Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  They decided to try a new tactic. They went back to where the trail met Douglas Lake Road and put Frank in a car. They chauffeured him in on the logging road about a quarter mile.

  Suddenly he yelled, “Stop. Right here.”

  Frank made a beeline about 80 yards in, past the stands of birch and oak into the deeper woods ahead. Then he saw the three big pines.

  “I found it,” Frank yelled.

  A police dog had already tracked right over the spot.

  The only hint that the ground had been disturbed earlier was the ease with which the evidence technician’s trowel slid into the black earth. A foot and a half deeper it struck the satchel. Brantley watched the straps stretch as the valise was carried from the hole.

  They laid it all out on a sheet of plastic amid the swarming mosquitoes. The team stood in a circle as the garbage bags were opened. Frank noticed how neatly the contents were wrapped. The hair and skin were heavily matted with blood. But Brantley, Tibaldi, and McMasters all recognized the facial features. They had been well preserved by the cool ground.

  It was 7:40 P.M.—one week since Jan Canty had placed the hamburgers on the kitchen counter for her husband in the big Tudor in Grosse Pointe Park.

  The squad had its case. They had the hands and the feet. They had the head of psychologist W. Alan Canty.

  87

  Jan Canty wondered what more could be waiting for her as she walked again past the face of Merton W. Goodrich early Sunday morning. Marlyss Landeros had called and wanted her at Police Headquarters immediately.

  Jan had found much comfort in the way the detectives treated her. They made her feel as though they’d dropped everything to find Al. Earlier in the week Bernard Brantley had visited her at the Fisher Building. He seemed so big standing over her desk.

  “Does it ever happen where these kind of cases don’t get solved?” she’d asked him.

  “Rarely,” Brantley said.

  Later she would write an open letter to local newspapers praising the section’s professionalism and sensitivity. But no one there could have eliminated the shock of what had to be done on this Sabbath.

  First she identified Al’s gold Seiko watch. Then Gerald Tibaldi handed her a burned remnant he’d fished out of the stove during a search of the house in Alanson.

  Jan recognized the corner of a newspaper cartoon Al had laminated in plastic and carried many years in his wallet. It was one of those special things couples savor. It was an Ashleigh Brilliant cartoon from his syndicated feature “Pot-Shots.”

  The caption read: “One of my favorite places in the world is anywhere with you.”

  Jan listened as Landeros gently told her about the mutilation and the body parts at the morgue.

  “We have something for identification,” she said. “We need you to come over to the medical examiner’s office and identify your husband.”

  I’m not hearing what she’s telling me, Jan thought. Identify what? What will I see? The proposition terrified her. How much more of all of this, she thought, can I be expected to take?

  Her thinking began to take on a dark, whimsical quality. Maybe, she thought, this was all a bad dream, a bad joke, a Hitchcock movie scripted by Al on a stormy walk to the lake.

  Al Canty, my husband, she thought. I don’t even know my husband anymore. Who is he? What has he been doing? And why is he doing this to me?

  “Jan,” Landeros said, patting her shoulder. “It’s important for the case. It’s important for you.”

  Landeros continued preparing her as they drove to the morgue. The identification was a legal requirement, she said. They conducted it now with a video on a black-and-white television. She would see only his head.

  “It’s going to be him,” she said. “We know it’s him. There’s no doubt in our minds. All you have to say is ‘yes’ and you can close your eyes.”

  The fluorescent lights and tile walls reminded her of an insane asylum. Jan’s father wanted to tackle the task for her, but now she felt she had to do it.

  “No, Dad, nobody should have to do this,” she said.

  “OK, then, I’ll do it with you,” he said.

  They held her under her arms as she approached the TV screen, Landeros on one side and her father on the other as she waited for the image.

  The second or so she saw him would fashion nightmares for many months to come. The white sheet was wrapped around his neck like a collar. He looked as though he’d been beaten badly. The right eye was heavily bruised. His mouth was open, his tongue swabbing the lower lip, just like that night in University Hospital.

