Brian Teeuwe testified that he and Dwaine Olson not only “staked out” Clifford’s home but also “walked around the house looking for a way in past the security system” and that finally “we did find a way.” He and Olson went beneath the house through the crawl space where they found the warning devices, complete with instruction manual. Blumberg copied the material, and Teeuwe returned it to the house the next night, pausing to take pictures of the layout. They discussed either “finding somebody who knew the alarm system” or taking a more direct approach, like “showing up at the door as pizza delivery men and putting a gun on [the Cliffords] and tying them up.” They never tried it, and nothing more was said about the idea after Blumberg was arrested in Riverside and “had to leave town.” Once Kenny Rhodes decided to turn Blumberg over to the authorities, he called Henry Clifford to warn him of the plot. Clifford confirmed this to me several months afterward. “What I would have liked to say to the man if I had a chance was that I also have a nice collection of guns,” he said, “and I keep a few of them loaded.”
In his frenzied attempt to gather information about the Pasadena house and its occupant, Blumberg went so far as to root through Clifford’s trash, a detail he brought up after I remarked on a practice he called “Dumpster diving.” During our drive he abruptly stopped the car in Ottumwa, got out without saying a word, and bounded quickly through the top hatch of a large refuse receptacle to see if anything valuable was inside. He came back stinking of garbage but also exuding triumph, for he had “rescued” several items from the scrap heap. “That’s how I got the Clifford material,” he explained. “You can learn almost as much about a person by his trash as by talking to him.”
Henry Clifford died on February 21, 1994, eleven days after observing his eighty-fourth birthday. The books Stephen Blumberg had schemed so zealously to steal from him were consigned to the Austin, Texas, rare-book dealer Dorothy Sloan for dispersal at auction. On October 23, 1994, during the first of three sales held in Los Angeles, Clifford’s Zamorano 80 collection went on the block. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, the only copy privately owned and the one book of Clifford’s particularly coveted by Blumberg, was bought for $69,000 by a collector, who chose to remain anonymous. Sloan reported total receipts of $1.17 million for Clifford’s library.
After leaving the “library” on Jefferson Street, Blumberg took me to his warehouse downtown. The facility was searched thoroughly by the FBI, but since the government was only looking for books, virtually everything else was left behind. Blumberg had not been inside since his arrest ten months earlier and was giddy with excitement when we got there. I took about twenty photographs of him as he went through these possessions, and he appeared radiant in every one.
“Oh, look at that,” Blumberg shouted at one point, howling with delight. “A prefire Chicago imprint!” Finding an oversize illustrated book titled Ornamental Art, he quickly opened it and began looking carefully at the pages. I guessed out loud that there must be about two hundred books remaining in the room. “Wasn’t it nice of them to leave me something,” Blumberg said. A few minutes later, he was looking at doorknobs packed in about a hundred neatly stacked plastic milk cases, perhaps, as he told me earlier, as many as fifty thousand of them. In another area, dozens of old suitcases were piled to the ceiling, some of them empty, others filled with assorted items. Stained-glass windows stood upright throughout the building, at least a hundred, possibly more. And in a far corner were crates upon crates of old seventy-eight r.p.m. records.
“I didn’t know everything that I had in here myself,” he said in wonder. “I’m alive,” he exclaimed several times, “I’m living.”
• • •
The bibliokleptomaniac’s crimes were outlined in painstaking detail by Linda Reade. The defense lawyers, Don C. Nickerson and Raymond Rosenberg, did not deny that Blumberg had stolen the books. Sanity was the issue, and Judge Harold D. Vietor would make clear in his instructions that the defense had the “burden of proving, by clear and convincing evidence,” that Blumberg was insane when he stole books and transported them across state lines into Iowa.
On Tuesday morning, January 29, 1991, Nickerson and Rosenberg called their first witness, a seventy-three-year-old antiques dealer from St. Paul, Minnesota. Emily Augustine Fredericksen testified she met Blumberg about 1960, when Stephen was twelve. She recalled “a skinny little guy,” dirty like “dry old soot” but “very gentle,” coming by her shop one day on a “rickety bicycle” outfitted with an unusual trailer to carry around items he had removed from old houses. “I can remember his eyes. His eyes were very prominent,” she said, but what impressed her most of all was the youngster’s knowledge. “Can you imagine a twelve-year-old boy interested in the design of hardware on a door, door hinges, window openings?” An immediate rapport was established. Mrs. Fredericksen asserted that she and young Stephen were “two of a kind,” but there was a fundamental difference: “I collected because I was doing it for the profits to live on; he didn’t sell, he just collected to preserve.”
This was about the time, she continued, when many elegant old houses were being taken by eminent domain to make way for a new freeway being built between St. Paul and Minneapolis. “These were some beautiful old homes, just gorgeous,” she said. “It was just something that you’d walk in and be back there.” Because the houses were condemned, vandalism was rampant, and the things Blumberg took were things no one wanted. “This was just going to be crushed under the ground and bulldozered over.”
Occasionally Mrs. Fredericksen went out with Blumberg to some of these buildings. “Steve had no fear that I could see. If he saw something that he wanted to preserve or have, it didn’t matter if he was going to break his neck or back, he would go after it.” She described one time when he had permission to take a weather vane from an old barn. “I wish you could have seen that young man climb that roof and go up. I was scared to death that I was going to pick him up, that he was going to slide down. He got it down, no damage.”
