It started with a knock at Marty Dwyer’s
apartment door. He opened it and found a middle-aged man standing in the
public hallway and unabashedly offering him oral sex. Dwyer quickly pulled the man into his kitchen —
not to accept his offer but to discover, without the neighbors hearing,
what had brought this strange person to his door. The man, who called
himself Kent Fairchild, explained that he had a penchant for cops and
military types, and he’d heard about Dwyer — a member of the
Air National Guard’s security force — from someone named Shawn.
After a brief conversation, Dwyer asked
Fairchild to leave. Dwyer admonished him not to talk about him to anyone
else and to pass the same message to Shawn. A few nights later, Fairchild knocked at
Dwyer’s door again, this time after 10 p.m. Roused from sleep, Dwyer
was blunt: He told Fairchild to go away and never come back. To Dwyer, these encounters seemed bizarre but brief,
like a visit from the Fuller Brush salesman from hell or, he says,
“some Jehovah’s Witness gone rogue.” He never gave
Fairchild another thought until he was summoned by the security-forces
manager to meet an investigator in the chaplain’s office. There, Dwyer was handed a printout of his own listing
from a Web site called gay.com and immediately placed on administrative
leave. Eight months later, on Feb. 28, he was both discharged and fired
from his full-time job with the Air National Guard for “homosexual
conduct.” What about that famous “Don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy? With more than a decade of service and
evaluations rating his job performance as “excellent,” Dwyer
had vigilantly kept his private life separate from his work as he rose to a
position overseeing the security forces’ training program. He gave no
one any grounds to question his sexual orientation. But Fairchild prodded the ANG into focusing on Dwyer.
Days after being rebuffed by Dwyer, Fairchild — whose real name is
Timothy Robert Hugo — filed a complaint with the ANG’s
inspector general, claiming that Dwyer had threatened him with bodily harm.
That “criminal threat” was never substantiated, but the Guard
seized upon it as an opportunity to delve into Dwyer’s private life.
And Hugo’s assertion that he had heard that Dwyer had a listing on
gay.com turned out to be the death knell for Dwyer’s military career.
In the months leading up to his appearance before the
administrative discharge board, Dwyer’s appointed attorney, Lt. Col.
Douglas B. Olivero, filed a series of strongly worded motions arguing that
the investigation violated Air Force guidelines. One point of contention was whether the ANG had
“credible” information from a “reliable person,”
which is required before such an inquiry is launched. Lt. Col. Clayton
Moushon, representing the ANG, responded that the government found Hugo
reliable. “Indeed, as a self-proclaimed homosexual, Mr.
Hugo had no reason to randomly label SSgt Dwyer as a ‘closet
homosexual’ if the allegation was without merit and unless Mr. Hugo
was genuinely concerned for his own safety. As the investigation
progressed, there was no evidence that ever questioned the credibility of
Mr. Hugo,” Moushon wrote. “On the contrary, given the
widespread knowledge of the military’s ‘don’t ask,
don’t tell’ policy, there is no reason for a homosexual
civilian to actively seek out protection from the military under these
circumstances, unless the allegations were in fact true.”
But what Moushon must not have known — and what
Olivero and even Dwyer didn’t know — is that Hugo has a
well-documented track record of filing bogus complaints. A simple check
with local law-enforcement agencies produces a stack of forms in which he
reports everything from domestic battery and verbal death threats to his suspicion that
a roommate had damaged his clothes with bleach and broken his new
hairdryer. A search of Hugo’s name at local court-houses
yields all sorts of handwritten pleadings spelling out fantastic
accusations against friends, family members, and alleged former lovers
— most of whom, Hugo has claimed, want him dead. In several of these
cases, Hugo describes himself as disabled by mental illness. The files are
thin because the complaints were quickly dismissed. In other cases, Hugo is named as the defendant. His
father, stepmother, and several siblings have active orders of protection
against him in Macon County. In Springfield, he was arrested for criminal
trespass at an apartment house where the owner had asked him to leave on
several occasions. In 2004, he was arrested on Christmas Day for violating
a protective order filed by a nursing home on behalf of his mother, who is
a resident there. The papers show a pattern of chaos wrought by a man
quick to accuse others of wrongdoing and a cadence of cops and attorneys
who have listened to Hugo, checked out his tales, and quickly caught on to
his shtick. As one Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy summed it up in a
report, “Tim is 10-96 [cop jargon for ‘mental subject’]
and is always calling police.” Unfortunately for Marty Dwyer, the one government
agency that never recognized Hugo’s modus operandi was the Illinois
Air National Guard.
