Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men: Guest Post by Harold Schechter

Harold Schechter:
Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

In the weeks since the publication of my book, Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men, I’ve been asked a number of times how I first learned of its subject, the notorious “Lady Bluebeard” of La Porte, Indiana. Given my rapidly deteriorating memory, I’m not exactly sure, but I believe I first encountered her name in one of my favorite books, Olive Wooley Burt’s 1958 classic, American Murder Ballads and Their Stories. Among the scores of priceless ditties collected in that indispensable volume was one that began:

In old Indiana, not far from La Porte 

There once lived a woman, a home-loving sort. 

Belle wanted a husband, she wanted one bad. 

She placed in the papers a lonely-hearts ad. 

So big, mean, and ugly, she stayed to herself. 

A sharp cleaver lay on her slaughter-pen shelf. 

She was a hog-raiser, she started from scratch 

And planted each suitor in her ‘tater-patch. 

In church every Sunday you’d see pious Belle, 

The Devil’s own daughter, the Princess of Hell. 

Belle Gunness’s heaven was her slaughter-pen 

For she lived in the glory of butchering men. 

I was, of course, immediately intrigued.

My subsequent research into the Belle Gunness saga led me to conclude that she was that rarest of all psychopaths: a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. What made her even more unusual was the extreme savagery of her crimes. There were other female “murder fiends” in our country before Belle--Lydia Sherman, Sarah Jane Robinson, Jane Toppan. But they had all shared the traditional m.o. of female serial killers--poisoning their victims, then pretending that the deaths were due to natural causes.

Belle Gunness was different. Frighteningly different. True, most of her victims had apparently been dosed with arsenic (then readily available in the form of the popular vermicide, “Rough on Rats.”) But the corpses that were dug up on her Indiana “murder farm” hadn’t simply been dispatched with poison. They had been butchered.

A forty-two-year-old Norwegian emigrant, Belle had purchased the farm in 1902 with the insurance money she came into when her first husband, Mads Sorenson, died suddenly in convulsive agony. Moving to the small town of La Porte, she set herself up on what she liked to call “the prettiest and happiest country home in northern Indiana.” Shortly thereafter, she married a young widower, Peter Gunness. Just nine months after the nuptials, he was killed when a cast-iron sausage grinder fell from the stove top and struck him directly between the eyes while he was reaching for a shoe. At least that was Belle’s explanation. So bizarre was this story that neighbors talked openly of murder. The insurance company, however, declared her husband’s death an accident, and Belle collected another hefty payment.

That was when her homicidal career began in earnest. Over the course of the next six years, a succession of men found their way to Belle Gunness’s happy country home. Some were hired hands, brought in to help with the farm work. Others were well-to-do bachelors, lured to the farm by the classified matrimonial ads that Belle regularly took out in Norwegian newspapers throughout the Midwest.

All of them vanished without a trace.

Then, in the early morning hours of April 27, 1908, the Gunness farmhouse burned to the ground. When the blaze was finally extinguished, firemen were aghast to discover the remains of four people--three children and an adult woman--stacked like cordwood in the cellar of the incinerated house. Though badly charred, the murdered children were recognizable as the youngest of Belle’s six offspring. The fourth corpse was assumed to be that of Belle herself. Positive identification was impossible, however. The woman had been decapitated, and her head was nowhere to be found.

Suspicion immediately fell on a disgruntled farmhand named Ray Lamphere, who was charged with murder. In the meantime, searchers continued to sift through the ashes in a search for the missing head. They never found it. What they did unearth sent shockwaves throughout the nation--and earned Belle Gunness everlasting infamy as one of the most terrifying sociopaths in the annals of American crime.

A dozen butchered corpses lay buried around the property: in a rubbish pit, a privy vault, a hog lot. Most of the bodies had been carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey--head hacked off, arms removed from the shoulder sockets, legs sawed off at mid-thigh. The various pieces of each body--limbs, head, trunk--had been stuffed into separate grain sacks, sprinkled with lime, then buried.

The discovery of these atrocities turned the Gunness farmstead into an instant, macabre tourist attraction. On the Sunday following the discovery of the chopped-up corpses, an estimated sixteen thousand curiosity seekers descended on the property, some from as far away as Chicago. Whole families strolled about the place like vacationing sightseers, while hawkers did a booming business in hot dogs, lemonade, and souvenir postcards of the “murder farm.”

As to her fate, questions linger to this day. Did Lamphere--her suspected accomplice--kill her and her children for unknown reasons, then set fire to the farmhouse in an attempt to cover up his crimes? Many people believed so.

