Couples Who Kill

by Carol Anne Davis

  Bernice, her mother, sometimes sent gifts and cash – but Frances would keep the cash and return the gifts unused to cause upset. At times the two women wrote each other very hurtful letters. Bernice often said that she couldn’t send her youngest daughter any more money – but she always backed down and found extra cash. Her husband would find out about her largesse and be enraged as he thought Frances should give up her New York socialite lifestyle and live in Utah with him.

  Marc’s life remained incredibly strange. On the one hand he was his mother’s companion and she clearly favoured him over Larry. She even took him into her bed every night for a year for companionship. On the other hand, she often beat him, locked him out and told him that he belonged in a zoo or a mental hospital, that he was worthless. Indeed she was so obviously cruel to him that the Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Children became involved.

  The years passed, an ugly mixture of Frances’ suicide threats, hysterical letters and emotional manipulation. She was clearly mentally ill but it seems that there was no one close enough to offer her help.

  Religion

  By the summer of 1977 she’d got religion and had herself baptised. That year she sent Marc and Larry to her parents in Salt Lake City and ordered them to break into their grandfather’s warehouse, forge cheques and send them back to her. As usual, she wasted the money she received, spending fifty thousand dollars on one pair of designer earrings. The illicit earnings were soon spent.

  She also told them to be as cruel to their grandmother as possible. And she gave them stimulants to put in the old man’s oatmeal in the hope that he’d have a heart attack. Her father went very red in the face and rushed around more than usual whilst on these amphetamines but he was a very fit man and did not die. Still the two boys continued to create chaos in the household and Franklin became increasingly afraid of them. An onlooker would later say ‘Frances programmed this. She created these monsters.’ And Franklin’s staff felt very sorry for the old man as he’d hoped, albeit belatedly, to spend time with his family but was now even further estranged from them.

  Cut out of the will

  At the end of this appalling summer, it was rumoured that Franklin had cut Frances out of his will. In truth, he made notes for a new will and left them lying around the warehouse, knowing that his wife and other family members would find them and that word would get back to Frances in New York.

  Word did indeed get back – but if Franklin thought it would make his youngest daughter cut back on her spending spree, he was mistaken. Instead, she began to plot to kill him, ideally before he could cut her out of his will. But even if she was formally disinherited she knew that she could benefit from his death as her mother would immediately offer financial support.

  Frances tried to hire a hitman, using a male friend that she’d met in church as a go-between. But the potential hitman simply took his fee and didn’t kill her father.

  Her hysteria increasing, Frances made it clear to Marc that she wanted her father – his grandfather – killed, that this was the solution to all of their problems. She rationalised that Franklin was old, that she could personally put all his money to better use. She warned him that they’d all end up homeless if her parents disowned her – did he really want the entire family to end up living on the streets? Frances added that if Marc didn’t kill Franklin she would lock him out of her life forever, just as she’d so often locked him out of her home. But he could be her special friend again if he would only buy a gun, travel to Salt Lake City, and kill the old man…

  Marc, who was now living in at college, kept saying no, but his mother phoned him several times a day and would rant at him for hours. The teenager was delighted that she wanted to talk to him, but terrified by her increasingly bizarre requests. After a year of this relentless pressure, seventeen-year-old Marc agreed to shoot his grandfather dead. He travelled to Texas and bought a .357 Magnum pistol then flew onto Salt Lake City under a false name.

  The murder

  On 23rd July 1978 at around 7am he arrived at his grandfather’s warehouse. When the seventy-six-year-old arrived, he talked to him for fifteen to twenty minutes, asking him to provide the family with more money. When Franklin turned away for a moment, he shot the multi-millionaire once in the back. The man looked shocked as he slumped to the ground and his grandson shot him again, blowing off the lower back of his skull. Marc then went through the hard-working entrepreneur’s pockets and threw some of their contents about to make it look like a robbery.

  He took a plane back to his mother’s house and told her that her father was dead. Francis allegedly exclaimed ‘Thank God!’ and kissed him and hugged him in a way that she’d never done before. She’d told him to bring the gun back with him, perhaps as a souvenir or in case she needed a weapon again in the future. She would later give the Magnum to the friend who had tried to arrange a hitman for her.

  Blood money

  Less than a month after her father’s death, Frances asked her mother to give her three thousand dollars a month from his estate. Her mother did so. (Two years later Bernice would buy Frances a twelve room apartment in the most sought-after district of Manhattan that cost over five hundred thousand dollars.)

  Larry becomes violent

  Meanwhile, various acquaintances of the family told the police to look closely at Francis and Larry as possible murder suspects. They found that Frances had been in New York at the time of the killing so couldn’t have pulled the trigger. Suspicion then fell on Larry as he’d actually been staying with Franklin and Bernice on the day that his grandfather was shot dead. But Bernice claimed that he hadn’t woken up until long after Franklin had left for the warehouse. As such, he had an alibi and the trail went cold.

