Connie, according to the book, made the first breakthrough—to a group of seven autistic children in the basement of the Birmingham Psychiatric Clinic in 1962. Her chapter described the children sitting in a half circle, watching her “spellbinding performance” of a story about black swans. Then one of the autistic kids outside the circle made a noise—first a cackle, then a laugh.
“Within minutes primitive laughter was percolating through the circle,” Al wrote. It was the birth of the therapeutic peers.
Then Jan remembered. The guide had gone on to become a professional actress. Al had pointed her out in a movie he insisted on seeing called W. W. and the Dixie Dancekings. She had a part with Burt Reynolds in the film.
“That’s her,” Al said during the film. “See, the one who touched the children. Isn’t she a fine actress?”
Al talked that night as though he and Connie were old friends separated only by time and profession. If there was at least one group of autistic children, at least one particle of truth to the book he had dictated off the top of his head, the actress could confirm it, Jan thought.
Her stage name was Conny Van Dyke.
Jan’s friend found her in Naples, Florida, retired from the screen. She was forty-one and working as a turnkey in the Collier County Jail on the midnight shift. At fourteen she was chosen the prettiest teenager in America by Teen magazine. She’d made five hundred TV appearances and several films.
She spoke in a soft voice. Unlike most of Al Canty’s other guides, she had long blond hair.
“Have you ever heard of Alan Canty?” Jan asked.
“No, but that doesn’t mean a thing. Who is he?”
“A psychologist in Detroit. Did you know him from the early sixties?”
There was a long pause.
“Him,” she said. “Yes, I know him.”
Then she began to cry.
“People like to think that somewhere along the line they made a difference,” she began. “I’m still trying to do that.
“I was a senior in high school. I met him while modeling at an auto show. I only did it three or four times, put on the plays for him. I was modeling, singing, and recording at that time. I volunteered for the job.
“I don’t remember the room, but I remember the kids. There were children, five or six of them. One skit had to do with a machine gun or something, the girl being threatened with the machine gun. I couldn’t do it mean, he said. It had to be done Punch and Judy. Not as sinister and macabre.
“He gave me the script. And told me the story, and what he was aiming for—to trigger something in the mind of the child. I was alone. I didn’t work with anybody else. I remember the group of children, sitting in a circle. Except one child—she was off by herself. Sitting with her arms wrapped around herself, cuddling herself like an orphan.
“I remember doing it, then I remember the laughter. Yes, laughter, the speaking.”
The former actress began crying again. She said she was moved because the memory was linked with a recent event.
“The funny thing is, a couple of years ago I worked at an old persons’ home in Naples,” she said. “Two days a week. I’d sing and dance, make up songs at the piano. They’d give me words and I’d make up songs—and the very same thing happened.
“There was an old man who hadn’t spoken for a year … and people thought he was totally nuts. I went over and started scatting with him. And he scatted too. Then I started saying words and he started saying words. And the staff was amazed. It’s the first time he’d spoken in a year.
“When that happened it triggered that memory from long ago, you know, how sometimes something like that will get people to speak.
“The funny thing was that the old man later said he could speak all the time. He just didn’t like the way they were treating him. The staff at the home were saying, ‘Come on now, it’s time for us to have our dinner, time for us to go beddie-bye.’
“But he was putting them all on. He said he was just sick of always being treated like a child.”
100
By late winter, the big Tudor had been up for sale for six months with no takers. Jan wrote a list for the realtor stating the recent improvements: the new hot-water heater, the new roof, the brick driveway, and anything else that would help sell the house.
She could also pen her own list covering why she wanted out: high taxes, high heating bills, high mortgage bills, living alone with the six bedrooms and six bathrooms—not to mention the memories.
The realtor also insisted they inform any potential buyers of a so-called “hidden defect”: “The former owner was murdered and dismembered.” If they didn’t, a troubled or superstitious buyer might sue down the road, he said.
