wrote: "All through my self-doubts, French was there. He gently led me to how I am now."

But in 2003, not long after her 16th birthday, Lin became moody. She applied for a summer job with a teen help line but quit soon after starting. She also had begun to make small cuts on her arms. At one point, she visited a school counselor and said that an unnamed "family friend" had molested her. The counselor secretly alerted the police, who showed up unexpectedly at Lin's house and demanded to speak with her privately. Lin recanted, saying that it was all a misunderstanding. But her mother, in a panic, immediately called the family's most influential friend: French Anderson. On the phone, Anderson calmed Zhao and counseled against finding Lin a therapist. Zhao agreed, but the door had been opened. Lin's life was beginning to unravel, and Anderson's soon would too.

__The year 2003 __ was the start of a bad time for Anderson. Gene therapy had proven to be more dangerous than investigators expected. In 1999, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died just four days into a trial after an experimental treatment provoked a massive immune response. A 2003 trial to treat immunoadeficiency with gene therapy was halted when four of the 11 subjects developed leukemia. Soon even Anderson, whose work at USC was supported by a multimillion-dollar agreement with pharmaceutical giant Novartis, was feeling the pinch. As one of his collaborators, Nori Kasahara, recalls, Anderson's industry funding "was cut and it was cut and it was cut."

A couple of years before, Anderson had sought out a longtime friend, investor Robert Monks, and persuaded him to fund a new company, Farmal (an acronym for French Anderson and Robert Monks at Last). On Anderson's recommendation, Yi Zhao was hired as director of research, overseeing the development of commercial gene-therapy cures. Initial experiments proved discouraging, however, and in March 2003, Monks abruptly pulled out. Anderson was forced to lay off two-thirds of the lab overnight. Zhao remained, though at a reduced salary.

In June that year, Anderson sent Lin a rather desperate letter: "Bob Monks is going to sue me because we did not make Farmal profitable quickly enough," he wrote woefully. "Charles Spence, the Caltech grad student I tried to befriend by offering him a job, is sueing [sic] me... And Maria Gordon is sueing me because I would not join her company. It folded, and she thinks that it would not have failed if I had joined... So here are three people who were friends and colleagues, all three of whom I tried my best to help, and all three are sueing me."

Then, in November, Anderson lost even Lin's support. Shortly before Thanksgiving, she wrote Anderson an email confronting him about his abuse. The following May, after a second counselor alerted police, Lin agreed to help pursue prosecution. At the investigators' suggestion, she arranged a meeting with Anderson in front of the library and arrived wearing a wire.

In the wake of the encounter, Anderson wrote a letter to San Marino police chief Arl Farris, whom he knew socially, saying he feared that Lin might be trying to extort him. "What if Mei says that she will destroy our reputations by telling her school that she was sexually abused by FA unless we give her money?" Anderson wrote in a letter cosigned by Kathy.

A few days later, two detectives came to Anderson's house, ostensibly in response to the note. One was wearing hidden recording equipment. Anderson chatted comfortably about his achievements, offering the detectives a copy of his biography and reiterating his connection to Arl Farris. The officers were polite and for the most part acted as if they were sympathetic. Three weeks later, a team of policemen descended on the house and arrested Anderson.

There's no spare office in the courthouse, so I spend three days in a storage closet, surrounded by broken desk chairs and cast-off printers, reading the 6,000-page transcript of Anderson's trial. Horrifying details loom large, like when Lin describes how, when she was about 10, Anderson rubbed her genitals as she hung from a punching bag in the garage, and later ejaculated against her as she lay on a towel in her underwear. But I'm looking for signs of something else: what one of Anderson's colleagues had described as a "Rashomon effect" about the evidence. Read sympathetically, the sinister-sounding emails and conversations with Lin could be interpreted simply as emotional exchanges between a high-strung teenager and a devoted but incautious man.

Anderson told police that around Thanksgiving of 2003, when Lin says she emailed a two-page diatribe detailing his abuse (a message Kathy Anderson claims was never sent), he received a short email that included the provocative sentence: "You sexually abused me." But he added that Lin had recanted the accusation in a subsequent email. "She said, ‘No, you didn't sexually abuse me, but you did emotionally abuse me,'" Anderson recalled on the witness stand. He had no record of either email, he said, because he had deleted them immediately: "I was so embarrassed by it. Kathy was so embarrassed by it."

Explaining the accusation, Anderson said that he believed that Lin had "crashed." He explained: "You don't get much sympathy if you mess up your life. But if you were sexually abused as a child, it's not your fault."

In cross-examination, the prosecution asked why Anderson had then continued to contact Lin, at one point pleading to be allowed to watch her play in an upcoming South Pasadena High soccer match. "I could sit in the stands alone," Anderson wrote to her, "never approach the field or talk with anyone, and leave right after the game."

Anderson said that he still hoped to repair the rift between them — the same explanation he gave when asked why he had pretended to enter therapy when Lin insisted that he seek treatment. Although Anderson dropped out after one session, for two months he continued to send Lin fake reports detailing his therapeutic progress.