Others, however, had doubts that the charred, decapitated woman in the cellar was Belle. For one thing, the body weighed just seventy-three pounds--inordinately small, even allowing for the shrinkage that results when meat is roasted at high temperatures. Lamphere himself claimed that Belle had staged her own death, then absconded with a fortune in ill-gotten gains. For many years, sightings of the infamous “Lady Bluebeard” were reported in places across America. In the popular mind, she continued to live on, a legendary monster immortalized in story and song.

***
Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. 

In HELL’S PRINCESS: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men (Little A; 4/01), the two-time Edgar Award finalist, Harold Schechter brings to life one of the strangest and most gruesome serial killings in the history of the United States. 

You Have the Right to Remain Silent: Guest Post by Clark Lohr and Timothy W. Moore

Clark Lohr & Timothy W. Moore:You Have the Right to Remain Silent….

There’s a display in the Phoenix Police Museum devoted to Ernesto Miranda, the man whose arrest led to the Miranda Decision, handed down in 1966 by the United States Supreme Court. Booking photos show a slender, well-muscled young man with pale skin, black hair, and full lips. In some images, Miranda wears black horn-rimmed glasses.

Ernesto Miranda had been in trouble since he was a teenager. He joined the Army at age eighteen, only to be dishonorably discharged on a Peeping Tom conviction.

When Phoenix PD reviewed Miranda’s RAP Sheet (Record of Arrests and Prosecutions) and then arrested him, he had already created a criminal pattern of behavior as a serial rapist, robber, and kidnapper.

Flash forward to 2014. Phoenix Police Detective Timothy W. Moore knew that 2016 would be the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Miranda Decision. He also knew that no one had actually taken the time to write the story down in detail. Moore set 2016 as his deadline to produce a true crime book about the hunt for Ernest Miranda and the court actions leading to the Miranda Decision.

Moore had read thousands of suspects their Miranda Warnings in his nearly thirty-year career. He’d started as a patrol officer, and he’d worked a wide range of detective assignments in order to round himself out by learning the many aspects of various police investigations. He’d earned a bachelor’s degree along the way and, in 2014, he was working the Violent Crimes Bureau’s Crime Gun Intelligence Squad.

Moore was also an associate director on the board of the Phoenix Police Museum, along with a host of current and retired Phoenix police officers and detectives, one of whom was Carroll Cooley, a tough, square jawed man with wide set eyes who’d retired from the Phoenix PD in 1978. Cooley and another detective named Wilfred Young had arrested Ernesto Miranda on March 13, 1963, kicking off a chain of events that resulted in the most famous Supreme Court decision in United States history.

Cooley was open to being interviewed and Moore set about getting the Miranda story right. His work with Cooley opened a door leading to many retired officers and detectives who were involved in various aspects of the Miranda story from 1962, including the detectives who investigated Miranda’s murder in 1976.

In follow-up interviews, Moore learned about Miranda’s trial, the appeals, his re-trial and his sentencing. But there was more to it. Newspaper accounts and Freedom of Information Act requests led to original documentation and court records.

Moore did additional interviews, which included a Miranda family member— retired Phoenix Police Detective David Miranda, the nephew of Ernesto. Using these interviews, coupled with Phoenix Police Department reports, court records, and the volumes of Supreme Court documentation, Moore did a draft of a book written with a unique structure.

Mirandized Nation is largely a scary true crime book that shifts points of view between Miranda, his victims, and the detectives who search for the answers that will lead them to a sick, dangerous, and persistent predator of women.

We follow Detective Cooley’s successful career, which paralleled Miranda’s criminal career. Cooley retired with the rank of captain. Miranda’s career ended in true outlaw fashion by way of a violent death.  

Mirandized Nation is also a book that uses an accessible, fast moving narrative to detail what the Supreme Court was doing at the time. They were, in fact, examining multiple cases like Miranda’s, all of which had to do with suspects’ rights, and the Miranda Decision was so named only because his was the first case of that type to arrive on their court calendar.

Moore fictionalized some of the dialog and some of the characterization of the players to facilitate the story and made use of close third person, quoting Miranda’s thoughts. Names of victims and witnesses were changed, but nothing else was invented—which, again, makes it scary. We’re with Miranda when he’s pulling out of his driveway at night to find and assault women and we know what day it is and we know what time it is—and we know it’s true. Every chapter of the book is furnished with a list of references.

With his draft completed, Tim Moore solicited the assistance of Clark Lohr, a crime novelist living in Tucson, Arizona, who possessed what Moore did not have—a degree in Writing and Literature and another in English. The two men were able to combine their research and expertise, leading to a lasting friendship and a revised draft of Mirandized Nation.

