On Wednesday, October 4, 1989, Hazleton Research Products accepted a shipment of a hundred wild monkeys from the Philippines. The shipment originated at Ferlite Farms, a monkey wholesale facility located not far from Manila. The monkeys themselves came from coastal rain forests on the island of Mindanao. The monkeys had been shipped by boat to Ferlite Farms, where they were grouped together in large cages known as gang cages. The monkeys were then put into wooden crates and flown to Amsterdam on a specially fitted cargo airplane, and from Amersdam they were flown to New York City. They arrived at JFK International Airport and were driven by truck down the eastern seaboard of the United Sates to Reston monkey house.
The monkeys were crab-eating monkeys, a species that lives along rivers and in mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia. Crab eaters are used as laboratory animals because they are common, cheap, and easily obtained. They have long, arching, whiplike tails, whitish fur on the chest, and cream-color fur on the back. The crab eater is a type of macaque (pronounced ma-KACK). It is sometimes called a long-tailed macaque. The monkey has a protrusive, doglike snout with flaring nostrils and sharp canine teeth. The skin is pinkish gray, close to the color of a white person. The hand looks quite human, with a thumb and delicate fingers with fingernails. The females have two breasts on the upper chest that look startlingly human, with pale nipples.
Crab eaters do not like humans. They have a competitive relationship with people who live in the rain forest. They like vegetables, especially eggplants, and they like to raid farmers’ crops. Crab-eating monkeys travel in a troop, making tumbling jumps through the trees, screaming, “Kra! Kra!”. They know perfectly well that after they have pulled off an eggplant rad they are likely to have a visit from a farmer, who will come around looking for them with a shotgun, and so they have to be ready to move out and head deep into the forest at a moment’s notice. The sight of a gun will set off their alarm cries: “Kra! Kra! Kra!”. in some parts of the world, these monkeys are called kras, because of the sound they make, and many people who live in Asian rain forests consider them to be obnoxious pests. At the close of day, when night comes, the troop goes to sleep in a dead, leafless tree. This is the troop’s home tree. The monkeys prefer to sleep in a dead tree so that they can see in all directions, keeping watch for humans and other predators. The monkey tree usually hangs out over a river, so that they can relieve themselves from the branches without littering the ground.
At sunrise, the monkeys stir and wake up, and you hear their cries as they greet the sun. The mothers gather their children and herd them along the branches, and the troop moves out, leaping through trees, searching for fruit. They like to eat all kinds of things. In addition to vegetables and fruits, they eat insects, grass, roots, and small pieces of clay, which they chew and swallow, perhaps to get salt and minerals. They lust after crabs. When the urge for crabs comes upon them, the troop will head for a mangrove swamp to have a feeding bout. They descend from the trees and take up positions in the water beside crab holes. A crab comes out of its hole, and the monkey snatches it out of the water. The monkey has a way to deal with the crab’s claws. He grabs the crab from behind as it emerges from its hole and rips off the claws and throws them away and then devours the rest of the crab. Sometimes a monkey isn’t quick enough with the claws, and the crab latches onto the monkey’s fingers, and the monkey lets out a shriek and shakes its hand, trying to get the crab off, and jumps around in the water. You can always tell when crab eaters are having a feeding bout on crabs because you hear an occasionally string of shrieks coming out of the swamp as a result of difficulty with a crab.
The troop has a strict hierarchy. It is led by a dominant male, the largest, most aggressive monkey. He maintains control over the troop by staring. He stares down subordinates if they challenge him. If a human stares at a dominant male monkey in a cage, the monkey will rush to the front of the cage, staring back, and will become exceedingly angry, slamming against the bars, trying to attack the person. He will want to kill the human who stared at him: he can’t afford to show fear when his authority is challenged by another primate. If two dominant male monkeys are placed in the same cage, only one monkey will leave the cage alive.
The crab-eating monkeys at the Reston monkey house were placed each in its own cage, under artificial lights, and were fed monkey biscuits and fruit. There were twelve monkey rooms in the monkey house, and they were designated by the letters A through L. Two of the monkeys that arrived on October 4 were dead in their crates. That was not unusual, since monkeys die during shipments. But in the next three weeks, an unusual number of monkeys began to die at the Reston monkey house.
On October 4, the same day the shipment of monkeys reached the Reston monkey house, something happened that would change Jerry Jaax’s life forever. Jerry had a brother named John, who lived in Kansas City with his wife and two small children. John Jaax was a prominent businessman and a banker, and he was a partner in a manufacturing company that made plastic for credit cards. He was a couple of years younger than Jerry, and the two men were as close as brothers can be. They had grown up together on a farm in Kansas and had both gone to college at Kansas State.
They looked very much alike: tall, with prematurely gray hair, a beak nose, sharp eyes, a calm manner; and their voices sounded alike. They only difference in appearance between them was John wore a mustache and Jerry did not.
John Jaax and his wife planned to attend a parent-teachers’ meeting on the evening of October 4 at their children’s school. Near the end of the day, John telephoned his wife from his office at the manufacturing plant to tell her that he would be working late. She happened to be out of house when he called, so he left a message on the answering machine, explaining that he would go directly from the office to the meeting, and he would see her there. When he did not show up, she became worried. She drove over to the factory.
The place was deserted, the machines silent. She walked the length of the factory floor to a staircase. John’s office overlooked the factory floor from a balcony at the top of the staircase. She climbed the stairs. The door to his office was standing open a crack, and she went inside. John had been shot many times, and there was blood all over the room. It was a violent killing.
The police officer who took the case at Kansas City Homicide was named Reed Buente. He has know John personally and had admired him, having worked for him as a security guard at the Bank of Kansas City when John was president of the bank. Officer Buente was determined to solve the case and bring the killer or killers to trial. But as time went by and no breaks came along, the investigator became discouraged. John Jaax had been having difficulties with his partner in the plastic business, a man named John Weaver, and Kansas City homicide looked at the partner as a suspect. (When I called Officer Buente recently, he confirmed this. Weaver has since died of a heart attack, and the case remains open, since unsolved murder cases are never closed.) There were few physical clues, and Weaver, as it turned out, had an alibi. The investigator ran into more and more difficulties with the case. At one point, he said to Jerry, “You can have someone killed pretty easy. And it’s cheap. You can have someone killed for what you would pay for a desk.”