Marty Dwyer is a big guy with a barbed wit, a
hearty smoker’s laugh, and the physique of a teddy bear. His
co-workers at the 183d Fighter Wing made a few water-cooler jokes about
Dwyer’s sexual orientation, but, says one, it wasn’t a hot
topic. “They’d talk about you if you got too-big
feet. It’s just conversation,” he says. “I’d work
with Marty any day of the week. I consider him a friend.” “I never knew,” says another co-worker.
“I kinda suspected it, but I didn’t care. He did a good
job.” “I never saw him do anything inappropriate or
conduct himself in any manner that would suggest he was homosexual, on-duty
or off-duty,” says a third co-worker, who, like others still employed
by the Guard, asked that his name not be published. “There are
homophobics who think he got everything he deserved. But the other 50
percent say he never bothered anybody and think what they did to him was a
lynch mob.” This persona wasn’t just something Dwyer wore
to work. Even the profile he posted on gay.com is borderline bland.
“I am interested in a warm, outgoing, and romantic guy under
40,” he wrote. Under the heading “Interested In,” he
listed friendship, love/relationship, conversation, and travel, and ended
with the phrase “Friends first and go from there.” He described
his build as average, his religion as “spiritual,” checked
“none” under “body piercings,” and indicated just
one tattoo — an eagle with the letters USAF. Dwyer, 45, first joined the military in the early
1980s, with the U.S. Army Reserve, where he became a senior military-police
instructor. His civilian job — working at the Plaza shopping mall in
Evergreen Park, a suburb of Chicago — also involved law enforcement.
In 1989, Dwyer entered the seminary, intending to
become a Roman Catholic priest. He earned a degree in religious studies
from St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and spent
several years working in parishes. But he left without ever being ordained
because, he says, he observed priests sexually abusing children. Two men he
reported were arrested, but the church, Dwyer says, tried to ignore the
problem. “It was during the time of ‘Let’s
bury it,’ ” Dwyer says. He spent the next few years teaching at Catholic high
schools in Jacksonville and Springfield. Then, in 1999, a student’s
dad, who was in the National Guard, suggested that Dwyer rejoin. After
serving a few months as a weekend warrior, Dwyer was hired for a full-time
job with the military security police at the 183rd Fighter Wing. He eventually became the head training officer for
security forces — a position for which he was approved by the
adjutant general. He was in charge of setting up training for all new
officers, for planning training for the squadron, and for creating
exercises for drill weekends. Last May, he reenlisted for another four
years. But later that same month, Tim Hugo came knocking on
his door.
Some people who try to describe Hugo use mimicry
— rolling their eyes, waving their hands, speaking in a loud,
sing-songy, melodramatic voice. Some resort to slang, calling him a
“nut,” a “freak,” a fruit loop,” or
“nothing but a creep.” Molly Mack, a lawyer who used to handle
domestic-violence complaints for the Sangamon County state’s
attorney’s office, is diplomatic in pinpointing the trait that makes
Hugo so dangerous. “Tim is not easily embarrassed,” she
says. He doesn’t mind ringing phones and doorbells in
the wee hours of the morning. He has no qualms about causing a scene or
creating a ruckus. He seems to throw himself with unmitigated enthusiasm at
any guy who catches his fancy — even if that guy happens to be a
happily married heterosexual. Police reports and legal pleadings portray
him as a mentally ill gadfly; interviews with people who are parties to
these legal cases paint a more disturbing portrait. Hugo, 46, was born in Mattoon and raised by his
mother, Oma Jean Fairchild. As a child, he had regular visits with his
father and stepmother, Robert and Bonni Hugo, of Decatur. But Bonni says
that Tim was never satisfied with his relationship with his father, and she
admits that the family didn’t handle the situation perfectly. “The main reason his dad was upset was he found
out Tim was gay. But he accepted it eventually,” she says. “His
being gay has never been an issue with me, and I’ve told him that
repeatedly. But I think Tim has, over the years, tried to cause trouble
with his dad because he feels his dad was never there for him. Because of
that, he as a strange way of doing things. He’ll do everything he can
to hurt Bob to get even with him for not being there, and Bob, his fuse is
a little shorter, and he just gives up.” Wilson Douglas, pastor of Wesleyan Holiness Church in
Springfield and a friend of Hugo’s mother, says that her
“nervous” condition may have affected his upbringing. “He grew up kind of protected,” Douglas
says. When Hugo was away at college, his mother would panic if she
didn’t hear from him every day. “She’d call and say,
‘Is he dead?’ ” Douglas recalls. Hugo and his mother “moved in and out of
Springfield for years,” Douglas says. They also spent time in
Oklahoma and Florida. Oklahoma court records show that Hugo filed a lawsuit
against a college official and sought protective orders against his
