One theory held that they ran away together to live in Hayworth, Oklahoma, where Owens’s aunt lived. The couple was reportedly seen there “several times.” (The aunt denied this.) Another theory: They’d hitchhiked to Kansas, where Owens’s mother lived. Wichita, perhaps. Neither story panned out, said Gray.
On September 30, a few weeks after the disappearance, Dunn’s father, John, called the police to report that he’d received a call from a friend in Durant, Oklahoma. The friend had said he’d seen Dunn and Owens, and they were “dirty and hungry.” He got them cleaned up and fed. “That’s what the father told the deputy,” said Gray. “Of course, they called up there and never found them or anything like that.”
There was another, considerably darker possibility, suggested by Dunn’s father: that Owens, who had been involved with drugs in Oklahoma, was targeted by a dealer who kidnapped them both. But there was no ransom demand. Indeed, said Gray, “There was no signs of anything like that happening.”
Neither Dunn nor Owens has been seen again.
Is there any reason, I asked Gray, to believe they were anything but runaways? “No, not really,” he said. “The reason why is, if you knew her parents, they were kind of strange. They were different, I’ll put it that way. When this happened, you would have actually thought, Okay, yeah, she’s trying to get out from underneath them.”
By the time “Runaway Train” aired, said Gray, “things went cold.” Even the popularity of the video couldn’t move the needle much. There was a tip that Dunn was working as a waitress near New Boston. (“Of course, I called over there, and that wasn’t true.”) About a year ago, Gray heard about a woman in Mississippi who reportedly resembled Dunn’s age progression photo. That, too, came to nothing. And that, he said, was the last time anyone called about Martha Wes Dunn.
“I don’t know if I would go so far as saying that she’s alive,” said Gray. But there’s no evidence to the contrary. That makes Dunn one of only two long-term missing persons cases in Morris County in the last 25 years. (As of 2013, Daingerfield had a population of only 2,526.)
Dunn’s sister, Tina Holstine, posted a video about her to YouTube and wrote, in part:
I just hope your out there this video is for my sister she went missing in 1990 never to be seen again. We have been to oklahoma and other places she might would be was told she was ok and to just leave it alone. But we can’t just back down and forget about her we just want to see her again. The police put her down as a run away couse of her age. Eric Owens come to our house and took her they were into drugs pretty bad and our only conclusion is that she can’t get back to us couse she couldn’t find us so I done this video for her. If your watching siss we love you and just want you back.
Attempts to reach Holstine were unsuccessful.
“RUNAWAY TRAIN,” SAID DAVE PIRNER, WAS A MIRACLE: “We were able to turn a blatant promotion item into a public service announcement and got away with it.” Since Grave Dancers Union, Soul Asylum has gone on to release five more albums. In fact, Pirner and his band—of whom he is the only remaining original member—released a new album in March called Change of Fortune.
It’s been more than 20 years since the song’s release, but to Pirner’s astonishment and maybe consternation, it continues to resonate. (The video immediately spawned imitators. There were, at the very least, versions in the UK and Canada with entirely different children.) When we talked in September, he’d just been contacted by a Syrian man who wanted to use the song with a photo collage of children who had been maimed by war.
Pirner knows, though, that “Runaway Train” is an inescapable association. Not that long ago, he told me, “I went to an Irish bar and there was a guy playing Irish songs in the corner on his guitar. He had a sign on the wall next to him and it said DANNY BOY, TEN BUCKS. I just laughed because I understood exactly. It’s like the only Irish song that people know, so they always request it. I should have a placard like that around my neck that says RUNAWAY TRAIN, TEN BUCKS.”
I asked Pirner, who splits his time between Minnesota and Louisiana, if he had any children. Yes, he said, a 13-year-old. Had the song changed his parenting at all? Yes, he said, “Runaway Train” had likely made him more protective than he would have otherwise been. “I was probably more aware of the possibilities of creeps and predators,” he said. “It seems hard for me to even explain something like that to a kid without scaring him, but I guess that’s the whole idea.”
