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Becky Beane
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 Young Daniel Wickham sat alone in a four-by-eight-foot holding cell, shut off from all the other inmates. He was a kid in a man's world-a greasy-haired 16-year-old who looked even younger, so the officers kept him away from the older men. The seriousness of his crime had put him there, waiting to be tried as an adult. He was on 24-hour lockdown, except for a brief shower every other day.
He had one visitor: "a tall, skinny guy in a bad suit," Daniel remembers. "But he had this light in his eyes" and a perpetual smile, in sharp contrast to Daniel's wretchedness and rage. Pastor John Bartosik led a Bible study at the jail, but Daniel wanted nothing to do with "God and Jesus and Bible stuff"-and spewed his most vulgar chain of profanities to get the point across. So John offered to just come and sit outside Daniel's cell for a couple hours every Thursday.
"Whatever," Daniel said dismissively. "I can't control who sits outside my bars."
Every week John showed up. At first Daniel refused to talk to his visitor; then he started sharing some of the poetry he had written. "I would save the darkest, creepiest stuff for him," says Daniel. "I just wanted to shock him." But John was unflappable, finding some nugget to praise even in the most twisted writings. To the young, frustrated inmate, "it was just a game. But he saw through that, I guess."
For on the other side of Daniel's anger and defiance festered a misery and hopelessness that had mocked him through a childhood of chronic abuse. "I spent my early years trying to overachieve and please and earn some approval," he describes. But frequently relocations sent him to a new school every year, "so I never connected with people and was never around long enough to receive any help"-most likely because he never got close enough for anyone to notice he needed help. "I was meticulously neat and very quiet. I tried to be as low maintenance as possible."
But when countless efforts failed to stave off the cruelty or win the approval and security he longed for, young Daniel simply quit trying. At 12 years old, "I just make up my mind those things I wanted were never going to come." And when the last shred of hope dissolved, resentment erupted in its place.
"I lashed out in anger, got involved in drugs and anything destructive that appealed to me," he describes. That included black metal music-shrieking, discordant, blasphemous-which lured him into a reckless tryst with Satanism. "I knew something was happening, something intriguing and frightening and powerful," he says. But deep down, he admits, "I just wanted something to make the pain go away."
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