landlord, a co-worker, and the principal at the elementary school where he
briefly worked as a teacher. He succeeded in getting temporary orders, but
the cases were subsequently dismissed. In 1993, he filed suit against Dr. Kenneth Elsner,
the now-retired dean of the alternative-certification program at University
of Central Oklahoma. Elsner says Hugo was having problems with his first
student-teaching assignment. “I recall he took offense at something going on
in the teachers’ lounge, and they asked me to remove him. We found
another assignment next semester, and we were able to allow him to complete
the program,” Elsner says. Although almost 10 years have passed since
Elsner last saw Hugo, he remembers him: “As I recall, he had some
personality characteristics that might have contributed to his
problems.” Four years later, after apparently losing his job
teaching the sixth grade at Fogarty Elementary in Guthrie, Okla., Hugo
sought a protective order against the principal, Dr. Pamela Daniels. In
court documents, he described himself as an “unemployed
teacher” and promised to file a subsequent civil suit charging
Daniels with defamation, “Contractional Interfearance [sic] . . .
Assalt [sic] . . . Slander & Liable [sic].” Terry Simpson,
superintendent of the Guthrie Public Schools, declined to elaborate on the
case, saying that district policy prohibits the divulging of personnel
information. Hugo’s former landlord, Sam Kysar, did not
return a phone call seeking comment, but Arlene Schultz, manager of the
Hammond Manor Apartments in Bethany, Okla., a 98-unit complex where Hugo and his mother
lived for less than two years, recognizes Hugo as soon as a reporter
mentions “complaint,” without even hearing his name. “Everybody remembers Tim,” she says.
Hugo and his mother lived at Hammond Manor twice, moving to Florida
briefly in between. The first time, Schultz says, Fairchild was healthy and
Hugo well-behaved. “He was real nice. He didn’t bother the
neighbors. He was just kind of a loner. He just took care of his
mother,” she says. But when they returned in the late 1990s, Fairchild
stayed in her room, and Schultz believes that Hugo may have kept his mother
overmedicated. He wouldn’t even let Meals on Wheels volunteers inside
the apartment, instead having them leave food outside the door. In May 1999, he filed a petition — describing
himself as “a disabled Oklahoma school teacher” — seeking
a protective order against Kysar, claiming that the owner had hammered on
his door, “threatening me with physical harm,” after he
complained to health authorities about the condition of the swimming pool. Schultz agrees that the pool regularly turns green
after a hard rain, but she chuckles at the notion that Kysar could have
threatened Hugo. “If you ever met Sam, you’d know
he’s not a violent person. He’s so soft-spoken, and he loves
people,” she says. Libby Myers, who worked with Hugo off and on for more
than a year, also laughs when she hears the text of Hugo’s petition
requesting a protective order against her in February 2000. “Libby Myer [sic] illegally restrained me from
entering my place of employment and performing my duties at work,”
Hugo wrote. “Libby Myer [sic] screamed vulgar and abusive language to
me in the face: calling me son-of-a-bitch, Jack Ass, and a Bastard. Chased
me around two office rooms making threats bodily, and disturbed the peace
of the office place.” Myers, a 62-year-old retired registered nurse, says
that she now uses a cane to get around but that back in 2000 she was in
worse shape, with three compressed vertebrae. “I want to know how somebody who uses a walker
could chase anybody around,” she asks. The only time she
“restrained” Hugo from entering the office, she says, was when
she was slowly backing out the door, dragging her walker after her, and
Hugo was waiting to come back inside after a break. She also denies using
any bad language. “I told him: ‘People that act and talk
like you are the reason homosexuals are called queer’ — and
that’s as far as I got toward being vulgar,” Myers says. She
emphasizes that she didn’t disapprove of Hugo’s sexual
orientation, just “the way he conducted himself.” Their workplace was a telemarketing firm called Jobs
for the Disadvantaged, where they made cold calls hawking $5 light bulbs,
pricey gift wrap, and fruit cake — an operation that Myers says was a
scam. Hugo was friendly at first, regaling her with tales
of how he would pick up men, get them drunk, and entice them to participate
in “homosexual acts” — after which he would take their
wallets. “He bragged about it at the office,”
Myers recalls. But when he started accusing her of
“harassing” him if she happened to enter the kitchen area while
he was there, she began bringing a Thermos of coffee or a cooler with soda
pop, just to avoid him. When she brought home-cooked food to share with her
co-workers, Hugo announced that Myers’ house was infested with
roaches — even though he had never been to her home. After the temporary protective order he sought
against Myers was dismissed, he appeared at the grocery store and followed
her through the aisles. When she asked a security guard to escort him out,
Hugo yelled, “You can’t arrest me! I’m
bipolar!”
