The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
Page 1
Also By Mark Bowden
Doctor Dealer
Bringing the Heat
Black Hawk Down
Killing Pablo
Finders Keepers
Road Work
Guests of the Ayatollah
The Best Game Ever
Worm
The Finish
The Three Battles of Wanat
Hue 1968
The Last Stone
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Bowden
Jacket design Gretchen Mergenthaler
Jacket artwork by The Red Dress @ Début Art
“The Incident at Alpha Tau Omega” appeared originally in the Philadelphia Enquirer; “why don’t u tell me wht ur into,” “The Case of the Vanishing Blonde,” “. . . A Million Years Ago,” and “The Body in Room 348” appeared originally in Vanity Fair; “Who Killed Euhommie Bond?” appeared originally in Air Mail.
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FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
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First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: July 2020
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eISBN 978-0-8021-4632-8
Atlantic Monthly Press
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Contents
Introduction
The Incident at Alpha Tau Omega
“why don’t u tell me wht ur into”
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
. . . A Million Years Ago
The Body in Room 348
Who Killed Euhommie Bond?
Introduction
Newspaper reporting hones an appetite for crime. Good crime stories sell. All the bad things said about them are true—they exploit tragedy, they are voyeuristic, they generally lack any broader social import—but they are unfailingly fascinating.
When I wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, back in its heyday, when it had reporters based all over the region, nation, and world, we reporters competed vigorously for the paper’s limited news hole. You learned fast that a good crime yarn was a shortcut to page one. Our tall, darkly handsome Sunday editor, Ron Patel, would blithely sweep aside the most important news of the week to make room for one. He called them, affectionately, “dirtballs,” and would literally rub his hands together with delight as he read them. We dubbed him “The Dark Prince.”
Ron reserved a space on the Sunday front page for what he considered the most compelling read in that day’s paper, which back then reached well over a million readers. Very often these were crime stories, and this being Philadelphia, there was no shortage of material. There was the one about the kid who was killed when, fleeing a bank robbery in the suburbs on a motorcycle, he crashed when a dye pack in the money bag exploded—he was found mangled and blue; or the dentist who recruited two thugs to cut off half his index finger so he wouldn’t be able to work anymore and could collect a big insurance payout; or the transit-bus accident that generated about two times more insurance claims from passengers than it could hold. Ron would strip the headlines of such stories across the very top of page one, over the masthead. The “Dirtball Strip” was coveted real estate for young staffers, and we vied for it weekly, no matter what our assigned beats. I have never lost my appetite for such tales.
“The Incident at Alpha Tau Omega,” published in 1983, is from that era; it ran on the cover of the Inquirer’s Sunday magazine, an even more coveted spot. At the time, it was a controversial story in the newsroom, given that most men (and newspaper staffs were then, even more than today, predominantly male) thought that any young woman foolish enough to attend a college frat party drunk and tripping on acid could more or less expect to be sexually assaulted. The attitude of some of the editors was, “Why are we making a big deal out of this?” There has been a significant and appropriate social adjustment since then. Incidents like the one at ATO still happen, of course, only now they are often front-page news. Women are still being sexually exploited, but less and less is such male behavior considered somehow normal or understandable. I’m proud of the story, because it got beyond the binary legal argument—rape versus not rape—to grayer and more difficult moral terrain.
Crime has been a part of my work ever since. Three of my books, Doctor Dealer, Finders Keepers, and The Last Stone are of that genre, and several others arguably belong to it—The Finish and Killing Pablo, about the successful efforts to track down and kill Osama Bin Laden and Pablo Escobar, respectively. Crime has been the subject of many of my shorter works, produced for magazines like the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and others.
Over the years I have seen these stories increasingly influenced and often shaped by audio and video recordings. One of the biggest challenges for anyone trying to write nonfiction with the immediacy of fiction is to do it without invention—without expanding on what can be confidently known. In the past, scenes were usually reconstructions, dependent almost entirely on the memory of participants. For a writer like me, audio and video recordings are like gifts from God. When I started as a newspaper reporter in the 1970s, it was rare to have a photo or recording of anything I wrote about. Today it is rare not to have such material. In fact, there is often so much of it that it poses new challenges.
