Janice Pockett was last seen leaving her home in Tolland, Connecticut, on 26 July 1973, riding her green bicycle. The bike was recovered later in the day, but tragically Janice Pockett has never been seen since. Lake Webster is only 20 miles away from Tolland and, although Bar-Jonah would have only been 14 at the time, in light of his attacks against children, which authorities know began at a very early age, he remains a possible suspect in the case.
Forensic scientists also unearthed a collection of tiny pieces of crushed bones buried beneath the garage of Bar-Jonah’s previous home in Great Falls. There were 21 bone fragments in all, but only one was big enough to allow for DNA testing. While the DNA did not match that of Zachary Ramsay or Janice Pockett, scientists were able to confirm that the bones belonged to a child aged 8 to 13 years old.
The garage did open up another possibility. When police examined it, they discovered a word written on the wall. That word was ‘TITA’. In August 1973, a 15-year-old Massachusetts boy called James Teta went missing and his naked body was later found ditched along a roadside. No definite connection, however, has been made between the disappearance of James Teta and Bar-Jonah.
Police still planned to go ahead and use the 83-page affidavit to support their murder charge against Bar-Jonah in his upcoming trial for the death of Zachary Ramsay, but ultimately they still had no body, no crime scene and no forensic evidence. The final devastating blow came when Ramsay’s mother came forward and declared that she would refuse to testify at Bar-Jonah’s trial, believing that her son was still alive. Her belief stemmed from a videotape of a boy who bears a remarkable likeness to her son. Although dental records show otherwise, Ramsay’s mother refuses to face the terrible possibility that her son may be dead.
So the murder charges were dropped and Bar-Jonah no longer faces execution. Meanwhile, authorities are still trying to work out whose bones were buried beneath his garage and are still sifting through over 3,000 other names that Bar-Jonah had written in his many notebooks. It is a monumental task as law-enforcement agencies try to track down any children unfortunate enough to have crossed Bar-Jonah’s path.
Worse still, it emerged that he had spent time in at least three other states besides Montana and Massachusetts. The search has even gone as far as Canada, which Bar-Jonah is known to have visited on several occasions. The database set up by the FBI to track his movements as far as possible has quickly grown to more than 14,000 names and places. And there are still many unanswered questions. What about those bones under his garage? What about the lists of children? What about his coded recipes? Bar-Jonah won’t say.
Instead, he claims he is innocent of all charges against him, even though his conviction was recently upheld by the State Supreme Court on every single count. In the rare interviews he gives from his prison cell in Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge, he now sees fit to warn parents to watch out for child molesters, claiming at the same time that he would never dream of hurting a child. As Nathaniel Bar-Jonah serves out his 130-year sentence, the true fate of Zachary Ramsay – and possibly many, many more missing boys like him – will probably never be known for sure.
CHAPTER NINE
NAZIS AND MURDER IN SITCOM LAND: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF BOB CRANE
When faded sitcom star Bob Crane was found murdered in his rented apartment, his dirty little secret was soon out of the bag. Twenty years after his death, his murder remains one of Hollywood’s biggest mysteries. But did Bob Crane really get what was coming to him?
In the UK, Bob Crane isn’t all that well known, but for generations of Americans he will always be Colonel Robert E Hogan, star of the smash sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. Set in Nazi Germany, the show revolved around the exploits of a group of GIs housed in a prisoner of war camp. Playing the title lead – a street-smart soldier outwitting his Nazi guards at every turn – to perfection, Crane’s performance made him a household name.
Bob Crane’s career had initially taken off in radio, as host to the most widely listened-to radio show in Los Angeles. As the so-called ‘King of the Los Angeles Airways’, he regularly interviewed big stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra and it wasn’t long before television started knocking on his door. Crane quickly landed parts on both The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and soon captured the attention of CBS executives, who asked him to try out for the lead role in their newest primetime sitcom, Hogan’s Heroes. In due course he was offered the part, but very nearly didn’t accept it. Like many of the future cast members of Hogan’s Heroes, when Crane first read the script, he thought that the show’s creators had gone out of their minds.
