MASQUERADE
A True Story of Seduction, Compulsion, and Murder
Lowell Cauffiel
FOR MY FATHER AND MOTHER
Are we really happy here with this lonely game we’re playing?
Looking for words to say.
Searching but not finding understanding anywhere,
We’re lost in a masquerade.
“This Masquerade” by LEON RUSSELL
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thine own life. Trust thyself. To believe in your own thoughts, to believe that what is true for you in your own private heart is true for all men; that is Genius.
Preface to Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy
by W. ALAN CANTY
It’s almost irresistible. She’s so deliciously low—so horribly dirty!
Professor Higgins to Pickering in My Fair Lady
Prologue
We were jammed into the jury box, waiting for the first witness, when the main door of the courtroom swung open and the widow made her way toward the bench. More than a dozen reporters and artists filled the enclosure for the preliminary exam, simply because there was no other place to sit.
She wore a smart blue suit and medium heels, with her shiny hair pulled up in a french twist. Her eyes were swollen, her attractive face fatigued, but she marched up the aisle between the rows of spectators as though all of hell wasn’t going to stop her.
Her name was Jan Canty, a Ph.D., psychologist, and marriage counselor, and wife of W. Alan Canty, Ph.D., psychologist, and murder victim. As she headed to the front of the courtroom, it occurred to a number of us that this had been a week quite unlike any other, even for a town numbed by six hundred homicides a year.
The headlines had progressed from PSYCHOLOGIST DISAPPEARS AFTER LEAVING OFFICE to POLICE THINK THEY’VE GOT CANTY’S BODY to BODY PARTS FOUND ON I-75 to TORSO FOUND MAY BE PSYCHOLOGIST’S. There were reports as well of more body parts found buried in an “animal boneyard” 250 miles to the north, near the tourist town of Petoskey, Michigan.
The suspects facing preliminary examination on murder and mutilation charges were a young street whore named Dawn Marie Spens and her pimp, John Carl Fry, an ex-con known on the streets as Lucky.
Spens, once an honor student from the suburb of Harper Woods, sat sleepy-eyed at the defense table. She wore ragged jeans, a tattered baby blue blouse, and a pair of cheap black high heels with mesh toes. Fry relaxed at her side, his body weight shifted to one elbow. His white head was shaved, his mustache chiseled. His thick arms and barrel chest were like those of a professional wrestler.
Police still hadn’t found all of Alan Canty, but the reporters in the jury box were just beginning to put the story together. There was talk in Homicide that the psychologist was the prostitute’s regular customer, though the proposition seemed unlikely under the courtroom’s bright lights.
“Jesus, she’s nothing,” one reporter whispered, eyeing Spens. “Maybe she’s a terror in bed.”
There was speculation that Canty had spent $140,000 on the girl over eighteen months, and there were reports that he’d fashioned a second identity for himself as well. In the tough sections of the city’s smoggy south side he had taken on another name and was known as a general practitioner.
It seemed an unlikely role for the fifty-one-yearold psychologist. His mother was a former president of the Detroit school board and a longtime leader of the PTA. His late father was a nationally known criminologist and a former executive director of the psychiatric clinic serving the city’s largest court.
Some of us in the jury box already had portrayed the victim as an author, a teacher, and an expert on autism. He was a prominent professional with a flourishing practice in the Fisher Building, one of the city’s most impressive office addresses.
When the first witness sat down, her back was erect. Jan Canty was only six feet from us on the stand. Yes, she knew the victim. Yes, they were married nearly eleven years. Yes, the last she heard from him, he was on his way home from the office, planning to stop at a grocery store for coffee.
No, she hadn’t given anyone permission to dissect her husband’s body.
There was nothing more about their life together, only answers that shored up the prosecutor’s charge of mutilation. We all wondered what she knew, but she left as quickly as she came.