In 2003, Wilson Douglas — the pastor who has
been a friend of Hugo’s and his mother’s for decades —
helped them move back to Springfield. Bonni Hugo says that her stepson
rejoined the family. “He would come over and see us a lot. We’d
have a good time, we’d go out to eat, he’d come over to the
house, he’d spend the night,” she says. But sometime after Christmas 2003, she says, Hugo
began pestering the family for money. He started by asking for back child
support he claimed his father owed his mother; he was unhappy when a Macon
County judge ruled that the amount was less than $1,000. He then asked his
father to list him as the beneficiary on the only life-insurance policy he
had — a $10,000 policy meant to pay for funeral expenses. His father
refused. “That infuriated Tim,” Bonni Hugo
recalls. Hugo started calling his relatives constantly. If he
couldn’t get them on the phone, he would call them at work and try to
speak with their employers. “I don’t know — maybe he had
a little breakdown,” his stepmother says. About this same time, Hugo filed a lawsuit against
Patriot Auto Sales, a used-car dealership where he had purchased a 1988
Buick Park Avenue for $950 more than a year earlier. Complaining that the
car was now burning oil, Hugo asked the court to award him $1,005. “He had been driving it over a year, he had
never changed the oil, and he wondered why it smoked,” says Patriot
owner Paul LeJeune. Losing that case apparently caused Hugo to file other
complaints. He had met LeJeune through Douglas, the pastor, and had called
Douglas to testify in the case. After the pastor refused to say that
LeJeune had lied about the car’s condition, his church suddenly
started receiving visits from all sorts of inspectors, checking out
complaints phoned in by Hugo. “He had fire department, the electric people;
they checked, and we didn’t have anything wrong with the
church,” Douglas says. On April 4, Hugo called Springfield police to report
that members were bringing indigent children to the church in a van and
forcing them to change into “long robes” and sit segregated by
sex. “If a
child cried or wanted to be with a sibling, they would yell at them to shut
up, and forcibly make them sit down,” according to the police report.
But when officers arrived at the church, they found
the children wearing their own clothes, and boys and girls sitting
together. “The children stated they liked coming to the church, were
not forced to be there, and was [sic] not abused,” according to the
report. “Officers then left after no violations were
observed.” That same month, Hugo called the chancery of the
Diocese of Springfield in search of counseling. He met former Bishop Daniel
Ryan, and embarked on a friendship that lasted several weeks. Hugo would
later tell police that the relationship was sexual; Ryan told officers that
Hugo needed psychiatric help and that they were “only friends.”
Whatever its character, the relationship ended in the early-morning hours
of July 5, when Hugo called police claiming that Ryan — who relied on
a walker — had kicked him in the knee, causing a bruise. The next day — again in the early-morning hours
— Hugo called 911 to request a welfare check on a man named Jeff at a
mobile home located in an unincorporated area. But when a sheriff’s
deputy knocked on the door, the tenant, Jim Buerkett, said that Hugo had
been calling nonstop for three hours and that there was no
“Jeff” there. Buerkett, a former union concrete finisher who is
devoutly heterosexual, knew Hugo only as “Ken Doll” — a
guy who showed up, uninvited, to a party. “Next thing I know, he’s calling me. The
guy’s a freak!” Buerkett says. “I kept telling him,
‘No, I don’t swing that way.’ ” A few days after the party, Buerkett ran into
“Ken” again, this time with a smaller group getting together
for drinks. Buerkett was halfway through his first wine cooler when he felt
“loopy, like really loopy.” He asked a friend to call a cab,
and made it home just before he passed out. He awoke the next morning with his feet hanging out
his front door and the key still in the lock. “I know I got
drugged,” Buerkett says. “I know I did.” Buerkett didn’t report the incident, because he
couldn’t pinpoint who had tampered with his drink. Still, he feels
certain it was Hugo. “It could’ve been somebody else at the
party, but those were all people I knew,” he says. Hugo’s stepmother, Bonni Hugo, says
Buerkett’s tale echoes stories Tim has told her. “He did not
ever mention [drugs] to me; he just said every man he’s ever had a
relationship with, whether for one night or a month, he always gets a
souvenir, something to prove he’s been with them,” she says.
