Lives Lost in a River of Debt

Maybe it was the angle of the gun. Maybe it was the way he held his head. Maybe in that dark millisecond that was to have been his last, he flinched when he squeezed the trigger. He had never flinched at the baccarat tables.

When Pat Bexson summoned up the will to commit suicide on a June morning in 1995, something kept him alive to struggle on against his gambling fever. The bullet he fired into his mouth missed his brain, fragmenting in his neck. The first thing he noticed was his ears ringing, echoing the gun’s concussion. When he heard his breathing, he cursed inside.

You can’t even kill yourself right.

The providence that spared Bexson was absent 10 months later when Carol and Skip Warriner took the same steps. The retired couple went out almost the way they had planned. They had agreed to die together. They ended up dying one after another, a week apart in April 1996. Each turned on the ignition of their Olds Regency after stretching a vacuum hose from the exhaust pipe into the car’s interior, climbing in and rolling up the windows.

Carol, 63, was the obsessive gambler. Disabled and saddled with the monstrous debt she had created, Skip, 69, had wanted to join her. Instead, he followed.

Undone by a ravenous habit that cost them $200,000, a house, a nest egg and two lives, it was Carol who left a terse hint of the forest of guilt and fear that had grown around them. “There is no one to blame,” she scribbled on lined paper, “but me and the monster inside.”

A failed suicide, a death pact that succeeded: Even a prosperous Rust Belt river city like Joliet suffers its fair measure of self-destruction. But the Warriners’ deaths and Bexson’s narrow escape were different, even more troubling for the months of gathering misery that preceded them.

Bexson and Carol Warriner chose suicide as a last exit from gambling habits that drove them again and again to the card tables on Joliet’s four casino boats.

The spread of floating casinos into the waterways of middle America has showered billions of dollars into the coffers of gaming firms and revived impoverished Midwestern towns with a nourishing stream of tax revenue. But in recent years, some of those same communities have had to bury victims of gambling-related suicides, a phenomenon long seen mostly among casino strips in Nevada and Atlantic City, N.J.

Documented cases of gambling suicides in river towns are hardly epidemic, still rare enough to tally on a single page of community death notices. But in Will County, Ill., where the Warriners and three other residents with gambling habits have killed themselves since 1994, repercussions spill out like pools of ink, darkening lives long after final prayers are read.

“There’s not a day that goes by without sad thoughts about Carol,” said Janice Grace, still bewildered by her sister’s downward spiral. “It’s like someone else took her place and disappeared.”

Low-radar gambling has gone on for decades in the country’s midsection, its back-room poker games and bingo nights a familiar antidote for boredom and loneliness. But with the advent of riverboat gambling in the early 1990s, bettors like Bexson and Warriner are a worrisome breed, progressing rapidly from minor habits to overwhelming addictions to deadly compulsions. They emptied savings accounts, mortgaged houses, bounced checks, bilked families and friends, then tried to erase the likeliest culprits--themselves.

Their stories are grimly familiar to those in Elkander, Iowa, where 19-year-old college dropout Jason Berg shot himself to death in June 1994, despairing over a budding gambling habit. In May 1996, Bay St. Louis, Miss., resident James Shamburger, a casino regular, hanged himself with a dog leash. Two months earlier, gambler Robert Jewell threatened to spray gunfire in an Elgin, Ill., casino, then returned home and shot himself. Since 1994, gamblers have killed themselves in Lakeville and Collinsville, Ill., in St. Paul, Minn., in Florissant, Mo., in Parkville, Kan.

Critics of Gambling Expect More Suicides

The cluster of suicides is only the start, say critics of legalized gambling. As river towns are saturated with boats, they warn, more suicides will follow. “These are the bodies that the gambling industry can’t hide and government can’t explain away,” said anti-gambling crusader Tom Grey.

Betting, casino executives say, is not to blame. The suicides mask other emotional problems and have no direct “correlation with casino gambling,” insisted Adrienne Levatino, executive director of the Illinois Casino Gaming Assn. Still, prodded by state laws and their own image concerns, casinos now fund addiction hotlines and counseling centers for addicted bettors.

“If we weren’t here, people would just fill the void somewhere else,” said Pat Dennehy, executive vice president and general manager of Harrah’s casino boats in Joliet, where Bexson and Carol Warriner played the tables. There may even be more river-town suicides, but tallying them is difficult, health authorities say. Survivors, shaken with guilt and shame, rarely come forward to disclose a suicide’s grim history. Most medical examiners have neither the time nor inclination to investigate.

“Families tell you anything to keep you from thinking suicide,” said Dan Heinz, coroner in Peoria, Ill., a riverboat town.