  She hung her head. She couldn’t speak. The three-letter word would not come.

  They had to repeat the entire procedure again. The image flashed again on the screen.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You look so gray,” her mom said when she walked out.

  She just wanted to go home. She began to walk to the front door of the morgue. Then she saw the people outside through the glass doors. Her first thought was machine-gun turrets, the spindly-leg kind from old World War I documentaries. No, she thought, those are the legs of camera tripods. What are those cameras for? Then Jan realized they were aimed at her. Reporters were waiting outside.

  My God, she thought, there’s just no end to this. She felt as though she was about to be raped.

  Landeros spun Jan around and whisked her down a corridor and out the back door of the morgue. A police car was waiting. They laid her down in the backseat and sped away.

  Jan felt as though her entire life had been turned upside down. This has to be it, she thought. There can’t be anything more left to learn.

  Her mother told her to rest in the backseat as they drove back to the big Tudor. The next day her mom told her that was when she’d fallen asleep.

  Landeros wasn’t exaggerating when she told Jan she was sure of Al Canty’s identity. The medical examiner had already made the ID from fingerprints. One set came from his stay in jail as a repeat traffic offender.

  A newer set was lifted on February 28, 1983. That night Alan Canty had solicited a female Detroit police officer acting as a decoy in the Cass Corridor. He’d offered her twenty-five dollars for sexual favors. The misdemeanor cost him a seventy-five-dollar fine.

  Mark Bando wanted a piece of the Canty case from the time he’d seen the teletype. Earlier in the week he rounded up a Corridor regular who had spent the evening partying with Fry before the murder.

  The whore car was no longer his to command. He’d burned out on the detail and requested transfer. One of the reasons was a nineteen-year-old hooker named Sheila Blanton. Bando had high hopes for the attractive girl with the long chestnut hair. But she overdosed on prescription drugs and booze a month before her twentieth birthday in February 1983.

  He talked to Sheila in the whore car the night she died. She told him about a doctor she’d found for a sugar daddy. His name was Al, and he wanted to set her up in an apartment so she could straighten out her life. One day she’d gone into his glove compartment and seen his name. It was Dr. Alan Canty. When Sheila asked him about it he said, “Please keep this confidential. It would be very, very devastating if anyone found out.”

  Bando had always wondered what happened to the guy.

  The TV cameras didn’t get footage of Alan Canty’s widow, but one station shot something far more compelling for its Sunday evening audience.

  Late in the afternoon Gerald Tibaldi and Madelyn Williams drove out I-75 to the exit ramp at Joslyn Avenue. When the police plane had returned from Alanson, John Fry had told Gilbert Hill the location of the “garbage” he’d thrown out a week ago.

  The squad tried to keep the search secret. Hill wanted a news blackout until he could get Fry and Spens arraigned on Monday. Tibaldi told headquarters he would radio “we have arrived at our destination” if they found what they suspected.

  Tibaldi saw the green garbage bag about fifteen feet from the pavement, three quarters of the way up the ramp. A sectio
n of newspaper was sticking out of the end. The maggots were already at work.

  The TV crew arrived with the coroner’s van. They shot footage as an evidence technician used both hands to lift the green bag into the body wagon. Inside was Al’s left leg.

  The next day the morning newspaper would erroneously report that his torso had been found. Back at headquarters, Marlyss Landeros already was upset.

  “My God, his wife,” she told another cop. “How many more pieces are we going to find? How many times does she have to be slapped in the face with this?”

  By early Sunday evening the squad was talking to the prosecutor’s office about charges Homicide could expect Monday morning. John Carl Fry: murder in the first degree and mutilation of a dead body. Dawn Marie Spens: accessory to murder after the fact and mutilation.

  Several squad members, including Landeros, wanted first-degree murder charges against the prostitute.

  “That statement of hers is packaged,” she said. “She’s as involved as he is. He’s taking all the weight.”

