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As they listened to the tape together, Eckardt started to come unglued. He told Saunders that "the guy in Arizona" was the hit man. He had not been paid the $100,000 he was promised, and might be coming to Portland. Eckardt's concern was so intense he started to give Saunders the tape for safekeeping -- "It was almost in my hand," said Saunders -- then decided against it.
Crowe says he would have dismissed the report had it come from a con man like Eckardt. But knowing Saunders to be devoutly honest, Crowe called his father Alan, who pressed him about the credibility of the tale. "I don't want to parade a ridiculous story about a national figure," Alan warned. They settled on a strategy. Alan Crowe phoned an investigative reporter with the Oregonian while Saunders and an attorney approached the Clackamas County D.A., who steered Saunders to the FBI. All of this left the FBI scrambling to follow up Saunders' leads even as the story was leaking to the press. No one has come up with the tape, though police last week did recover the assault weapon from a dumpster near the attack site.
Saunders was not the only source with information about a conspiracy. Rusty Rietz, 38, was a former aluminum worker who was also in Crowe's course, studying to become a paralegal. Rietz told TIME that he too visited Eckardt's house in early January, when he had to stop off to pick up a computer disk. The bodyguard, Rietz says, invited him inside to "talk confidentially."
"Would you kill somebody for $65,000?" Eckardt asked. When Rietz said no, Eckardt pressed.
"Would you break some legs for $65,000?" When Reitz again refused, Eckardt continued, "Well, I've got a job in Detroit."
"Oh, that's nice," Rietz joked, at which point Eckardt concluded, "Well then, I guess I'll have to send my team." Rietz assumed this was Eckardt doing his usual weird cloak-and-dagger routine. But only seven days later, Rietz said, he "put the pieces together."
On Saturday Sarah Bergman, 20, a friend and classmate of Eckardt's, told TIME another tale of Gillooly. A week before the tournament, she said, Eckardt told her that "Jeff wants me to do this for Tonya. Jeff wants me to set it up so that Tonya can win the Olympics. They're going to break ((Kerrigan's)) legs." The plans did not go at all smoothly. Eckardt, she says, had to deal with two sets of hit men. The first pair absconded with $55,000 without doing the deed. Eckardt, she said, "was really upset. He said, 'They took all my money! How am I going to pay for this?' "
Both Nancy Kerrigan, 24, and Tonya Harding, 23, are soap-opera fans, though only Harding's life resembles one. Kerrigan's sturdy family life and stable upbringing imbued her with a manner so authentic and unassuming that even last week's media barrage seemed not to faze her. Through her good years (a bronze medal in the '92 Games) and bad (a dismal fifth-place finish at the '93 World Championships), Kerrigan has drawn on the unconditional love of two parents, two devoted older brothers and an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins, who turn out at competitions to cheer her on. Blessed with long, slender limbs and a natural elegance, she also reaps the rewards of a photogenic beauty that last year won her standing as one of PEOPLE magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World."