Part One

Badger had a question about his father. Badger was dying, so he chose his words carefully, because he would only have the opportunity to say them once.

“Why did he do such a bad thing to me?”

Badger's real name was Brian. He shared the name with his father, who was standing trial, accused of an inconceivable crime against him.

Badger was 7. He had fevers, a swollen liver, chronic ear infections, fungus growing under his fingernails. He was on 23 oral medications. He had no immune system. A plague—the worst plague—swam the current of his blood.

When he'd been stronger, he had walked the halls of St. Louis Children's Hospital wearing a sign around his neck with the words BIDS FOR and a huge red pair of lips, trying to coax the nurses to kiss him on the cheek. He idolized Forrest Gump, and to every doctor who entered his room he spoke the famous line from his favorite movie, removing a chocolate from a little box on his bed. The doctors would then toss a quarter into his aluminum can as if it were a piggy bank. Years later, his mother could still remember the jingling.

Badger flatlined twice, and the doctors told his mom not to resuscitate him if it happened again. They advised her to prepare for his funeral and she did, picking out the little white suit he'd once worn as a ring bearer.

So Badger wasn't in the courtroom to read his words to his father himself. Instead he dictated them, had them written down for his mother to read in court in the fall of 1998.

“I think he shouldn't ever be out of jail. He shouldn't have done this.”

Badger's mom, Jennifer Jackson, struggled to get through the words as she read them to a jury and a judge.

“Why can't he say he's sorry?”

Badger's father, Brian Stewart, was in the courtroom. He listened beside his lawyers from behind a wooden table. He wore a military crew cut and a fresh shave, sitting with his hands clasped in front of his chest. He had said nothing in his own defense in the entire six days of the trial, which in St. Charles County, Missouri, was the trial of the century. But the Honorable Ellsworth Cundiff addressed him directly after hearing Badger's words.

“I believe that when God finally calls you, you are going to burn in hell from here to eternity, and maybe that's the only justice that will come of this when you are finally gone,” the judge said. “My thought is that injecting a 10-month-old child with the AIDS virus really puts you in the same category as a war criminal, as the worst war criminal.” He went on: “The maximum I can do with you is life in prison. I don't really think that is a very fair sentence, not with what your son is going to have to go through. He is going to die. We all know that.”

Brian Stewart was a phlebotomist. He worked evenings. His job was to draw blood from patients at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. He was particularly adept at using butterfly needles, the very small kind often used in the military or by doctors to comfort frightened children. If other phlebotomists were struggling with a stingy vein, they would ask Stewart to help find it, and using a gentle pair of hands, he would. But Stewart was a strange man. In court testimony he was said to enter areas of the hospital that he shouldn't, giving himself access to all kinds of blood. To have sometimes drawn too much blood from patients. To have kept vials of blood in the freezer of his home.

Stewart was tall and dapper with a prominent dimple in his right cheek. He dressed better than the other phlebotomists, in khakis and ironed shirts, and he wore his lab coat even outside the hospital—a detail that would come back to haunt him.

Stewart had served during Desert Storm right before Badger was born. He met Jennifer in the Missouri town of Troy in 1990, as part of a training program for the armed services. “He was so good-looking,” she remembered. He had the crew cut, he dressed nice, and—that dimple. They talked of becoming engaged, though they never followed through.

Jennifer and Badger, age 5, sort through the equipment for his treatment.

Jennifer, by her own admission, had an attraction to troubled men. Years after she and Stewart had separated, she recalled their volatile relationship in an investigator's report. She told the police he bruised her, hit her, bit her. She told them that when he was angry, he threatened to give her an embolism by injecting her with a needle full of air. She said that in December of 1990, while she was pregnant with Badger, Stewart demanded that she have sex with him, and when she refused he stuck his entire hand into her vagina and said that he would “ruin” her for anyone else. He was arrested, then called her from jail apologizing and saying he would get help. The charges were dropped.

Stewart did have a tender side. To celebrate the impending birth of their child, he gave Jennifer a framed poem about parenthood. Before Stewart left for Desert Storm, they discussed what it might be like to raise a son. They agreed the boy would take Stewart's first name, just in case he didn't come back. While Jennifer was in labor, Stewart called her from the Middle East. He wanted to know, “How big is he? What does he weigh? Do I have a son?” Badger was born on February 24, 1991.

When Stewart came home from the war a few months later, Jennifer met him at the airport and he held his boy in his arms and wept. They spent Thanksgiving and Christmas as a family. Stewart might open the door for Jennifer, hold her hand, kiss her, talk vaguely of plans for the future—but she says he also smashed a car windshield with his fist during an argument. When she finally told him she didn't want to be with him anymore, he said, I'll decide when I'm going. He'd leave for two or three days, come home for a while, and then leave again.