Style serves up another piece in the Ben Fawley puzzle

Thanks, Jason. Style Weekly's feature is a first-person account of the days surrounding Taylor Behl's disappearance as told by Ben Fawley's roommate at the time, Cesca Janece Waterfield. It is a riveting account that fits another piece into the puzzle that is Ben Fawley: a 38-year-old who seems to be trapped in adolescence, yet is the father of two girls. His initial arrest on child pornography charges makes that particular fact all the more awful. Waterfield recalls Fawley's insistence about keeping children away from pornography: "He raged about the irresponsibility of adults who allowed pornography to find its way into the hands of children and avowed to take every conceivable precaution to ensure that nothing he sold would come near anyone other than adults. Since his arrest for child pornography, some depicting children younger than 3, his claims and the intensity with which he made them remain chilling mysteries to me." Waterfield doesn't come right out and say, "Methinks he doth protest too much" but you get the idea.

Please read this story for yourselves. Although the details Waterfield provides are fascinating at at times startling, they simply raise more questions than they answer about this character, Ben Fawley. Waterfield acknowleges as much, as she continues to try to make sense of the things she saw and heard and experienced while she was Fawley's roommate. Even in looking at his photographs it seems there is little insight. While most art in some ways reveals the artist, Waterfield tells us that Fawley's photographs of vulnerable young women juxtaposed against backdrops of decaying buildings or crumbling facades were hackneyed rip-offs of stuff we've seen a million times. It sounds as if looking at his photographs is a bit like staring into his soul and finding nothing.