The prosecution also presented emails from Lin in which she explicitly confronted Anderson about molesting her. The most damning read:

Although I tried not to, I must bring up what you did to me. And I ask: why? Do you even admit that you did hurt me totally with your sexual acts upon me? Then why did you say that you wouldn't be able to stand it if you didn't have some sort of hope that I would let you do those things again? You know about rape and child molestations, you should know that a person can't erase memories. I know. I've tried to.

Because that message was recovered from the draft folder of Lin's email program, Kathy had argued that it might never have been sent — and may have been planted to provide evidence of alleged abuse. But Anderson wrote a reply, which no one denies was sent, clearly following from Lin's message:

I have thought a great deal about my actions. Since I could never give myself a satisfactory answer, I finally came to the sad conclusion that there must be a very bad part of me that, now that I have recognized it, has to be permanently suppressed.

When Lin requests an explicit apology, however, Anderson replies with a strange, thinly veiled message.

Concept for a Novel. Plot: Extortion of a famous biotech scientist either for money or to acquire bioterrorism expertise.

An exchange: You are correct, and let me explain why. If we were talking face-to-face I would do it. But emails are not safe. They are routinely hacked into... And what would someone do with... an explicit email from a famous person confessing to something terrible? Sell it, or extort money for it. The "confessions" of a world-famous scientist would easily bring $100,000 from a tabloid that would publish them on page 1 with lurid headlines and lots of pictures of all parties involved... Sleaze reporters would be all over South Pas HS interviewing all your classmates and teammates looking for dirt; likewise, all over USC... If I saw you and your family destroyed, and my whole career down the tubes, and all the thousands of people abandoned who would have been helped by the cures that your mother and I are developing, then I can understand what would drive a person to suicide. For me, a powerful 9-mm bullet through the head would be the way to go...

The Black Talon 9-mm bullet is said to be able to blow half the brain out the other side of the skull. Just in case, I have bought the ammunition.

In response, Lin berates Anderson for threatening to commit suicide and he becomes sulky. "If you think that it was stupid or emotional of me to go out and buy the ammo, okay maybe it was," he writes petulantly. "You couldn't think any less of me than you already do."

Since my first visit, Kathy has moved out of the temporary rental to a spacious two-story in a gated community 15 miles farther east, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. "The back of beyond," Kathy says, giving me directions over the phone. When I arrive at her home at the end of a long day sifting through emails in the courthouse closet, I'm tired and irritable. We sit in the living room and sip water with Pablo Valencia, a USC colleague who is organizing Friends of French Anderson. His letter exhorts supporters to remember their "moral duty to help in this struggle, so that an extraordinary human being such as French is not forgotten."

That day, I can't bring myself to ask Kathy any questions and am afraid to mention my growing doubts about Anderson's innocence. Instead, we chat about other things. As Pablo natters on about a recent trip to China, Kathy sits with her hands in her lap, appearing distracted but elegant. The image reminds me of a photo in Anderson's biography, taken a few years after French and Kathy were married. In the picture, Kathy is perched on the edge of a coffee table. She is beautiful: slender as a doll, with fine blond hair and gray eyes. French, seated kitty-corner to her on the sofa, is young and handsome in a dark suit. Though looking at the camera, he is leaning toward Kathy, resting one hand on his knee with the ease of an athlete: a Harvard standout and track star with ambitious plans to revolutionize medicine.

Now, as the three of us sit awkwardly in the living room, Kathy tells a strange story. During the move to her new house, the two spaniels escaped and couldn't be found for a day. That night, Kathy recalls, she had a dream in which a friend brought the lost dogs back. They were dirty, with mud on their paws, and they ran right past her. "They didn't even notice me," Kathy says. "Just went straight to look for their toys, like they hadn't even been gone." The next day, the dogs were returned exactly as Kathy had imagined it.

It's a happy ending, and I can't understand why Kathy looks devastated. Then she turns to me. "The point is," she says, "why didn't I foresee what was going to happen to French?"

Although Kathy is referring to what she sees as Lin's betrayal, she might also be talking about her own choices. "It's not easy being married to a genius," she once told me bluntly. "Have you read A Beautiful Mind? John Nash. He was a genius."

It's a strange comparison. Nash, I point out, was schizophrenic. His wife spent years caring for a husband who was profoundly delusional and unable to function, let alone give in return any love or emotional support. When I mention this, Kathy looks stunned. "Yes," she says finally. "The parallels are not entirely there."

But I can't help wondering about the sacrifices that Kathy may have made in deference to what she believed was Anderson's special brilliance. I also wonder how she is able to dismiss the emails between Anderson and Lin. At best, they show an intimacy more suited to dysfunctional lovers than to a 67-year-old man mentoring a teenage girl.

That day, Kathy repeats her conviction that her husband is innocent. A short time later, she sends a letter once again urging me to read A Beautiful Mind. "Only when one understands how different geniuses are can they be understood," she concludes. "And how the devotion of those who love them is absolute."

__On my way back __to the hotel from Kathy's, I drive by the South Pasadena public library, where the confrontation between Lin and Anderson took place. A pretty, Mission-style building flanked by lawns and leafy camphor trees, it is tranquil and suburban, with couples pushing strollers across the diagonal walkways.