FOR ME, THE STORY BEGINS AND ENDS WITH CHRISTOPHER Kerze, who disappeared that Minnesota spring 26 years ago. The arc of his life is devastatingly incomplete.
The day after he left, Jim and Alona received an envelope in the mail, postmarked Duluth. In it was another handwritten note, addressed to “Mom, Dad, And Readers.” Kerze explained that he’d lied about being sick in order to take the family’s 1988 light blue Dodge Caravan “to not even I know where.”
Furthermore, wrote Kerze, he intended to commit suicide. He declined to give a reason. But he understood how deeply it would hurt those he loved, and for that he expressed regret.
“Take heart,” he continued, “because if just one person is better off for having known me, my life will not have been wasted.”
The next day, two days after Kerze was last seen, police found the family’s van abandoned by the side of the road in Itasca County in northern Minnesota, about 20 miles north of Grand Rapids.
And yet: all these years later, no one can say with certainty what happened. When Kerze left the house, he took the shotgun but not the ammunition. No traces of him have ever been found—not the shotgun, not his glasses, not his clothes, and not his body. And, as Ernie Allen said, “He could’ve changed his mind. The reality is he is missing until he’s found.”
The uncertainty is, for Jim Kerze, both hope and torment. But he hasn’t given up. “My pipe dream is that Christopher works for a little company in Cleveland, is married and has three kids. He’s a very quiet employee. He’s not a person who would lead the charge. He’s one of those guys in the back to hold the place together.
“Smart, could do the job, hold the place together, be very relied on. But you wouldn’t want to ask him to try to sell stuff to the public because that’s not his personality. His personality is the other way.”
He paused. “I know that the reality, intellectually, is probably a lot different. But you have to have some way to hope.”
Originally published by MEL magazine, November 2016
The True Crime Story Behind a 1970s Cult Feminist Film Classic
By Sarah Weinman
They met in New Orleans just before Mardi Gras, in 1959. He was part owner of a French Quarter bookshop. She was looking for a job. He was 30. So was she, though she claimed to be three years younger. He said his name was Don Reisinger. She gave hers as Alma Malone. His name was fake. Hers was, too, in a way; she hadn’t used her birth name, Stephens, in a long time.
She didn’t get the job. She did, however, get the guy.
Alma and Don made a strange couple. He was short—five foot four without his customary elevator shoes, and 110 pounds on a good day. He tended to squint at the light or when something didn’t suit, but was rarely photographed with glasses on. She was taller, rangier: a natural brunette with an elegant neck.
Don tended to disappear for days or weeks at a time. Alma never had warning before he’d take off, and even less when, in early September, he told her they were leaving for Cleveland. She didn’t have anyone to alert, anyway, being estranged from her family.
That family included a mother and a younger sister, back in her hometown of Salina, Kansas, both of whom she refused to write. Her father played no part in her life; his repeated molestation of her had driven her to juvenile delinquency, a stint in a Kansas City convent, and a permanent grudge against her mother. She wasn’t in contact with her 11-year-old son, Robert—who lived with his father—either, nor with any of her four ex-husbands, the first of whom she married when she was only 14 years old.
Alma and Don arrived in Cleveland on September 7, 1959. Once there, Don revealed that his real name was William Ansley. (He also operated under the aliases Shannon Ansley, William Shannon, and Robert Shannon.) He had drifted into New Orleans two years earlier, after finishing up probation and a suspended sentence in Philadelphia for armed robbery.
That sentence stemmed from an earlier, more serious one in Boston, when William decided to hold up the Northeast Airlines offices at the Statler Hotel. It didn’t go well. William bungled the robbery, nearly killed a cab driver, and received a 9- to 12-year sentence for both crimes.
But William had a new plan, as he explained to Alma: the newspapers were full of reports about someone who had tried to heist the Lorain Avenue branch of the Cleveland Trust Company bank. William would do one better. “He said if I would help him he could do it successfully, but if anything did go wrong, we could die,” Alma later told reporters. “I kept stalling the job. I suppose I wanted to live, even though I didn’t have much to live for.”
