I love the serendipity of the YouTube algorithm.
It’s given me some terrific viewing over the years. I think the first time I saw a Home Free video was on YT. I discovered Jamie Dupuis, Justin Johnson, James Butler, and Chris Boden there, all from having one of their videos randomly appear in my feed.
There are some amazing creators out there.
Such was the case Saturday, when I came across a video in Business Insider’s “Authorized Account” series.
This one introduced me to Jackee Taylor. Her claim to fame? Over 40 years in the United States Federal Witness Protection Program, AKA WITSEC.
Writers love the concept of WITSEC. So does Hollywood. Writers and filmmakers can do just about anything they want with a character involved in the program because there’s basically nothing available for research. The Marshal’s Service is notoriously tightlipped about the program. They barely confirm that it exists. Ask them any questions about it and you get a stock answer along the lines of “We don’t discuss the program.”
Gerald Shur, the man usually credited with creating WITSEC, wrote a book in 2002 talking about the program. His co-author Pete Early wrote a moving tribute to Shur after his death in 2020.
Jackee Taylor
Taylor found herself forced into witness protection in 1982 as a seven-year-old child. Her father, Butch Crouch, was the VP of the Cleveland chapter of Hell’s Angels, and he’d just turned state’s evidence against the chapter. Estranged from his family, he told the feds he wanted witness protection and to be reunited with his family in the program.
In the entertainment world, everyone would have been hustled off from Cleveland to some lovely suburban home with a white picket fence, two dogs, and shiny new cars in the driveway.
Taylor, her mom, and two younger siblings ended up in Florida for a couple of months in a safe house, then moved to their new home.
In Montana.
In February.
The Taylors received just under $1,300 per month for a short time. Out of that, they had to pay for the motel, food, and try to find a car. On foot. In Montana. In February.
Remember, this was 1982. There was no internet to go get advice from.
Taylor goes on to explain how hard it was for her and her siblings. The Marshals told her family that they were in danger from the Hell’s Angels chapter, that if they didn’t strictly obey the WITSEC rules, they’d be killed. That’s heady stuff for a seven-year-old kid whose first memories are of hanging out at the chapter house.
Harleys were no longer the sounds of friends. Now, the grumble of a big bike meant danger.
We teach kids to always tell the truth, she’s said in several interviews. Now she had to lie to people. She wasn’t Jackee Crouch from Ohio, she was Jackie Taylor from Wisconsin, at least according to her Social Security Number.
She never got a new birth certificate, either. They gave her a passport, though.
That birth certificate issue still causes problems today.
WITSEC Reality
Her video led me to DuckDuckGo, which led me to a bunch of interviews she’s done over the years. She mentions that the USMS considers her in breach of the WITSEC contract, but she points out that she never signed a contract. Besides which, she was seven at the time. Kids can’t be held to a contract.
The biggest issue she faced at the time was an almost complete lack of support once her mom got a job. They’d been cut off from literally every piece of family they’d ever had. Her dad was in prison. Her grandparents were back in Ohio and she wasn’t allowed to call or write them. She thought the guys in the chapter—her “uncles”—were out to kill her and her mom and siblings.
She later found out that wasn’t true at all. Sure, the club had a beef with her dad. But never with the rest of the family, they said.
She went public, she says, because of that lack of support. She said she “stormed” the federal courthouse twice to get assistance on getting her birth certificate, in part because not having one kept her from getting a marriage license.
Since 2010, she’s made it her mission to speak for the 19,200+ people in WITSEC because not much has changed. Therapy and counseling are available now, but she still wants to see dedicated caseworkers assigned to the kids involved. After all, they didn’t ask to be uprooted from everything they’ve ever known. She wants to see more oversight of the program as well.
I found her whole story fascinating. I’ve dropped the video here, and I’ll share some links after.
“Billings woman tells of trouble with federal witness protection program” at the Billings Gazette (2010). This is the first time that Jackee told her story.
“Turning On the Lights” at The Montana Quarterly.
Interview at All The Wiser podcast.
Jackee’s own podcast, Relative Unknown.
An AMA (Ask Me Anything) at Reddit (2020).
“Children of Witness Protection Struggle to Reclaim Identities” at ABC News (2016)
Reading
Monday was Diana’s birthday. I’d been dutifully checking her Amazon list but couldn’t see any new entries, so I decided Saturday evening that I’d get her a gift certificate to Bear’s Bookstore, the local independent bookstore. I planned to get it Sunday or Monday but they’re closed both days. So I told her we’d go Thursday, which we did.
The store’s been around since the late 90s. Gabby bought it in 2023 and has been running it ever since with Bear’s help.
We spent about an hour there Thursday, making our way through the shelves. It reminded me very much of The Book Loft in Columbus. Gabby doesn’t have 32 rooms yet, but she’s looking to expand.
Check out the store’s Facebook page or Bookstore.org page.
I picked up the first couple of Body Farm books and I have every intention of ramping up my reading Real Soon™.
Writing
I made a tough decision this week.
I took over the Mystery Writers Forum in 2006 when the original owner realized she no longer had the time to run it after nine years. Since then, through a number of fits and stumbles, it’s been chugging along pretty steadily.
But most of the traffic these days comes from bots. There have only been five new threads this year and six posts, and I think those were all automated threads welcoming new members.
As much as I’ve enjoyed having the site around, it’s taking storage space on the server that I can’t really afford to give up, and I can’t see that anyone’s getting any real return from it.
How much space? The error log alone is 70,685,974,528 bytes. That’s 70.6 gigabytes.
I don’t think I have any software that could read a file that size.
I think it’s time.
I’m going to pull the plug on the forum, probably by Thanksgiving.
I know the Wayback Machine has taken plenty of snapshots of the site, so the content won’t disappear forever. It makes me more than a little sad that things are going away, but MWF has been around in one form or another since 1997, and that’s one hell of a run on the internet.
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