Sherron Watkins: The Party Crasher

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Only now, a year later, has she begun to think of fashioning a life without Enron. In November, she left her $165,000 job. But her future is shaky. She plans to start a global consulting firm to advise company boards on governance and ethics, though CEOs privately chuckle at the thought of opening up to the gimlet-eyed Watkins. The first to speak out, Watkins has had the most time to acclimatize to her strange new existence. Unlike the FBI's Coleen Rowley and WorldCom's Cynthia Cooper, she does not shy away from describing herself as a whistle-blower or suggesting that her gender may have played a role in her decision to act. She alone has been flirting with celebrity, earning up to $25,000 on the speaking circuit and sharing a $500,000 advance to co-author a book.

At the same time, Watkins is the most self-critical of the three. She regrets "naively [thinking] that I would be handing Ken Lay his leadership moment," regrets not taking her concerns to a higher authority. To get by, she has cloaked herself in her family and church. "Her faith," says William Vanderbloemen, her pastor at Houston's First Presbyterian, "was sharpened." But so, markedly, was her despair. "There were some very bleak moments throughout when you're just so disappointed with human nature, with the power of greed and the power of denial, trying to rationalize that you've done nothing wrong," she says.

Things were different back in Tomball, Texas, a town of 10,000 where Watkins and her younger sister Julie were raised. Today, with its strip malls and megastores, Tomball is at the outer edge of Houston's suburban sprawl. But when Watkins was growing up, it was a no-stoplight town with an oil derrick on each corner. Her ancestors were among the hardy German immigrants who descended in the mid-1800s and helped establish the Lutheran church her mother Shirley Klein Harrington still attends each Sunday. It seemed as if Watkins either knew or was related to everyone in town: One uncle owned the grocery store. Another ran the funeral home. Her aunt was her second-grade teacher.

Watkins has the kind of booming personality that refuses to escape notice. At 13, she was unimpressed that her principal split his time between running her Lutheran school and teaching the seventh-and eighth-graders. If his administrative duties called, he would simply send them out for an hour-long recess. She complained so loudly that the principal was divested of his two hats and left the school a year or so later. "He needed to pay attention," she remembers, "or we weren't going to learn." Then, as now, Watkins voices her views firmly, and she never filibusters. "She always has an opinion, but it's always backed up," says her sorority sister and close friend Karen Payne. "It's thought through, and it's thought through in less time than anyone else."

Around the same time as the principal incident, Watkins went on a hunting expedition with her father. While he went off to spot ducks, she hung back with her .243-cal. rifle in search of bigger game. Her father returned to find Watkins standing over the carcass of a deer. She set about gutting it so the family could make spicy ground-venison chili. "It stinks, it's gutty, it's nasty," she says. "My father could not take it." He stepped to the side and vomited.