“He tries to get a picture, after the guy goes to sleep or passes
out. He used to brag to all of us how much money he could get by saying,
‘I think I’m going to send these pictures to your wife, your
girlfriend, your relative.’ ” Bonni Hugo believes her stepson suffers from a
genuine mental illness, but she has no idea how to heal him. “I’ve tried to help him in every way I
can. I feel very, very sorry for him. But at some point, you don’t
know at what cost,” she says. “I truly don’t know how to
help him.” In August 2004, Hugo’s father, stepmother and
siblings were granted orders of protection to prevent Hugo from calling or
visiting them. Those orders are still active today.
These incidents represent just some of what the
Air National Guard might have discovered had they checked into Hugo’s
credibility. In the year before he knocked on Dwyer’s door, Hugo
filed more petitions against his relatives, only to have his complaints
dismissed as “frivolous.” He was arrested twice and, while in
jail, was robbed by his transient roommates. His tires were slashed, he
fled a fender-bender, and he was evicted from his apartment after setting
fire to it, according to police reports. If the ANG officers looking for Dwyer’s profile
on gay.com had just done a Google search on Hugo, they would have stumbled
across a lengthy article in the summer 2005 issue of Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, published by
Stephen Brady’s conservative Roman Catholic Faithful Inc. In the
prologue to a detailed account of Hugo’s relationship with former
Bishop Daniel Ryan, Brady introduces Hugo as “a needy, confused and
seemingly lost individual desperately seeking love in life.” The investigator assigned to Dwyer’s case
— Chief Master Sgt. Stephen J. Eakle, a retired Peoria Police
Department captain — spent more than an hour interviewing Hugo on
June 28. He noted that Hugo’s only occupation was “SSI
disability for mental breakdown” and that Hugo had discussed this
incident with his mental-health counselor. Hugo told Eakle that he had heard about Dwyer from
someone named Shawn, who had “picked up” Hugo in a public park.
According to Hugo’s statement, “Shawn” had met Dwyer
online and spent an evening watching American
Idol with him but never had a physical
relationship with the military cop. Thus, the ANG had no evidence that
Dwyer had engaged in homosexual conduct. As for the “criminal threat” — the
allegation that gave the military an excuse to investigate and oust Dwyer
— it was flimsy, even by Hugo’s standards. All Dwyer had said
to Hugo, according to Eakle’s report, was something like “If
you tell anyone, I’ll take care of you.” With Dwyer facing discharge, his military attorney,
Olivero, argued that Hugo’s statement and the gay.com printout should
be suppressed because the investigation itself was improper. A criminal
threat fell under the jurisdiction of the local police, not the military,
Olivero argued. And notes from the ANG investigation suggest that the
government’s lawyer, Moushon, agreed, though he saw it as a way to
ascertain whether Dwyer is gay. In a memo documenting his June 4 conversation with
Moushon, Lt. Col. Jeffry Rice, the ANG inspector general, writes:
“The complaint should be given to local law enforcement. If that is
done, we can use local law enforcement investigation to launch an
investigation into sexual orientation if that comes up in the external
investigation.” But the next day, Moushon decided that ANG could
investigate.
No one with the Illinois Air National Guard would
speak with a reporter about Dwyer’s discharge. Lt. Col. Tim Franklin,
public-affairs officer for the Illinois National Guard, says the fact that
Dwyer has filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights
prevents all discussion of the case. Hugo, now living in California, says he doesn’t
know Marty Dwyer and has no memory of filing any complaint against him.
Reminded of his hour-long interview with Eakle, Hugo’s phone suddenly
clicked off. He never answered later calls or responded to messages asking
for comment. Dwyer, whose firing came just after he had surgery to
repair a torn ligament in his right arm, now faces months of physical
rehabilitation with only VA health benefits. Though Hugo started the chain of events that ended
his career, Dwyer doesn’t hold him responsible. He blames the ANG for
mishandling Hugo’s complaint. “Throughout the entire investigation, I played
by the rules. The Air National Guard would not,” he says.
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2006.
