He shook his head, concerned.
Maybe he’s right, she thought. Maybe I couldn’t stand being in that type of atmosphere. Why should I put myself through something like that?
“OK then, go.”
She handed him his thermos, kissed him, and pointed him toward the door.
The Wayne County Jail was not Jan Canty’s idea of enjoyment, but she suspected it was probably Al’s. He always had kept a hand in some criminal work. Earlier in his career, he consulted on criminal cases for the Wayne County Circuit Court. Recently he’d evaluated a teenage murderer in Port Huron.
Jan knew that Al had some of his father’s first love in him. On their nightly walks he sometimes spoke of his dad’s work with Recorder’s Court and the Detroit Police Department. She’d heard a good deal from both father and son.
For Alan Canty, Sr., notoriety began, quite literally, in the streets. In the mid-1930s, he came up with the then novel theory that certain drivers were responsible for an unusually high number of accidents. He backed up his theories with a battery of tests on troublesome drivers, weeding out offenders that ranged from alcoholics to the clinically insane.
His findings drew nationwide attention, spurred systems to detect offenders in other states, and catapulted his career. Later, he wrote on the uses of hypnosis and polygraphs. He taught criminology at Wayne State and the Detroit Police Academy. He lectured at training schools throughout the United States and instructed cops in the art of interrogation. He was commissioned by the CIA in 1954 to conduct experiments on sexual psychopaths using hypnosis and LSD, a drug then thought to be a truth serum.
By then, Al Sr. had excelled in a new area of study—criminals he called “sex deviates.” The Recorder’s clinic evaluated some five hundred sex offenders a year.
Jan knew that Al Sr. didn’t leave all the cases at the office. Once, Al complained that as an adolescent he listened to the sordid details of many cases as his father pontificated about them at the dinner table: Homicides. Rapes. Fetishes. Sexual dysfunctions. Missing children. Child killers. Her husband said he disliked hearing about them but listened to please his dad.
But Al Sr. also was artful in the use of shock value, as in the time he jolted a large downtown assembly hosted by the Detroit Council of the PTA. The organization invited him to speak on sex offenders. He gave the audience more of a lecture than they anticipated.
“Neurotic mothers and frustrated schoolteachers,” he began, “do more actual psychological damage to Michigan children than do the small fraction of 1 percent of the state’s population who collide every year with the criminal law as sex offenders.”
The audience of teachers and civic-minded parents shifted in their seats. The criminologist had more for them to ponder.
“Parents who reject their children, who mistreat them, overprotect them, or fill them with exaggerated anxieties, even about ‘sex fiends,’ and teachers who try to work out their own frustrations on the children to whom they stand as parent substitutes do severe damage to unknown thousands of children every year.”
The talk made front-page headlines in 1951. Gladys Canty, a PTA leader, got quite a few phone calls.
Al Sr.’s animated speaking style was refined by The Players, an exclusive, men-only theater club in downtown Detroit. Its distinguished members were known for their historic playhouse on Jefferson Avenue, and their all-night drinking sessions following their “frolics.” His most memorable role in the troupe was that of neurotic Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.
Al Sr. made his sex crime lectures equally compelling. They kept him booked on the criminal justice lecture circuit for fifteen years. Police departments and civic groups around the country clamored for his talks as sex came out of the bedroom into public discussions.
He always closed his lectures the same way. After covering sadism, window peeping, homosexuality, exhibitionism, fetishism, impotence, castration complex, and a half-dozen other disorders, he always said:
“And there, but for the grace of God, go I.”
Al saw his father receive many accolades. He was the only non cop to be given a gold badge by the Detroit Police. The University of Louisville awarded him with an honorary doctorate. The state certified him as a psychologist, despite his lack of formal degrees from Syracuse and Western Reserve, the universities he attended.
When he retired from the Recorder’s Court Psychiatric Clinic after 19 years as its executive director, the state police tapped him in 1969 to help solve a rash of co-ed killings in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. A serial killer named John Norman Collins had eluded police for more than two years.
