The Mother

It's just before noon on a Tuesday, and the living room ashtray already is packed with crushed cigarettes. Two soap lovers silently scream at each other on a TV with no volume while Deanna Johnson hurries from room to room – flipping through books, under newspapers, in desk drawers – looking for the picture.

It's taking a while because Deanna Johnson's house on the east side of Las Vegas suffers the clutter of the catatonic, the static mess of those who have given up. Newspapers and files and books and mail are stored next to the couch, under a table, under a shoe, by the bed. Deanna snuffs out one more Marlboro Light, thumbs through one more file and finally finds it.

It's a photograph any mother would love, from a banquet three years earlier. Shane Johnson, then 15, had just been recognized as his class's most highly decorated Junior ROTC cadet. His dress shirt is blinding white, his pants are creased razor sharp, his polished brass belt buckle glistens. He smiles a smile that, frankly, would put any parent at ease. It's a smile that tells you he's a good boy – honest, open and slightly self-deprecating.

"That was my son," Deanna Johnson says, her eyes reddening again. "He was a good kid."

Deanna is tall with clear, sky-blue eyes and a shock of red hair. She's quick to laugh at herself, but she's still on a hair-trigger, still alone in the cyclical trap of being the mother of one who killed. His blood is her blood; his faults, her guilt. His guilt, her anger.

"How did you ever get past the point of his – how long did it take to ...?"

"To be his parent again?" she says, finishing the question. She flashes that sad smile. She wondered about that, too, and was startled that it came back so quickly.

"About two days," she says, sniffling. "I was freaked out. I was like, 'I can't talk to you, I can't deal with this, I can't talk to you.' I prayed about it a lot, and the bottom line was, I was still his mom. The good boy I knew was still there, I just had to find him."

She pulls out a folder stuffed with newspaper articles. "Two to testify against others," says one headline. With the story is a photo that shows six boys sitting together in the defendant's booth in a courtroom. They all wear Clark County Detention Center blues, charged with murder in the 2003 death of 17-year-old Jared Whaley.

They look about as evil as the Cleaver boys—wide-eyed, staring, unsmiling, wrinkle-free faces. One of those boys is Deanna's son. He's the one whose face you can't see. He's the one looking down.

The Son

A baby screams in his mother's arms, then his eyes flutter and close as he sucks desperately on a pacifier. After 10 seconds of sleep, he's screaming again, arching his back, hating it, hating where he is, where everything is echoing and bright and hard, where even his momma's arms hold him more tightly, feel harder and colder than usual.

Still, it's a mother's touch, something Shane Johnson hasn't felt in almost a year. The jail is so restrictive that visitors only see inmates through a closed-circuit television moniter.

His dark hair is cut to a half-inch, his jaw line is long and thin, thoughtful and nervy. Nothing about the way he looks makes you think he's Deanna Johnson's boy. Until he talks. You don't hear a monster – you hear his mom; her wit, her need to laugh, her quickness.

The only thing missing is her weary, wizened sighs. Shane Johnson has lived here for the past eleven months, ever since his arrest in 2004, and he'll stay behind bars for at least the next 20 years as part of a plea bargain. Yet, this is still a 17-year-old kid who thinks he's made of Teflon. He still struggles to fully comprehend that he will age, that by the time he gets out of here his face will have lines, his joints will ache and he'll be as old as his mom is today. It's the same teenage Teflon that helps him push away the pain and guilt he knows he's heaped upon his mom. In prison, with little to do but think, that can be a merciful trait. In the world, burying that kind of stuff is almost always dangerous.

He doesn't flinch when asked if he, Matt Baker or the Myers brothers ever thought they'd get caught. "When I thought about it before, I thought we'd go out there, have, like, that moment when it happened," he replies. "Then it'd be done, we'd wipe our hands and walk away, like in the movies."

Actions without consequences: Fairly ordinary thinking when it comes to teenagers. Except most teenagers don't gang up on one of their friends and kill him...