I have to file a special petition to listen to the recording of the confrontation, but I can't shake the need to hear the exchange firsthand. If, as Kathy claimed, the library encounter was one-sided — an ambush in which Anderson mumbled apologies while a hysterical Lin berated him and yelled — it still seemed possible that the rest of the evidence had been twisted, or even faked. I also wanted to check Anderson's assertion that Lin had manipulated the police recording, turning the microphone off when she first began talking with him, and back on only when she had gotten him "into a state."

I listen to the recording three times. It begins with Lin in the police van, attaching the wire and talking with the officers. Afterward, there's some rustling as she walks the four blocks to the library. When she arrives, Anderson is waiting. "Hey," she says flatly. Anderson mumbles, then asks if they can go somewhere. Lin asks why. "Because I think I'm going to break down," he says softly.

For 10 minutes, the conversation unspools, Lin growing irritable when Anderson continues to whisper. "Goddamn, I can't hear you," she says crossly at one point. For the most part, though, there is little to hear but the slow burn of misery. When Lin asks Anderson why he did it, the exchange proceeds so calmly that in other circumstances it would seem almost serene.

LIN: Why did you do it?

ANDERSON: I don't know.

LIN: Why?

ANDERSON: I don't know. I don't know. It was the — I'm — I love you for the rest of my life.

LIN: Well, I hurt, OK? And it's gotten worse. As I grow older, it's worse. I go to sleepovers and we talk, and we're girls and stuff. And you know what? I can't. And I can't — I don't know what to do. Why did you do it?

ANDERSON: I don't know.

LIN: Why did you molest me? Why? Why me? Why the fuck?

ANDERSON: I don't know. I know initially I had this stupid idea that this would help you. I know it sounds ridiculously stupid, but...

LIN: What, touching would help me?

ANDERSON: I know.

LIN: Yeah?

ANDERSON: I know. I know. But that was — I had this thought that you had low self-esteem and so — and it's stupid. It's — it's — it's indefensible... I can't explain it. It's just — it's just evil... The guilt I feel, I'm going to have forever. I'm going to have it every single day.

There is no evidence of the gap that Anderson referred to, or of the recording picking up midstream. The last sound is the rustle of the microphone brushing Lin's jacket as she walks away.

It's been eight weeks since I sent my first letter, and Anderson has still not replied to my original questions. I'm beginning to despair of getting answers when my application to visit Anderson at North Kern State Prison is approved. On a Sunday morning, I drive the 30 miles from Bakersfield to Delano, a dusty stretch of truck stops and heavily irrigated fields. When I walk in, Anderson is already seated on the other side of a thick glass window. We'll talk through a phone. After so many months of correspondence, it's disorienting to see him in person. White-haired and lean at 70, his skin is ruddier than I expect, though I notice a slight tremor in his hand as he picks up the receiver.

He's also surprisingly likable, with a shy smile and an attentive warmth. Vaguely embarrassed, he admits to begging the warden for a shaving razor in honor of my visit, and even convinced the barber to conduct an unscheduled haircut. He smiles encouragingly. "So you see, this is a big event."

We begin by talking about prison. Even here, Anderson tells me, he continues to drive himself, sometimes running laps in the exercise yard to the point of exhaustion. When I ask why he would do something so punishing, Anderson describes a conversation he had with the prison psychologist. "We spent an hour talking about why I've been so compulsive all my life," he begins. "Well, now I guess I've got to tell you. When I was a little boy — 2, 3, 4 — my mother always told me that God had a plan for me."

Now that I'm actually talking with Anderson, I bring up the questions I still have about his testimony. But every time I try to pin down an inconsistency, the conversation seems to slip away. At the library, Lin had asked Anderson whether he was guilty enough to turn himself in. Anderson had replied that it "would damage too many people." Why, I ask, would he have even discussed the matter if all he had done was push Lin to study hard? Anderson explains that he was humoring Lin, who was obviously upset. When I insist that this seems odd — wouldn't an innocent man be baffled by the demand that he confess? — he listens patiently and then tells me to imagine having a conversation with a teenage daughter. "Afterwards, are the parents pleased with all they said?"

I want to argue that his explanation doesn't make sense, but there's nothing to do except repeat myself. Each time I do, Anderson offers another earnest but oblique reply. The progression is maddening: like trying to climb a staircase in an Escher drawing.

Instead, I ask about Lin. At the trial, Anderson speculated that she might be taking drugs and described himself as the victim of a strange and mysterious attack. But now, he is forgiving. "My feeling is that she got into this, possibly out of revenge, and her family pushed it," he says. "I think this was a juggernaut that just totally got away from her."

A prison officer announces a five- minute warning. Before I leave, I ask Anderson what he wants from this article. He says that he wants the hundreds of people who supported him to finally hear the facts. "How else is anybody going to know?" he asks. "You're it."

I also ask whether there is anything that he'd like me to tell Kathy. Anderson looks down and quietly begins to cry. "Tell Kathy that her love means everything," he says in a whisper. "As long as she stays with me, I'll be all right."

Jennifer Kahn (jenn_kahn@wiredmag.com) wrote about advances in athletic training in issue 15.06.

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