Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  Police swarmed up to nearby rooftops by the dozens, dropping tear gas into the bank through an open window. “Come out in ten minutes or we’re coming in,” Cleveland police chief Frank Storey intoned through a megaphone. “It’s your funeral.”

  William fired more shots. A bank employee jumped through a window, shouting, “Hold your fire! He’s letting us out!”

  The bank staff streamed out. This included Fox, who learned—to his relief—that his family was safe and the bomb had not gone off in his house. The hatbox turned out to be harmless: it held two dry cell batteries, a timer, and fuses of coal dust. That was it. Nothing explosive.

  Detective Jack Hughes entered the bank. He saw William on the floor, clutching an automatic. Hughes kicked away the gun from the robber’s hand. That’s how he learned William was dead. A shot had gone right through his temple, which had blown off his blond wig and exposed the bald head underneath.

  THE CLEVELAND POLICE SEARCHED FOR ALMA AND found her rented blue Ford, abandoned on the city’s east side. In it, cops discovered a picture of her with William from a New Orleans nightclub. They also found an ID card with the name Billy Jean Carroll, a blond wig, and her maternity-dress disguise. There was also a book on child care, some food, a cosmetics case, and men’s and women’s clothing.

  Alma knew something had gone terribly wrong. Following Fox and William, she would later say that she had “made a wrong turn somewhere”—and by the time she got near the bank, “there were so many people around, a traffic cop directed me away.”

  Alma figured William had committed suicide as planned. “It was understood that if anything went wrong, Mr. Ansley would kill me and then himself,” she later told local reporters. “I wouldn’t have had the courage to kill myself. With us, it was either make the job good or die, because Mr. Ansley said he would never go back to jail if anything went wrong.”

  After being directed away from the bank, Alma ditched the car and found a nearby bar. As she drank a beer, the television came on with a news flash. Alma fled as soon as she could.

  For “three cold days and nights,” she slept under a bridge in the woods near Baldwin Reservoir, about a mile from where she abandoned the getaway car, at East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue.

  On the third day, she decided to walk back into town and get a room at a rooming house—where, once she saw her own face on TV, she resolved to stay put. For the next two weeks, she didn’t leave the building. She also managed to make a few phone calls to her younger sister, who did not tell anyone else—not their mother, and certainly not the FBI agents looking for Alma. “They are listening in. Your phone is probably tapped,” Alma told her sister. “But I’m okay.”

  Alma might have remained at the rooming house even longer had she and a fellow tenant (and local drug dealer) not argued, their voices so loud it disturbed the other occupants. A tip went out to the police department. When they arrived, there was Alma.

  “Thank God it’s over,” she reportedly said, “I’m so tired of hiding.”

  THE CASE MADE HEADLINES ACROSS THE COUNTRY, EVEN the world. Alma’s past as an accessory to another heist came to light—she had been asleep in a car when a boyfriend and two accomplices robbed an inn in New York State in 1954, eventually getting a year in prison. Cleveland police deemed her a “very disturbed person.”

  On November 25, 1959, Alma was indicted for armed robbery, kidnapping, conspiracy to kidnap, and “malicious entry into a financial institution.” Six weeks later, on January 7, 1960, she pleaded guilty to the last charge, while the others were dropped as part of a deal made with the prosecutor, John T. Corrigan, to reduce her prison sentence.

  Judge Joseph Artl sentenced Alma to 20 years in prison, which she began on January 21, 1960, at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. The newly minted prisoner number W-7988 expressed relief to reporters afterward: “Oh, I’m very happy. I really expected him to lower the boom!”

  TWO MONTHS LATER, LODEN READ ABOUT ALMA IN RUTH Reynolds’s Justice column in the New York Sunday News. She saw the bones of a great movie—“That’s what struck me: Why would this girl feel glad to be put away?” she told an interviewer in 1974—but, after years of rejection by prospective studios and directors, Loden told the Los Angeles Times in 1971, “If I wanted to get it done, I’d have to [direct] it myself . . . It was like being a housewife. You do everything—you don’t differentiate.”

