The flight from São Paulo to Hartford took eleven hours, and Gabriel Fernandes spent most of it reading.
He had printed everything he could find: the trial transcripts, the police reports, the newspaper clippings from the Brookfield Journal and the Hartford Courant, the deposition of a demonologist named Ed Warren. He had organized them in a manila folder that he now held in his lap like a talisman, its edges soft from handling. Outside the oval window, the Atlantic was a gray nothing below gray clouds, and Gabriel felt, as he often did in open spaces, that he was very small and that the world was paying him no particular attention.
This was, he had learned, not always a comfort.
He was twenty-four years old, a graduate student in forensic psychology at USP, writing a thesis on the intersection of religious belief and criminal defense strategy. His advisor, Dr. Couto, had suggested something more tractable — a comparative study of Brazilian júri popular cases, perhaps. Something domestic. Something that would not require an international research visa and a university travel grant and eleven hours over the ocean.
But Gabriel had read about Arne Cheyenne Johnson in his second year of undergraduate study, and the case had lodged in him the way certain things do: not as an obsession exactly, but as a persistent wrongness, like a splinter too deep to reach.
The first person in American history to claim demonic possession as a defense in a murder trial.
He said it to himself now, quietly, his lips barely moving, as the seat belt sign illuminated and the plane began its long descent into the gray Connecticut sky.
The town of Brookfield in February was the color of old newsprint.
Gabriel had booked a room at a bed and breakfast in the center of town — a white clapboard building with black shutters and a porch that sagged slightly on the left side, like a face after a stroke. The woman who owned it was named Mrs. Hargrove, and she was in her seventies, with the particular briskness of New England women who had survived many winters and expected to survive many more.
"You're here for research?" she said, when he explained himself at the check-in desk.
"Yes. I'm a student. From Brazil."
She looked at him with the frank appraisal of someone who had no malice but also no pretense. He was slight, dark-haired, with the kind of face that people described as gentle, which he had always understood to mean that it was easy to overlook.
"The Johnson case," she said. It was not a question.
She handed him his key — an actual key, brass, on a plastic fob — and said, "Room four. Up the stairs, turn left. Don't leave the window open at night. It gets below zero."
"People come here for that every few years," she said, already turning back to her small television. "Never seems to do them much good."
He had arranged to meet, the following morning, with a retired detective named Paul Shaughnessy, who had been a junior officer with the Brookfield Police Department in 1981 and had been present at the scene on February 16th of that year.
They met at a diner on Federal Road. Shaughnessy was in his late sixties, heavyset, with the look of a man who had once been powerful and now carried that former power as a kind of ballast, weighing him down pleasantly into his seat. He ordered coffee and a piece of apple pie and looked at Gabriel with calm, professional interest.
"You want to know what I saw," he said.
"If you're willing to tell me."
"I've told it plenty of times." He shrugged. "It doesn't get any less strange."
Gabriel opened his notebook — a small, spiral-bound thing he'd brought from São Paulo, its cover printed with a map of the São Paulo metro system — and uncapped his pen.
"Alan Bono," he said. "February 16th, 1981."
"That's right." Shaughnessy wrapped both hands around his coffee mug. "Bono was the victim. He managed the kennel where Debbie Glatzel worked — the Brookfield Dog Kennel, on Newbury Road. He was thirty-six. He'd been drinking that afternoon. Wine, mostly. He took Debbie and her sister and Arne Johnson out to lunch, came back, kept drinking. Things went bad in the evening."
"The call came in around nine-thirty, nine forty-five. By the time we got there, it was over." He paused. "Bono was on the ground in the driveway. He'd been stabbed multiple times with a pocket knife. A small blade — two and a half inches. The number of wounds was..." He paused again, in a different way, looking at his pie without seeing it. "Inconsistent with the size of the knife."
Gabriel wrote this down, though he already knew it. He wrote it because writing things made them real in a useful way — contained them.
"He was there. Not trying to run. Just standing there." Shaughnessy's voice was steady but had acquired a certain careful quality, like a man walking on ice he knew was thin. "He was twenty-three years old. He worked as a tree surgeon. He was, by every account, a mild-mannered young man. He was engaged to Debbie Glatzel. There was no history of violence."
"He didn't deny it." A distinction, Gabriel noted. "He said he didn't remember all of it. That was his claim."
The Glatzel case was where it had started, and this was the part Gabriel had always found most disturbing — not the murder, but what preceded it.
