Popular Crime

by Bill James

  The people in the dorm had their own lives. He manufactured drugs in his dorm room, giving some away to anybody who would share them with him, and all the time studying, studying, studying, afraid to report to his mother anything less than a perfect grade.

  Large steam tunnels, providing heat to almost every building, lay underneath the Michigan State campus. There are eight miles of tunnels—insufferably hot, slimy, rat-infested, and seeded with thousands of little vents which blast steam without warning. A few sessions of Dungeons & Dragons had been played in there, although this was never common (as was represented in some news reports). On August 15, 1979, Dallas Egbert wandered into the tunnels. He left a cryptic note and an even more cryptic map, nothing more than some push-pins on a cork board.

  He went into the tunnels, apparently, to make a final choice among his options. There was a little “room” or alcove in the steam tunnels where the heat was not so intense. He sat in Dante’s living room, nibbling crackers and debating his course: to be, or not to be. He had brought a quantity of homemade Quaaludes which he believed would be sufficient to cause his death. Depression overcame him, at length, and he decided that he would never be able to make friends, or convince his mother to get off his case, or do any of the other things which make life worth living at sixteen.

  Egbert had miscalculated the dosage—barely. The drugs knocked him out for more than 24 hours, and left him sick as a dog when he awoke. He managed to get out of the tunnel and stumble and crawl to the home of a “friend” near campus, passing out from the pain several times along the way; he estimated that it had taken him about eight hours to travel a little less than a mile once he got out of the tunnels. The friend, a man in his early twenties, nursed him back toward health, fed him drugs, and had sex with him.

  After Egbert had been missing a few days his family became alarmed. Dallas had an uncle who lived in Dallas. The uncle was acquainted with William Dear, probably the nation’s best-known private investigator at that time. Dear agreed to take the case, and dispatched three operatives to Michigan.

  It appears that Dear’s men must have talked to the individual who was “holding” Egbert, or the man with whom he was staying, within hours of arriving in East Lansing; either they talked to the man, or they talked to someone within his circle of friends. Realizing how things “looked” to an outsider (someone who didn’t give children drugs and have sex with them), the “friend” panicked, and arranged to get Dallas out of his house as quickly as possible. He passed him to another man, an older man whom Egbert scarcely knew.

  The investigation exploded into front-page news. Within days Bill Dear had guessed that Egbert had gone into the tunnels, although he had not the slightest idea what had happened to him once he got in there, and so Dear determined to search the tunnels. Michigan State authorities insisted that the tunnels could not be accessed by the students—an obdurate and baffling contention, since one could simply walk into the tunnels from three places, and many students knew how to obtain access from other locations. The battle between Dear and Michigan State over access to the tunnels (in the midst of a missing-persons case) was soon on the front pages of newspapers from coast to coast. Dear obtained permission—and assistance—to search the tunnels.

  Meanwhile, Egbert was being passed surreptitiously from one house to another, a fact which was apparently well known within the East Lansing gay community. What you have, then, is this: a sixteen-year-old genius, homosexual, capable of manufacturing drugs, is being held by a group of men who are afraid to release him, while the nation’s news media roams the campus searching for information. This is not fiction. Each house to which he was passed was further lost in sin than the one before. Dallas was ill treated, and warned constantly how dangerous it would be for him to surface. He became subject to mind control, obeying the orders of his captors even when they were not physically present.

  Although of course we do not know exactly what was happening within that damned community, it appears that Dear’s group, without fully realizing it, was working its way up the back end of the chain, talking to people who knew not necessarily where Egbert was, but certainly where he had been. Somebody gave Dallas a few dollars and put him on a bus, told him to get to New Orleans. The phone number he had been given to contact somebody in New Orleans was out of operation, and Egbert was on the streets of New Orleans for several days. He attempted suicide again, this time with homemade cyanide, but his cyanide was like his Quaaludes: not actually strong enough to kill him, but certainly strong enough to make him wish even more sincerely that he was dead.

