Popular Crime

by Bill James

  Tison, despite his intelligence, utterly failed to perceive this. He killed six people who represented only the most obscure and indirect threat to his continued freedom. How do we explain this? What was Tison thinking? What are the principles that should guide an escaped criminal, in his efforts to remain free, and what are the principles that guided Tison’s irrational actions?

  I would suggest, based on my experience as a faithful viewer of almost every episode of The Fugitive, that the principles which should guide your thinking in this situation would be

  1) Disguise yourself,

  2) Get out of the area,

  3) Have no contact with anybody who might know you, and

  4) Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself.

  These were the things that John List and Katherine Ann Power did in 1970–1971, as a consequence of which they were able to remain free for twenty years. Tison didn’t do any of these four things: he didn’t disguise himself, stayed in the area by driving in large circles, made repeated efforts to contact his relatives, and murdered six people, thereby directing the attention of the entire state toward his capture.

  Tison’s thinking was dominated not by reason, but by fear and ego. The police have limited time and limited resources to deal with many potential threats. If you go about your own business and don’t bother anybody, within a few weeks there might be a couple of guys assigned to try to find you, or there might not. It might be years before you happen to brush up against the law.

  But Tison was so obscenely self-centered that the idea that he might disappear into a mass of humanity was simply not comprehensible to him. What? Me become invisible? The police stop looking for me? He saw himself as the epicenter of a world dominated and controlled by police authorities. Thus, since he assumed that he was already the focus of interest for all lawful authority in the known world, he perceived the persons whose vehicles he stole as being terrible threats: they could tell the police where he was, or if not actually where he was, at least where he had been a few hours ago.

  Fatal Vision, cited above, was Joe McGinniss’s story about Jeffrey MacDonald, a military doctor convicted of murdering his wife and two daughters on February 17, 1970. MacDonald tried to blame the crime on an East Coast franchise of the Manson family. Fatal Vision was a very successful book that a lot of people like, but the problem with it is that you could edit out 75% of the book without losing a single fact or insight. The TV mini-series based on the book is better than the book, mostly because the great Karl Malden played MacDonald’s father-in-law, Freddy Kassab, who crusaded for almost a decade to bring MacDonald to justice.

  That said, Fatal Vision does have a major virtue. McGinniss is genuinely obsessed with his story … with that story. That’s the flaw of the book; McGinniss is so obsessed with his material that he doesn’t know when to shut up about it. But it is also the positive of the book, in that McGinniss understands his material at a level that only obsession can give you.

  It is common, in crime books, to propose an “author’s solution” at the end of the narrative. Ninety-nine times in a hundred, this doesn’t work. William Kunstler, at the end of The Minister and the Choir Singer, proposes a solution that comes at you like a train that is not merely off-schedule, but miles off its track. P. D. James wrote a very good 1987 book about a series of crimes in England two hundred years ago, The Maul and the Pear Tree, but at the end of the book she proposes an author’s solution that is so off-the-wall that you can’t even figure out what the hell she is talking about.

  Fatal Vision has the most convincing “author’s solution” ever published. At the end of the book, McGinniss tells you what he thinks really happened, and you say to yourself, “Damn, that’s right. He’s nailed it.” That’s very rare.

  Another successful crime book that I don’t much like is Joseph Wambaugh’s Echoes in the Darkness, about the 1979 Pennsylvania murders of Susan Reinert and her two children. That case involved an “uh-oh” about the intrusion of the media into the crime. Wambaugh apparently paid a police investigator $50,000 for information, particularly evidence that would implicate a certain suspect (Dr. Jay Smith). Dr. Smith was arrested, tried, and convicted, but his conviction was set aside due to the inappropriate conduct of the investigator.