  But the following year (1979) Larry, who had become increasingly strange, attacked his college room-mate in the middle of the night, battering the innocent boy numerous times with a hammer. Other students heard the screams and intercepted nineteen-year-old Larry before he could leave the campus. Meanwhile his semi-conscious victim was taken to hospital where he had to have three operations on his head and a metal plate put in his skull. He was also temporarily paralysed down one side.

  Larry claimed that alpha waves had made him do it – and his student friends testified that he’d become so odd during the previous months that they feared for their safety. He was diagnosed as being schizophrenic and it was found that in the past he’d suffered from ‘burnt out child reaction’ where an abused child simply can’t take any more.

  Larry was full of violent hate but, instead of recognising these feelings, he projected them on to others and believed he was the one who was in danger. As such, he refused to see his room-mate as the victim and showed no remorse for the horrendous attack. He was put into psychiatric care – though at one stage he escaped and went back to his mother. She promptly phoned the police and he was recaged within hours.

  Ongoing hysteria

  Frances now had her wonderful upmarket home and she became a patron of the arts, giving vast sums to the New York ballet. Her daughter Lavinia showed real dancing talent and was given several significant roles. But one day Frances and Lavinia arrived very late for a public performance. As a result, the ballet had had to substitute another child dancer for Lavinia and Frances became hysterical, threatening to kill the terrified child.

  Frances now worried that the net was closing in on Marc so she insisted that he leave her house. The teenager obligingly booked himself into the YMCA under a false name and spent his days watching porn at the cinema and his nights with prostitutes. He would sometimes dress scruffily and go to burger joints but at other times he invented a wealthier persona for himself, dressed up and went to upmarket restaurants. He set up a post office box where he received regular cheques from his grandmother. It was a lonely and unstructured existence, but he would later say that these months of freedom were the happiest of his life.

  And indeed, mother and son would have probably gotten away with the crim
e if Frances hadn’t made herself a very bad enemy. The friend who had originally introduced her to a hitman had set up a joint account with her – and she’d taken his money. It was a tiny sum for her (but a lot of money for him) which she could have paid back but for some unfathomable reason she refused. He contacted her lawyers about the missing cash but they couldn’t help so he went to one of her sisters and hinted that Frances and Marc were implicated in Franklin’s death. He continued to phone the sister and eventually admitted that he was still keeping the murder weapon for Frances. The police were informed and the YMCA-based Marc Schreuder was soon tracked down.

  Awaiting trial, he was suicidal as he believed he had nothing to live for. But the authorities explained that he could enrol in various educational courses from prison and his spirits revived.

  Marc Schreuder’s trial

  Four years after he’d shot his grandfather dead, Marc went to trial in Utah where he potentially faced death by firing squad. But the jury soon heard about the mitigating circumstances, the defence explaining that his mother was completely self-centred and that her tirades at him had lasted for days. They asked for a manslaughter charge as he’d been so repeatedly badly treated and had the emotional maturity of a child.

  In turn, the prosecution noted that he’d been at college so could safely ignore her threats to make him homeless. This was true – but she still influenced him hugely, phoning for up to three hours a night, demanding that he do whatever as necessary to bring her money. Sometimes his college friends heard him crying as she berated him on the phone. She said that if he didn’t do what she wanted he couldn’t come home that summer – or ever again.

  Marc had taped her ranting at Lavinia for four hours because the child didn’t understand a complex grammar lesson – and it was clear that she ranted in a similar way at Marc. A more stable teenager could perhaps have coped with such lengthy verbal onslaughts but Marc had never known stability. He was terrified of being left completely alone. It was easy for outsiders to suggest that the seventeen-year-old simply sever the connection with his mother, but she was the only parent he had and the closest thing to love that he had ever known.

  That said, he was aware that he was deliberately ending the life of a man who had done him no harm, a man who had paid for much of his accommodation and schooling. And he’d shot Franklin a second time and had been sufficiently calculating to go through the dead man’s pockets and scatter items about to make it look like a robbery. The jury took all of this into consideration and on 6th July 1982 he was sentenced to five years to life.

  Frances Schreuder’s trial

  Meanwhile, having heard more and more about Frances’ involvement in her father’s death, the police went to her apartment to arrest her. She refused to answer the door for hours and when they did gain access they found her in bed. She said she couldn’t leave the house until she’d finished writing her poetry but they insisted she come with them and she went into another room to get dressed. There she started to climb out of the sixth floor window but the police were alerted by her daughter Lavinia’s screams and found the child desperately clinging to her leg.

  Frances’ trial opened in September 1983. The main witness against her was Marc, who’d decided to testify in order to keep her away from Lavinia. The jury heard that Frances had given money to a hitman and told him where to find her grandfather. When the hitman backed down, she’d sent Marc off to buy a gun and had ranted at him so relentlessly that she knew he’d use it. She’d told him that if he didn’t kill Franklin that she would commit suicide. As she’d taken overdoses in front of him before, he knew that she was telling the truth.