Then a homicide cop began bringing forth witnesses through a door behind the bench. Soon it was clear why Jan Canty had waited outside, instead of with the others in the witness room. The proceeding took on a cinematic quality, the homicide cop a casting director as the standing-room-only audience murmured with each new character.
Visually, they all were striking. An unshaven southsider lumbered forward to testify in yellowed jeans and a faded black T-shirt. Another wore a gold earring, his arm tattooed with dragons and assorted slogans. A neighbor of the suspects raised his hand to be sworn, displaying a scorpion tattooed across his middle finger. One young blonde looked innocent enough with her turned-up nose and tiny frame. Then everyone saw the blue tattoo scrawled across her right triceps. Another waddled to the stand looking as though she was going to deliver any day. She was an odd sight—so pregnant, but so close to such murder and mayhem.
They all seemed incapable of sharing anything in the life of the first witness of the day.
When the exam was over, I left the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice and decided to drive from downtown to take a look at the victim’s home in Grosse Pointe Park. Already I suspected that even a lengthy magazine story wasn’t going to cover the distance between the two sets of images I saw in the court.
The drive out Jefferson Avenue along the Detroit River was stratified like a sociological core sample of class variations.
Once lined with ma-and-pa stores and thriving industrial plants, Jefferson was a broken chain of boarded building fronts and party stores fortified by bulletproof glass. A stretch of stylish high rises still stood, but only a few blocks away were some of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in the United States.
They weren’t much different than the streets that had produced the group of witnesses in court. Nobody in sight resembled the billboard over one burned-out building: a man in a designer tuxedo, savoring a snifter of Martell cognac.
Then, at Alter Road, Jefferson Avenue became the gateway to the Pointes—Grosse Pointe, Grosse Pointe Park, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Woods, and Grosse Point Shores. Since the nineteenth century, these suburbs have been the home of the Motor City’s industrial aristocracy.
Old rail and auto money developed the most affluent sections—people with such names as Ford, Fisher, and Dodge. Some exceeded extravagance. Anna Dodge, wife of auto pioneer Horace Dodge, imported European craftsmen to build Rose Terrace, her monument to eighteenth-century French architecture. It was razed a few years back, but most of the other stone-walled estates remained along the shores of Lake St. Clair.
For years the Grosse Pointers took the term “exclusive” literally. Until a 1960 lawsuit, the suburbs were known for their “point system,” a checklist used by realtors to weed out prospective buyers. They awarded “points” on the basis of ethnic background, complexion, religious affiliation, and other such values.
That day I drove out Jefferson, the contrast was most dramatic at the foot of Alter Road, the boundary between Detroit and Grosse Pointe Park.
To the east, a manicured municipal park complete with swimming pool and tennis courts. Men in cashmere sweaters and women in the latest jogging apparel strolled by the mansions on Windmill Pointe Drive.
To the west, there was a trailer town and a littered Detroit city park. Teenagers in jeans and Tshirts milled about a parking lot. Obscenities and
heavy metal rock boomed from rusted autos as the youths passed joints and sucked on cans of beer.
Even the trees appeared to mind the border. A cathedral ceiling of towering elms shaded Berkshire Road, where Alan and Jan Canty owned a six-bedroom, six-bath, Tudor-style home with a five-car garage sporting doors of stained and varnished wood. Just across Alter, Dutch elm disease had ravaged most of Detroit’s tall timber, leaving the streets virtually barren.
It was as though the Pointes were impervious to disease. But there was no real magic at work. Grosse Pointers could afford a costly, experimental treatment from Europe to save their elms. In time I would discover that W. Alan Canty, a concerned professional and valued resident, purchased the deluxe therapy. Money and a little planning. It’s the way many problems are solved in the Pointes.
Part One
1983
1
Very few individuals, regardless of their “intellect,” can view their own emotional behavior objectively.