There would have been silence too in Will County. But a family could not live in peace with the Warriners’ deaths. A local coroner grew curious. And a survivor, Bexson, felt compelled to bear witness even as he tried to stay off the boats, still wrestling with the tempter inside him.

“God left me here for something,” he said. It is as good a reason as he can find for the time being to go on living.

This is supposed to be fun, Bexson thought on his first riverboat cruise in the fall of 1993. He was not convinced.

He had been to Las Vegas, awed by its walls of flame, fake volcanoes and medieval castles. But the Joliet boats’ Gay ‘90s and faux Egyptian decor seemed out of place on a river dominated by belching smokestacks. Gawking crowds jostled him on his way to the tables.

“The whole set-up looked chintzy,” he said.

He adapted. A somber man who fidgets as he chain smokes, Bexson, now 32, is marked for life by his suicide attempt. His throat is indented where doctors shoved in a plastic tube to keep him breathing. There are 15 bullet shards in his skull and neck, mementos to remind him of “how low I got.”

As much as he preferred Las Vegas, its casinos were a costly plane trip away. He had flown there every few years since he was 21, blowing savings from work at his father’s equipment rental shop. In Joliet, his only diversion was a weekly poker game with friends. Its paltry winnings paled against the high-wire acts he had witnessed at the Vegas card tables.

So when the riverboats opened, Bexson gritted his teeth and went. By fall of 1994, he was becoming a regular. Once he had won some impressive hands, acting “the big shot, buying rounds, hitting on the ladies,” the boats became the high point of his day.

The first boat to open in Joliet in June 1992 was the Empress I, anchored beside a pharaoh’s temple facade on the Des Plaines River. A twin followed, then competition from Harrah’s, which docked two boats in a muddy downtown canal.

The boats became floating profit factories. The four casinos combined to attract 18,000 players betting a total of $1 million each day until last year, when rival casinos opened at the steel port in nearby Gary, Ind. Monthly revenues rose to $19 million, and still average between $10 million to $12 million. The four boats are among the 10 most profitable in the nation.

“We were doing extraordinary before,” Harrah’s Dennehy said. “Now we’re just doing great.”

So is Joliet. Officials cringed in the early 1980s when the town’s 26% unemployment rate led the nation. But the boats brought 4,000 new jobs (700 were laid off recently because of Indiana competition). Will County’s population grew by nearly 100,000 to its current 430,000 in the past six years. And while the Joliet area’s economic revival is laid more to Rust Belt recovery than the riverboats, casino tax revenues have transformed the city’s shabby downtown with a $2-million brick river walk and purchased a fleet of new police cars.

Bexson could see the changes every time he left his father’s store, a minute’s drive from Harrah’s. Streets were being torn up for new construction. Locust trees were sprouting everywhere. The city was feasting on the casinos.

Why not him?

Mask of Optimism Cracks at the End

Carol Warriner made bad choices. It was the way her life ran.

Her sister, Janice Grace, marveled at “Carol Jean’s optimism. Whatever mess she got herself in, she would always say, ‘Oh, it’ll be all right.’ ” It was not until the end that her mask cracked.

As a farm bride, Carol had abandoned her first husband and two young sons, taking off with Harold Warriner, a rounder who called himself “Skip.” They married, found factory work, quarreled, reconciled. There were times, she confided to family and friends, when she might have moved on. But they were too dependent on each other to split up.

Carol Warriner blossomed in middle age. She became a real estate agent, then switched to work as an appraiser, earning $60,000 a year. Looking for a retirement home, she snapped up a cottage on the Kankakee River in south Wilmington, 15 miles south of Joliet.

They each had their diversions. Skip had been a horse player. Carol preferred bingo. They drank, at times heavily. Skip was a recovering alcoholic. Carol survived an attack of jaundice. A congestive heart condition and poor circulation forced Skip to quit his job at the chemical plant. He stayed home, puttering in the garden.

Carol grew bored when Skip sat frozen before the TV. A “people person,” her sister says, she joined other women at the bingo halls. She stood out from the stretch-pants players with her business suits and high-fashion glasses. She collected new friends easily.

“She’d just come up to you and start chatting away,” recalled Lucille Stevens, who took up with Carol after they met at a carnival bingo tent.

Bingo games were not high stakes, but Carol had a taste for playing the odds. As a child, her sister recalls, Carol had nestled in her father’s lap while he played poker in the back room of a tavern in the farming town of Kinsman. Ned Troxel was such a wily cardsman that his winnings paid family bills for a spell when his tractor franchise almost went under.