  A producer friend, Harry Shuster, put up the $115,000 budget, an amount Loden felt she must not exceed. Nick Proferes, the cinematographer, and Michael Higgins, who played Mr. Dennis, were the only professionals Loden hired. The others were amateurs, nonunion workers, or both. “It’s not a new wave . . . It’s the old wave,” Loden told the New York Times in 1971. “That’s what they used to do. They took a camera and they went out and shot. Around that act this whole fantastic apparatus grew up—the Hollywood albatross. They made a ship out of lead. It won’t float anymore.”

  Loden disdained most Hollywood films as “too perfect to be believable” and wanted to stay far away from them. “The slicker the technique is, the slicker the content becomes,” she said, “until everything turns into Formica, including the people.”

  When it was finally time to start shooting Wanda, Loden reached out to the prison warden at Marysville to ask for permission to interview Alma. It had taken Loden many years to find out where Alma was housed, but the warden refused the request. “No, I don’t think it would be interesting,” said the warden, according to Loden. “I don’t think that you should be interested in this story. I’m the person who gives permission for everything here, and that I will not allow.”

  SHORTLY BEFORE DYING OF THE BREAST CANCER THAT would consume the last two years of her life, Loden gave an interview in the late ’70s for a German television documentary about herself and Wanda. “There’s so much I didn’t achieve, but I tried to be independent and to create my own way,” she said in the posthumously released broadcast. “Otherwise, I would have become like Wanda, all my life just floating around.”

  Loden didn’t spend her final decade floating around. She did, however, run into difficulty after finishing her film. Though it received critical acclaim—a warm reception at the Venice International Film Festival, a rave from Times film critic Vincent Canby (“Wanda’s a Wow”)—that didn’t translate into commercial success. Loden, Higgins, and Proferes were then attached to a film to be called Love Means Always Having to Say You’re Sorry, about a housewife involved with three men at the same time, but it never got made. Nor did Loden’s adaptation of Kate Chopin’s classic story The Awakening. She did direct and produce The Boy Who Liked Deer (1975), an educational short film broadcast on PBS, which was about the horrific consequences of vandalism.

  Wanda, for Loden, was a declaration of filmic independence. But because she found no way to make more features—a struggle too many female directors still face—it ended up as her own albatross.

  Criticized by feminists upon its release for its passive nature—which Loden took in stride, feeling she came too late to the movement—the film is now justifiably lauded as a second-wave landmark. But Wanda was more or less forgotten soon after its release, until its revival began in earnest when Bérénice Reynaud wrote an essay about it in 2002. “Wanda’s historical importance [is that] Loden wanted to suggest, from the vantage point of her own experience, what it meant to be a damaged, alienated woman—not to fashion a ‘new woman’ or a positive heroine,” argued Reynaud. Since then, Wanda’s cult appeal has only grown; its influence is evident in directorial and acting work by Chantal Akerman, Isabelle Huppert (who spearheaded a French DVD release in 2004), and Deb Shoval.

  ALMA WAS RELEASED ON PAROLE FROM MARYSVILLE ON April 8, 1970, ten years into her prison sentence. She did not go back to Salina, as she had after her previous incarceration, but instead to the Denver suburb of Commerce City, Colorado, where her younger sister, Dixie, lived with her then-husband and six sons, the youngest not even old enough for school.<
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  Alma, now 37 years old, tried to settle in. Her nephews enjoyed her company. Dixie, three years younger, was thrilled to have her sister back in her life. The one time she’d visited Alma in Marysville, taking her mother and one of her sons along, it nearly broke her heart. The years of incarceration had taken a toll on Alma’s psyche and appearance.

  Dixie knew what others thought of Alma. They judged her for her actions, for being a convicted bank robber. They saw a lithe figure with a five-foot-six frame (although she had gained weight in Marysville, she slimmed down upon being released), and found her beauty dangerous. They grew weary of her lies, of which there were many.

  They couldn’t see her as Dixie did: as the older sister who had taken care of her, who had tried to look out for her when they were young. The sister who bore the brunt of their father’s abuse, shielding and protecting Dixie, while also refusing to condemn her for loving the man and wanting some semblance of a good relationship with him. The sister who knitted sweaters for the people she loved best. And the person responsible for the best tomato soup recipe Dixie had ever tasted. “She could be anyone she wanted to be and be very convincing,” Dixie said in a telephone interview last month. “I was in awe of that!”