“I don’t know whether I can solve them,” Al Sr. told reporters when he joined the hunt. “I’m not God.”
Al Sr. could pass an hour richly detailing how the Collins case was solved by basic policework. Jan used to find Al Sr.’s stories captivating. The man’s knowledge was formidable, especially for someone with so little formal training. She could see how Al had been influenced. Her husband gave an extemporaneous eulogy at his funeral. The speech covered his career, but said nothing about him as a father.
In that way, Jan felt she really didn’t know Al Sr. at all. She didn’t perceive him as a very warm man. He reminded her of George C. Scott in one of his more belligerent roles. Toughness was etched into his puffy eyes and pendulous jowls. He could be very opinionated. She figured his jaded world view came from his association with cops.
Maybe that was why Al never chose to devote his entire career to forensic studies, she thought. They had different styles. Al chose his words carefully. His father could swear like an ironworker.
But that didn’t diminish her husband’s admiration. For years he kept an office for Al Sr. in his Fisher Building suite. Jan began using his sprawling walnut desk for homework. She felt like a dwarf behind the thing. One day, when Al Sr. was still alive, she wondered out loud why it was there anyway.
“Oh, I keep it for Pa,” he explained. “He needs a place where he can get away from home and do some writing.”
But she had never seen his father use it, and Al had always been somewhat mysterious about his dealings with his father. In fact, he rarely talked about his relationship with either of his parents. The only poignant moment that she could recall was after the funeral. Al broke down crying and said:
“I’m going to miss him so much. I tried to be a good son.”
Jan did know, however, that psychology was not Al’s first career path. He first wanted to be a paramedic and took some emergency medical training in college. He still had his father’s old stethoscope and blood pressure gauge somewhere in the basement.
Then, Al wanted to be an actor. But after taking drama classes and appearing in several college plays, Al succumbed to doubts about making it in that field. She knew he’d sublimated his thespian training with Project Indianwood.
He blended theater and psychology in other ways. He still admired James Dean and the film Rebel Without a Cause, the quintessential movie about troubled adolescence in the 1950s. Al was intrigued by the characters and the film’s Freudian undertones. He sometimes talked about the tragic nature of the actor’s death.
He also cherished the Robert M. Lindner book Rebel Without a Cause. Unlike the movie, the book was a true case history of a teenage psychopath. The personality disorder was one of her husband’s favorite areas of study. He sometimes thumbed through The Mask of Sanity, Hervey Cleckley’s definitive work on the disorder. He talked of his father’s dealings with them.
Jan always thought of psychopaths as destructive actors. They were not legally insane, nor did they respond to therapy. But Al found intriguing these men, who, void of conscience or true empathy, manipulated others to meet their needs. The psychopath’s best role was that of a seemingly normal, often intelligent human being. Behind the mask, however, he plotted antisocial acts ranging from the discounted sale of the Brooklyn Bridge to murder.
Well, the Wayne County Jail was probably full of such seasoned co
n artists, Jan Canty reasoned. She suspected Al’s parolee evaluations were his escape from the daily grind. Maybe I’m being too selfish, she thought, wanting him all to myself for the entire day.
Jan was pleased when his Buick came up the driveway after the lunch hour. She guessed she could live with him missing for a couple of hours on their day off.
13
The criminal psychopath, or sociopath, can run the range of crimes from bank robbery to murder. He is without conscience … He will do anything to keep from serving in the armed forces. Often he tends to be heavily tattooed.
—W. ALAN CANTY,
Henry Ford Community College lectures
On his first visit to apartment 202, Dr. Al Miller looked more equipped for an outing to the Detroit Public Library than to the bed of a Cass Corridor prostitute. He carried a yellow thermos and the morning newspaper as he arrived for the Friday lunch hour.
John headed for the White Grove, nodding to the trick on the stairway. The apartment only had three rooms: a bathroom, a small kitchen, and a living room with a fold-out bed. John didn’t much care what his girlfriend did with her tricks, as long as they paid in cash. But he had no desire to stick around when she conducted business.
