Schrenker: the fallout

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second in a two-part series describing the mysterious January plane crash involving Marcus Schrenker, a Merrillville High School graduate who was under investigation for alleged securities fraud. The Times was the first media outlet to conduct a full, in-person interview with Schrenker about his dramatic jump over Alabama, and the events surrounding it.

The thin air from 3,500 feet was painfully cold.

"I felt like I was choking," Marcus Schrenker said of the leap from his plane.

The violent wind slapped him left and right.

"It was like a gorilla was just throwing my body around."

There was an explosion of wind. He smacked into the stabilizer in the rear of the plane.

He heard the loud rip of his parachute tearing on the back fin.

"I knew this was it," he said.

Earth grew closer. It was happening so fast, it was like it wasn't happening at all.

"I asked God for forgiveness. 'Please,'" he begged silently, "'look out for (my) children.'"

He closed his eyes.

His body broke through the sharp branches of so many trees. They slowed his drop for a kinder landing into an Alabama river below.

"And then it was lights out."

He woke up in icy water. He pulled himself to the bank.

"F---!" he screamed as loud as he could. "I even screwed this up. I can't even kill myself right."

There was blood everywhere.

He listened for the crash. The plane would slam into the earth, and he was sure to hear it. But it was silent.

"I expected to see the fireball. I heard no firetrucks, nothing," he said. The plane must have stayed on autopilot. It eventually would sputter out of gas and careen into a woody Florida swamp.

He had missed his mark by 150 miles, he estimated.

"I laid there trying to figure out what I was going to do.

"All of a sudden," he said, "I wanted to live." He kicked into survival mode.

He walked 8.6 miles -- bleeding and delirious -- to a trailer park. He knocked on doors -- some people flung them back in his face when he told them he had fallen from the sky.

He was exhausted and hemorrhaging badly. No one could detect this through his black pants, he said.

One resident directed him to police. After talking with a series of local officers, he checked into a Harpersville, Ala., motel under the name Jason Galoozis, his half brother.

He walked 5.5 miles to a storage unit where he collected the motorcycle, computer and cash he had stored days before.

His first priority, he said, was to find his plane. He whipped out his GPS device and aimed his motorcycle to the path of his single-engine Piper Malibu Meridian.

For hours, he zipped his motorcycle through the frigid cold of winter and night.

He wasn't sure where he was going, or what time it was. As he did on the plane, he began hallucinating.

He buzzed along Flat Creek Road in Chattahoochee, Fla., and pulled up to the KOA Campground. He was 130 miles from Destin, Fla., the destination he gave air traffic controllers when he left the Anderson, Ind., airport.

He had to rest. He sat in a tent, opened his laptop and saw his face splashed across news Web sites.

He swallowed 100 pain pills with a gulp of beer.

It was over.

So he opened a new e-mail, and wrote to Tom Britt, an acquaintance who edits a newsletter about Geist, the tony Indianapolis suburb where Schrenker owned a multimillion-dollar mansion.

Hours later, he was arrested.

After the fall

"It's hard to tell how much is true and how much is fiction," said Rachel Quade, Schrenker's neighbor across the sprawling Geist Reservoir, in Marion and Hamilton counties.

Quade, who met Schrenker eight years ago volunteering for their sons' school, said Schrenker and his often "larger than life" antics long have been part of the community chitchat.

"The Marcus I saw always seemed very sincere," she said. She said she knew other neighbors allegedly had run-ins with Schrenker, but she got to "see the positive side."

Britt said he had always gotten along with Schrenker, but that "you never knew what side you were going to get."

"From my perspective, as a licensed mental health (professional), he fits the profile of someone with bipolar disorder," his Fishers-based counselor Skip Beyer said.

Beyer said he began treating Schrenker nearly two years ago when Schrenker was having marital problems. He was Schrenker's sole defense witness when Schrenker was sentenced in August in Florida for crashing his plane.

During his sessions with him, Beyer said Schrenker showed alternating signs of anger and irritability, followed by bouts of depression. He appeared anxious and shared suicidal desires, Beyer said.

"He said on a number of occasions he was going to crash his plane into a mountain and end it all," Beyer said.

Beyer said Schrenker did not disclose a bipolar diagnosis from his college days at Purdue University until after he was arrested in Florida.

Schrenker told Beyer and The Times that he spent time at Southlake Center for Mental Health in Merrillville when he was 12 years old.

Citing privacy laws, a spokeswoman for Southlake -- now part of Regional Mental Health Center -- said she could not confirm or deny Schrenker had ever spent time there.