  That issue is between Wambaugh, his conscience and the law, but the problem with the book is that Wambaugh tries to tell Susan Reinert’s story more or less as it happens, in a style similar to that used for The Onion Field, which is obviously influenced by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. The style doesn’t fit the story. The disappearance of Ms. Reinert and her children is fundamentally a mystery, a case so convoluted that one detective worked on it almost full-time for seven years—but as Wambaugh tells the story, in chronological order, we have known in broad outlines what happened to Susan Reinert for several hundred pages before it actually happens. The journey is long and tedious, and the portion of the story after the arrests, when Wambaugh is just trying to convict the bad guys, is positively excruciating.

  The story would have worked a lot better, for me at least, if Wambaugh had introduced Bill Bradfield as simply a person, an acquaintance of Susan Reinert’s, then brought him forward as a suspect, then began to develop him as a strange, imbalanced personality with a peculiar hold over some women. Instead, he starts beating us over the head with Bradfield’s strangeness on page one. By the time Susan Reinert disappears, we believe him but we don’t care.

  The TV mini-series based on that book starred Robert Loggia as Dr. Smith, Peter Coyote as Bradfield and Stockard Channing as Reinert. That, too, was better than the book, but suffered from the same problems—the absence of real mystery, the lugubrious character development. In the movie it is hard to feel much sympathy for Susan Reinert because she’s such a sap, and it’s hard to feel anything for her kids because they almost don’t exist, mere phantoms in the shadow of Bradfield and Smith. There are also several other books about the Reinert case.

  You know, I stopped watching these TV crime dramas decades ago. Maybe I should go back to them; I seemed to like them better than the books. There was one about the Tison escape, too, starring Robert Mitchum as Gary Tison. He was too old for the part, and, because I liked the book, I naturally rejected the movie.

  XXV

  On May 26, 1978, Eric Christgen was abducted from a shopping area in St. Joseph, Missouri. Christgen (pronounced “Christian”) was the four-year-old son of a wealthy family. A babysitter had taken him shopping, and had allowed him to play on a small slide while she ran into a store. When she came out he was gone.

  Because of the family’s wealth, police suspected a kidnapping for ransom. This suspicion lasted less than 30 hours. Eric’s body was found on the following day. He had been raped and strangled.

  Months passed.

  A frantic search for the killer gave way to a slow, grinding police investigation. Melvin Reynolds, a 25-year-old gay man who lived and worked near where Eric was abducted, was interrogated nine times between May and the following February. Anxious to accommodate, he never asked to have an attorney with him while he was questioned. During one lie detector test he was asked whether he had killed Christgen. “No,” he said, “but I’ll confess if you want me to.” On February 14, 1979, he confessed to the murder. Although he quickly recanted the confession, he was convicted of the crime in October, 1979, and was sentenced to life in prison.

  In retrospect, it is easy to say that the police should have known they had the wrong man. Two witnesses had seen Christgen being led to his death. Reynolds resembled the man they had seen about as much as Oprah resembles Bill O’Reilly. The FBI had provided a profile of the man who might commit such an atrocity. Reynolds bore no more resemblance to the profile. The other evidence against him was, obviously, of a type which could have been manufactured. I take this to be apparent from the fact that an innocent man was convicted.

  But this also should be kept in mind: that much of the evidence which police deal with in any case w
ill turn out to be false or misleading. One cannot expect the police to drop a prosecution whenever they are confronted by contradictory evidence, because they are virtually always confronted by contradictory evidence. In any case, in July, 1982, the peaceful city of St. Joseph, Missouri, was once more stunned by the disappearance of a young child, 11-year-old Michelle Steele. She was found about 30 hours later on a river bank, less than a mile from where they had found Eric Christgen, and in the same condition.

  Charles Hatcher had been seen by a number of people in the area where Michelle’s body was found, drunk and behaving more or less as one might expect a psychopath to behave. After being stopped and questioned a few times he had turned himself into a nearby psychiatric hospital, shortly before the little girl’s body was found. He asked the attendant to stop the voices. Hatcher could be tied to the murder of Michelle Steele by forensic and circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony. There was never any doubt that he had committed this crime. But what about the other one?