After professional editing done by Lisa Anderson, and a final editing by Deborah J. Ledford, a novelist and owner of IOF (Ice on Fire) Productions, Ltd., Mirandized Nation was published in May of 2015.

Clark Lohr lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of two crime novels, Devil's Kitchen and The Devil on Eighty-five.

Timothy W. Moore retired from the Phoenix PD after a thirty-year career, most of it as a detective. Moore has an enduring marriage and two grown daughters.

Prison Visits: Guest post by Kathryn Casey

Kathryn Casey is the author of fourteen books, her most recent POSSESSED: The Infamous Texas Stiletto Murder. In Plain Sight, on the Kaufman County prosecutor murders, is scheduled for publication by HarperCollins in early 2018. Ann Rule called Casey “one of the best in the true crime genre.”

Kathryn Casey:
Prison Visits

The door opens, and suddenly he’s there. Minutes later, he grins, his excitement palpable, as he describes the murders of four women. A crime writer’s life can take strange turns. 

I started covering sensational cases for magazines in the eighties, and it stuck. In the mid-nineties, I began writing true crime books. Eleven books later, I traveled Texas interviewing folks for Deliver Us (Harper, 2015), investigating more than two dozen unsolved murders that unfolded between 1971 and 1997 near Interstate 45, south of Houston.

I’d considered writing this particular book for some time. The cases haunted me. Over the years, I’d collected Houston Chronicle articles on the killings in a folder I kept in my desk drawer. At times, I took it out, reread them, and wondered. The murders were, after all, the ultimate mysteries, and I felt compelled to find out what happened to so many young women.

In many ways, true crime isn’t an easy life. I do an incredible amount of research, spend long weeks even months on stiff-backed wooden courthouse benches during trials, and over the years I’ve had to get used to pretty strong reactions from people I approach asking for interviews. It comes with the territory. For the most part, those involved agree to talk to me. Some, however, aren’t happy to see me when they open their doors.

As I dug into the I-45 murders, I realized that although the cases remained unsolved, there were suspects. The majority of the killings appeared to fall into three groups, divided by decades and linked by proximity. I always try to interview everyone involved, so I journeyed between five Texas prisons, where the main suspects are inmates serving long sentences for unrelated crimes. Most of the men denied they’d murdered anyone.

One glaring exception: Mark Roland Stallings.

Tall, muscular, bald, edgy, Stallings is suspected in one of the murders tied to the notorious Texas Killing Field. Between 1983 and 1991, four sets of remains were recovered from under trees in what was an overgrown oil patch, a mile from the highway. The victims included: a 23-year-old waitress, Heide Fye, a high school student, Laura Miller, and two unidentified women, Jane and Janet Doe.

While all the bodies were found in the same area, the fourth killing differed from the first three, suggesting two killers. Stallings was the prime suspect in the death of the final victim, Janet Doe.

That day I walked into the prison, I felt a familiar knot in my chest when the metal prison doors clanked shut behind me. The place was grim. Prisons pretty much all are. A special building reserved for high-risk inmates, that section of the Gib Lewis Unit struck me as even more suffocating than most. Moments after I arrived, a guard brought Stallings out and locked him in a metal cage opposite me. I felt a surge of gratitude for the thick window that separated us, as Stallings picked up the phone on his side of the Plexiglas to talk to me.

In truth, I’d assumed Stallings would claim innocence, like most of the others I’d interviewed. To my surprise, he instead recounted in vivid detail how he strangled Janet Doe and his involvement in the murders of three other women.

The experience was more than unsettling.

Most of the killers I’d interviewed in the past and since acted for some form of personal gain, money or possessions, for revenge, many to dispose of significant others who became inconvenient. While tragic, the killings had some twisted logic.

Mark Stallings murdered for a more primal reason: he enjoyed it.

I’m not new at this. I’ve heard and seen a lot over the years, but it’s hard to interact with someone like Stallings. He talked with a detached delight about his years in the Texas Killing Fields. And he didn’t blame himself or hold himself accountable for his crimes. Instead, he felt justified. The women were at fault. They were troubled. They were disposable.

Why write a book on men who commit such horrific crimes? For one reason: to understand.

More than any other aspect, I’ve always been interested in the psychology of the cases I cover, and as we talked, Stallings recounted a common history for serial killers, one involving childhood sexual abuse and early experiences that mixed sex and violence.

While his history didn’t in any way mitigate his abhorrent crimes, perhaps it explained some of the volcanic rage that consumed him.