The Kinsman gathering is one of the few small-town games near Joliet that have not yet fallen to the boats. For years, it was prized by local farmers as a distraction from the monotony of long Illinois winters. The game endures, says onetime player Nick Walsh, but with the deaths of old sharks like Troxel and the fading attendance of younger players lured by the gambling boats, “it’s only a matter of time before it’s history too.”

Bingo was Carol’s escape until the boats came. Sitting with fanatics who armed themselves with lucky totems--clay Buddhas, troll dolls, Indian relics--Carol relied on a lone rabbit’s foot and her bear-trap concentration. She would spread 30 cards in front of her, “more than any of her friends could handle,” Stevens said. She might lose $50 in a night, Stevens added, “but with the money she made, she could afford it.”

Joliet’s largest bingo games are surviving the riverboat era. But crowds are thinning in union halls and church cellars. Several parlors shut down, unable to offer enough prize money to compete with the boats. At Stone City VFW Post 2199, where Carol played, senior vice commander Larry Peete knows the familiar faces missing from the Wednesday night game. “When the dust clears,” he muttered, “the only game in town will be on the river.”

One morning in the summer of 1992, Carol showed up at Stevens’ door “bubbling over with news.” She had taken her first cruise on the Empress. That week, she gave up her bingo run and took Stevens to the riverboat. As they walked in circles around the carpeted decks, Stevens was amazed by how much Carol already knew--the best tables, the friendliest bartenders, the blackjack dealers’ names.

Stevens settled in to play slots while Carol, puffing Pall-Malls, vanished into the card pits. Hours passed. Tapped out, Stevens was ready to leave. “I figured she had to be exhausted,” Stevens recalled. But when she found Carol hunched over a blackjack table, her friend would not budge.

“I’m not done yet,” Carol said.

Pinning Hopes on a Winning Streak

As long as he was awake, Pat Bexson thought about the big score. Once he hit, everything would be all right. He only needed enough cash to start the winning streak. It became his daily prayer.

At work, he replayed bad baccarat hands from the night before. He wondered who he could touch for a few hundred dollars. If there were no obvious candidates, he sneaked back into the store after everyone left, dipping into the next morning’s deposits.

By spring 1995, he was dropping $12,000 a month. “When you’re gambling like a maniac,” he said, “they’re all just numbers.”

When his father, George, opened a second branch of the rental store in Coal City, a farming town west of Joliet, Bexson was eager to run it. He took pride in building up new business. But he made the store his personal fief. Its cash flow provided a virgin supply of gambling capital. And he could always hit up loyal clients for last-minute loans.

Bexson tried to pay his debts when he won. But losses always outstripped winnings. If someone had to go begging, he would stiff a stranger, even his father. Not the boats. On a late-night cruise, a casino credit office was the last-ditch place to find instant money.

His father is baffled at how easily the boats extend credit. “The casinos know these people are hooked,” the older Bexson said. “Here’s Pat, fidgety as a bird, bouncing from table to table, and they keep giving him more credit? They should have run him off the boat.”

Harrah’s employees have escorted addicts off the boats, Dennehy says. But they can only take action after a bettor asks for help. Ejecting a player who appears addicted but is not risks public scenes, perhaps lawsuits. “We’re not health care professionals,” Dennehy said. “If a customer’s not ready to admit they have a problem, we can’t make the call for them.”

Harrah’s approach, recently adopted by all Illinois’ riverboats, is to list a hotline on brochures and posters. Callers are linked to phone counselors in Chicago, then referred to therapists and Gamblers Anonymous groups. Last year, 1,715 calls came into the hotline for help. Another 1,400 sought casino cruise times and daily lottery numbers. “It’s been harder to get the word out than we expected,” Levatino said ruefully.

When Pat Bexson was desperate for loans, he worked the pay phones in the casino lounges.

“No one ever told me it was time for me to go,” Bexson said. “I would have laughed at them. Gamblers are good actors. I’d never admit I needed help.”

Only when he trudged out after the 2 a.m. cruises did Bexson surrender to guilt. He stank of sweat, cigarettes and beer. His eyes were raw, his wallet empty. He felt soulless, “like a zombie.”

He was in too deep, even writing worthless checks to the casinos. When he finally owned up to his parents, his father was aghast. He agreed to cover $13,000 of his son’s debts if Pat would join a self-help group. Hours after his first meeting, Bexson was back on a late-night cruise.

“You keep hoping, praying every day that something will click,” his father said. Nothing did.

Pat Bexson felt his life washing away. Man, what’s wrong with me, he thought. I was always a good person. Why is all this happening?