  After the Christgen slaying, the two witnesses who saw Eric with his abductor had talked with a police artist, who had made a sketch based on their descriptions.

  It was an oddly perfect drawing of Charles Hatcher. And Charles Hatcher was a very unusual-looking man.

  Despite this, police and prosecutors refused to admit that they had convicted an innocent man in the death of Eric Christgen. Hatcher, it turned out, had been murdering people for more than twenty years. In 1961 he had stabbed to death a fellow inmate at the State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri. By that time he had been in and out of prison for 14 years. In 1959 he had threatened a newsboy with a knife and attempted to run over a police officer, earning him some serious prison time. In 1961 the warden had determined, by process of elimination, that Hatcher had to have been the man who murdered another inmate, but lacked enough evidence to convict him.

  God gives something to every man, and to Charles Hatcher he had given an extraordinary talent for faking insanity. Hatcher, I suspect, was legitimately insane—but he was also a wizened and experienced thug, who worked very hard at exploiting the insanity morass which perpetually gums up the work of the law. Whenever arrested, Hatcher would give a false name; in his career he was booked under dozens of aliases. If the charge was serious, he would then go into his act. At times he would refuse to speak, sometimes for months on end. If speaking, he would ignore questions, grunt, scream, and talk randomly about voices and violence. He would roll his eyes around in his head, expose himself, run around in small circles, and bang his head against whatever was handy. Although many psychiatrists were certain that he was faking, it was nonetheless almost impossible to put him on trial. He would not cooperate with his defense attorney. He wouldn’t answer questions. He wouldn’t sign anything; he wouldn’t say anything about who he was or where he had come from.

  He simply made it impossible for the law to give him a fair trial. What does the system do when a crazy man decides to act crazy?

  Then, when the process of justice had ground firmly to a halt, he would become sane, or sort of sane, and begin to sue for his freedom. You can’t hold me, he would argue; I’m sane. I haven’t been convicted of any crime. And, before you know it, he’d be out there killing people.

  How many people he killed is not and can never be known. After the murder of Michelle Steele, he went into his shtick. The evidence against him this time, however, was too strong to let him out after a few months of acting crazy, and after a year or so he decided to unburden his conscience. He asked to speak to the FBI, although actually he wasn’t speaking at the time. Communicating through notes, he gave the FBI directions to where they could find a body, near Davenport, Iowa.

  They found it.

  How many people have you killed? asked an agent.

  Hatcher rolled his eyes back, visualizing them one at a time, and began counting on his fingers … one, two, three. He ran out of fingers. Finally he wrote down an answer. Sixteen, he wrote. “Sixteen total that I know for sure …” He was haunted by the 1969 murder of a young boy in Antioch, California, as Albert Fish had apparently been haunted by the murder of Grace Budd. This, he thought, had been his sixth or seventh murder, but different from the ones before, the murder of someone who was loved by someone.

  A day or two after the murder in Antioch, he assaulted a five-year-old boy in San Francisco, a vile and disgusting attack which would unquestionably have ended in the boy’s death, had not a stranger happened across them in a secluded area, and quickly summoned the police. Hatcher, giving his name as Albert Price, went into his act. He was held in custody for four years, during which he was classified and re-classified sane and insane innumerable times, as authorities fought to qualify him for trial. “It is most unusual,” wrote a prison psychologist, “to find an individual with the kind of memory defects that Mr. Price has. This is the first time I have interviewed someone who did not remember the name of his high school or the year that he graduated.”

  Although authorities never found out who he really was and never linked him to the murder in Antioch, they did eventually convict him of the attack on the five-year-old boy, and he was sentenced to one year to life in prison. He was released in May, 1977.

  In custody, both in mental hospitals and in prisons, Hatcher was so abusive that he terrified those around him. Realizing that it was difficult to put him on trial without an attorney, Hatcher would terrorize his court-appointed attorneys. One young attorney, refusing a court’s order to continue in Hatcher’s defense, said that if his choices were to defend Hatcher or give up the practice of the law, he would abandon the law.