TCM March Spotlight: TCM Villains 3/20-3/25

TCM SPOTLIGHT: Villains: March Malice - 3/20-3/25

This month on TCM villains will have their due by pairing some of the most nefarious characters in 32 different categories and letting viewers decide who reigns as the worst of them all. Villains run the gamut and come in all shapes, sizes and forms.

The couplings begin with Psycho Killers Norman Bates, played with chilling perfection by Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960); and Mark Lewis, portrayed by Carl Boehm, in Peeping Tom (1960) with a creepiness that made his movie a cult favorite. Technology Kills! covers such high-tech threats as the android gunslinger played by Yul Brynner in Westworld (1973) and HAL 9000, the spaceship computer that takes on a life of its own in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Movies featuring Western Outlaws include The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), with Lee Marvin as the ruthless desperado of the title, and Hombre (1967), with Richard Boone as the marauding bandit Grimes.

True Crime gives us Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez (Shirley Stoler and Tony LoBianco), the killers of The Honeymoon Killers (1970) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the legendary bank robbers played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty.

Femmes Fatales don't come any deadlier than Phyllis Dietrichson played with icy brilliance by Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944); or Vera, the sultry hitchhiker brought to scary life by Ann Savage in Detour (1945).

Two Killer Kids who wreck the lives of the grownups around them are Patty McCormack's Rhoda Penmark, the little psycho of The Bad Seed (1956); and Ann Blyth's Veda Pierce, the scheming daughter of Mildred Pierce (1945).

Many Dark Forces loom large over their opponents such as Margaret Hamilton as the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939); and Sala Baker as Sauron, the ominous Dark Lord of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).

Among the classic movie Aliens Among Us are those seed pods that transform into human replicants in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956); and that, well, thing played by James Arness in The Thing from Another World (1951).

You Animal! is a category that showcases such savage beasts as Larry Talbot, the werewolf played by Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man (1941); and Irena Dubrovna Reed, the pantheresque beauty acted by Simone Simon in Cat People (1942).

The Mid-Atlantic Does Murder: True Crimes by Cathy Pickens

Mystery Readers Journal changed up its themes for 2016, but not before our True Crime columnist Cathy Pickens submitted her column. Rather than wait until we add Mid-Atlantic Mysteries to our line-up, I thought I'd post this great article.

 Cathy Pickens’ mystery series started with the St. Martin’s Malice Domestic-award winning Southern Fried. She conducts popular workshops on developing the creative process and developed a program to teach jail inmates how to start their own businesses.

Cathy Pickens:
The Mid-Atlantic Does Murder  

In the diverse and densely populated mid-Atlantic states, what’s a better illustration of their crime history than cases open to continuing speculation?

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll 

In 1979, when parents enrolled their children in Philadelphia Mainline’s Upper Merion High School, they didn’t expect the kind of education or the educators they got. Bear-like Bill Bradfield, the English and Latin teacher, had a live-in teacher-girlfriend, plus other girlfriends (some married) for added entertainment.

The principal, Dr. Jay Smith, was an Army Reserve colonel with a rigid manner and subscriptions to swinger and porn magazines.

In a swirl of sexual experimentation and drama, free love became establishment at Upper Merion High School.

What created such a bubbling stew of sexual intrigue? A sign of the ‘70s? A confluence of personalities around a master manipulator?

It was all fun and games until someone ended up dead in a car trunk.

The body of English teacher Susan Reinert, wrapped in chains, was found in her car trunk in the parking lot of a Harrisburg grocery store. The story exploded over national news as the tangled facts slowly unwound: Reinert had divorced her husband, was having an affair with fellow teacher Bradfield, who was living with yet another teacher. Her young children—ages 10 and 11—were missing and, tragically, have never been found. Reinert had been beaten and later injected with a fatal dose of morphine.

Was Bill Bradfield a pied piper of perversion? Many who followed the case thought so.

Was principal Smith—the military man—a hired killer? Or a deranged man seeking vengeance on a quiet teacher for unnamed reasons? He had, after all, been convicted of robbing two Sears stores, disguised as an armored car guard.

Was Reinert killed for the $700,000 life insurance policy benefitting Bradfield? Did Smith, living out a macho fantasy, commit the murder or was his involvement just another Bradfield con job?

Two books (one written by Joseph Wambaugh), a TV movie, and a memoir written by principal Jay Smith rehashed the details, but the motives remain murky.

Did Wambaugh’s involvement skew the investigation and the trial results? An appellate court believed it might. Documents later found in the effects of a state trooper who investigated the case showed that Wambaugh had paid at least one officer more than a trooper’s annual salary for inside information on the investigation.

Smith’s attorney William Costopoulos got him off death row after six years, then got him out of prison. The court held the prosecution had withheld evidence possibly helpful to Smith and thereby created double jeopardy. Smith could never be retried.

