So imagine this.
Joe Watson, in his pre-Tent City days.
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You're home on a Thursday night, watching TV. You live with your college sweetheart, a fellow journalist, a guy you'd once planned to marry. But you broke up a couple of months ago, and although you're still living together, he hasn't been home in two days.
Then you see him — on the 10 o'clock news. On the surveillance tape they're playing, he's guiding a young woman to the back of the tanning salon where she works. He's wearing the flannel shirt you bought him.
And he's brandishing what looks like a gun under a paper bag.
That's when you realize: Your fiancé is the "Salon Bandit."
That is the story spelled out in a Scottsdale Police Department affidavit, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court last month, and reported here for the first time. The story was confirmed in an e-mail by Ashlea Deahl, who recently acknowledged her role in the Salon Bandit's capture to me.
The Salon Bandit.
Deahl's former fiancé, and my former co-worker, Joe Watson.
The affidavit tells us that Deahl called Scottsdale Police at 10:40 p.m. on March 29 to report that she'd recognized Watson on the news. She was "very emotional," the police reported.
According to Deahl's account, Watson is a gambling addict. I can tell you he was also a talented journalist. But that's before he bottomed out, before he left New Times and his career took a sad trajectory.
By the time Deahl called, police had said the Salon Bandit held up at least five stores in Scottsdale, claiming to have a gun and demanding contents of their registers. In each case, he targeted small shops or salons where women were closing up alone.
He threatened to shoot one of the women. He ordered another to give him "the fucking money" and promised a third that if she didn't comply, "it's not going to be good for you."
That's Joe Watson.
And thanks to the love of his life, a woman brave enough to do the right thing, he's now facing a few decades in prison.
Good riddance.
I used to be one of those dumb girls who drank too much and depended on the kindness of strangers to get me home. I used to go running after dark, in the not-so-great part of town. And, yeah, I hitchhiked. Just twice, but still, I did it armed only with cheery smile and a sense of my own invincibility.
I was young. And I'd always been lucky.
Things changed for me not because of Joe Watson, but because of a pair of cases that had the entire area on edge last summer. I'd always felt safe wherever I was — until we had two serial killers in the headlines. For a while, it seemed as if someone was getting murdered or raped every day.
Both sets of killers struck within a few blocks of my apartment. And both of their attacks were so random, so senseless, that, suddenly, it wasn't enough to be young(ish) and lucky. It never had been, I suppose. But last summer, that idea finally hit home, and I haven't slept well since.
I remember reading about Robin Blasnek. Twenty-two years old and so carefree that she left her home in her pajamas and slippers to visit a friend who lived a few blocks away. The Serial Shooters got her that hot July night, right before the police got them. I cried, even though I'd never met her, cried even though I felt stupid crying. It's the pajamas that get me, even today — the sheer innocence that comes with believing your neighborhood is safe, that the world is a good place, that screwed-up assholes don't gun down young women in the street just because they can.
You can safely rely on the kindness of strangers 500 times. It takes only one awful person, that 501st stranger, to make you realize that you never should have been so trusting.
That's when everything changes. Suddenly that bump in the night may not be your cat. That man smiling at you in the parking lot may be carrying a knife.
You can't hitchhike anymore. You don't even walk alone after dark.
Now, I know that my old colleague Joe Watson isn't a serial killer. As best we know, he was never actually violent in a single robbery. Not physically, anyway. That's what the Scottsdale Police affidavit says, and that certainly fits with the Watson I knew.
But just because he never hit anyone, or shot anyone, doesn't mean he didn't terrorize a whole group of people. It wasn't only the five women that he's known to have threatened. Even the women at the central Phoenix salon where I get my hair cut knew about the Salon Bandit, knew about his robberies long before his ex-fiancée outed him to the cops as a successful journalist.
They knew because they worked at a salon. Sometimes they had to close up, alone, at night. And they were afraid.
Joe Watson was — and I suppose still is — a gifted writer. He was also charming. He told several people on staff here that he hoped they'd mentor him, that they were great writers and he wanted to learn everything they could teach him. (Believe me, that sort of flattery works on journalists, who tend to be a needy crew.)