—W. ALAN CANTY, 1973,
Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy
The black Buick broke from the congestion at the Fisher Building and wheeled into the surging traffic on Third Avenue. Executives in wool suits and power ties of steel gray and scarlet hustled from the world headquarters of General Motors, stirring the New Center’s streets for the lunch hour. But after a few blocks, only the granite tower of the Fisher dominated the Buick’s rear-view mirror as the car headed south.
The man in the black Buick knew the drive well. If two and a half miles of Third Avenue between the New Center and downtown portrayed the character of the Motor City, Detroit could boast as many faces as Eve.
The Buick glided by the pampered landscaping and scrubbed windows of Burroughs Corporation, then cut the western edge of Wayne State University. It passed the campus’s nineteenth-century homes, the University’s contemporary architecture by Minoru Yamasaki, the 118 cobalt security lights. The blue beacons marked phones to campus police and burned small halos into the gray day.
When the Buick crossed Forest Avenue, the only university building left ahead was Wayne State’s mortuary school. At Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a church sign reminded the driver that “Christ Died for Our Sins.” It sometimes lured a convert or two but also inspired a metaphor locals evoked to describe the people in the surrounding blocks:
“Those motherfuckers would steal Jesus off the cross, then go back for the nails.”
The Cass Corridor, as the area just north of downtown is called, was marking its fourth decade as Detroit’s Hell’s Kitchen. The area inspired studies on urban decay and provided stark scenery for the film Beverly Hills Cop. But its main contribution to the Motor City remained dope, despair, and sex.
Unlike flashing porn strips that lure johns in other towns, the Cass Corridor had only broken glass to supply its limited accents of glitter. Street whores strolled blocks lined with weedy lots and gutted brick tenements. More stylish girls worked the saloons, perched along Formica bar rails dulled by many rotating drinks.
The Cass Corridor also was Detroit’s Skid Row. Faded lettering on flophouses still advertised long-gone dollar-a-day rates, while alcoholics outside hugged brown sacks and shielded their wet brains with stocking caps. A state lottery symbol on one liquor store teased the drunks with dollar signs. Few could spare a buck for a two-way bet. If a gentleman of leisure hadn’t hit bottom on Cass, Second, or Third avenues, he’d crashed through it.
The drunks and other indigents made the whores conspicuous, transforming the women into something more tempting than another backdrop might dictate. Beauty, like age, was a matter of perspective and perception in the Cass Corridor. Working girls in their late twenties were considered senior citizens.
A longtime drug-addicted prostitute was a hard sell in the sunlight. More often than not, her body was marred by poor-quality heroin, a neighborhood plague called “mixed jive.” The dope was cheap and reliable only for its tendency to cause abscesses when it was cooked and mainlined. The scars were circular. A junkie with a lot of miles on her looked as though a pack of hot cigarettes had been put out one by one on her skin.
The man in the black Buick might have thought twice about the quality of the Corridor’s merchandise had he been flagged by one of the older girls. But most past their prime worked the evenings, turning quick tricks in cars, aided by the cosmetic advantages of the night.
Dawn Marie Spens preferred working the noon hour, and she swore she would never let herself deteriorate like that. She stepped from Sabb’s Market with a fresh pack of Marlboro menthols and full intentions of getting what she had to do over with before the rush hour emptied downtown that night.
Dawn’s appearance fell somewhere between a Wayne State sorority pledge and a newcomer to the sisterhood of the streets. Her skin was largely unblemished, and her shoulder-length auburn hair framed full lips and sleepy chestnut eyes. Other whores called her a “young girl,” not because of her eighteen years, but because she was a new face, one who needed hardly a touch of makeup.
That meant good money from the selective tricks, with only a little encouragement from her wardrobe. Her 105 pounds contoured a velour shirt and tight designer jeans but were largely concealed by her full-length leather coat. Her shapely legs would have looked as good in running shoes as in high heels. Her breasts were full, but not lofty.
Dawn Spens didn’t need any special effects.