John occasionally gave some thought to the line of work that paid for his drug habit the past three years. Some might call him a pimp, but that word was considered as demeaning around the Corridor as the term “whore.” Whores fucked and sucked johns for a living and had to give all their money to their pimps. Working girls went on dates and got paid by their tricks. They received protection from their boyfriends.
John wasn’t proud of his role, but he wasn’t ashamed either. He took a rational view of the whole matter.
“Personally, I feel that 99 percent of the people in the world are prostitutes,” he often said. “They prostitute themselves to a job or whatever. Therefore, if you got to prostitute yourself anyway, then why make believe you’re not, which most people do. The broad, specifically speaking of females, will live with a dude for security, and fuck a man on the side. I’m a realist enough that I’d rather know that she’s going out there and getting paid than me going out and prostituting myself and her fucking for free while I’m gone.”
“But what makes a girl give her body to a man she doesn’t even know?” a friend once asked.
John answered matterof-factly.
“Money. And if I was a woman I’d be the biggest whore in the world. Because I love money. I’ll do anything for money.”
John Fry’s love of the American dollar had been a costly affair over the latter half of his thirty-seven years. That was one reason he’d gone into prostitution. It was low-risk crime—for John, at least. He already had marked ten years in six state and federal penitentiaries. Between sentences, he’d married and divorced three times and sired at least five children.
John’s tour of prison cells began after he was drafted into the Army in 1965. He was court-martialed twice for desertion. After his discharge, he landed in prisons in Michigan, Minnesota, and Indiana. His felonies included bad checks, counterfeiting, and breaking and entering. He’d never been convicted of a violent crime.
John did well in prison settings. He snagged preferred work details by keeping his institutional record clean. He handed out cell assignments as a clerk. He gave advice as a drug counselor in one of the federal pens. In prison, he finished his senior year of high school. He took college-level social science classes, including psychology.
John could pull an average intelligence level on an IQ test. But one forensic psychiatric evaluation also described what was perhaps his best talent: “He can make people feel at ease and has developed the ability to ascertain people’s needs and exploit them by fulfilling these needs.”
John had a big need not to be locked up. Three times he’d escaped from institutions. When he was paroled from a federal halfway house in 1980, Lucky Fry vowed he’d never go back.
The nickname was not intended as satire. John often said he earned it after being severely beaten and left for dead by a rival motorcycle gang. Others said it came from his ability to talk his way out of trouble.
The word “Lucky” soared on a pair of Harley-Davidson motorcycle wings in a tattoo on his left arm. It was only one of seventeen, most of which were penned by prison tattooists.
In a sleeveless shirt, John’s brawny limbs put on quite a display. On his left arm was “LBT” (Living on Borrowed Time); “FTW” (Fuck the World); a snarling panther; a “74” for the Harley-Davidson series; a preying eagle; “TWIGGY,” a reference to his old girlfriend; and a winged skull in a motorcycle hat.
On his right arm he used to have “Cheryl” over a marijuana leaf, until Dawn crossed out his ex-girlfriend’s name with a cousin’s tattoo gun. A skull and crossbones bore the words “AS YOU ARE I WAS; AS I AM YOU WILL BE.” There was another skull. There also was a yellow tattoo of the cartoon character Tweety Bird.
The most eye-catching of the lot was “WHITE POWER.” “WHITE” was printed vertically down Fry’s left arm in big block letters, “POWER” down the back of the other. The tattoo was only visible when he was walking away, his back turned to a city that was nearly 70 percent black.
“I guess they figure if I’m crazy enough to have it there,” he once said, “I’m crazy enough to back it up.”
John’s disdain for blacks revealed itself in other ways. He refused to allow Dawn to turn a date with one. Once he put the likes and dislikes of his life in a poem he sent to an old girlfriend. He claimed to be its author:
As I was sitting on my porch one day
Suckin’ down a brew,
A nigger rode by on a Harley.