In July of 1980, six months before Arne Johnson killed Alan Bono, an eleven-year-old boy named David Glatzel began to exhibit what his family described as signs of demonic possession.
It had begun, according to the accounts, after the Glatzel family helped Debbie and Arne move into a new rental property in Brookfield. David had reportedly seen a figure in the house: an old man with black holes for eyes, a thin and desiccated face, and the legs of a goat.
Gabriel had read this and felt the specific discomfort he associated with folk terror — the deep iconographic imagery that bypassed reason and went straight to something older in the brain. He did not believe in demons. He was a secular man, a scientist-in-training. But he understood that certain images accumulated power through centuries of repetition, and that the human nervous system had not entirely caught up with the Enlightenment.
David Glatzel, by the account of his family and of Ed and Lorraine Warren — the paranormal investigators from Monroe, Connecticut, who were called in to help — began to speak in voices not his own, to quote passages from John Milton's Paradise Lost that he had never read, to describe details of people's private lives that he could not have known, to exhibit physical symptoms including bruises, claw marks, and a dramatic loss of weight.
His family called a priest. Then they called two more priests. Then they called the Warrens.
Gabriel had spent considerable time on the Warrens. Ed Warren had described himself as a demonologist — a self-taught one, though he'd had no formal theological training. Lorraine Warren described herself as a light trance medium and clairvoyant. Together they had, by 1980, built a substantial reputation through cases including the Amityville house in New York. They were, depending on your perspective, either the most important paranormal investigators in American history or extraordinarily skilled architects of narrative.
Gabriel was inclined toward the latter view. But he had learned, in his training, that inclination was not argument, and that the most dangerous move in any investigation was to decide the conclusion before examining the evidence.
He spent the afternoon in the Brookfield Public Library, with the help of a young librarian named Hannah who pulled the local newspaper archives with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done it before.
"You're not the first person to look at these," she said, setting a box of microfilm on the table beside him.
"I know. I'm sorry if it's —"
"It's fine." She smiled briefly. "It's history. That's what archives are for."
The microfilm reader was an old machine, and Gabriel sat alone in the back of the library working through the 1980 and 1981 issues of the Brookfield Journal while the afternoon light came through the high windows and moved slowly across the floor.
He found the first mention of David Glatzel in a brief item from August 1980, a single paragraph describing an unusual incident involving a local family that had attracted the attention of the Diocese of Bridgeport. The priest who performed the examination, according to the Warren accounts, had been Father Dennis. Gabriel had the name in his folder. He had tried to reach the Diocese of Bridgeport before his trip and had received a polite letter informing him that they had no comment on the matter.
He moved forward through the months, through the fall of 1980 and into the winter. The trial coverage began in November 1981 — the murder itself having occurred in February, the grand jury indictment following in March, the trial in October.
He stopped at one item dated October 24th, 1981, the day the trial began.
The defense attorney was named Martin Minnella. His strategy — arguing that Johnson was not responsible for his actions because he had taken into himself, voluntarily or not, a demonic entity that had previously afflicted David Glatzel — was rejected by Judge Robert Callahan before the trial even began. The judge ruled that demonic possession was not a legally cognizable defense in the state of Connecticut.
Johnson was tried instead on the claim of self-defense, arguing that Bono had attacked him first. He was convicted of first-degree manslaughter. He served five years of a ten-to-twenty-year sentence and was released in 1986.
Gabriel wrote all of this down, though he had it already. He was writing it again because he was trying to find the shape of something he couldn't quite see.
He sat in the library until Hannah came to tell him they were closing, and he walked back to Mrs. Hargrove's bed and breakfast through streets that were empty and very cold, his breath coming in small white clouds, the manila folder held against his chest.
On his third day in Brookfield, Gabriel went to find the rental house.
It was on Newbury Road, and it still stood — a modest Cape Cod style, white with green shutters, set back from the road behind a screen of bare oak trees. It had passed through several owners since 1980 and was now a private residence occupied, as far as he could determine, by a family who had nothing to do with any of this.
He stood on the road and looked at it for a long time.
He was not, he told himself, expecting to feel anything. He was a researcher. He was gathering visual data, establishing geographical context. He had driven past the Brookfield Dog Kennel on Newbury Road as well, now a different business in the same building, and had felt nothing particular there either — just the ordinary flatness of a place where something terrible had occurred and which had subsequently absorbed itself back into the landscape.
But standing in front of the house on Newbury Road, Gabriel felt cold.
This was not remarkable. It was February in Connecticut, and it was nineteen degrees Fahrenheit. He felt cold the way you felt cold in nineteen degrees.