  Again he turned to an older man, asking for help, and this time his luck was marginally better. The man took him to Morgan City, Louisiana, where he found a dump to live in and, improbably enough, a job working as an oilfield roustabout.

  For the men who had held Egbert, it was a near thing whether it was more dangerous to set him free, or to kill him. It is not entirely clear which they chose—nor, in the end, is it entirely clear which they accomplished. The central plan, apparently, was to get him out, as far as possible away from those who had held him, and also to get Bill Dear out, get him back to Texas, and then to arrange for Dear to find Dallas.

  Dallas continued to call back to Michigan for counsel, as he had been ordered to do. Finally he was told to call Dear and, a little before 1 AM on September 13, 1980, he did. He had been missing for 29 days.

  There followed a joyous reunion, and a tragic denouement. The Egberts were overjoyed to recover their son. He enrolled at Wright State University in Ohio, closer to home. The problems which had enveloped him at Michigan State proved ultimately intractable. His depression returned and, eleven months later, his third suicide attempt was more successful than the others. On August 11, 1980, a gunshot wound to the temple left him mortally wounded. He died five days later. He was seventeen.

  The article above is based largely on the book The Dungeon Master, by William Dear (Houghton Mifflin, 1984). Bill Dear missed his moment. Had he been born 25 years later, he would have become the star of his own reality television series, like Dog the Bounty Hunter or those horribly ugly people who re-possess automobiles for the entertainment of the public.

  Dear was—I think still is, although he must be in his seventies by now—an utterly shameless self-promoter. It is quite unusual to read a book in which the author talks repeatedly about how handsome he is, and compares himself, with a straight face, to James Bond. At the same time the book The Dungeon Master is quite good; another book by Dear, about the murder of Dean Milo, is also quite good. One can’t avoid the conclusion that Dear was using the book publishing industry to build his reputation as an investigator, but the books will stand on their own feet.

  On April 17, 1980, Chris Hobson disappeared from his home in Overland Park, Kansas. Chris Hobson was a thirteen-year-old boy; Overland Park is a sprawling, wealthy suburb of Kansas City.

  Hobson had disappeared in the evening; his parents, or one of them anyway, thought he was out playing, around the neighborhood. When he didn’t come home they called the police, who assumed that Chris had run away.

  A couple of weeks later his wallet was found in a shopping mall. A senior detective recognized the implications of this immediately. “You’re going to have to cover your ass,” he told the younger man assigned to the case. The investigation began in earnest. Kansas City media was saturated with Hobson’s picture.

  The boy was dead before the police were ever called. Paul Sorrentino, a likeable, open high school senior who cut classes more often than he attended, was bragging about the crime to his friends. He had always wanted to be a mafia hit man; this was his entree.

  One of his friends went to the police. The police, skeptical, had her make a taped phone call to Sorrentino, who made incriminating comments. The police didn’t know what to think. They knew Sorrentino well: he was a police informant, who had been given a pass on numerous felonies because he liked to talk. Was Sorrentino just talking now, or had he actual
ly participated in the boy’s murder? Was the boy even dead?

  Hobson’s body was found May 3 by two other high school kids, out fishing. Sorrentino had described the location of the body, not well enough to enable police to find it, but well enough to leave little doubt that he had been there. Actually, he was lost at the time of the murder, and didn’t know where he was.

  Sorrentino’s arrest unraveled a family soap opera. Hobson was a member of a five-person crazy-quilt family: two marriages, two divorces, children stashed around here, there, and yonder for several years, then another marriage, unstable children from widely varying backgrounds brought together into one house.

  Sueanne Hobson should have grown up to be the governor. She was an attractive woman from a comfortable background, trim, neat, always well-groomed. She was intelligent, witty, articulate, and generous to her friends. She had tremendous energy, boundless energy, and phenomenal force of will.

  Unfortunately, she was self-centered beyond belief. Ms. Hobson apparently felt that if you spent money fast enough it was the same as being rich. She was a manipulator, which somehow doesn’t say it. She was a manipulator in the sense that Michael Jordan was a basketball player, in the sense that Louis Armstrong was a trumpet player. She transcended the genre.