Did Smith kill Reinert? He says no, in a self-published book detailing the holes he saw in the prosecution case. Smith died in 2009 at age 80.

Was Bradfield a gifted con artist who found the right pawns and victims all gathered in one place? Was he also a murderer? Or simply the orchestra leader? He was at Cape May with other teachers during that deadly holiday weekend. Did any of his companions conspire with him? Did he hire a murderous thug (with money he’d supposedly invested for Susan Reinert but which he’d kept)?

In 1998, Bradfield died in prison at age 64, fifteen years into his sentence. After weaving lots of wild stories about how Smith was going to kill Reinert and how he didn’t know she’d left him her insurance policy, Bradfield remained quiet about what really happened. Despite books and movies and loads of speculation, the facts remain a mystery—at surely one of the wildest high school English departments ever.

High Tech—1904-Style 

In 1904, decades before the classic hardboiled P.I. novel debuted, a murder mystery suited for a twisty crime novel unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia.

J. Samuel McCue, former mayor of Charlottesville and a successful lawyer, returned home from church one evening with his wife.

He’d started upstairs, then turned to get something he’d left downstairs. His wife Fannie continued past him up the stairs—where she met a masked man with a gun. In the dim light, he shot her, ran downstairs, and smashed out a large back window to escape.

Former mayor McCue had little faith in the police chief, so he sought help from Roanoke private investigator W. G. Baldwin. The PI surveyed the scene—the upstairs landing where she died, the shattered window, the torn spider web outside the window where the gunman had escaped.

As Baldwin examined the ground outside the window, he saw the glint of metal—a small ring with a broken screw attached, the lanyard ring from a gun.

While Baldwin searched, McCue was in his study packing his briefcase. Even in his grief, he couldn’t ignore clients who needed him. He also needed to stop by the bank, he told Baldwin, to get his will from the safe deposit box. His wife—and only heir—was now dead, so he needed to change his will. He was a lawyer, after all. Such details were his bread and butter.

PI Baldwin accompanied him on his walk to the bank, on his way to see the police chief.

The chief handed Baldwin the unusual bullets taken from Mrs. McCue’s body.

Back at McCue’s office, Baldwin asked him the delicate but obvious question: Do you have any enemies? You were first on the stairs. The bullets were meant for you.

McCue named two men with whom he’d had difficulties, including Reginald Evans, who’d accused McCue of seducing his wife while meeting with her about divorcing Evans.

As any devoted detective would, McCue followed the leads. Mrs. Evans was indeed a looker, but the Evanses had reconciled.

McCue then went to the telephone office to call a gun expert about the odd bullets and the lanyard ring. He chatted up Miss Virginia Bragg, the telephone operator, then continued to follow leads to their dead-ends.

Later, Miss Bragg called him at his hotel to report an unusual phone call former mayor McCue had placed. As she checked to make sure the call connected properly, she’d heard just enough: a woman telling McCue to “send the money now.”

Baldwin, suspecting blackmail, asked Miss Bragg to find out who and where McCue was calling.

He then visited his client and asked if he had any personal skeletons he needed to tell him about. McCue drew himself up in all his Victorian dignity: “Certainly not.”

Baldwin quickly cracked the case: thanks to the lead from Miss Bragg, Baldwin found that McCue had a beautiful woman stashed in a Washington hotel—none other than Hattie Evans.

Mr. Evans was an Englishman and owned an English Webley revolver. The bullets and the lanyard ring both came from a Webley revolver—an unusual weapon for anyone in that area to own. Evans said his revolver had disappeared from his desk.

Hattie Evans told Baldwin she’d given McCue her husband’s gun, afraid her husband might act on his jealous suspicions and do something foolish.

Baldwin searched his client’s house for the revolver. He found a dusty envelope in McCue’s desk: McCue’s Last Will and Testament. Going through jacket pockets in McCue’s closet, he found no gun but did get his fingers tangled up in fibers stuck on one jacket. He carefully folded the jacket and took it with him.

He asked the police chief what McCue was wearing the night of his wife’s murder. The chief described the jacket Baldwin had taken from the closet—the jacket with the sticky spider web on it. The killer had run through a spider web escaping through the garden window.

Why did McCue hire Baldwin to “solve” his wife’s murder? For the same narcissistic reason he walked with his PI to visit his safe deposit box. McCue didn’t go there to get his will—that was dusty and stuffed in a desk drawer at home. He didn’t get anything out. Instead, he put something in: he’d carried the Webley revolver with the broken lanyard ring down the street in his briefcase, his PI at his side.