She didn’t need that sort of grief. One by one, she was paying off Al’s debts. Her own practice was growing. She left Al’s old suite for a new office more suited to her tastes. When the movers picked up Al Sr.’s big old walnut desk, it fell into pieces. She sent it away to be fixed, asking repairmen to also cut it down to size.
Mainly, she just wanted to get on with her life. But interest rates were high and the real estate market slow. She’d never expected to have to go through the entire winter in the house alone.
When the frigid weather came, she shut most of the rooms to save energy and money. She heated only a couple—the kitchen and the guest room, where she moved after Al’s death. Even then, she kept the living space at sixty degrees.
A warm electric blanket waited for her on the bed when she returned home every night from work. She ate her dinners on the bed, watched television from the bed, and fought her way out of nightmares on the bed.
One was particularly terrifying. She dreamt she was back in the morgue, looking at the TV screen. His severed head turned, looking at her. She woke in the pitch dark, sweating heavily, wondering where she was. Finally, she focused on the thick strips of lead that intersected the windows in the room.
The people kept coming to see the house month after month. It got plenty of traffic. There were many compliments.
“Oh, look at the leaded glass,” they’d say. “The whole house is so beautiful. Look at the lead on those windows.”
Yes, she thought, it’s beautiful. But it’s my ball and chain. It’s my prison.
That’s it, she thought. My beautiful prison. She began calling Al’s big Tudor that.
Then one day just before the break of spring, the realtor delivered a buyer—a couple who wanted the home, hidden defect and all. She was glad there were young children who would fill up all the space with toys, tiny fingerprints, and noise.
Jan found a condominium in the Pointes—something nice, but quite scaled down. She liked the lines of the new place. Later she discovered it was designed by Albert Kahn, the architect of the Fisher and the home on Berkshire. Some things, she thought, will always be with me.
The seasons were balancing somewhere between winter and spring when she made her last trip to the house. She drove down Jefferson Avenue, then aimed her red Thunderbird under the elms of Berkshire. Then she noticed another car coming in the distance as she approached the house.
It was a Buick—a black Buick Regal. She felt a surge of blood through her chest. The driver looked so much like him, but the resemblance was only a cruel coincidence.
The house seemed as immense as ever when she walked inside for the last time. She paused in the living room, looking at the expanse of carpet stretching to an empty fireplace and bare mantel. How, she thought, did we ever fill all this?
She decided to check all the rooms to make sure she hadn’t left anything behind. She looked everywhere—the closets, the basement, the linen cabinets. She searched last in the kitchen. She opened all the drawers and cupboards in her favorite room.
Finally, she ran her hand across the shelving of the last of the upper cabinets, the one where Al used to keep his precious coffee. As her hand swept above her, she felt her fingers hit something small.
It was a toy, one sh
e remembered Al saying his parents had bought for him at an antique show when he was just a young boy. It had been missing for years.
The toy was a little monkey, but unlike any she’d ever seen. He was made of several types of hardwood. The limbs and extremities—the head, the arms, the legs, the feet—were separate, held together only by frail wires at the joints. He could flip and flop in any direction, take on most any posture or form.
She could see how Al’s monkey had remained hidden there for so long. He stood only two inches tall.
Jan found herself squeezing him in her palm as she walked out the door.
Image Gallery
Buster and Ma in a family photo taken in 1984. (Credit: The Detroit News.)
Alan Canty, Sr., shortly before his retirement as executive director of the Detroit Recorder’s Court Psychiatric Clinic. (Credit: The Detroit News.)
Alan Canty and wife Jan on a vacation at the Grand Canyon.
Dawn Marie Spens and John Woodington in front of the Thirteenth Precinct in the summer of 1983. (Credit: Mark Bando.)
A partying John Fry just after moving into the bungalow on Capser in March 1985.
