The more I learned about Atkins’s past, though, the stranger her manipulation became to me. In the years before the Family’s rise to notoriety, the justice system afforded her a shocking amount of latitude. If anything, she’d gotten away with far too much in those years. When she was on probation, she broke the law regularly, but her arrests never put her in any further legal jeopardy. Instead, there was a pattern of catch-and-release. Whenever the police brought her in, she’d find herself cut loose within a few days. Why was law enforcement so lenient with her?