Then again, Hogan’s Heroes was never your standard all-American sitcom. According to Brenda Scott Royce’s book Hogan’s Heroes: Behind the Scenes at Stalag 13, the President of CBS found the idea ‘reprehensible’ and its slogan – ‘If you liked World War II, you’ll love Hogan’s Heroes’ – hardly endeared critics to the already sensitive subject matter. The obvious parallels to a concentration camp – and, remember, this was only 20 years after the Second World War – were all there: Gestapo agents, barbed wire and guard dogs. And, as a great many GIs had learned, prisoner of war camps were no laughing matter. Indeed, before the show even aired many critics were already berating its writers for their flagrant disregard for the millions who had genuinely suffered at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.
What’s more, the premise behind Hogan’s Heroes was more akin to an action series than a comedy, causing further doubt among television executives and crew members. In the pilot, we learn that Hogan and his crew are all members of the so-called ‘Underground Unit’, a team made up of men who have willingly given up their own freedom so that they can cause maximum disruption behind enemy lines. As head of this group, the wily Hogan manipulates the bungling camp wardens, helping disrupt the German war effort by sabotaging factories and other Axis operations.
During all this, Hogan, described by radio adverts for the programme as a ‘glib and impudent ringleader of a zany band of Allied captives’, also somehow finds time to romance Fräulein Hilda, the sultry camp secretary, played by actress Sigrid Valdis. Crane would later marry Valdis on the set of the show and the couple would have a son called Scotty.
Somehow the mixture of comedy and high adventure seemed to work, though. And, although Hogan’s Heroes did have its fair share of slapstick and often childish humour, there was a darker undercurrent to it too. As a result, it appealed to children and adults alike and was a huge smash at the time, despite all the early criticism. It also went on to enjoy a very long run. First screened in September 1965, in all 168 episodes were made and the show ran for over six years. In fact, it is still hugely popular the world over and when it finally left the air, in 1971, it became one of the most successful syndicated shows of all time. Just a year after the show was cancelled, re-runs were being shown in 45 other countries besides the United States, where it was still being broadcast in every single state.
After the show was cancelled, Crane had hoped, not unreasonably, that his career on television would continue to thrive. But unfortunately he had been too strongly typecast and his career now took a spectacular nose-dive. There were a few promising breaks, such as landing the lead role in the 1973 Disney flick Superdad, in which Crane played Charlie McCready, the overpossessive father of his teenage daughter. The film was shelved for a year by The Disney Studio, though, and flopped at the box office when it was finally released. Crane spent the next five years in faded-television-star hell, reduced to playing special-guest-star roles in standard Seventies fare such as Quincy, The Love Boat and The Invaders and appearing with increasing regularity on celebrity game shows – a veritable Death Row for TV has-beens.
In 1976, Crane was hired again by Disney for a film called Gus. In the same vein as other slightly surreal Seventies Disney films like The Cat From Outer Space and The Million Dollar Duck, Gus told the bizarre tale of a field-goal-kicking mule on an American football team; Crane only
got a small role, as a sports journalist commentating on the eponymous Gus’s games. With two Emmy nominations under his belt, earned for his work in Hogan’s Heroes, it was in many ways a sad spectacle to see Crane taking a bit part in a relatively low-key Walt Disney release.
It wasn’t all bad news. Crane was still getting $100,000 a year for those Hogan’s Heroes re-runs and, of course, as the dashing Colonel Hogan was still recognised wherever he went. The role in the Disney film, although a small one, was promising too, and Crane hoped that the picture would help catapult him into the spotlight once again.
It didn’t.
Two years later, the television and film work had dried up completely and Crane was on the road working the unglamorous dinner-show circuit with his show Beginner’s Luck, which would eventually take Crane to Scottsdale, Arizona. It was a long way from Hollywood.