Years ago, recordings or transcripts existed for things like trials, depositions, and hearings, for events closely covered by news organizations, or purely by chance, as with the shaky film footage shot by Abraham Zapruder that captured the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the TV coverage of the killing of his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, days later. Such raw material was relatively rare. Today cameras are everywhere. Virtually every store, library, bank, highway intersection or toll booth, stadium, building lobby, parking lot, and city street corner has one or more running continually, and nearly every citizen owns a cell phone capable of recording and publishing, or “posting,” videos and still images. Police increasingly wear cameras or have them mounted on their vehicles. The military mounts video cameras on drones that can watch over entire cities, with software that can zero in on specific vehicles or places over time. Increasingly, video exists for the most private of human interactions. Often raw clips of a crime surface before anything else—a sports figure striking a woman in an elevator, a cop shooting a fleeing suspect, a bomb exploding on a busy street—and the footage drives the reporting that follows, much of it increasingly devoted to interpreting and arguing about what the captured scene really shows.
This development has been invaluable for telling true stories. Re-creating past events, crafting fully realized scenes, with characters, action, and dialogue, has traditionally been the hardest part. Unless you witnessed a thing for yourself, th
e only way to build past scenes was by reconstructing them from written records and the memories of participants. Until fairly recently, this is how all of history has been written down, and the process is, of course, imperfect. Memory is always iffy. Records are sometimes wrong. I learned long ago to seek as many different accounts of a scene as I could before arriving at a version I could trust. My rule, when relying on interviews to re-create scenes, has been to let the reader know, either in the text or in a footnote, where the information comes from—three sources are excellent, two are good, one is sketchy at best. Crafting scenes calls for extreme detail. You can’t just ask a source, “What did you do?” Or, “What did you say?” You must ask, “What exactly did you do? What exactly did you say? What were you thinking? What were you wearing? Was it cold or warm? Night or day? Rainy or sunny? Where were you standing? Why were you standing there? What did the place where you were smell like? Sound like? Which hand did you use?” People look at you funny when you start down this path, but drafting a compelling scene on the page depends on such minute, seemingly irrelevant detail.
Recordings answer many of these questions with certainty. We can now readily imagine a future where any past event can be dialed up and watched in high-definition, with wraparound sound. But even then, we will still need storytellers to edit the raw footage, make sense of it, move beyond what we see and hear. The makers of the 2019 documentary Apollo 11 relied entirely on the extensive audio and video of the mission recorded at the time, and the filmmakers have said they might eventually place a recording of the entire eight-day mission online for those who want to experience the whole thing as it unfolded in real time. While this would be a very useful resource for historians, I can’t imagine anyone else subjecting themselves to it. Most of it will be stupefyingly boring. And even when you have audio or video of an event, you don’t know the full story. It takes work to understand even what seems apparent. I once wrote a story about a series of at-bats by the great Phillies slugger Mike Schmidt. I had the opportunity to observe him closely through a succession of games and then to review tapes of his at-bats with him. In my story I described Schmidt stepping out of the batter’s box between pitches during one game and taking a deliberate big breath “to calm himself.” The fact that he stepped out and took a deep breath was indisputable. I saw him do it, and it was there in a recording of the game. But Schmidt was displeased. He asked me later, “How could you have known why I took a deep breath there? Whether I was anything but calm?” And he was right. I couldn’t. I should not have assumed; I should have asked. Even when everything is recorded, writers will still need to do old-fashioned reporting and to exercise the art of storytelling, choosing what to leave in and what to take out, choosing when to slow the narrative and when to speed it up, choosing how to begin and end. An abundance of raw material can make the task both easier and harder.
Two of the stories here are built mostly around such documentation—“why don’t u tell me wht ur into” and “. . . A Million Years Ago.” The former shows how an aggressive detective, posing online as a mother offering her two young daughters for sex, lures a man desperate for sex to his ruin. The larger question posed by the story is whether J, who indulged online in despicable fantasy, was a criminal or just a troubled soul who posed a danger only to himself. If he was entrapped, as I think he was, the only way to show it would be through the long online dance between him and the detective. Because they left a word-for-word digital trail, it’s possible to watch it happen. “. . . A Million Years Ago” is built around a critical interview with Stephanie Lazarus, in which she is confronted with the fact that she was being charged with a twenty-three-year-old murder. Because there was video of the entire session, I was able to construct the story around that dramatic scene.
The others here rely on more traditional reporting methods. The remarkable private detective Ken Brennan, who is featured in three, phoned me cold in 2010. He said he had a great story; was I interested? I receive such calls from time to time. Most are from people who are under the erroneous impression that I (or the magazines I write for) will pay them for material or that I might want to coauthor a story or book with them, which I don’t do. When I disabuse them, they retreat. Ken was unfazed. He had a cool story, and he wanted me to tell it. I met with him in Florida, where he laid out for me what became “The Case of the Vanishing Blonde.”