He was standing on the road, looking at the house, and he became aware — slowly, the way you become aware of a sound you haven't consciously registered — that he had the sensation of being looked at.
The windows of the house were dark. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. The family who lived there presumably worked, went to school, occupied themselves elsewhere.
He stood on the road and looked at the dark windows and felt himself observed.
Stop, he told himself. This is what happens. You read about something long enough, you start to see it everywhere. This is the psychological phenomenon you are writing about.
He took a photograph of the house with his phone. The photograph showed a white house with green shutters and bare oak trees and a strip of gray winter sky.
He walked back to his rental car.
That night, at the bed and breakfast, he couldn't sleep.
This was not unusual for Gabriel — he had a tendency toward insomnia that his mother attributed to his being too much inside his own head, a diagnosis he found both irritating and accurate. He lay in the narrow bed in room four, with the window firmly closed against the below-zero night, and listened to the silence.
New England silence was different from São Paulo silence. São Paulo had no silence, not really — even at three in the morning, the city was a low continuous presence, like an enormous animal breathing. Brookfield at two a.m. was genuinely, thoroughly quiet, and in that quiet, Gabriel's mind moved over the case like fingers over a surface, looking for the catch, the loose edge, the place where it didn't fit.
The thing that had always troubled him — the thing that had first made him want to come here, to sit in this cold room in this cold town — was not the murder. Murders happened. Young men drank and fought and made irreversible decisions. The presence of the Warrens, the elaborate supernatural narrative, the media attention — all of that could be explained as the accretion of mythology around a straightforward act of violence.
What troubled him was the boy.
David Glatzel was eleven years old in the summer of 1980. He had, according to multiple witnesses including two Catholic priests, exhibited behaviors and spoken in voices and demonstrated knowledge that his family could not account for. The Diocese of Bridgeport had ultimately authorized an exorcism — a minor exorcism, the records suggested, not the full rite of Rituale Romanum, but an exorcism nonetheless.
Catholic dioceses did not authorize exorcisms for theatrical purposes. The process was lengthy, skeptical, resistant to easy claims. For the Diocese to have taken the Glatzel case seriously enough to send multiple priests —
He was thinking about what Martin Minnella, Johnson's defense attorney, had actually argued — not the demonic possession defense that had been rejected, but something more specific. Minnella had argued, in his formal pleadings, that Johnson had been present during the exorcism attempts on David Glatzel, and that during one of those sessions, he had — either in genuine spiritual crisis or in psychological collapse — called out to the demon to leave the boy and come into him instead.
Whether you believed in demons or not, this was a remarkable fact. It meant that a twenty-three-year-old man had, in full consciousness, performed an act he believed to be a transfer of supernatural affliction — had, in other words, deliberately taken on what he understood to be a possessing entity in order to protect a child.
And then, six months later, he had stabbed a man to death.
Gabriel sat in the dark room and felt the cold coming through the walls, and thought about the distance between those two events, and found it, suddenly, insufficient.
Part Four: What the Records Said
He had one more appointment before he left Connecticut.
He had spent weeks before the trip trying to locate anyone who had known the Glatzel family in 1980 and had finally, through the Brookfield Historical Society, been connected with a woman named Irene Voss, who had been a neighbor of the Glatzels on the street where they'd lived before the rental property — a woman now in her early eighties who had agreed to speak with him briefly over the phone but had, somewhat surprisingly, agreed when he asked if they might meet in person.
She lived in a retirement community in Danbury, twenty minutes south of Brookfield. He drove down on a Thursday morning, through a light snow that was mostly sleet, and found her in the common room: a small woman with white hair and sharp brown eyes, sitting in a chair by the window with a cup of tea.
She looked at him when he came in and said, "You're younger than I expected."
"I get that sometimes," Gabriel said.
She looked at him for another moment. "You have a kind face," she said. "I don't usually talk about this. Sit down."
"I knew the family for four years before the trouble started," she said. "They were ordinary people. Carl, Judy, the kids. David was always a sensitive child — not unusual-sensitive, just, you know, the kind of child who felt things strongly. He cried at things other children didn't notice." She paused. "I always thought that was a kind of intelligence."
Gabriel thought of himself at eleven — the child who had cried at the news, at injustice, at the death of animals — and said nothing.
"When did you first know something was wrong?" he asked.