  Yet as horrible as he was, some faint reed of conscience still sung within him. His murders bothered him, some of them, and it bothered him that another man was in prison for one of his crimes, because he could relate to that. For a few months he communicated with lawmen in his strange, elliptical way, apparently trying to let the authorities clear up the crimes for which he was responsible, but without exposing himself to renewed prosecution. He stayed with this until Melvin Reynolds, the man who had been wrongly convicted of Eric Christgen’s murder, was set free, and then the mad silence with which he tormented the law settled around him once again. He had two sealed envelopes, apparently giving the details of his most serious crimes; he carried these with him at all times. And then he destroyed the envelopes, and then he killed himself. On December 7, 1984, he was found hanging in his cell at the Missouri State Penitentiary.

  In the aftermath of Hatcher’s suicide, investigators debated what to make of Hatcher’s claim to have killed sixteen or more persons. Only five of the victims can be accounted for with reasonable certainty (the 1961 prison murder, the 1969 murder in Antioch, California, the two child killings in St. Joseph, Missouri, and the body found by the FBI in Davenport). The basic argument against the supposition that Hatcher may have killed the other eleven was that he had been out of prison only a few months, here and there, since 1947.

  What do I think? Well, serial murderers are fantastic liars—all of them—and you can’t believe anything they say. In Hatcher’s case, there’s a good chance he killed sixteen or more persons. Hatcher was an unbelievably violent person. If I had to choose between spending a week with Hatcher or a week with John Wayne Gacy, I’d choose Gacy in an instant. Most serial killers are not particularly dangerous to you unless you turn them on. I’m not saying that you would want to get comfortable with them, but they’re not usually violent from moment to moment. Hatcher was never more than ten minutes away from killing somebody. Anybody. Eleven unknown murder victims in a few months unaccounted for?

  No trouble at all. Hatcher was arrested in Minneapolis on July 27, 1977, in a police dragnet organized after a 13-year-old boy had been molested and strangled. The crime was never solved.

  Hatcher was arrested for crimes against children which didn’t end in murder at least a half-dozen times, and most of those didn’t end in murder only because fate intervened. Also, he escaped fr
om prison or from mental hospitals, in his career, at least five times. If I were a lawman assigned to make an account of every murder to be put on his score, I would take very seriously the possibility that he might have escaped from detention on some occasion, killed somebody, and then returned to custody before his absence was officially noted. It is exactly the sort of thing that he would have done. He was canny. He knew enough, when he committed a murder, to get the hell out of town within an hour, before the body could be found. The murder of Susan Nason (Chapter XXIII) seems indistinguishable from crimes Hatcher is known to have committed—and occurred within days and within a few miles of a crime for which Hatcher spent several years in custody. If I have the chronology exactly right, Hatcher was in custody at the time of Nason’s murder, but it strikes me as worth noting.

  Repeatedly sentenced to long prison terms, he was repeatedly released by a judicial and medical establishment which knew for a certain fact that he was a violent psychopath.

  This concludes the Charles Hatcher story, but if I could digress here to make a point … I am often struck, in reading crime books, by how little good normally comes of police sketches. Police sketches are the public face of a criminal investigation—here is the man we are looking for—but for some reason, at least in my reading, they seem to accomplish little in these kinds of investigations. A few examples:

  In this case, the police sketch was a remarkably good likeness of the actual criminal. Hatcher had an unusual physiognomy—a sunken, wrinkled, muscular face and upside-down almond eyes—and the witnesses had remembered it, and the artist had captured it. The witnesses had also described a crooked left arm and an extremely stooped shoulder, both of which Hatcher displayed. This bit of good luck did nothing to prevent a miscarriage of justice. No one who saw the sketch recognized Hatcher, even though, in retrospect, it is difficult to understand how they could not have. The fact that Melvin Reynolds bore absolutely no resemblance to the sketch did not prevent him from being coerced into a confession.