‘My father was not unlike most performers; he needed public adulation, attention and validation,’ Bob Crane’s son Scotty told me. ‘He needed to be loved and wanted, and it really hurt his self-esteem when Hollywood started to turn its back on “Bob Crane”. After the Disney fiasco and toward the end of his life he’d take gigs like ribbon-cutting ceremonies for a new Safeway in El Segundo. He’d do anything to be in the public eye.’
Crane stayed in Scottsdale for a month. On 28 June 1978, after signing autographs and chatting with people who had just seen his show at the Windmill Theatre, Crane went out for a double date with a friend and then returned to his rented apartment. The next morning he failed to show up for an interview. As he still hadn’t emerged by two o’clock, his co-star, Victoria Berry, decided to knock on his door. There was no reply and the door was unlocked, so she walked in.
As she opened the door, she saw a body on the bed and thought that it was a woman. The body wasn’t moving. She later recalled thinking to herself, ‘Oh, Bob’s got a girl here. Now where’s Bob? Well, she’s done something to herself. Bob has gone to get help.’ Then she saw the blood.
The curtains were still drawn and in the half-light Berry saw Crane lying on the bed. He was curled up in a foetal position and wearing only his boxer shorts. ‘The whole wall,’ she later recalled, ‘was covered from one end to the other with blood.’
The autopsy revealed that Crane had been dead since the early hours of that morning and had been bludgeoned to death while he had been asleep.
Crane, an avid home-movie maker, had a lot of film equipment in his room, but there was a heavy camera tripod missing, which police were convinced the killer had used to crack open his skull. Then, either as a sick joke or to make really sure that Crane would tell no tales, the murderer had wrapped a VCR cord tightly around his neck.
There were also traces of semen just below his shorts and as Crane was not known to be a homosexual police suspected that the killer could have masturbated over Crane’s dead body. Further indication that the killer was male came in the form of the pattern of blood splatter. As there wasn’t much blood on the ceiling, the pathologist speculated that the killer was probably male, or at the outside a strong female, as the attacker hadn’t needed much swing as they had smashed in his skull – and so less blood had flown upwards on impact.
Apart from that, however, there were few other clues. There was no murder weapon, no signs of forced entry and guests in neighbouring apartments hadn’t seen or heard a thing.
As police dug more deeply into Crane’s past, however, they discovered something unexpected, something that might possibly provide a lead. Crane was into a very special kind of home movie. There was much more to Crane than the wholesome television image the American public had been swallowing since Hogan’s Heroes.
It turned out that for years Crane had been addicted to sex, and had become a formidable sack artist in the process. Using ‘auto focus’, a remote-control device that allows a cameraman to film himself, Crane had recorded himself having sex for hours on end and then meticulously edited his footage in the basement of his own home – amassing in the process literally thousands of hours of pornographic footage and photos.
The further the police delved into Crane’s past, the longer the list of possible suspects grew. It could have been any one of hundreds of angry one-night stands, or any one of their devastated husbands or boyfriends.
The murder made headlines all over the country, and rumours and allegations about Crane’s sexual exploits were public knowledge soon afterwards. He had kept a photo album featuring nude photographs of women he had had sex with. He had spent thousands of dollars building a string of S&M-equipped dungeons and had employed the services of a vicious dominatrix called ‘Tiffany Moonlight’. Indeed, so seriously was he into dominance and submission that he had been sighted at a notorious S&M club called The Castle. He had put out ads in swinger magazines, took part in orgies whenever he got the chance and was even said to have had metal penile implants in order to enhance the size of his penis.
Allegations of Crane’s spectacular sexual exploits became legion, but the most damaging of all was that he also illegally filmed women without their consent or knowledge. Added together, it painted an extraordinarily dark tale of a washed-up TV has-been on a self-destructive quest for endless sexual encounters.
