In 1983, Lake remarried and the family relocated again, this time to Sarasota. Fenzau, who was now a sophomore in high school, had a hard time making friends. "His classmates teased him a lot," Lake says. "They called him a fag. We had left a very liberal community for a very conservative area on the west coast of Florida. People were very prejudiced there."
One evening that year, Lake recalls, her 16-year-old son took her out to dinner and told her he was gay. Lake says she was "shocked" at the revelation but accepted her son's homosexuality. A year later, he tested positive for HIV.
Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department
Fenzau's ex-boyfriend Kevin Goode.
Courtesy of Lori Grande
Growing up, Lori Grande idolized her brother.
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"I used to lecture him all the time about safe sex," Lake says. "I don't think either one of us was too surprised. The only thing that bothered him was the stigma of having HIV. He often said he felt dirty and contaminated."
After high school, he moved to Washington, D.C., and in 1991, he earned a degree in psychology from George Washington University. The same year, he met Brian Linkous, an art director at a small D.C.-based advertising firm who was six years his senior. Their relationship would last a decade.
Whenever he and Linkous could take time off together, they would travel to Miami Beach, at a time the city was undergoing its transformation from sleepy retirement community to bustling sexopolis. Gay investors were snatching up beachfront properties and opening stores and boutiques at the then-dead Lincoln Road Mall. In the early '90s, a gay chamber of commerce set up shop in Miami Beach and Carl Zablotny launched Wire, a gay-oriented South Beach weekly.
In 2000, Fenzau and Linkous moved to Tampa, Florida, where Fenzau quit his career as a social worker and got a license as a massage therapist. Shortly after, he and Linkous moved to Miami, where they purchased a three-bedroom house at 85th Street and NE Tenth Avenue.
By this time, the HIV was taking its toll. Although Fenzau regularly lifted weights, he still had a gaunt look about him. "His brain and his thought processes were going," his sister remembers. "The medical cocktails he was taking were no longer working. He had dementia. He couldn't remember things."
To ease his fatigue, Grande continues, her brother began using crystal meth. "He was never into the club scene," she says. "He used meth to keep himself going."
Fenzau's mother says his personality darkened as a result. "It made him more angry, short-tempered, and impatient," Lake says. "He was paranoid and difficult to reason with." The meth was also killing Fenzau's relationship with Linkous. "We called them the bicksters because they bickered all the time," Lake notes. "Brian was very jealous. And rightly so. William was cheating on him."
Her son was never the same after breaking up with Linkous, Lake contends, adding it didn't help that the deadly disease was ravaging his memory and causing him mass confusion. "Even though they argued a lot, William really loved Brian," she says. "He got to the point that he didn't care anymore."
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Shortly after their breakup, Fenzau began cruising Internet chat rooms, looking to hook up with other men. He frequented Manhunt.net, a website with the tag line "If he is out there, he is on here. We just make him easier to find." Fenzau's handle: Scorpio Rising. According to a 63-year-old flight attendant who asked to remain anonymous, he and Fenzau would often chat about the men they met online. "We would share our sexual experiences," the friend says. "He was more out there than I was. Certainly, more sexually active. I lived my life vicariously through Will."
One day in late 2003, from the comfort of his Upper Eastside home, Fenzau logged on to Manhunt. Within minutes, he chatted up a 31-year-old DJ named Kevin Cunard, who had moved from Boston to Miami. After a day and a half of messaging back and forth on Manhunt, Fenzau met Cunard at his South Beach apartment, where they snorted meth and had sex. Cunard tells New Times that getting crystal meth was easy through Manhunt and other "hook-up" sites. "The first thing anyone asks you is if you party," Cunard explains. "In the gay world, that means, 'Do you do meth?' If the answer is yes, well, then the person would pull out the pipe."
According to Cunard and another man Fenzau met online, Tom Edwards, Fenzau began selling crystal meth sometime in 2003 to supplement his massage therapy income. "He started off dealing to help pay for his mortgage," Edwards says. "And then he turned out to be a very good drug dealer." Fenzau started off slowly, buying an ounce of meth at a wholesale price of about $1,500. He would divide it into smaller portions and turn at least a $500 profit.
The anonymous flight attendant says he cautioned Fenzau on the perils of getting into the drug game. "If you go that route, it never lasts long, so be careful," he told Fenzau. "But he had a good network of customers. When I used to go to Fort Lauderdale, people knew about Will up there."