  Alma could still attract men. “She did not like men, but she could get one and control him,” said Dixie. She met them at dance studios or bars. One, named Glenn, had a mother who lived in a nearby suburb.

  Dixie didn’t recall exactly how Glenn and Alma met, but she remembered, vividly, one of the last times she saw him. She was cooking in the kitchen; Alma and Glenn sat at the table. “Daddy,” said Alma, “show this Dixie what you have.” Dixie had never heard her sister talk like that. Alma’s eyes were all snappy. “Show him your baby,” Alma said.

  Glenn stood up, opened his jacket, and revealed a gun tucked in his waistband.

  Dixie wasn’t afraid of such displays; maybe it was her innocence, or because she hadn’t been around guns much. She said, “Oh. That’s nice.” It was the last time the subject, or the object, ever came up.

  But Dixie remembers the scene well because, soon after, Alma and Glenn disappeared. Alma jumped parole on August 28, 1970, just four months after her release from prison. Dixie paid a visit to Alma’s parole officer, with no luck.

  Years went by. Then decades. Dixie thought Alma would get in touch eventually. It was her way to go underground for long stretches of time without contact. And if Alma was back in prison, perhaps she couldn’t phone or even write.

  Eventually, Dixie divorced her husband, remarried, and moved back to Salina. She hoped that eventually, Alma would find her. She hoped Alma would figure it out and find her. But then her mother, Helen, died of cancer on Christmas Eve 1981, at the age of 66. In 2015, Alma’s son, Robert, died, also at the age of 66.

  Still nothing from Alma.

  “I always wondered,” Dixie told me. “I always thought she would get a hold of me. And then I knew, after all those years not hearing anything, that she was dead. Don’t know why, but I did. Deep down inside, I think she would have contacted me if she could.”

  Dixie’s voice, a melodic, midrange Kansan lilt, broke periodically during our 90-minute conversation. She would cry as if she hadn’t let herself do so for years. “I’m sorry I didn’t think about what happened to her sooner. Now I feel ashamed of myself. I just tucked it away.”

  Dixie celebrated her 82nd birthday last August. Alma, if still living, would be 85. So much time has passed. “I just want to know where she’s buried,” Dixie said.

  WANDA ENDS IN A BAR, NOT LONG BEFORE CLOSING TIME. The title character arrives in the aftermath of the failed robbery. She sits down among a group of men. The lighting is coarse and claustrophobic. Fiddle music plays as she drinks her beer and scarfs down a hot dog. Wanda lifts her head, eyes downcast as a cigarette reaches her lips. Her mouth alternates somewhere between a smile and a grimace. Despite the crime, trouble, and tragedy, there is an aura of quiet possibility about her.

  The likelihood is that Alma Helen Stephens Malone came to a bad end, not long after jumping parole in Colorado. She may be buried somewhere, waiting to be identified. The Ohio Bureau of Prisons lists an “administrative release” from parole of February 23, 1990, but it’s not clear if that was paperwork shuffling or if they had some contact with Alma.

  Dixie never thought to report her older sister missing. So much time passed, and the shame seemed too great to overcome. But she plans on doing so soon.

  Perhaps Alma, like Wanda, found some aura of quiet possibility, too. Maybe she did not, as one would expect, heed the wrong call. Perhaps she is still out there, in a disguise of her own making.

  Originally published by Topic, October 2017

  Part III

  Justice and Society

  What Bullets Do to Bodies

  By Jason Fagone

  The first thing Dr. Amy Goldberg told me is that this article would be pointless. She said this on a phone call in summer 2016, well before the election, before a tangible sensation that facts were futile became a broader American phenomenon. I was interested in Goldberg because she has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, almost all of that at the same hospital, Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, which treats more gunshot victims than any other in the state and is located in what was, according to one analysis, the deadliest of the 10 largest cities in the country until 2016, with a homicide rate of 17.8 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015.

