Vester Lee Flanagan lamented shortly before gunning down two journalists on live TV that his glory days as a $2,000-a-night male escort were behind him, stunning new documents reveal.
The typed and handwritten letters, as well as photographs, driver’s licenses and student IDs, were shown to the Daily News by one of Flanagan’s close friends, Robert Avent, who says he spoke to the calm and collected killer moments before he committed suicide as cops closed in on him last Wednesday.
The notes provide a new window into the megalomaniacal madman’s mental state as he made the decision to exact revenge for an unsuccessful career filled with perceived racial slights.
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In the stream-of-consciousness-style letters Flanagan, 41, is alternately cheery, reflective, apologetic for any hurt he caused Avent and eager to reveal the “raw truth” that racist gunman Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine black churchgoers inspired his own decision to kill.
“I do NOT wanna get old … HELL NO!!!” Flanagan wrote.
“Please keep working out player … when the heads stop turning, it’s AWFUL!!!”
Avent, who is straight, said he was not any part of Flanagan’s life as an escort.
“He didn’t hit on me. We were just friends and roommates. I didn’t participate in any of that,” Avent told The News.
Flanagan, apparently obsessed about his fading looks, recalled his life as a sex worker in the package to Avent.
“I totally CANNOT score right now …,” Flanagan wrote. “And this is from a man who used to be paid hundreds an HOUR to sleep with men…one was a hot YOUNG guy in SF…he once asked, ‘Can I f— you?’ He offered to give me $1,000…I playfully said, ‘No.’ Well, he gave me 2k.”
But Flanagan’s creepy confessional to his friend and former roommate in Vallejo, Calif., was far from over. As he fled a manhunt around 7 a.m. Wednesday following the rampage near Roanoke, Va., he texted Avent.
“Please do not respond to this text,” the perplexing message said, according to Avent, who said he didn’t see it until he woke up.
Flanagan admitted he did something “very bad,” but didn’t say what, Avent said.
“I’m sorry,” Flanagan wrote, according to Avent. “I had no other choice.”
The unexpected text was vague, so Avent didn’t reply as he rushed to his office job.
“He didn’t tell me he was planning to kill anybody. I had no idea,” Avent, 45, said Saturday, still shaken.
Around 8:30 a.m. (Pacific time) Avent called his friend from work.
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“Hey, what’s going on with the text?” he said he recalled asking Flanagan.
“He said, ‘Oh, I did something this morning.’ And he was talking normal, like nothing. Like he didn’t do anything at all. Like a normal voice,” Avent recalled.
“And he said, ‘I shot and killed two people.’ Just like that, in a normal voice,” Avent said.
“No you didn’t,” Avent replied.
Flanagan told Avent to check CNN and hung up.
Roughly two hours before that call, Flanagan, a disgruntled ex-employee of WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, had gunned down two former colleagues, reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward.
The two were filming a segment live when Flanagan opened fire. The sicko uploaded his own first-person footage of the killings to Twitter and Facebook.
Vicki Gardner, 61, who was being interviewed by Parker, was wounded in the shooting.
Avent called Flanagan, who was on the run.
“I’m just riding. But I’m not going to jail,” Flanagan said, according to Avent.
The killer asked his friend why he wasn’t condemning him for what he’d done.
“He asked me, ‘How come you seem so calm after I told you what I did? You don’t seem like it bothers you,'” Avent recalled.
He couldn’t explain himself. The two met in a Greenville, N.C., gym around 2002 and become friends. When Avent got a job opportunity in California, he called Flanagan, who was quick to invite him into the four-bedroom house in Vallejo where he lived at the time — alone. They were roommates from 2006 to 2012.
Now, his friend was confessing to a double murder.
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“I’m just trying to stay calm after hearing news like that. …You’re talking to me in a calm voice after you did that? You shot these people. How come you’re talking to me in a calm voice?'” Avent remembered saying.
“Well, you know, I just feel, I didn’t like those people,” Flanagan replied, according to Avent.
The cops were closing in on Flanagan’s rental car.
“Now it looks like a bunch of police cars behind me now,” Flanagan told Avent.
He was ready to die.
“Man, I’m not going to prison. I’m going to shoot myself in the head,” Flanagan said, according to his friend.
“He asked me if there was anything I wanted to say before he goes,” Avent recalled. He struggled with what to say on the spot.
“He said, ‘Come on, spit it out! I don’t have much time,'” he recalled.
“I said, ‘Just don’t do it,'” Avent said. “He said, ‘I love you and thank you for being there for me.'”
Flanagan told Avent he had to go and abruptly hung up.
Avent tried to call back, but Flanagan never answered. Authorities say he shot himself moments before his car crashed on Interstate 66 near Markham, Va., about 200 miles from Roanoke.
“I think he stayed calm because he knew what he was going to do,” Avent said.
Flanagan’s televised murders left two families devastated and shook a nation where gun violence is the norm.
Parker’s mother, Barbara, told The News she recalled once meeting her daughter’s killer. Now she refuses to speak his name.
“I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of any kind of recognition,” she said.
Flanagan was dead, but he still had a lot to say.
Avent said he received the package, which included check stub receipts that Flanagan indicated were from his time as a male prostitute, Saturday. ABC News received a manifesto last week with similar rantings.
“Life was so much better back in” those days, Flanagan wrote.
He also wrote that he’d told his dad in a separate letter a month ago that he didn’t want a funeral but wanted to be cremated.
“I stated my last wishes … to be cremated. NO FUNERAL!! That didn’t raise a red flag?” Flanagan wrote.
His family had long been a source of his anger, Avent said.
“He felt his family didn’t like him,” Avent said. “He said they didn’t like his lifestyle and didn’t want to come over. He got very upset about it.”
When Flanagan got his news job in Roanoke he left Vallejo with high hopes. But he soon became lonely, bitter and angry.
“He didn’t have anybody to talk to. He was home by himself. When you’re home by yourself and you think a lot — he started thinking bad things,” Avent said.
Avent said he contacted authorities about his conversation with Flanagan last Wednesday — the day of the murders.
He said he alerted authorities Sunday to the package he received. Virginia authorities would not comment on Avent’s claims, citing the ongoing investigation.
Flanagan’s paper trail offered another peek into his warped mind.
“OK, so I guess my first suicide note is finished…Oh wait a sec…we only get one per lifetime…oooops,” he wrote.
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With Edgar Sandoval