  But an assistant prosecutor said even the mutilation charge was pushing it. Dawn Spens hadn’t confessed to cutting up Canty, or helping in the packaging. In fact, she had distanced herself from the act, saying she was turning tricks.

  Nevertheless, she fell under the mutilation statute because of the wording of the statute. The law, passed in 1846 to deter grave robbers, declared it a felony to “carry away a portion of the dead body of a person …”

  Dawn had admitted to carrying the brown valise from the refrigerator.

  Squad detectives had doubled their forty-hour work week in five days on the case, but Gerry Tibaldi wasn’t finished. Threatened with criminal charges on the black Buick, Gary Neil had been locked up for three days. The squad wanted to refresh his memory about his dealings with John Fry. Tibaldi had yet to take Neil’s fourth and final statement.

  By late Sunday the twenty-year veteran was running on fumes when he got word from the lockup that Lucky Fry wanted to talk to him.

  “I want to make a statement,” Fry said.

  Tibaldi took the offer back to the squad room. Nobody was interested.

  “It’s such a good case, why screw it up?” Tibaldi said.

  On Monday morning John Fry and Dawn Spens were led to the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice for arraignment in Thirty-sixth District Court. Marlyss Landeros and Gerald Tibaldi strolled the pair through a mob of reporters and cameramen waiting in the one-block walk from headquarters to the courthouse.

  Everyone got their first look at the pair they’d already heard so much about. Dawn still was wearing the tight jeans and halter top, and she hid behind a pair of sunglasses. With his bald head and massive chest poking from an open Western shirt, Fry looked like a character from a slasher film. TV reporters kept yelling the same questions at them:

  “Why did you do this? John Fry, why did you do this?”

  “Dawn, did you love Dr. Canty? Dawn, why did you do this?”

  They were mute. They remained that way during their arraignment. Fry was ordered held without bond. As tears glistened in Dawn Spens’s eyes, she was ordered jailed on $100,000 cash bond. The arraigning magistrate looked at the couple and said:

  “The conscience of the court is shocked.”

  88

  In the days following the arraignment, headlines thickened from POLICE FEAR PSYCHOLOGIST WAS KILLED GIVING AID to PSYCHOLOGIST’S DOUBLE LIFE TRACED.

  At first news editors treated the sordid details of Canty’s exploits as delicately as they would have for a priest. Once the story was out, the pendulum swung, sometimes with little basis in fact. One TV report featured a talkative prostitute. Her identity obscured by the shadows, she knew what the TV reporter wanted. She claimed she introduced Dawn Spens to Canty.

  Canty, she said, was “into fantasies … bondage—chain me to a wall with my arms spread in chains and my legs spread apart.”

  The popular David Newman radio talk show from the Fisher’s Golden Tower buzzed several nights with callers and their theories. Detroiters’ imaginations ran wild. One caller claimed firsthand knowledge that Dawn Spens “was the only one who could dress up like a little girl for him.”

  Some of Canty’s patients came to his aid, calling reporters and saying Al sometimes talked of helping a Cass Corridor prostitute. He was a skilled, helpful professional, they said. But they had no desire to give their names for the record.

  The coverage unleashed a flood of memories for a social worker named Carla McGuire. She first met Alan Canty sixteen years ago as a student in his psychology class at Henry Ford Community College. He gave her academic and career guidance at first. That blossomed into having drinks together once a week, always at the same time, the same place.

  In 1969, she was a twenty-three-yearold single mother with big baby-sitting bills and the tastes of a marginal flower child. He seemed to do a lot of vicarious living through her. He was fascinated that she smoked pot, went to rock concerts, and attended antiwar rallies. Then he began giving her about fifty dollars a week.

  “Take this and buy something for yourself,” he’d say.

  They talked a lot about psychology. He delighted in revealing details about prominent Detroiters who were his patients. She later learned that was unethical, but she thought psychology the perfect profession for him. He seemed to find excitement in picking up the shades on other people’s lives.