Somehow, it was all TV’s fault: the story went that Bob Crane had been a churchgoing family man who suddenly turned into some kind of sex maniac the moment TV came calling. Until now, most reports have laid the blame for his rise to fame on Hogan’s Heroes, but, as I found out when I talked to his son Scotty, Bob Crane was busy taking ‘intimate’ pictures 20 years before Hogan’s Heroes even began. Scotty has photos dating as far back as the 1940s and films dating back to 1956. Crane certainly wasn’t the good Catholic boy suddenly turned bad by TV stardom.
‘My father did attend church – when people died. He wasn’t religious and he didn’t raise me to be religious,’ Scotty said. ‘The whole mythology about him being this churchgoing saint that was brought down and corrupted by the evils of Hollywood is really just a dramatic way to dress up a story. But it’s totally untrue. He was an overly sexual person from an early age. In the 12 years that my mum knew him, he went to church three times: my baptism, his father’s funeral and his own funeral.’
Twenty years after his death, the story of Robert Crane’s life is still being told as if it were some kind of morality tale about the dangers of fame and too much sex. Reading through the books and articles and watching the recent Hollywood film about his life, Auto Focus, it is almost as if Crane somehow deserved to get his head caved in. Perhaps his biggest sin in the eyes of the American public was the fact that he had fame and somehow managed to lose it, becoming in the process that most hated of TV personalities – the ex-celebrity.
‘A lot of these rumours paint a really ugly, dark portrait of my dad,’ Scotty told me. ‘Bob Crane was not a dark person at all; he was extremely funny, charismatic, quick-witted, silly and a very driven, hard-working guy! A workaholic, in fact. At one point in his life he did a radio show, a television show, sat in as a drummer with various big band jazz groups and had an active sex life! I barely have time to take a shower! My dad was an amazing guy and I continue to be motivated by him. He achieved an amazing amount of success at a very young age.’
Although there were an awful lot of angry boyfriends who would have happily seen Crane dead, the police quickly focused their investigation on his best friend, Sony video technician John Carpenter (no relation to the famous director). Crane had been introduced to Carpenter on the set of Hogan’s Heroes by fellow cast member Richard Dawson. To begin with, he just used Carpenter for cheap video parts, but in 1975 they started to hang out together, cruising for sex.
They made an odd couple. Aside from Crane’s obvious charms and good looks, many women jumped at the chance of sleeping with a celebrity – any celebrity – especially one who was synonymous in their minds with the dashing Colonel Hogan. Carpenter, on the other hand, came across as desperate and slightly sleazy; he picked up what was left. The two
of them frequently took part in foursomes and recorded their exploits on film for prosperity.
Why did Carpenter become the prime suspect? Firstly, he had flown down from Los Angeles a couple of days before to hang out with Crane in Scottsdale and had spent much of the previous night with Crane, having arranged a double date. The date had been a blow-out, though, and Carpenter told police that he had driven to the airport to catch a flight back to Los Angeles. He did have a motive, however. According to Scotty, his father had seriously started to reassess his relationship with Carpenter. ‘Carpenter had made a life out of being Bob Crane’s associate, posing as his manager and getting nothing more than his sexual cast-offs. My dad treated John like a second-class citizen and, when John found out that their friendship had come to an end because my dad had made plans to move home and resume a life with my mother and I, he was mad… According to the police, this angered John so much that he murdered him. My father had a very rare blood type, and blood that matched his was found in John Carpenter’s car.’
There was no DNA testing in those days, though, nor any other concrete physical evidence that could tie Carpenter to the murder scene, so the case was closed unsolved. It looked like it would stay that way, but in 1994 John Carpenter was suddenly arrested and tried for murder. Police claimed that they had discovered a photo of Carpenter’s rental car that showed a small speck of ‘brain matter’ on the inside passenger door. From the start, however, their case looked unlikely to succeed, as it was based mainly on just one new photograph, and indeed it rapidly fell apart. Carpenter walked. He didn’t have much longer left, though. In 1998, by which time he was a convicted child molester, Carpenter died of a heart attack, aged 70.
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 9