where they worked. (She had to have surgery once after a heroin needle became stuck in her arm but told colleagues “some crazy lie that I’d cut it on a fence.”)
After her dismissal from the firm, Ashlyn stole from her family to buy drugs: credit cards, checks, even heirloom jewelry from her Hawaiian-born grandmother, who was now, at eighty, raising her elementary-school-age son. A relative visiting from Wahaii had predicted when she was a little girl that “Ashlyn is gonna break your heart,” her grandmother Lee Miller told me.
And, sure enough, Ashlyn did. “We enabled her,” her grandmother conceded; her grandparents paid for rehabs she typically left after only a few days. They sometimes gave her money to buy Suboxone on the black market, “because she’d get sick and have to turn to heroin if she didn’t have it.”
It was the car her grandparents bought, a 2013 Nissan Sentra, that led to Ashlyn’s undoing and eventually—once she was forced, behind bars, to get clean—her saving grace. A dealer approached Ashlyn about driving him back and forth to New Jersey for three bundles (or thirty bags) of heroin; he had a Newark “connect,” a relative with a source willing to sell to them in bulk. When they progressed to bricks, or fifty-bag allotments, they bought them for $100 each, then sold them back in Roanoke for six or seven times that, she said, and made the fourteen-hour round-trip trek three, sometimes four times a week. Her dealer typically sent his girlfriend along on these runs to keep an eye on Ashlyn, who was known to inject the heroin, swiping bags from their mutual stash, at rest stops en route to Roanoke.
“I now know that he enlisted me because I am a well-spoken, young white girl that drives a nice car, therefore it didn’t look [to police] like we were there for what we were really there for,” she wrote. More important, her craving for the drug was so insatiable—her skinny, desperate look practically screamed white female addict—that no Newark dealer would mistake her for an undercover cop.
When Ashlyn first landed in downtown Newark, heroin was so easy to get that the moment she left her car, a man approached her, wanting to know, “Hey, baby girl, what you lookin’ for?”
By 2014, when DEA agents and federal prosecutors caught up with her, the government’s case laid itself out in the fifteen thousand text messages recovered from her phone—enough evidence to map out a pyramid of addiction, from her New Jersey source to dozens of Cave Spring and Hidden Valley kids. The exchanges were marked by logistics, deals, and despair:
Can you meet me at Sheetz
on Peters Creek Road?
Whatcha got? Can you do two?
Yeah.
You got ten more? Can I owe ya?
Ashlyn was almost home when Virginia state police pulled her over on I-81 just north of Roanoke, ten minutes from the end of another Roanoke–Newark round trip. Unbeknownst to her, drug task force officers were following her movements with the help of a GPS tracker they’d hidden on the undercarriage of her car. She’d been on their radar six or seven days, ever since a former classmate overdosed on the heroin Ashlyn sold him. He lived, selling her out to an undercover cop in exchange for avoiding jail time.
Now, a week later, DEA agents were searching the trunk of her Nissan, beginning with her purple paisley Vera Bradley purse. They found the 722 bags of heroin, not so carefully hidden inside the monogrammed bag. (She and a friend had already blown through half a brick.) Now they were handcuffing the former paralegal and reading her her rights.
Ashlyn realized there was no story to tell herself that didn’t begin with the first of the Twelve Steps, she told me: She was powerless to overcome her addiction. She was about to lose her son, who was six at the time, because she had chosen heroin over him.
She watched as officers extracted her belongings from the car, including her Narcotics Anonymous book, left over from two earlier rehab attempts, which had been there all along, next to her purse.
As the interstate traffic roared by, the agents waved the NA book around, laughing about it. Then they tossed it on the ground, next to Ashlyn’s other stuff. It was windy and unseasonably brisk that September day, and she remembered shivering by the side of the road in her flower-print skirt, wedge sandals, and shirt, purple to match her purse.
*
The man in charge of prosecuting Ashlyn Kessler keeps a