  Carla’s father thought Al was a prize catch. But she became more uncomfortable with him as the relationship heated up. His awkward advances and tight-lipped kisses reminded her of an adolescent. She couldn’t believe he’d once been married. He said he and his wife Maggie were separated, and that she was a full-blown schizophrenic. She later learned he was lying.

  When Al gave Carla a used car, she realized she had to break it off. She felt uncomfortable about his fifty-dollar handouts. She never went to bed with him in their six months’ relationship. But she was feeling like a whore. She wasn’t surprised by the stories in the paper.

  A forty-eight-yearold Mount Clemens attorney named Bruce Karash saw the news stories and felt cosmic justice had been served. He’d always thought Al Canty unethical. Now everybody knows it, he thought.

  Karash met Canty through the young woman who would later become his first wife. In the mid-1960s Jane was an extremely attractive twenty-year-old with long dark hair. She worked for an advertising agency in the Fisher Building and met Canty one day in a Fisher coffee shop. Jane had a peripheral interest in psychology and was fascinated by the program for autistic children Canty told her about.

  Then Canty offered her a job. He would pay her five dollars an hour, more than double the minimum wage, to read stories he said were for children in the project. For six months she worked early evening hours in his office one or two times a week.

  Karash suspected Canty had something other than autism on his mind. All she did was read fairy tales while he sat in his big chair and listened. Some stories he wrote. Others were traditional. Canty said the stories were “being developed” for presentation to the kids. But Jane never saw an autistic child, or any child for that matter. Later he hired several of her friends. They never saw children either.

  “Broom him, Jane,” Karash said. “The guy is a fraud.”

  “Oh, you attorneys are all alike,” she told him. “Always skeptical.”

  Later she saw his point. Canty told her his wife Maggie was critically ill with cancer, ready to die at any time. Then they ran into Canty and his wife in a restaurant.

  “Bruce, she’s as healthy as a horse,” she admitted.

  Jane became more watchful of his behavior. Canty unsuccessfully tried to hypnotize her a couple of times. Then she noticed that as she read the psychologist fairy tales, he often had an erection.

  She quit soon after that.

  Dr. Lorraine Awes heard about her patient’s murder and the arrest of the two suspects when her former secretary telephoned her in Anchorage. The psychiatrist recogniz
ed the descriptions of Dawn and John. She was deeply disturbed by the news.

  But the psychiatrist was glad she was in Alaska. She knew she could be subpoenaed and forced to testify in a criminal case. She had no desire to detail her patient’s psychological profile in an open courtroom. And from the news reports, it sounded as though the prosecutor had everything he needed.

  Gladys Canty couldn’t read enough about her son. She was quite pleased the homicide section had been so proficient. If Al Sr. was here, she thought, he would commend the detectives on their fine work.

  She was stately, often helpful, when reporters called. She wanted to lift Buster’s name out of this scandal.

  “He’s still my son,” she told one. “And I love him very much.”

  Mrs. Canty also had a conference with Gilbert Hill. The inspector speculated that Al was being blackmailed. He told her he doubted sex alone could have motivated him to spend that much money. Then he complimented her late husband, Al Sr.

  “We used to ask him,” Hill said, “ ‘How are we supposed to stand the gore that goes with this job?’ He would say, ‘Leave your job here. Never take it home.’ I remembered that.”

  “I thought that was ironic,” Mrs. Canty later said, “considering the way Al Sr. regaled Buster and me with his cases.”

  The news media that had provided so much comfort only a week ago now became Jan Canty’s tormentor. She perceived reporters as persistent window peepers. The phone calls and people at her door were continuous. On Berkshire, where local residents never parked their cars on the street, the television trucks stood out like high-tech invaders among the old homes and tall trees.

  Jan knew what the media wanted. But how, she thought, can I ever explain the last two years? Who would believe me? And what business is it of theirs anyway?

  She saw the scenario as another segment in her husband’s Hitchcock script: Everyday psychologist goes from relative obscurity to the nightmare of the public eye. God, she thought, everyone must think I’m stupid, naive. She wanted to rip that word out of the dictionary.