The case accounts have some major discrepancies. The trial account by the publisher of Charlottesville’s The Daily Progress gives little mention of PI Baldwin but lots of speculation about discord in the McCue household and about his philandering. Mrs. McCue had been strangled and hit with a bat before being shot, so things were messier and not quite so well planned as the PI’s account suggests.

Was there a Webley revolver and a missing lanyard swivel? The weapon that shot Mrs. McCue was a long gun owned by McCue. Was there a spider web and an incriminating jacket? That seems a bit far-fetched, even for a detective novel.

The newspaperman’s account focused on the official version of the facts, as presented at trial. The PI’s point of view was the focus of crime authors Boswell and Thompson’s account. Any event has different perspectives.

Did hiring the PI help build the case? Or was the case being solved before he arrived from Roanoke? The professional competition between PIs and police doesn’t rage only on the pages of novels, it seems.

Regardless of how the case developed, the wealthy lawyer and former mayor was perhaps the most prominent person ever hanged for murder by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

We might think of the days of phone operators as decidedly low-tech, in the days when we can track cell tower pings. But even simple technology can solve a crime—even though it may never explain the mysteries of the human mind.

References: 

Reinert: 

Costopoulos, William C. Principal Suspect: The True Story of Dr. Jay Smith and the Main Line Murders (1996).

Noe, Denise, “Two Sues and Bill,” www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/classics/mainline_murders/1.html.

Swartz-Nobel, Loretta. Engaged to Murder (1988).

Smith, Jay Charles. Joseph Wambaugh and the Jay Smith Case (2008).

Wambaugh, Joseph. Echoes in the Darkness (1987).

McCue:

Boswell, Charles and Lewis Thompson. Advocates for Murder, “The Case of the Nosy Operator,” pp. 77-94 (1962).

Lindsay, James H. The McCue Murder: Complete Story of the Crime and the Famous Trial of the Ex-Mayor of Charlottesville (1938), accessed August 2016, http://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:5807065$11i.

Destroying Reality and Rebuilding It as Fiction -- Stefan Thunberg & Anders Roslund

Today we have a return of one of the favorite themes on Mystery Fanfare: Partners in Crime. Not only was The Father a collaborative novel, but this guest post is by both authors. The Father is the fictionalized story of Sweden’s most notorious bank robbers who terrorized the country in the early 1990s. It is written by the brother of the three bank robbers, Stefan Thunberg, and Anders Roslund, under the name Anton Svensson. The Father is an amazing novel, and as Macleans (Canada) wrote, "an extraordinary book that works on every level for which it aims, as a fast-paced thriller, as a psychological portrait of the brilliant and charismatic older brother becoming the father he loathed, and as an exploration of the damage violence wreaks on victims even when they are not physically harmed.” Thanks to Sue Trowbridge for translating this great post from Swedish for Mystery Fanfare. And thanks to Stefan and Anders for taking the time to write this--and to write their novel.

Destroying Reality and Rebuilding It as Fiction 

Stefan 

When I was in my twenties, I attended an art school in Stockholm. I wanted to become a painter. At the same time, the people who meant the most to me — my three brothers and two of my best friends — devoted themselves to something completely different. They robbed banks. I never knew when or where the next robbery would take place, but the fact that it would happen was always present, constantly on my mind. I was one of the family. The brother. The second oldest in a close-knit quartet of siblings, in which my eldest brother obviously played the role of “big brother.”

The door to his house was always open to me, and therefore I could, when I least expected, step into his apartment just as they were planning a robbery, or dealing with the aftermath of one.

I particularly remember one evening when I entered my big brother's living room. The television was on and there were reports of a robbery of an armored truck. All five of them, my three brothers and two friends, sat on the couch and spoke with frantic voices. The mood was palpable; the adrenaline had not left their bodies, even as they discussed what had happened that evening. How, for a few intense minutes, they had robbed the very armored truck that I was watching on TV. How, with automatic weapons, they had helped themselves to the spoils. They told me about the robbery, described it in short, disjointed scenes. It was like listening to several people who had all watched a movie I had not seen. A movie that I wanted to watch.

I remember feeling like an outsider. They had crossed a border together. They took out an empty goldfish bowl and filled it with all the money they had taken, and someone commented that a million doesn’t take up a lot of space. And in that moment, I could feel their disappointment that they had not gotten away with as much as they had expected. They had left several million behind the doors of the armored truck, along with two traumatized guards. At that moment, it became obvious to me that they would continue until they made a huge score worth many millions, or until it all went straight to hell.