It was an amazing story, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I was writing at the time primarily for the Atlantic and Vanity Fair. The former tends these days to concern itself with issues of national import, and it hardly seemed like something that would interest Vanity Fair, with its fetish for glamour, wealth, and fame. I was chatting with Vanity Fair’s editor, the delightful Graydon Carter, when he asked what I was writing. I told him I had a crime story, but I added, “It wouldn’t interest you.” This turns out to be best line ever conceived for pitching a magazine story. Graydon demanded to see it, and he turned out to have the same appetite for dirtballs as the Dark Prince. “The Vanishing Blonde” became one of the most successful stories I’ve ever written. It has been translated into other languages and featured in a number of TV adaptations. Ken has become justifiably famous and very sought after. Graydon ran the second of my stories about him, “The Case of the Body in Room 348,” and, after retiring from Vanity Fair and launching his new online project, Air Mail, picked up the third, “Who Killed Euhommie Bond?” Whenever we talk, Graydon asks me for another dirtball.
Like all the stories I write, the ones collected here took me to people and places I would have never seen otherwise. In Lafayette, Louisiana, Susie Fleniken, the widow of the victim in “The Body” story, treated me to her delicious homemade crayfish étouffée; the shamed subject of “why don’t u tell me wht ur into” introduced me to a horrid Internet underworld of sexual interplay and predation that I had never heard about; and the Euhommie Bond story showed how one man’s violent death would roil the racially divided small Tennessee city of Jackson. Some of these crime yarns touch on larger social themes—sexual predation, entrapment, racism—but the real reason they exist is that I found them fascinating.
Why I do is anybody’s guess. When I was a boy, the local pharmacy stocked the classic magazine True Detective, which had garishly illustrated covers (usually depicting scantily clad damsels) and featured work by some of the best crime writers in the country. My parents wouldn’t let me read it. So they are probably to blame.
December 2019
The Incident at Alpha Tau Omega
The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 1983
It was February 18, a sunny Friday afternoon. The brothers of Alpha Tau Omega had partied straight through to the purple dawn. It had been ATO’s first successful “pub night” of the semester. A few of the boys were idling in a first-floor bedroom, downing the foamy dregs of a near-dead keg.
Even the house seemed hung over. Crud from hundreds of dancing feet caked the floor. Discarded gray cups of unquaffed beer wafted an odor stale and unpleasant, like the taste of a dry mouth the morning after a few too many. The ATO house is a muscular mansion of burgundy stone, ornate but a bit down-at-the-heels, that commands a key corner lot at Thirty-Ninth Street and Locust Walk, right at the residential heart of the University of Pennsylvania campus. Drape a few sheet banners between windows above, roll a dented keg or two onto the porch, and you have it. The house was home to one of Penn’s most bumptious communities of “Greeks.”
Social graces they had not. But fun, they had plenty. Among Penn’s twenty-seven fraternities, ATO was known for its rowdy, lowlife crew. Taking only enough pledges to fill the rooms of their beloved house, ATOs recruited quietly on a back-pocket jock network. Most of them were varsity athletes. The thirty-one members of ATO saw themselves as the tightest group of brothers on campus. They studied together, played together, partied together, and, now and then, got in trouble together.
It was one week after the big snow. Andrea Ploscowe, a good friend of the ATOs, had come over
to hang out. It was always fun talking to Andrea.
And today there was much to talk about. Last night’s party had, in a way, stepped over the edge. There was this girl, this strange girl named Laurel, and . . . well, in the vernacular, there had been a “train.” Nobody was sure at that point how many brothers had had sex with the girl. Five? Six? Maybe ten. Word whispered around all that morning. Some brothers were disturbed, others delighted—it was the kind of event that enhanced house lore. Still, others weren’t sure what to think. Andrea hadn’t heard. When she mentioned that she had seen this girl Laurel dancing pretty wildly early on at the party and that Laurel had seemed so strange, the brothers just started telling her about it.
Right away Andrea’s response shocked them. She was horrified. She wanted details. She wanted to know exactly what had happened.
The brothers asked her why, and what she said next stung—a sudden slap in the face from a friend. It was the first hint of the ordeal they would all face in the months ahead, an ordeal that would be, for many, the most difficult experience of their young lives.
Andrea had answered, abruptly, “For my own information, I’d like to know who the potential rapists in this house are.”
Andrea Ploscowe’s outrage was the first splash on a still pond. Ripples of angry accusation would ring out across campus to city newspapers and television stations and from there across the nation. “Gang rape at Penn” was hot news nationwide. Almost overnight, this group of college boys had become the object of such intense, widespread disdain that they scarcely believed that the callow faces they saw in the mirror were their own. Lumping the ATO brothers in with the perpetrators of a notorious New Bedford, Massachusetts, barroom rape, a columnist for Time magazine wrote, “All subhumans are created equal.”