  Over my years of reporting here, I had heard stories about Temple’s trauma team. A city prosecutor who handled shooting investigations once told me that the surgeons were able to piece people back together after the most horrific acts of violence. People went into the hospital damaged beyond belief and came walking out.

  That stuck with me. I wondered what surgeons know about gun violence that the rest of us don’t. We are inundated with news about shootings. Fourteen dead in San Bernardino, six in Michigan, 11 over one weekend in Chicago. We get names, places, anguished Facebook posts, wonky articles full of statistics on crime rates and risk, Twitter arguments about the Second Amendment—everything except the blood, the pictures of bodies torn by bullets. That part is concealed, sanitized. More than 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds each year in America, around 75,000 more are injured, and we have no visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot. Goldberg does.

  She is the chair of Temple’s Department of Surgery, one of only 16 women in America to hold that position at a hospital. In my initial conversation with her, which took place shortly after the mass shooting in Orlando, where 49 people were killed and 53 injured by a man who walked into a gay nightclub with a semiautomatic rifle and a Glock handgun, she was joined by Scott Charles, the hospital’s trauma outreach coordinator and Goldberg’s longtime friend. Goldberg has a southeastern Pennsylvania accent that at low volume makes her sound like a sweet South Philly grandmother and at higher volume becomes a razor. I asked her what changes in gun violence she had seen in her 30 years. She said not many. When she first arrived at Temple in 1987 to start her residency, “It was so obvious to me then that there was something so wrong.” Since then, the types of firearms have evolved. The surgeons used to see .22-caliber bullets from little handguns, Saturday-night specials, whereas now they see .40-caliber and 9mm bullets. Charles said they get the occasional victim of a long gun, such as an AR-15 or an AK-47, “but what’s remarkable is how common handguns are.”

  Goldberg jumped in. “As a country,” she said, “we lost our teachable moment.” She started talking about the 2012 murder of 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Goldberg said that if people had been shown the autopsy photos of the kids, the gun debate would have been transformed. “The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.” Her voice rose. She said people have
to confront the physical reality of gun violence without the polite filters. “The country won’t be ready for it, but that’s what needs to happen. That’s the only chance at all for this to ever be reversed.”

  She dropped back into a softer register. “Nobody gives two shits about the black people in North Philadelphia if nobody gives two craps about the white kids in Sandy Hook . . . I thought white little kids getting shot would make people care. Nope. They didn’t care. Anderson Cooper was up there. They set up shop. And then the public outrage fades.”

  Goldberg apologized and said she wasn’t trying to stop me from writing a story. She just didn’t expect it to change anything.

  THE HOSPITAL’S MAIN BUILDING IS A NINE-STORY TOWER on North Broad, the street that traces a north-south line through Philadelphia. If you think of Broad as the city’s spinal column, the hospital is about level with the heart. Stand on the sidewalk outside the hospital and look south on a clear day and you can see the pale marble and granite of City Hall, about four miles away, near Philly’s pelvis.

  You can go to Temple for high-end elective surgery, like getting a knee replacement, same as at any other major teaching hospital in the country. As Jeremy Walter, Temple Hospital’s amiable director of media relations, reminded me more than once, “Temple isn’t just a hospital that treats drug addicts and gun victims.” Still, it was founded 125 years ago by a Samaritan to provide free care, and that public-service mission persists. Some of the most violent blocks in the city are within a four-mile radius of the hospital, and crime victims funnel in.

  I first met Goldberg one summer weekday, in the hospital lobby. I had arranged to stay and observe for 24 hours, accompanied every moment by Walter, who carried a trauma pager and a yellow folder of consent forms. The rule was that I could observe a surgery if the patient or a family member consented, and if I wanted to do an interview, the patient had to sign a form. Goldberg is five feet two inches tall, with a runner’s build. She wore a gray mock-turtleneck sweater with no sleeves. Her hair is short, and there was a little gel in it that made it spiky. She explained that there are two main categories of trauma: blunt and penetrating. Blunt trauma is like a beating, a fall. Penetrating is a gun or stab wound. “Unfortunately we get a lot of penetrating traumas,” she said. Temple sees 2,500 to 3,000 traumas per year, around 450 of which were gunshot wounds in 2016.