John Carl Fry poses in the window of Mark Bando’s whore car shortly after moving into the Cass Corridor in the fall of 1983. (Credit: Mark Bando)
Dawn Spens in Harper Woods.
Dawn Spens in front of the Thirteenth Precinct station in the summer of 1983. (Credit: Mark Bando.)
Dawn Spens when she was still living in Harper Woods.
The southside Detroit bungalow on Casper where Al Canty was killed and his body mutilated. (Credit: Michael Green, The Detroit News.)
Al and Jan Canty’s Tudor-style home in Grosse Pointe Park. (Credit: Michael Green, The Detroit News.)
Police photo of Alan Canty’s 1984 Buick Regal the night it was found torched near a pair of southside Detroit railroad tracks. (Credit: The Detroit Police Department.)
Detroit policemen Mark Bando and John Woodington in 1983. (Credit: The Detroit News.)
Robert Agacinski, the Wayne County assistant prosecutor who tried the Fry-Spens murder and mutilation case.
Jay Nolan, John Fry’s defense attorney. (Credit: Harrol Robinson.)
Recorder’s Court Judge Michael F. Sapala. (Credit: David Coates, The Detroit News.)
Robert Ziolkowski, Dawn Spens’s defense attorney. (Credit: Russ Pfeiffer.)
Homicide inspector Gilbert Hill. (Credit: Michelle Andonian.)
Detective Gerald Tibaldi leading John Fry to his arraignment on murder and mutilation charges. (Credit: Edwin C. Lombardo, The Detroit News.)
Dawn Spens and John Fry being led by detective Marlyss Landeros to their arraignment on murder and mutilation charges. (Credit: Edwin C. Lombardo, The Detroit News.)
Author’s Note
Masquerade is not a so-called “fictionalization” of the W. Alan Canty murder case. It is a work based on police records, trial testimony, three hundred hours of interviews with thirty-five key characters, and other proven methods of journalistic legwork conducted over a period of two years. The extensive dialogue is reconstructed from the best memory of those involved and, wherever possible, was carefully cross-checked with documents, testimony, and other reliable sources in the story.
The patients of W. Alan Canty portrayed in this book have requested anonymity for fear of embarrassment and repercussions for having undergone psychotherapy. Some are recovering alcoholics. There fictitious names will appear in italic type in the first reference.
Acknowledgments
The most valued discoveries in researching and writing this book have been the counsel, support, and experiences offered by many good people along the way.
I would especially like to thank Russell Galen, Scott Meredith, Jack Olsen, and Ruth Coughlin for their key roles right from the start. I’m also indebted to Tom Murphy, my research assistant, for his fleet-footed legwork; my editor, Nick Bakalar, for his ways with writers as well as with words; Michael Novak and Pat Freydl for their valued legal expertise; and Debbie, Jessica, and John for their love and tolerance.
Special appreciation goes to Jan Canty, who cooperated without remuneration, as did every source in this work. Also, I wish to acknowledge Dr. Lorraine Awes for agreeing to detail her patient’s case history at the request of his wife.
For their help when I was at the Detroit News, I would like to thank Lisa Velders, Ben Burns, Jim Vesley, Lionel Linder, and Bob Giles. Also much thanks to Anne E. Sweeney, Robert Ficano, Nancy Mouradian, Chris Kucharski, Anita Mack, Gladys Canty, and Jeanne McAllister.
Finally, there’s no greater gratitude than the kind I’ve discovered in the company of Bill’s many friends: Al, Richard, Pete, the late Don Ball, and all the rest.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
“This Masquerade,” Copyright © 1972, Stuck on Music (BMI). Written by Leon Russell.
“Happy Birthday to You” words and music by Mildred J. Hill and Patty S. Hill. Copyright © 1935 Birch Tree Group Ltd., Princeton, N. J. Used by permission.
Grateful acknowledgment is given to The Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to quote from Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
Copyright © 1988 by Lowell Cauffiel
Cover design by Barbara Brown
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