One night in May, rummaging in his closet, he found a semiautomatic rifle a friend had left for safekeeping. Bexson played with the gun, sticking the barrel in his belly, against his chest, into his mouth. It felt right. But he had to abort his planned suicide the next morning when his mother dropped by and saw the gun half-exposed in the sheets on his bed.

Panicked, Bexson’s parents convinced him to undergo counseling in a Joliet psychiatric clinic. The 10-day retreat was one more failed stopgap.

The crash came when he pocketed $1,700 from a deposit at the Coal City store. A co-worker called George Bexson. Enraged, Pat’s father demanded a showdown. Hot tears in his eyes, he told his son he no longer trusted him to run the store on his own. He took Pat’s Coal City keys.

A week later, still deeper in debt, Bexson took a .22-caliber pistol from the Joliet store, sneaking it out in a box. The next morning, June 30, he awoke and laid out his best clothes, a Navy blue jacket and khaki trousers, on a chair. They were for the funeral.

Uncertain of Suicide ‘Procedure’

As a pot of coffee brewed, he sifted through photo albums and newspaper clippings from his career as a teenage boxer. He wondered what a man wears to his own death. His shorts and T-shirt would do. “I never even thought about a note,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what the procedure for killing yourself was. I was new at this.”

Finally, he lay back in his bed, his head on a pillow. He slipped the gun barrel in his mouth and lay two thumbs on the trigger. When he heard the blast, he went black for moment. Opening his eyes, his mouth felt gauzy. He had blown the front of his tongue off.

He stumbled to the kitchen table. Spitting blood, he phoned his father. Then he sat back and waited for the ambulance. God, he thought, what do I do now?

It is not knowing that bothers Patrick O’Neil.

Unable to get into a suicide victim’s mind, the Will County coroner wants to know what their motivations might have been. A note, an interview with a survivor usually clears things up. But some cases continue to rankle.

“There’s no obvious reason for these people to take their lives,” O’Neil said. “Maybe we can determine how despondent they were, what drove them to the act.”

In January 1994, O’Neil was puzzled by the death of Haskell Little, 65, a retired auto factory hand who shot himself with a bolt-action shotgun. Little’s relatives in Tennessee suspected foul play. He had gambled a bit, they said, but all they knew of his betting habits was his boast of winning $25,000 on the Empress.

O’Neil decided on an unusual tack. He issued coroner’s subpoenas for both Joliet riverboats, asking sheriff’s investigators to search for records that would track Little’s gambling habits. The casinos were surprised by the move, O’Neil recalls, but “pretty compliant.”

During a 13-month period, detectives found, Little had made 79 trips to the Empress, using a casino card to play on the boat’s slot machines. He had lost $273,768.

O’Neil again used subpoenas to pore over casino records in the death last September of Robert Guenzani. The 48-year-old chemist killed himself by drinking milk laced with drain-cleaning acid. Casino card files showed he had gambled away $177,000 at both Joliet boats. Friends testified in an October inquest that he was “depressed over his gambling.”

Since Little’s death, there have been five documented gambling-related suicides in Will County. That number is dwarfed by the 40-odd suicides that occur each year in the county. But Deputy Coroner Dean Kane, who has investigated deaths for the county since 1979, worries that a new phenomenon is in the offing, a trend that bears watching.

“It’s something that seems to follow the boats,” Kane said. “People here never had this kind of wide-open access to gambling before.”

O’Neil and Kane do not always seek casino records when they suspect a suicide’s link to gambling. When they probed the death of Harry Tatro, a prison guard who shot himself last September, the investigators were content to rely on friends’ accounts of the dead man’s heavy gambling debts and growing depression.

And on the morning of April 14, 1996, it did not take much prodding for Kane to figure out why Skip Warriner killed himself. Janice Grace, who found the body, led Kane to a desk and showed him the spiral notebook where the dead man’s wife had written a suicide note the week before.

“Any help you can give Skip,” Carol Warriner wrote, “would sure be appreciated.”

Wandering through the empty house, Janice Grace took silent note of all the signs she had missed.

The old oak hutch was gone. So were her mother’s china pieces. Sold to some pawn shop, no doubt. In the shed, everything had a price tag attached--lounge furniture, Skip’s garden tools, the leavings of two lives offered up for garage sales no one attended. All for one more night at a blackjack table.

After Skip’s funeral, Janice had come with Carol’s two sons, Tom and Kenny Walker, expecting to salvage what was left. There were no savings: Only two limp dollars in Skip’s wallet and 28 cents hidden in a drawer.