  She had married Hobson’s father sixteen months before the murder. The son and the stepmother had engaged in an unfettered war for the father’s affection. Sueanne had tried to convince Hobson Sr. that Chris should be sent to a military school, and, that failing, to a psychiatric hospital. When Mr. Hobson would not yield, she had tried poisoning Chris with drugs.

  Living with them was her seventeen-year-old son, Jimmy Crumm; she had brought him into their home after not seeing him for several years. She leaned on Jimmy to kill Chris, telling him repeatedly that “if you loved me, you would do this one little thing for me.” Jimmy listened and stalled; he could not kill his stepbrother, whom he saw as a harmless little dork. Sueanne decided that she needed professional help, and ragged at Jimmy to find somebody to do the job. Jimmy found Paul Sorrentino. Jimmy was to get a car. Sorrentino was to get $350, to get his motorcycle fixed.

  They let Chris think he was going with them on a big drug deal, took him out in the country, had him dig his own grave, and shot him. Chris had thought he was digging a place to stash some drugs. Both of them shot him, Sorrentino and Jimmy Crumm.

  Convicting Sueanne Hobson was to be no easy task. Jimmy broke as soon as he was arrested, but refused to testify against his mother. Paul Sorrentino had already given the police enough information to convict himself, but he had never met Sueanne; his only contact was through Jimmy. Jimmy Crumm and Sorrentino were both sentenced to life in prison, although both are out now and still alive. Sueanne Hobson and Jimmy’s father were divorced and then, in a dramatic testimony to her ability to turn the world inside out, re-married a few months later. Finally, Jimmy’s lawyer told him that he should testify against his mother, and he did. In May, 1982, at the conclusion of a complex and difficult trial, she was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, and was sentenced to life in prison.

  There are two books about the case, Crazymaker, by Thomas J. O’Donnell, and Family Affairs, by Andy Hoffman. O’Donnell taught English literature at a fine university, and upholds an appropriate standard in his prose. He makes the place, Overland Park and the Hobson house, come alive as a character in his work, although frankly I would have enjoyed the book twice as much if it had been half as long. Hoffman, a newspaper reporter, cuts to the chase with less ceremony.

  Sueanne Hobson is now eligible for parole, although she keeps getting turned down. Her husband is determined to get her out, and the prosecutors seem fully engaged in the battle to keep her where she is.

  How many criminal cases are there in which your sympathies are with the accused? It’s not common, but it happens. The Duke Lacrosse players … obviously innocent. Martha Stewart … in my mind, her prosecution was a misuse of power. The people who prosecuted Martha Stewart were the people who were supposed to be watching the bankers. They let the bankers lose billions of dollars of your money and my money while they were playing gotcha with Martha Stewart.

  In the 1980s there were a string of cases in which the sympathies of the sensitive and intelligent observer (that would be me) tended to lie at least partially with the accused, for a variety of different reasons. The simplest of those were cases in which the accused was innocent or possibly innocent: Lawrencia Bembenek, the McMartin Preschool case, the Little Rascals day care case, Wayne Williams.

  OK, I’m not arguing that Wayne Williams is innocent. I’ll get to that in a minute.

  Lawrencia Bembenek—Bambi to those of us who love her—was a nicely contoured Milwaukee policewoman, a former Playboy bunny, who was accused of murdering her husband’s ex-wife on May 28, 1981. The case against her is either specious or doesn’t travel well, but Bembenek was convicted of manslaughter. In 1990 she escaped from prison and fled to Canada. The Canadians said they wouldn’t give her back unless Wisconsin conducted a judicial review of her case. After the review her conviction was set aside due to a variety of serious problems with the investigation, and in lieu of a re-trial Bambi was allowed to plead no contest to a charge of manslaughter, sentenced to time served (which is to say, released) but told that she was now too old to pose naked. As if this story isn’t goofy enough already, in 2002 Bembenek jumped out of a second-story window, breaking her leg so badly that it had to be amputated below the knee. She claimed that she jumped because she was being held against her will by the producers of the Dr. Phil television show. I always suspected as much.