  Now forty-five years old, Frances opted not to take the stand in her own defence. She wore a large crucifix throughout the trial and scribbled copious notes. One witness suggested that a patron of the ballet could never encourage a murder – but more clear thinking observers noted that an appreciation of culture doesn’t necessarily make a woman incapable of inciting violence.

  She was found guilty of criminal homicide, murder in the first degree on 27th September 1983. Six days later she was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Utah State Prison. There she told the authorities that she only had one son, Larry. She had clearly disowned Marc, the fate he most feared.

  Sadly, the family remained divided after the trial, with Bernice saying that Frances had been a wonderful mother but that little Marc was ‘a born thief’. She blamed his and Larry’s psychiatric problems on their father – but he hadn’t seen them since they were toddlers. She was also enraged at one of her other daughters who had told the police about the gun.

  By the time of the trial, Marc’s father had come back into his life and he was very glad of his support. Meanwhile Lavinia was cared for by a nursery nurse, aided by Bernice. Larry was eventually freed from psychiatric care and set up home alone.

  In 1987, film star Lee Remick played Francis Schreuder in an ABC mini series called Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder. The Chicago Sun-Times noted that it was ‘a powerful characterisation of a woman trapped within a warped and steadily deteriorating mind – incapable of love and distant from reality,’ whilst Rivadue said that it was ‘steeped in psychotic grandeur.’

  Asked to comment on Francis Schreuder, Lee Remick said ‘In my view, the sickness about this woman is that she was totally narcissistic. Only her needs in this world mattered.’

  Frances Schreuder’s needs simply weren’t met when she was a young child, a negligence for which others paid a very heavy price.

  3 FATAL ATTRACTION

  ALTON COLEMAN & DEBRA BROWN

  Worldwide there are proportionately probably as many black serial killers as there are white – but white killers are the ones reported on at length by a largely white media. As Pat Brown of the Sexual Homicide Exchange has written, ‘Minority serial killers in the United States more than likely exist at the same ratios as white serial killers for the population.’ And South Africa is currently experiencing an epidemic of black serial killers. But Alton Coleman and Denise Brown are unusual in being a black male/female pairing – rather than a solo operator or male duo – who killed multiple times.

  Alton (Elton) Coleman

  Alton was born in 1956, the third child of an alcoholic prostitute who would go on to have another two children. She alternated between rejecting him and having sex with clients when he was in the same room. Worse, she insisted he cater to those of her clients who preferred boys. He suffered this sexual abuse throughout his formative years, repressing his fear and anger, but his disturbance showed in that he regularly wet his pants. As a result, he was teased mercilessly at school by the other children until he started to rob and assault them. By puberty he was stealing cars.

  He was originally christened Elton but hated the name and changed it to Alton. As he matured and began to run with a street gang, his nickname became Big Al.

  His mother died when he was thirteen, by which time he was living with his grandmother in the projects. He remained deeply disturbed and regularly sexually assaulted his girlfriends. His IQ was borderline retarded and he harboured a deep hatred for almost everyone, but as he matured he hid his rage behind a charming façade. Both men and women were initially drawn to the handsome youth with the appealing manner and winning smile. It was only when he had them alone and vulnerable that he dropped his act.

  At eighteen he and a male accomplice abducted a middle-aged woman, drove her out of town, robbed her and raped her. The naked woman ran screaming from the scene and bystanders swiftly called the police. But, embarrassed and frightened, she refused to testify about the rape so Coleman was only given six years on the kidnapping and robbery charge. Two years later he was released and almost immediately raped again. He was also arrested for molesting an eight-year-old relative but it’s likely that he intimidated her mother for the charges were suddenly withdrawn.

  However, he was found guilty of other violent assaults and by his mid-twenties he’d spent a total of thre
e years in prison. There, he regularly beat and sodomised younger inmates and was widely feared. He left prison and married but his wife left him after six months of sexual brutality. She had to seek police protection before she felt safe.

  Coleman now raped several girls and young women but juries often found him so plausible that they returned a not guilty verdict. Other cases didn’t even go to court because Coleman intimidated the victims or the witnesses.

  In 1984 – aged twenty-eight – he jumped bail charges for raping a fourteen-year-old and fled to Waukegan in Illinois where he met twenty-one-year-old Debra Brown in a Waukegan bar. He was attracted to younger women with a poor sense of their own identities so she was tailor-made for him.

  Debra Denise Brown

  Debra was born in November 1962 in Waukegan, Illinois, the fifth of eleven children. Hunger and poverty ruled their lives. Children from large families tend to have lower IQs than children from small families but Debra was actually diagnosed as being simple. This mild retardation may have been exacerbated by a head injury she suffered as a child.

  Bored, the pretty teenager dropped out of high school and took a range of menial jobs. At home she remained exceptionally quiet. Her employers noticed that she was a passive girl who was easily led.

  Yet she wasn’t entirely without free will, breaking off her engagement to a nice young man at age twenty-one when she met the outwardly more charismatic Alton. Her family begged her to reconsider but she fell quickly in love with Coleman who offered excitement with his tales of other cities and his flashy stolen cars.