Carol had stripped or lost everything of value. The car was about to be repossessed. Unopened mail, stuffed with 7-month-old utility bills and collection agency threats, littered her desk. The $80,000 second mortgage she took out to play the tables had squandered their equity.

“When we left, we put the keys on the table and walked out,” Tom says. “We figured whoever Carol owed money to could fight over the house.”

Janice had stuck by her sister until the end. It didn’t seem possible Carol would bilk her own flesh and blood. She tried to be stern, but when Carol phoned in those final months, always promising to change, what was a sister to do? Now Janice could tally the cost of her loyalty. More than $20,000 in loans, all gone.

Even the Walker brothers, long alienated from their mother after she deserted them, could never quite say no. When Carol came weeping to Kenny in October 1995, he weakened. She told him she needed $12,000. “Please don’t get mad at me,” she whimpered. So Kenny called his banker.

Even Tom, a Will County sheriff’s deputy, lost $1,500. When she pleaded for money to pay the IRS over disputed taxes, he ignored the obvious. After all, Carol did know her real estate.

But by late 1995, she had lost her appraising job. She kept asking her boss, Bob Kulof, for advances. When she hit $10,000, he cut her off.

Hints of Suicide Begin Surfacing

Weeks after she left, Kulof still fielded calls from collection agents. One finance man said Carol had secured a loan by telling them she needed money to bury her husband. “You wonder if she was planning something back then,” Kulof said.

Hints of suicide began surfacing during her teary, awkward pleas for more money. One Sunday, Carol called up Stevens. She had been out driving, “thinking about killing herself,” Stevens recalled. “I said: ‘Come on, Carol, that won’t solve anything.’ And then, she perked up, just changed the subject. I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not.”

“Well, Janny,” Carol confided to her sister, “I prayed all the way over here that I’d have an accident in the car. I looked through the Bible and I don’t see anything there against suicide.”

Her sister knew she was serious. “What do you do when someone tells you something like that? I said, ‘No! No! No! Don’t be silly.’ But I was scared. She said, ‘Please don’t tell the boys I’m talking like this.’ ”

No one could keep an eye on Carol. Her family never knew when she was home. She kept her answering machine on to screen for collection agents. Sometimes she just let the phone ring.

Even Skip Warriner was helpless. He sat alone in the living room, sometimes not even bothering to watch TV. The house looked like a tomb, shades always drawn. The kitchen wallpaper reeked of cigarettes.

“She’s got a bad gambling habit,” Tom fumed to Skip one night. “Nothing I don’t know,” he replied.

Only after Carol’s death was it apparent how much Skip did not know. She had buried him in a chasm of debt. She owed $90,000 just on the house. Other debtors had thousands more in liens. Carol had wheedled money from scores of friends. She owed $4,000 to Stevens. She had bilked one high school classmate out of $10,000.

It was Skip who found Carol’s body in the garage the Friday before Easter. Phoning paramedics, he tried to revive her, but it was too late.

“She left me,” he told Grace when she arrived. “We were supposed to go together.”

‘It’s People Who Are Weak’

It was no use blaming the boats.

“They’re good for the community,” Tom Walker said. “It’s people who are weak.” Still, he wonders whether his mother would be alive if the boats had never anchored in Joliet.

His brother gave up his own trips to the riverfront for awhile. But as the months passed and the hurt faded, he returned for the occasional cruise. One night last spring, he saw a familiar figure at the baccarat tables, a businessman he knew from Coal City.

It was Pat Bexson.

Kenny Walker said nothing. He had heard about Bexson’s suicide attempt. He hung back, unsure whether he wanted to be noticed. Staring across the crowded pits, Walker noticed the dent on the gaunt man’s throat. “Poor guy,” Walker thought. He looked away.

Two years on, Pat still confronts each day with dread. Suicide is not an option, he tells himself. He forces himself to remember the long weeks he lay in his hospital bed and the eerie halo skull brace that made him look like a “refugee from ‘Star Wars.’ ”

At work, George Bexson complains about having to “treat my son like a child.” The father manages most of his son’s pay, paying off his monthly bills and reducing the debt he still owes.

At night, Pat tries to stay busy. He attends self-help meetings, carries a list of friends to call. But the sway of the baccarat tables is still too strong. He backslides. After one losing night at Harrah’s, he flashed back to his suicide attempt, saw the gun in his mouth.

But there are tiny victories too, enough for him to keep on.

Some nights, he drives up to the boats, his wallet fat with cash, then walks away. Sometimes he gets as far as the boat ramp. The security guards wave him on in, but he stands there as the crowds pass by, not moving until he knows it is time to go home.

Times researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.