Alma and William spent the next two weeks planning the job. She bleached her brown hair blond and pretended at pregnancy, thanks to a maternity dress and foam-rubber padding. William bought a blond wig of his own to conceal his bald head, as well as all the equipment they would need for a successful bank heist.
By the morning of September 23, William and Alma were ready. He affixed the wig on his head. She threw on a shabby blue gabardine dress and a pair of faded black loafers. He made a list of 15 steps to follow to the letter, and put the list in his pocket.
What happened in no way resembled what they had planned. It did, however, end up immortalized on film.
WATCHING WANDA, BARBARA LODEN’S 1970 DIRECTORIAL debut, is a revelation. The pace is languid, until it isn’t. Grimy and washed-out, the film makes a point of being naturalistic.
Wanda Goronski, played by 38-year-old Loden herself, is drabness personified—a Rust Belt housewife barely awake, listless about cooking, cleaning, and her employment status. She lies on the couch, absorbing her sister’s pointed criticism about her state of apathy. She drifts into bars and mediocre sex. She is robbed while asleep in a movie theater and barely reacts.
“I’m just no good,” Wanda declares in court as she loses custody of her two children to the husband she’s divorcing. She soon takes up with Mr. Dennis, who she meets in a bar, endures his physical abuse, and goes along with his criminal plans, because she has nowhere else to go.
The filmmaker herself could relate. “I used to be a lot like that,” Loden explained to the Los Angeles Times a few months after Wanda was released. “I had no identity of my own. I just became whatever I thought people wanted me to become.”
Loden was an ex-Copacabana showgirl with a heavy North Carolina accent who was transformed by Method lessons into an actress of note. (Her Marilyn Monroe–inspired performance in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall won her a Tony Award.) She landed juicy film roles, including one as Warren Beatty’s sister in Splendor in the Grass, and a famous director husband, Elia Kazan, to whom she was married until her premature death in 1980 at the age of 48.
Loden’s marriage to Kazan came after she spent years as his mistress, an affair begun while she was still married to the father of her two sons, Leo and Marco. She endured a heavy dose of public humiliation from Kazan’s depiction of her in his 1967 roman à clef The Arrangement, made even worse when Loden was passed over for a role in the film adaptation in favor of Faye Dunaway. Kazan later tried to take credit for Wanda’s initial script—though he claimed, with mock gallantry, to have stayed out of his wife’s way as she shot the film in and around Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Loden’s internal strife provided the emotional motivation for her to write, direct, and act in the film. But the seed for Wanda—which manifests, in the second half of the film, in a bank robbery that goes awry—was planted a decade before the film’s limited release: Loden had chanced upon a March 27, 1960, newspaper story called “The Go-for-Broke Bank Robber,” which described a duo’s failed bank heist in Cleveland that led to the death of the lead robber. Loden seized upon the story of the accomplice, a woman who later thanked the judge for her long prison sentence.
The French film theorist Nathalie Léger, in her brilliant 2012 book Suite for Barbara Loden, a hybrid of biography, memoir, fiction, and criticism, identified the woman as Alma Malone. (“She might have been the daughter of Samuel Beckett’s Malone, the one who says at the beginning of the book, ‘I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.’”)
Léger found the discovery of Loden’s real-life inspiration deflating: “All the thrill of the quest evaporated. An overwhelming sense of sorrow overtook me during the exhausting period of going through these pages and I immediately lost all interest in the subject for a period of several weeks, filled with regret for ever having allowed myself to be overtaken by the urge to pinpoint the source of the story.”
For Léger, finding out about Alma detracted from her own work, opening up questions she knew she wouldn’t have time to investigate. But had Léger persisted, she’d have discovered a remarkable tale of a woman more like Loden’s creation than the filmmaker herself had ever realized. One whose story has never been fully told.
THE DOORBELL RANG AT SEVEN A.M. HERBERT FOX WENT to answer. The bank manager’s two daughters, 18-year-old Marilyn and 10-year-old Bonnie, continued to eat breakfast. His wife, Loretta, was washing the dishes.