And continue they did. A spate of armed robberies and a constant search after new objectives, new escape routes from the police. It became routine. The abnormal became normal. And not once did my brother say to me, "You can’t talk about this." In my family, between us brothers, that was completely obvious. It was as though we had been trained by our dad. Never, under any circumstances, betray a family member.

That peculiar but obvious confidence became extremely clear one day when I was walking home from the art school I attended. I would take the commuter train from Stockholm’s Central Station to return home to my big brother, but on this day, it was impossible. All routes had been closed, and there were cordons and police everywhere. I remember being annoyed when I heard the reason: some idiot had put a bomb in a locker at the station. I was still blissfully unaware that it had been my brothers who had placed it there.

Anders 

In that chaos at Stockholm’s Central Station, amidst frightened and shaking people on their way home — but on the other side of the barricades, those high metal fences — there I was.

At the same time.

Holding a microphone in my hand.

At the time, I was working for Sweden's biggest news program, the 7:30 PM Report. I was there to report on a bombing, an event which much later would prove to be a mere diversion to lure Stockholm’s police force to the Central Station, right in the middle of the capital city. In the meantime, the gang that the police were desperately searching for were in a completely different location, and therefore were of course completely uninterrupted as they carried out yet another brutal bank robbery.

This was a time when Sweden, for a few, intense years, was faced with an entirely new type of crime, as well as a type of criminal we had never seen before, and were now forced to confront. And my job was to report on the consequences of criminality; on the forces driving the offenders; and what became of the victims. It was an attempt to get closer to understanding, to increase knowledge, and make sure it never happened again — resulting in even more victims.

That was why I followed the tracks of the faceless criminals who detonated that bomb in order to be undisturbed as they robbed a bank in a different location. A group which came to be known as the Military League, unlike anything we'd ever seen before.

They began by blowing their way into a military armory, committing northern Europe's largest weapons coup, stealing 221 automatic weapons in one night, and doing it so skillfully that it was only discovered six months later.

And then, with their very own weapons cache, they committed bank robbery after bank robbery without ever having to use the same weapons and risk that their robbery methods would be forensically coupled.

After armored vehicle robberies, postal robberies and bank robberies, they committed the first double robbery: two adjacent banks, in the same amount of time they previously spent robbing a single bank.

Then they committed the first triple robbery, three banks in the same place at the same time. That was their philosophy: in 180 seconds, regardless of how many banks were robbed, it was just as likely that the police would get there in time to stop them.

They exhibited extreme madness, extreme ruthlessness, but also, in a very particular blend, extreme brilliance and extreme ingenuity.

Eventually, I stopped reporting on crime on TV. I found a format I thought was so much better: I started writing suspense fiction, crime novels, thrillers with Börge Hellström. Roslund & Hellström.

Entertainment first and foremost, but blended with knowledge about the other reality.

A kind of reality most have not yet faced or waded into. I had sought to know this reality all my life, the consequences of violence that informs and pursues. That was why I became a sort of monitor, that is, someone wearing layman's clothes outside the prison walls who will be there for the person who stayed in the cell on the inside. That was why I, as a journalist, tried to describe the continued violence. What I now, in novel form, continue to search for.

But after fourteen intense years of writing — with books like Three Seconds, Box 21, Cell 8 and The Beast — we decided that the duo of Roslund & Hellström should take a break. We had worked so closely together for so long that our irritations had become increasingly clear, our discussions louder, and we did not want to destroy what we had created. I had already started to sketch out and write three books as a separate series, just Roslund, and I was in the middle of one of them during this break when I met Stefan. And something happened that made me lay my own book aside. Love. A love of writing. It wasn’t just that Stefan was an incredibly gifted screenwriter of box office hits, and not just that he was the fourth brother who had never joined the bank robber gang I had reported on and long been curious about. We had found each other as two storytellers. And we slowly began to approach what Stefan had been a part of, what he had carried around, for so long.

Stefan 

I never became an artist. I became a screenwriter and now I'm an author and when I went into this project, I knew that I would never write a documentary novel about my brothers. I wanted to destroy reality and piece it back together again. Not because the truth is difficult, but because I simply had to find the heartbeat of this story.

When I met Anders, I discovered that we had the same view on fiction. Another thing I discovered was that Anders is always working. I have never met anyone with Anders’ work ethic. He writes like a marathon runner who loves every step he takes. Anders has, with his routine, his experience and talent, brought so much to this story. And I have learned a lot from him. I have shared this story with him and we have made it our own. Another thing I appreciate is that we are very synchronized in our pursuit of those situations, the kind that will not let go of the reader ... like the story that has haunted me for twenty years.

