Adam Chrismer never really stood out at Ridgeland High School. He certainly wasn’t the smartest kid nor was he was the best-looking. He was, in many respects, just one among hundreds of kids who prowled the hallways between classes with nothing to distinguish him.

He had a little scar on his right cheek where a cyst had been removed and another cyst poking through the hair on his right temple. On his left cheek, he had a small bump where a BB had been imbedded, a souvenir of an afternoon of fun and games that had gotten out of hand. But you had to look closely to see it, and the truth of the matter was, not many people looked too closely at Adam Chrismer.

In fact, Samantha Foster Leming, a girl from school who was a year younger than he, was one of the few who ever gave him so much as a second look. They had fallen in together sometime after the ninth grade, Chrismer’s family members say, and found comfort in each other’s company.

Perhaps she was a little more flamboyant than he, a little more precocious, according to people who knew them. But they were far from hard cases. There were apparently no scrapes with the law, and if the pair had dabbled at all in drugs or anything else, they had been discreet about it.

Still, Chrismer’s family would later tell authorities, they were sort of uneasy about the relationship. Yes, they had some reservations about the girl, but most of their concerns focused on Howard Hawk Willis, an older man who seemed to have an unusual interest in and influence over the girl. It was never clear how they had met, family members say. Adam Chrismer had once suggested that Samantha had been friendly with one of Willis’s children. But it was clear to anyone who took time to notice that Willis’ relationship with the girl was hardly paternal.

On the few occasions that Willis showed up at the Chrismer’s house with Samantha, family members would later say they felt a sense that there was something inappropriate about the man’s attachment to the girl. There was something about the way he looked at the girl, and something even more chilling about the way he looked at Chrismer when he was with her. There was, they would later tell authorities, something in his eyes like jealousy.

But Adam Chrismer was 17. He was practically a man, and there was little his stepfather could do to change his mind once he had made it up. They had grudgingly accepted his decision to drop out of school when she had. And they had given up trying to stop him from spending all his time shuttling back and forth with Samantha and Willis from Willis’ home in Chickamauga to his mother’s house in Johnson City, Tenn.

The one thing they weren’t going to do, however, was give the boy permission to marry before his 18th birthday. That, for them, was a line in the sand -- it was the only authority they had over the boy, they believed, and they were going to exercise it.

Willis apparently had other plans.

No one really knows why it was so important to Willis that his two teenage friends marry.

Maybe it was simply that he enjoyed the control he had over the pair, and relished the fact that in his power over them, he could move them through the paces of their young lives like pieces on a chessboard, authorities speculate.

There is evidence -- discovered much later in the form of photographs Willis had taken and dropped off at a Johnson City CVS drug store in June, pictures that showed two young women, one of them Samantha, partially clothed and in sexually explicit poses –that suggests that perhaps he had other, more nefarious plans in mind.

In any case, authorities now say, Willis carefully crafted a plan to help the youngsters get around their parents’ objections to the marriage. There is, he knew, a loophole in Georgia law that allows minors to marry without their parents’ consent if the girl is pregnant.

Samantha was not. But she had a friend who was, and, authorities believe, under Willis’ direction, she arranged to have a local physician perform a pregnancy test. Before she went, she approached her pregnant friend, got a urine sample and gave it to the doctor, who, believing the sample to be authentic, signed the necessary document to clear the way for an August wedding.

Walker County Courthouse, Lafayette Ga.

When Adam Chrismer and his bride-to-be walked into the Walker County Courthouse in Lafayette, Ga., on a sweltering August afternoon to pick up their marriage license, Howard Hawk Willis was with them.