"When Judy called me in August." She set down her teacup. "She wasn't — Judy was not a dramatic person. She was very steady, very practical. And she called me and she said, Irene, I don't know what's happening to my boy, and she was crying. Not in a hysterical way. In a frightened way." She paused. "I had never heard Judy cry before. In four years."
Irene Voss was quiet for a moment. The sleet was ticking against the window.
"She said he was sleeping, and she had gone in to check on him, and he was lying on his back with his eyes open, and she spoke to him and he didn't respond, and then he turned and looked at her and what looked back at her from his eyes —" She stopped.
"She said it wasn't her son." Irene's voice was steady, but she had wrapped both hands around her teacup like it was a small source of warmth she needed to keep close. "She said she had looked at her son's face every day of his life, and she knew what was behind his eyes, and what was behind his eyes in that moment was not David."
The common room was very quiet. Someone in another part of the building was playing a television, but it was far enough away that Gabriel could not make out the sound.
"You believe her," he said. It was not a question.
Irene Voss looked at him. "I believe she believed it," she said, carefully. "And I believe that Judy Glatzel was one of the most grounded, sensible people I have ever known. And I believe that something happened in that house that summer that I cannot explain and that I have never been able to explain in the forty-five years since." She picked up her teacup. "Now. You tell me what to do with that."
Gabriel drove back to Brookfield in the sleet and sat in his rental car outside the bed and breakfast and did not immediately go inside.
He was thinking about testimony.
In his training, he had studied the psychology of witness testimony extensively — its malleability, its susceptibility to suggestion, its tendency to harden into certainty the more it was repeated. He had read Elizabeth Loftus. He had read the studies on false memory. He understood, at a cellular level, how stories became true simply by being told.
And he believed all of that.
And he was sitting in a car in a Connecticut sleet storm thinking about a woman in her early eighties who had, for forty-five years, carried the memory of a phone call from a friend who had looked into her son's face and found it empty.
He opened his laptop in the passenger seat. He had one more source he had not yet fully examined — a document he had obtained through an academic database, a psychological evaluation of David Glatzel conducted in the fall of 1980 by a licensed clinical psychologist from Danbury Hospital, as part of the Diocese's assessment process.
The document had been partially redacted. It was dry, clinical, written in the careful language of psychiatric evaluation.
He read through it for the third time.
The evaluating psychologist had noted, under differential diagnosis, the following:
Subject displays symptoms consistent with acute dissociative disorder and possible early-onset psychotic episode. However, the examiner notes several anomalous features that resist standard diagnostic categorization, including (1) subject's demonstrated knowledge of persons and events with no apparent informational access, (2) consistency and specificity of reported visual phenomena across independent accounts, and (3) absence of secondary gain motivation in subject's presentation. Further evaluation is recommended.
Further evaluation is recommended.
Gabriel read that line several times.
He knew what it meant, in the grammar of psychological reports. It was the phrase you used when the data didn't fit the model, when the conclusion you were trained to reach was unsupported by what you had actually seen, when professional caution required you to leave a door open that your training told you should be closed.
Outside, the sleet had become snow — soft, indifferent, covering everything.
Part Five: The Thing Gabriel Couldn't Explain
He had one last thing to do before he flew home.
He had been corresponding, for three months, with David Glatzel himself.
David Glatzel was now fifty-four years old. He had, in 2007, participated in a lawsuit against Lorraine Warren (Ed Warren had died in 2006) and the publisher of a book about the case, arguing that the Warrens had fabricated or dramatically embellished the account of his possession for commercial gain. His brother Carl had told reporters that David had been a deeply troubled boy who had been exploited by the Warrens and subjected to unnecessary religious rituals that had caused lasting psychological harm.
Gabriel had corresponded with David through an intermediary — a Connecticut journalist who had covered the lawsuit — and David had declined to meet in person but had agreed, after several exchanges, to answer written questions.
His answers arrived in Gabriel's email on the morning of his last day in Brookfield.
They were short. David Glatzel had clearly thought carefully about what he was willing to say.
To the question of whether he believed he had been genuinely possessed, he wrote: I believe something happened to me that summer that I didn't understand and couldn't control. I believe the Warrens made it worse. I believe the priests meant well. I believe Arne made a decision that night that changed his life and Alan Bono's life and I have had to live with being the beginning of that chain. Beyond that I don't have answers that would satisfy you or anyone else.
To the question of what he remembered from that summer, he wrote: I remember a feeling of not being alone. Of there being something else with me that I hadn't invited and couldn't ask to leave. Whether that was a demon or a breakdown I was eleven years old and I still don't know. I'm fifty-four and I still don't know.