Because on December 23, 1993, they said on the news that three robbers were fleeing in a blizzard after driving into a ditch. Three robbers, one of whom was in his fifties.

Slowly it dawned on me that the third robber was my dad.

The night before Christmas Eve, I watched every single newscast. They all reported on the hunt for the robbers who had fled into a wooded area, and about how the police’s elite unit was slowly closing in on them. The circle was centered around a summer cottage they had broken into in order to escape the blizzard.

My brother would never give up; of that, I was convinced. And the father who so many times during my childhood had solved so many problems with violence, how would he react? The two of them, armed with automatic weapons, under extreme circumstances. I remember my final thought before exhaustion and turmoil drove me to sleep: tonight, they will die.

What happened when my big brother and my father found each other after years of conflict and decided to carry out a robbery together, the gang’s last robbery and this event? How did they land in the summer cottage outside Heby, surrounded by the police’s elite force? What did they say to each other that night? How did they relate to each other during those hours before police fired tear gas grenades? Were there moments of reconciliation? Did they make up? What did their conflict look like when everything was put to the test?

As I told Anders my thoughts around this incident, we suddenly realized that what happened in that cottage on the night before Christmas Eve was the heart of this novel.

Anders 

A novel. Absolutely. A story. Obviously. It became our mantra throughout the writing process: "destroy reality and rebuild it as fiction." But sometimes, it became clear that we had to leave fiction behind in order to seek the reality that our story was based on.

At one point, we needed to access the report on the entire investigation. Or, rather, the reports. There were several: one for each robbery of an armored vehicle, one for each bank robbery, and one for the bombing at the Central Station — public endangerment — and even one criminal offense I had never seen before — attempted aggravated extortion against the police. Six thousand pages of police reports. It would become the skeleton we could surround with the body of our fictional parts, the base we would build our fictional story upon. 

But a long time had passed, making the documents difficult to trace. Until the day we discovered a well-preserved set of copies in a corner at the back of Stefan's youngest brother's basement storage area.

There they were — in a large, black garbage bag.

We returned to my writers’ lair at Reimersholme where for more than two years we shut ourselves in to write. I carried the black garbage bag in my arms up the stairs to the fourth floor and it was like carrying a body, ponderous, heavy, and when I opened the front door of the apartment, I spread the entire contents over the hardwood floors of the room.

And right there, right then, it happened.

What we should have expected, but had turned away from, hoping we would not have to deal with.

Reality suddenly clawed its way out.

The black garbage bag, which served as a reminder of what it was like to carry a body, became exactly that — the moment I emptied out report after report, it was as though I had released the smell of a corpse that had been trapped for over twenty years. A smell that sought out Stefan as he sat in his usual spot on the lair’s small leather sofa.

The reality he had chosen never to be part of.

But there it was, letter by letter, page after page. And he was strongly affected, frightened, suffered severe anxiety, disappeared from me and from the story for quite a long time.

Until we realized together just how he could return.

Once again, we had to destroy reality and rebuild it as fiction; again, we had to approach it as a new story. Now it lay there on the floor, in fragments, ready to be pieced together. It has been a privilege to work with the fourth brother. To witness some of the strongest sibling bonds I've ever seen, for evil and for good.

It has been a long, earth-shaking, staggering and sometimes just a wonderful trip to write about what on the surface appears to be a series of bank robberies — but at its core is a violent father-son showdown.

Ann Rule: R.I.P.

Sad news. Ann Rule, True Crime Writer, R.I.P.

From the Seattle Times:

True-crime writer Ann Rule, who wrote more than 30 books, including a profile of her former co-worker, serial killer Ted Bundy, has died at age 83.

Scott Thompson, a spokesman for CHI Franciscan Health, said Rule died at Highline Medical Center at 10:30 p.m. Sunday. Rule’s daughter, Leslie Rule, said on Facebook that her mother had many health issues, including congestive heart failure.

“My mom died peacefully last night,” Leslie Rule wrote. “She got to see all of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.”

Ann Rule’s first book, The Stranger Beside Me, profiled Bundy, whom she got to know while sharing the late shift at a Seattle suicide hotline. She has said she had a contract to write about an unknown serial killer before her co-worker was charged with the crimes.

Rule, who went to work briefly at the Seattle Police Department when she was 21, began writing for magazines like “True Detective” in 1969. A biography on her author website says she has published more than 1,400 articles, mostly on criminal cases.

Rule said she was fascinated by killers’ lives, going back to their childhood to find clues about why they did what they did.

After attending numerous workshops on crime topics from DNA to arson, local law enforcement, the FBI and the Justice Department started turning to Rule for her expertise on serial murders.

READ MORE HERE.