van disaster was just the last stop on hellish trip
Even with 7 dead and 5 maimed, magazine seller doesn't skip a beat
By Meg Kissinger
of the Journal Sentinel staff
Last Updated: June 4, 1999
Malinda Turvey had enough of small-town life in mid-America. These people, she'd say. These people with their cheap department store clothes, their rusted boats beached on their burned-out front lawns and their little faded paper American flags taped to their front windows - they were going nowhere.
She was 18 and craved adventure, glamour, somewhere where they would appreciate her tinted hair and sculpted fingernails.
Verona, Wis., where she lived, was deadly dull, especially in the grayness of March. Even the Hardee's closes up most nights before 9 p.m. This is no kind of life for me, she would say. She wanted out.
So, when the ad in the local newspaper last March promised big money and a chance to see the world, Malinda dropped everything and dialed the number.
She could start right away, she told them.
"Dad, I think I'm going to do this," she told her father.
The next day, she and her friends Amber Lettman and Niki McDougal, both 16, went down to State St. in Madison where Malinda blew the $600 she had saved to go to cosmetology school on clothes for her exciting new job. The violet-colored crushed velvet suit with the matching hat cost $200, way more than she had ever spent on anything before, but, what the hell, she thought, this is splurge time. She's in door-to-door magazine sales now with Y.E.S.,a company that crisscrosses the country. She's going to see the world.
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Phil Ellenbecker, Malinda's father, was worried. He appreciated her need to see the world but was bothered that she left without saying goodbye.
"I'd never heard of this outfit," said Ellenbecker, 50, a communications specialist for Amtelco in McFarland where he has worked for the past 23 years designing computer programs for telephone answering systems. His daughter Malinda promised she would stop by and say goodbye to him and Dustin, her 8-year-old brother, and their mutt, Charlie. But she never did. She left that evening, a Tuesday, from her grandmother's house in Madison. Amber and Niki were with her, too.
"Something didn't seem right," Ellenbecker said.
Ellenbecker spent most of the next day on the Internet trying to find out what he could about this company.
What he learned scared him half to death.
A woman from the Better Business Bureau in Janesville told him she had gotten complaints about a magazine sales firm that was abandoning kids who weren't selling enough subscriptions. He called the Oklahoma Department of Revenue. More bad news.
He found out that Y.E.S., which sells subscriptions processed under a contract with a company called Subscriptions Plus, had a tax code number but never used it. "The lady told me that means they were probably paying these kids under the table," he said. "Well, if they were doing that, what else was going on?"
Ellenbecker would find out soon enough. The next day his boss would show up at his office door with words that were sure to ring in his ears for the rest of his life. The Rock County coroner was on the phone.
Malinda was dead. So was Amber. So were four others, killed in a crash just outside Janesville when Jeremy Holmes, the driver, tried to change places with a front-seat passenger as the van raced down the road on cruise control at 81 miles an hour. Holmes was trying to avoid another speeding ticket. A police car had started to chase them, and Holmes, without a driver's license, didn't want to go to jail.
Niki was clinging to life. Six others were terribly injured. One more would die the next day.
The van crash in the first hour of March 25, just four miles from the Motel 6 where they were staying along I-90, was shocking not just for the sheer number of dead and injured but also for the stories about what kind of company this was and how the employees - some as young as 15 - were treated.
In interviews and in a Journal Sentinel review of thousands of pages of documents from Oklahoma, where Subscriptions Plus is based, and Wisconsin, where the firm was slapped with 229 consumer law violations, former and current employees told tales of physical and psychological abuse, casual sex, rampant drug use, intimidation and dangerous business practices.
It was an established practice, the employees said, for Holmes and other drivers without licenses to switch places while the van was moving to avoid being ticketed by police for driving without a license.
The employees and documents also disclose that workers typically were given $15 of pay for 12 hours or more of work. Others say they were choked for insubordination and fined $50 or more for falling asleep on the way to an assignment.
In response, Oklahoma labor investigators have turned to the IRS and FBI to sort out some allegations. The U.S. Labor Department and various state agencies in Wisconsin and elsewhere say they are probing aspects of both Y.E.S. and Subscriptions Plus.
The investigators' files are thick with stories of teenagers being ditched with no money in strange towns if they talked about quitting.
In sworn affidavits and in interviews, workers said crew members frequently are arrested for soliciting without a permit and thrown in jail.
"They'd bail us right out," said Craig Fechter, who worked for the company for a couple of months before his skull was fractured in the March 25 crash. "It was just considered the cost of doing business."
Former crew members, like Staci Beck, who worked for the company for 10 months, tell of exchanging sex for good assignments and, occasionally, with customers to make a sale.
Such dealings sounded to Ellenbecker and the other parents of the dead and injured more like something out of a Charles Dickens novel than a company doing business in the United States in 1999.
But, for all the outrage, they say, the most shocking news of all after the March crash is that the company simply packed up, taking the belongings of the dead and injured with them, and got right back to work that same day. They are working still.
"I don't understand why these people are still out there," says DeAnna Roberts, whose 16-year-old son, Marshall, was killed in the crash.
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The spirit of adventure was as much a part of Malinda Turvey's genetic makeup as her strawberry blond hair and brown eyes. She could no more deny it than she could change the shape of her nose or the way she walked.
"I was the same way as a kid," said Phil Ellenbecker, recalling how he crashed his motorcycle when he was just Malinda's age, nearly killing himself.
So when Malinda's eyes sparkled at the promise of travel and money, her father understood.
"That's what kids do," he said. "They take chances."
But Malinda had no way of knowing how big a chance she was taking. Like the other 13 people in the van that night, she believed that a better life was just around the bend.
The Front Seats
Behind the wheel was Holmes, 20, from Clinton, Iowa. In this modern-day Dickens story, he was the Artful Dodger. Even his father calls him "a hustler."
He was the first lieutenant to Choan Lane, the former husband of Subscriptions Plus founder Karleen Hillery. Often, Holmes had to endure Lane choking him for one failure or another, Holmes' fellow crew members told investigators. In turn, Holmes could dish it out, said Craig Fechter, the 22-year-old crew member from Belvue, Kan.
It was Holmes who got $1 for every subscription one of his crew members would sell. He was considered king of the crew. It was Holmes who levied fines against anyone stupid enough to fall asleep on the way to an assignment or daring enough to eat in the van.
"Jeremy was cool," said Alicia Rowe, 16, of Madison, who was on the Appleton crew but in a different van. "If you did what he said, you'd be all right."
Next to Holmes, asleep on the floor between the bucket seats was Kaila Gillock, 19, of Louisville, Ky. She had just joined the crew a few weeks earlier but already had taken a real liking to the pace. It was so much more fun, s
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