“HE WAS LIKE CYPHER FROM THE MATRIX,”
A FRIEND SAYS. “BUT WHEN HE REACHED THAT
GENIUS MOMENT, WHEN HE WAS ON THE CUSP
OF SOME BIG IDEA THAT COULD MAYBE CHANGE
THE WORLD, HE GOT NERVOUS.”
around the office with arms outstretched
while muttering, “I’m getting the idea, man,
I’m getting the idea.”
Haas was also a fount of fantastic lies. He
once submitted his notice to Edge Webware,
for example, explaining that he’d saved up
$40,000 and was going to move abroad
with his girlfriend and her father; he said
they needed to escape the US government,
which had targeted his girlfriend’s dad
because of his radical politics. After bidding
his final farewells on a Friday, Haas showed
up for work the next week, claiming that all
his money had been stolen just hours before
his flight to an unidentified foreign country.
As always, Edge Webware gave Haas
another chance, because hyperpolyglots like
him are so rare. “I can’t tell you how many
times a client would say, ‘Can you program
this in X?’ and I would go to Jerry and say, ‘I can
hire a contractor to do this, but do you want
to take a crack at it?’ ” Couture recalls. “And
he’d say, ‘Sure,’ and within 24 hours he’d know
the language well enough to have an intelli-
gent conversation with our client, and within
a week he’d be coding competently in it. I can’t
tell you how many times that happened.”
Haas’ run at Edge Webware finally came
to an end in November 2016. One morning,
as usual, Couture went to give the nondriving
Haas a lift to work. When Haas emerged from
his ramshackle rental house, he was trembling
and holding a .22-caliber pistol. He said he’d
been up all night because people had been
banging on his door, threatening to murder
him and his girlfriend. He persuaded Couture
to give him a day off to recover. He never
showed up for work again.
Once untethered from his main source of
stability, Haas swiftly succumbed to his worst
Ford’s friend. Soon enough he was crash-
ing with Ford, who in turn connected him
with Etienne Fieri. Within four months, he
was a cofounder of one of the most prom-
ising blockchain startups in Columbus.
When he spoke to old acquaintances about
his meteoric rise from vagrant to entrepre-
neur, he radiated clarity and joy. “It was the
first time he’d been totally coherent since
he went off to Ohio University,” says Mike
Czarnecki, a childhood friend. “I was so
happy for him, so happy I could almost cry.”A
FTER RETURNING to Warren
County, the detectives
assigned to the Haas case
attempted to check out
Charles Ford’s bizarre story.
The manager of the BP station
where Ford filled his gas tank
and bought snacks said there was no way
the credit card system had malfunctioned
for 45 minutes; 20 minutes was the absolute
maximum downtime. The cops also talked
to the clerk for whom Ford said he’d bought
a double cheeseburger. She told detectives a
man had offered to bring her food but never
returned to the store.
On November 7, police records show, the
investigators called Judith Wallace Huff to
see if she knew anything about her son’s
older friend, whose story seemed to be dis-
integrating. She told them she’d spoken
to Ford in mid-September after Haas had
been missing for two weeks and that she’d
been struck by something he’d told her: He
said that Haas would be discovered dead
in a field. (Ford did not respond to multiple
requests for comment.)impulses. His behavior turned increasingly
erratic, and his body withered from lack of
food. By the summer of 2017, his mother,
Judith Wallace Huff, had become alarmed
enough to intervene. She convinced her
son to move, sans girlfriend, into a vintage
camper on her remote 30-acre property. He
white-knuckled his way through opiate with-
drawal with only a patchy satellite internet
connection to salve the pain.
All was going well until the autumn chill
set in. Haas complained that the camper,
which lacked heat and adequate natural
light, had the aura of a jail cell. One night after
Thanksgiving, he ran off into the Appalachian
forest and went roaming for days. He was
eventually arrested for breaking into a back-
woods church in an attempt to stave off frost-
bite, and returned to his mother’s care. Haas
would later claim that he’d had a profound
spiritual experience while on his forest trek:
He said he sensed a phantasmic deer along-
side him as he hiked, and that the animal
taught him “to walk in the world again.”
Wallace Huff knew her son was deeply
unhappy in the camper, so in December she
helped him move to Columbus, the place
in Ohio where he seemed likeliest to find
work. She rented him a furnished apart-
ment and stocked it with groceries. When
January came, however, Haas had to move
into a homeless shelter. But he was finally
sober and, despite his dismal circumstances,
clawing himself toward something better.
He sold loose cigarettes to other shelter res-
idents and used a public library to send his
résumé far and wide.
Haas’ luck began to change when he met
a woman at a coffee shop who invited him
to stay at her apartment. This was Charles