On November 30, that was left to the optical illusion fashioned by the Fisher Building from the prostitute’s favorite corner at Second and Peterboro. The Fisher was the only skyscraper to the north on the city’s horizon, with Second Avenue running one way dead center into its main doors. It appeared to be only a dozen blocks away, though the black Buick’s odometer had measured the distance at nearly two miles.
The car approached in a slow roll, then braked, kissing the curb at her feet. The exchange was an old one, the kind where no one says exactly what each needs or wants.
“Hi, you working?” he began.
He examined her through a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. He had a peculiar grin and slightly squinting eyes.
“Want to go out?” she asked back.
No, he didn’t want to go out now. He wanted to go out later.
“Do you have a phone?” he said.
She didn’t give her phone number to just anybody.
“Well, my name’s Al,” he said. “What’s yours?”
As she responded she watched him pull out a ten-dollar bill.
“Here, Dawn, get yourself some lunch.”
She first guessed he was an accountant. Then she saw he didn’t have a tie. A sport coat and knit shirt peeped out near the collar of his tan overcoat. He wasn’t particularly good-looking, nor especially unattractive. Later she would guess his age as forty. But he grinned like a preschooler unable to conceal his mischief. She couldn’t remember ever seeing a look quite like that on an older man before.
A vice cop wouldn’t be so transparent, she decided. He was just another john. Dawn reached for the ten dollars and recited her phone number.
“I’ll call you this afternoon,” he said.
Still grinning, he drove off. He might have been nothing more than a dry hustle. As far as Dawn could tell, he’d failed to write her number down. A few minutes later, John Fry’s calf muscle twitched as he heard Dawn’s key slide into their apartment door.
The thirty-seven-yearold former biker had passed out smiling the night before, only to be rousted by daylight and the calling of his habit. The twenty-five dollars he’d held back had provided a couple of hours of relief. But a quarter’s worth of mixed jive was hardly worth another dope-burned vein in his right leg, and it was certainly not enough to make John civil for the day. He’d sent Dawn out to make some money for more.
Dawn was barely through the door when he realized his girlfriend was returning with little more than a story about a trick with a funny grin.
“But John, this guy gave me money t
o eat,” she said. “He says he’s going to call me later.”
John’s nose was running and his head felt as though it was lined with steel wool.
“Fuck all that,” he said. “I’m sick now. There is no fucking later.”
He lit a Marlboro menthol. His eyes told her not to even bother taking off her coat.
2
I’ve seen a great many divorced people who burned out very quickly on the singles scene. Too many options make people insecure. They suffer from what psychologists call complexity shock. There is too much out there, too many choices. People want to narrow the field into something simpler and more manageable.
—W. ALAN CANTY,
Detroit Magazine, September 1983; Modern Bride Magazine, July 1984
Jan Canty could have imagined spending Al’s birthday in bed, but not two thousand miles away from him on a brilliant afternoon in Sun Lakes, Arizona. She still felt bad about leaving him alone.
She set the alarm for 11 P.M. Detroit time, pulled the blankets around her shoulders, and reassured herself with the little talk they had before she left for her parents’ house near Phoenix.
“That means I will be gone on November 30, your birthday. You mean that won’t bother you?”
“Not at all. Jan, you know that.”
She must have asked him five times, five different ways. Al Canty had dismissed every one of his birthdays in their years together, but she thought that might be different this time. He was turning fifty, and she figured that called for something special. In fact, Jan had flirted with the idea of a surprise party.
Then she suspected he would probably dislike all the attention, and she was right. When she mentioned she had entertained the notion, he said, “No, Jan-Jan, I don’t want any part of that.”
It was so typical of the man she loved. The psychologist who put a formal “W. Alan Canty” on his clinic door preferred life easygoing and uncomplicated on the home front. In his practice he nurtured recovering alcoholics, searching singles, disillusioned divorcées, compulsive personalities, and desperately unhappy neurotics. After a day of helping them untangle their lives, she thought, who wouldn’t need some simplicity?
Masquerade Page 1