Beyer acknowledged that while it's possible Schrenker could be lying about his adventures, his time with him suggests otherwise.

"Marcus is smart enough that he would know that the cameras would pick up his image," Beyer said. "I just don't really don't see how he could fabricate this."

Florida prosecutors saw it, calling the dramatic skydive a charade, "another step in (Schrenker's) life of cons and lies."

Prosecutors poked holes in Schrenker's account, and painted him as a habitual liar.

He didn't lose his left arm, as he told his stepmother he had in a telephone call soon after the crash, they said.

In a 2008 deposition for a Georgia lawsuit, they noted, Schrenker said under oath that he suffered from "multiple sclerosis."

"For a man like this, it is not that unbelievable to think he would try get away by faking his death," Florida prosecutors said in court records.

According to Schrenker, some of the details of his failed suicide attempt are just a misunderstanding.

Schrenker's half brother always loved motorcycles, he said, but could never afford one.

He had stashed the bike in storage for Jason Galoozis, whose ID he had used to check into the Alabama motel. He still doesn't know why he used his ID, he said.

The $3,000 in cash he left with the bike was to pay for his portion of the funeral of his stepfather a week earlier in Crown Point, he said.

He did not explain the searches pulled from his computer -- "How to open a parachute," "Requirements to get a Florida Driver's License," -- or a Jan. 8 message telling a friend he was entering the witness protection program.

Orchestrated infamy?

No one smells good in jail, Schrenker laments.

There are many things he misses, he said, but the smell of his wife nears the top.

Inside a tiny, orange cinder-block room in the Hamilton County, Ind., Jail -- dressed in a jail-issued yellow T-shirt and slate-gray pants -- Schrenker reflected on what made him a national talking point.

There is thinned hair on his left arm, which he said was singed by jagged speed and cold during his plummet. (He evidently had covered his right arm for most of the drop.)

There is a dark pink horizontal scar near the inside of his left wrist.

He swears that, despite reports, he did not slit it in a Florida campsite. The parachute cord pulled violently across his arm, cutting it, he told The Times.

He displays a photo of his five-member family, dressed in white shirts and jeans, sitting on a Bahamian beach. They're all smiling.

"I miss my wife and kids. That's the most painful part," he said. "I taught (my kids) how to detail a jet before how to ride a bike."

Underneath the picture lie letters from ABC and CNN. They want interviews, he said, but he's not sure if he's ready.

At some point, he says, he'll sit down with Barbara Walters and Larry King.

"I think there is just too far a mystery with all this," he said. "(People) can't figure out if I'm a criminal."

There's no mystery, according to the state of Florida, which sentenced him to more than four years in prison for crashing his plane and calling for help when he didn't need it.

He will stay in the county jail in Noblesville for the duration of his Indiana case. His trial date was delayed last week until March.

He's fine with this, he said, after experiencing what he described as squalid Florida lockups. Though, he said with some pride, he did stay in the cell that had housed NFL player Michael Vick, who spent 23 months in prison for pleading guilty in 2007 to felony charges connected with his involvement in a dogfighting ring.

While bouncing around jails and waiting to be tried, Schrenker has written more than 200 pages of notes. He wants to publish a book that he said would focus heavily on bipolar disorder.

"Michelle will have final say" on the movie manuscript, he said in reference to his wife, who filed for divorce two weeks before Shrenker fled, as investigators were unraveling his investment business.

But for now, all of that will wait. He doesn't want to look like he's taking advantage of a bad situation, he said.

"I've got to get through this Indiana issue first," he said.

Schrenker faces 11 felony charges, including nine allegations of securities fraud. The former money manager, who is accused of conning clients into investing in a nonexistent foreign currency fund, calls prosecutors' accusations that he tried to fake his death "hurtful."

"This was just an adult who got very sick ... who should never have been flying a plane," he said. "I just lost control."

He said he could not have ripped himself from his family to see them flourish without him.

"I was worth millions, had a beautiful wife," he said. "I'm in hell right now."

Sometimes, he said, he regrets surviving the jump.

"I think it made a sensational story," he said. "I don't think it makes for a 'fake your death.'

"I think it makes for a bad night."

The Times was the first media outlet to conduct a full, in-person interview with Marcus Schrenker about crashing his plane into the Florida panhandle nine months ago. The Times was not allowed to photograph or record the interview, held at the Hamilton County Jail in Noblesville, Ind. Descriptions of some events, including the plane crash, were compiled from court records and Schrenker's remarks.