  In 1983 charges of ritual sex abuse were lodged against several members of the staff of the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, triggering a wave of paranoia that ran coast-to-coast and resulted in the arrest, imprisonment and financial ruin of dozens of innocent child-care providers. In the McMartin case, by the spring of 1984 it was being alleged by a group of highly organized nitwits who had been called in to investigate that 360 children had been sexually abused at the school, as a part of a program of satanic worship. This led to a long series of very expensive trials, at the end of which no one was convicted. Thank God.

  A similar case was the Little Rascals day care case in Edenton, North Carolina. In that one several people were actually convicted of large numbers of highly improbable felonies, the convictions later being thrown out, and all charges dropped finally in 1997. There were other, similar cases around the country, such as the Wee Care Nursery School in Maplewood, New Jersey, and the Fells Acres case in Malden, Massachusetts. There are people in some of these cases who are still in jail today—and who knows, some of them might actually have done something. It’s possible.

  Wayne Williams was convicted of murdering two young adult men in January, 1982, but is widely believed to be responsible for a series of child murders that rocked Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. My problems with the case against him are similar to the complaints lodged about the trial of Richard Hauptmann. In the Lindbergh/ Hauptmann case, people complain

  a) That the publicity surrounding the case was out of control, and made the trial a circus,

  b) That the prosecution put on a string of witnesses whose reliability is suspect,

  c) That the scientific evidence is out on a limb, and

  d) That defendant’s legal counsel was in over their heads in a case of this magnitude, and provided a defense that was, if not actually incompetent, certainly not what you would want if you were on trial for your life.

  All of those things are true of the Hauptmann trial except the third (the scientific evidence against Hauptmann was actually very good), but it doesn’t bother me, because there is much more than sufficient reason to conclude that Hauptmann was guilty of the crime. But it seems to me that these things are more true of the Wayne Williams trial than the Hauptmann trial. I’m not saying I would like to see Williams released, but I’d like to see him get a better trial.

&nb
sp; Returning to the general point of “cases in which our sympathies were with the accused” … John DeLorean, like Martha Stewart, was a victim of a gross misuse of the power of the government. DeLorean was a rich GM executive who had founded his own car company in the mid-1970s. Working in Ireland to take advantage of incentive financing, DeLorean produced 9,000 cars over the period of a couple of years before his resources were exhausted in November, 1982.

  Attempting to re-start his dream company, DeLorean had a series of meetings with a former drug distributor, James Hoffman, who, as it turned out, was working for the FBI. Hoffman talked about moving some cocaine in order to raise investment money. DeLorean mumbled and nodded a lot in front of hidden cameras. After a long, highly publicized and expensive trial, DeLorean was found not guilty, it being the conclusion of the judge and the jury (and the author) that the FBI had manufactured the crime for the purpose of entrapping DeLorean.

  After that prosecution failed the government went after DeLorean again, the same federal prosecutors pursuing DeLorean in Detroit on fraud charges related to the financing of his company; DeLorean was supposed to have siphoned off for personal use $9 million raised for his company. Once more he was acquitted, and the prosecutors were ordered by a judge to leave him alone. Fighting numerous lawsuits after the collapse of his company, DeLorean was forced into bankruptcy in 1999, and died in 2005.

  Drifting afield just a little bit, as I write this the American car companies are gasping for breath, trying to avoid going under for the third time, and people are asking “can America sustain three car companies?” My attitude is, whaddaya, nuts? America should have 250 car companies, or 300, or 500, or more. We sell 16,000,000 new cars a year in this country. If you divide that among 250 companies, that’s 60,000+ cars per company per year—many more than are needed to sustain a company. If we had a large number of local companies producing a wide variety of automobiles, those cars would be cheaper, safer, more fuel-efficient—and also more fun, more beautiful, and with a wide variety of features as yet undreamed of. The market would react automatically and seamlessly to the demands of the public. Innovation would run at a hundred times its current pace. If companies didn’t produce cars that people liked, they’d go out of business—and quickly.