Gabriel sat with that for a long time.
And then he read the last thing David Glatzel had written, at the bottom of the email, apparently as an afterthought — a single paragraph without a question prompting it:
I want to tell you something I've never told any journalist because I don't think journalists know what to do with it. During the worst of it, in August and September of 1980, there were moments when the thing — whatever it was — would speak. The voices weren't mine. I knew they weren't mine the way you know the difference between your own hand and someone else's. And sometimes what it said wasn't threats or obscenity, which is what the Warrens focused on. Sometimes it said things that were just — sad. Like it was exhausted. Like it had been doing this for a very long time. And once, just once, it said something that I have thought about every day for forty-four years. I was lying on the floor and the priest was praying and Arne was in the room, and the voice said, in a very quiet way, like it was just making an observation: he'll do.
Gabriel read this paragraph until he had it memorized.
Not a threat. Not an accusation. An assessment. The quiet, appraising language of someone who had found what they were looking for.
He sat in the cold room and listened to the New England silence and thought about what it meant to believe something you could not prove and could not disprove. He thought about the gap between the psychological evaluation's anomalous features that resist standard diagnostic categorization and the neat, rational thesis he was going to write about religious belief and criminal defense strategy. He thought about a woman in a retirement home wrapping her hands around a teacup, and a man driving to work each morning at fifty-four with the memory of a voice that had looked through him and found someone else.
He thought about Arne Johnson, who had stood in a courtroom and tried to explain that the thing inside him had made him do it, and who had been told, by the formal judgment of American law, that this was not a thing the law could hear.
He thought about Alan Bono, who had no voice in any of this, who had simply gone to work one morning and been alive and then, through a chain of events that had begun with an eleven-year-old boy in a house on Newbury Road, had stopped.
He thought about the two and a half inch blade and the number of wounds that were, as Paul Shaughnessy had said, inconsistent with the size of the knife.
He drove to Bradley International Airport in the dark and checked in for his flight and sat in the gate and read, without absorbing any of it, a novel he had brought for the return journey.
When they called his row, he stood and gathered his things and joined the line, and the woman in front of him turned to look at him for a moment — a middle-aged woman with dark hair and an unremarkable face — and he felt, for just a second, the specific sensation he had felt on Newbury Road.
The sensation of being looked at.
By something that was assessing him.
He boarded the plane. He buckled his seat belt. He held the manila folder in his lap and looked out the oval window at the dark tarmac.
The plane lifted into the darkness over Connecticut.
Below him, the lights of Brookfield were very small. And then they were gone.
Gabriel Fernandes submitted his thesis to the graduate faculty of USP in October of that year. The thesis was titled Possession as Legal Defense: Belief, Culpability, and the Limits of Secular Law in the State v. Johnson (1981). It received high marks. His advisor noted, in her written evaluation, that the historical research was meticulous and the analysis was rigorous, but that the conclusion felt uncharacteristically tentative — as if the author was not quite certain of his own position.
Gabriel revised the conclusion twice. He could not make it more certain. He submitted it as it was.
He did not return to Brookfield.
He thought about it, sometimes, at night — about David Glatzel's quiet paragraph, about the woman in the retirement home, about the two and a half inch knife. He thought about the careful language of psychological reports and what it meant to leave a door open.
He thought, more than he would have preferred, about the woman in the airport line who had turned to look at him.
He had written it off, immediately and firmly, as projection. As the mind performing exactly the kind of pattern-recognition he had spent three years studying. As nothing.
He had not, in the three years since, been entirely able to convince himself.
He kept the manila folder.
He kept it on his desk, under a stack of other papers, in the office he shared with two other graduate students. Sometimes he would move the papers and see it and leave it there, and sometimes he would take it out and hold it for a while, feeling the soft edges — soft from all the handling, from eleven hours over the Atlantic and three days in a Connecticut winter and the long months before that of reading and rereading in his apartment in São Paulo.
He told himself this was because the research was finished.
He was not sure he believed that either.
The murder of Alan Bono occurred on February 16, 1981, in Brookfield, Connecticut. Arne Cheyenne Johnson was convicted of first-degree manslaughter on November 24, 1981, and served approximately five years of his sentence. Ed Warren died in 2006; Lorraine Warren died in 2019. David Glatzel has maintained that the events described in the Warrens' account were fabricated or exaggerated. He has never publicly commented on the contents of the email reproduced above. Whether that email exists is something only Gabriel Fernandes knows.