I said this will never do.
I jumped right up and chased it down
With a length of chain,
Then beat the fucker senseless
And squashed its tiny brain,
Then took the bike home with me
And freed it from its doom
Of public humiliation, by being
Ridden by a coon.
But John hadn’t owned a hog or ridden with any clubs for years. His beard and hair were grown out, unlike those days when he preferred his head and face clean as he mounted the seat of a Harley.
His money was consumed by Cass Corridor drugs, and he complained about the neighborhood frequently. Not only was the dope bad; most of the action was controlled by blacks. John considered the area below his standards.
“I’d always said I’d never live downtown. That’s dead,” he later told a friend. “I’m not going to get caught up in that.”
But John was, and he knew it as he sat in the White Grove. He watched the hustle outside and thought of Dawn servicing the free-spending trick he now knew as Dr. Al Miller.
Already Lucky Fry had made up his mind. He was going to find a way out. Possibly he already had.
14
… The astonishing power that nearly all psychopaths and part-psychopaths have to bind forever the devotion of women.
—HERVEY CLECKLEY, M.D.,
The Mask of Sanity
A prostitute by the name of Cheryl Krizanovic cursed what she was about to do. Since the day she met Lucky Fry, her life had unfolded in a series of calamities. But now here she was again, running back to her old boyfriend for help on a cold mid-December night.
But damn if I’m going to spend the winter in the street, she told herself, especially while John and his new girlfriend play house in the Homewood Manor.
Cheryl already had ruined the Ford Escort that had served as her home for four weeks, as well as the regular trick who gave it to her. She totaled the little car on her way to cop dope one night. As for the sugar daddy, the Arab from Dearborn was broke. She’d shut off the sex long before the warehouse worker ran out of cash. But it took an empty bank account to bring him to his senses.
John Fry owed her, she reasoned. He owed her a place to stay until she found something—or someone—else. After all, she thought, I�
�m the one who kept a roof over his head for all these years. She planned to tell him as much as soon as she got to the Homewood. If that didn’t work, she knew a few packs of dope would give John a conscience.
Cheryl Jean Krizanovic didn’t wonder anymore how she got into such jams. The prostitute was only two months into her twenty-first year of life, but already, she felt like a worn-out machine.
She met John Fry on a fluke, during an inmate visit at Jackson Prison in 1979. She was fifteen, living with a friend and running from her stepfather and memories of a rape. Two months later, on April Fools’ Day, she helped John escape from a work farm.
Since then, she had endured nearly a half-dozen unwanted pregnancies, a miscarriage, a saline abortion, broken ribs, a shattered spleen, several drug overdoses, countless abscesses, and a crippling case of gangrene. She’d been raped by one of John’s friends, been train-raped by twenty-nine members of a motorcycle gang, and endured an average of two rapes a month working the streets. John had given her a daughter but then helped her lose it to the courts. She had tried suicide twice. Half of this happened before John ever convinced her to turn her first trick.
But the old machine could still make money, up to five hundred dollars a day if she worked at it. When she first started, her thin shoulders, blond hair, and lashy eyes earned her the nickname Twiggy. Now some of the cops and johns called her the Librarian Hooker because she sometimes wore thick glasses and put her hair up in a tight bun. The dates were nuts for the look.
For two years, Cheryl had turned every trick for John. Now she worked for herself. She didn’t know what else to do—at least that’s what she told herself. John had always promised her that one day he would find a job; they would kick their drug habits, and she wouldn’t have to work the streets. One day did arrive, but it was the day John didn’t need her or her money anymore. She was still hurt and angry.
John had been particularly cunning in the way he dumped her, she thought. It was in June, right after she was hospitalized for pneumonia. She came home to their old place off Michigan Avenue finding John had taken in a houseguest. Her name was Dawn Spens, and John said the girl had first been thrown out of her home in Harper Woods by her father, then evicted from her apartment in the Corridor. John had big plans.
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