William Ansley and Alma Malone were at the door.
“Our car broke down. May we use your telephone?” said William. Alma, the taller of the two, peered over Ansley’s shoulder.
“Why, uh—”
William thrust his foot into the doorway. Then, pointing a .45 at Fox, he went inside with Alma. Fox grabbed at William. Alma set down a hatbox and pulled an automatic handgun from her red handbag. “Let him go!” she cried.
Loretta Fox stuck her head out from the kitchen. “What is it, dear?”
“Come in here!” cried Alma. The girls appeared in the doorway. “You too!”
The Fox family assembled in the living room. Alma pulled some cord from her handbag and began to tie them up, one by one. William pointed to the hatbox.
“See that? That’s a bomb. A real, live bomb. You cooperate with us and we’ll be back here to disarm it before the time it’s set to go off.” William turned to Fox. “You are going to take me to the bank.”
“Wh-wh-wh-what for?”
William chuckled.
“To rob it, of course.”
No one said anything further. A ticking sound came from the hatbox.
“You just sit still,” Alma said. “If you joggle around trying to go free, the bomb will go off.”
William motioned for Fox to get his coat and hat. Fox put a rosary beside Bonnie, still tied up. “Pray for all of us,” he said, and walked out of his home with William and Alma following behind. “Go to your car,” ordered William. “Act natural.” Fox obeyed.
As they got into Fox’s car, Alma got into a blue Ford with a white top, intending to follow them. But when the men arrived at the bank, she was no longer behind them.
EDDIE LEE WAITED AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE LORAIN Avenue branch of the Cleveland Trust. He greeted Fox with a smile that evaporated when he saw William, who spirited both men into the bank.
William gave the same spiel to Eddie that he recited to the other dozen or so employees filing into the Lorain Avenue branch: there was a bomb at Fox’s house that would go off if they didn’t follow instructions. Fox was then ordered to fill a cardboard box with money.
He was about to hand off the box stuffed with bills to William, when a policeman appeared at the window.
“Stall him off!” said William. “Get out there, at the center of the floor.” Fox moved slowly, wondering if his family would survive because of his decisions.
Then he saw a second cop.
THE FICTIONAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WANDA AND Mr. Dennis is quite faithful to what Loden kne
w of the relationship between Alma and William. The film version of the heist stays true to the details of what happened at the Fox residence, down to the ticking hatbox. Wanda’s existential ennui could have, and likely did, come straight from what Alma later told reporters.
So one could imagine the real Alma reacting to William as Wanda does to Mr. Dennis when he says this on how to dress and act, and how to stop being so passive: “If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, you’re as good as dead.”
Or when Mr. Dennis slaps Wanda, and it takes her several beats of quiet shock before responding with a tepid, plaintive, “Hey, that hurt.”
“COME ON, WE’VE GOT TO HELP DADDY!”
Marilyn Fox had broken free of the cord that kept her tied up. She untied her mother, Loretta, and sister, Bonnie. The hatbox kept on ticking. For 15 minutes, the trio prayed. Then they ran over to a neighbor’s house. It was 8:20 a.m. The radio reported “some kind of disturbance” at the Lorain Avenue bank branch.
Patrolmen James Gatter and Thomas McNamara were on duty that morning. They heard the police scanner and stopped their car near the bank. Gatter grabbed a shotgun. McNamara fetched his service revolver. They were at the entrance when Eddie Lee ran out the door.
A hand holding an automatic gun rose over the bank counter.
The robber fired. Gatter fired back. They exchanged fire two more times, as glass shattered around them. Gatter first aimed at the wood near the top of the counter. The next time he aimed at the floor.
He reached for more ammunition and found it gone—William’s shot had ripped a hole in his pants, right at the ammunition belt.
Gatter got ready to draw his revolver again when a third policeman rushed in. “After that,” Gatter later recalled, “just about every policeman in town came up behind us. It was just like a movie thriller.”
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