Mrs. Fredericksen said she then drove the boy home and met his father, Dr. Henry Blumberg, in the driveway. Instead of complimenting Stephen on his latest acquisition, Dr. Blumberg “took it and threw it off the driveway.” She said she later learned that Dr. Blumberg routinely destroyed many of the artifacts his son brought home. “Steve was a loner from the first time I met him. He didn’t need anybody. He didn’t need anything. He didn’t need food. Food wasn’t important. Dress, clothing, entertainment was not of any interest to him. His only interest was in the past.” She judged him to be “brilliant,” “honest,” and “truthful,” always a gentleman, with “no roughness” or “coarseness” about him. “Well, let’s say I loved the kid. He just got to me. I just loved him.”
A psychologist from the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, where Dr. Blumberg sent his son in 1990, testified regarding ten tests he had given Blumberg. The Menninger Clinic was founded in the 1920s to treat people with chronic mental illness. Dr. Glen S. Lipson concluded that Blumberg “is someone who has an encapsulated delusional system pertaining to how he sees the world,” and that he had “created his own world that motivates a lot of his actions.” He defined a delusion as a “belief that is inconsistent with the way most people perceive reality.” Dr. Lipson testified that an earlier evaluation of Blumberg done at the Menninger Clinic in 1965—twenty-five years before his arrest in Iowa—“noticed many of the same things.” In fact, he said, “I was surprised by a lot of the consistencies,” particularly Blumberg’s “overconcern” then “with things of the past and that are old,” and by his “inability to deal with what is going on” in the present. “What we see twenty-five years later is a man of complete absorption,” he said. “He became an expert in the past,” a person who “could talk to you about doorknobs and books, but who retreats when you ask him about himself.”
The defense then called Dr. William S. Logan, at the time of the trial the director of the La
w and Psychiatry Department at the Menninger Clinic (where he had been since 1985) and a nationally recognized authority in forensic psychiatry. Since credibility in such a case is essential, Nickerson devoted thirty minutes to having Dr. Logan present his qualifications. He said that he had given expert testimony in forty-five other federal cases, and had once been cited by the U.S. attorney general for meritorious service.
Dr. Logan reported that he spent 33.4 hours interviewing Blumberg and an additional 21.75 hours with relatives and acquaintances who knew the patient. He noted that while it is “quite unusual” for him to spend that much time on a single case, “I’m still not aware of all of Mr. Blumberg’s delusional beliefs, many of which only come to light through various codes and symbols that he uses.” One “code” Dr. Logan described was a fictitious institution called the Columbian Library. Blumberg had named it after the World’s Columbian Exposition held in 1893 to commemorate the discovery of the New World four centuries earlier. Designed by a team of architects that included Charles F. McKim, Stanford White, Louis H. Sullivan, and Frederick Law Olmsted, the six-month extravaganza drew more than 27 million visitors to the banks of Lake Michigan and is considered an unqualified triumph of Victorian culture. Blumberg “so revered that era,” Dr. Logan said, “that he relabeled his books after this particular exhibition,” which is better known today as the Chicago Fair.
Of central importance to Blumberg’s defense was the family history, which Dr. Logan outlined in detail, beginning with Moses “Mose” Zimmerman, Stephen’s great-grandfather and the family patriarch, a “horse trader of some renown” who was born in Iowa and moved to what is now the Twin Cities area of St. Paul and Minneapolis in the mid-1800s. A true nineteenth-century entrepreneur, Mose Zimmerman supplied horses not only to the United States Cavalry, but to various European combatants in the Boer War as well. “The significant thing about Mose that I found interesting was that he was perhaps the first recorded collector in the family,” Dr. Logan said. “He would collect junk, piles of it, huge storehouses of it. He at one point bought a whole twine factory for which there was no practical use. Some of the other things he collected were a hundred buffalo coats and ten thousand horse collars.”
Much of what Blumberg’s great-grandfather collected had “very little practical value,” including large parcels of what were thought then to be “worthless pieces” of real estate in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Later, as the city expanded—and by ‘later’ I mean as much as a hundred years later—these portions of land became quite valuable and the basis for a considerable family fortune.”
Today, the family fortune is managed under the company name of Zimmerman Realty, and is operated by Dr. Henry Blumberg, Stephen’s father. Everyone Dr. Logan interviewed agreed that Mose Zimmerman “compulsively collected things, even things that others may not have particularly wanted,” yet he “was very much adored by the rest of the family,” and was even perceived by some “as the major figure or hero in the family.”
Two people who exerted tremendous influence on young Stephen were his great-grandmother—Mose’s wife, Carrie—and her daughter, also named Carrie, Stephen’s grandmother. “Both of these women lived to be quite elderly, eighties and nineties, and both were present throughout all of Stephen’s childhood and adolescence,” Dr. Logan said. “They lived together in an old large home, very Victorian in nature, because they were quite elderly and liked that style. Stephen was extremely attached to both of these women, particularly to his grandmother Carrie. In fact, Stephen’s middle name is Carrie. His father intended that it be spelled in a more masculine way, C-a-r-y, but one of the first of many disagreements they had when they entered my office was they argued about Stephen’s name.” Blumberg insisted on spelling his middle name “exactly the way his grandmother spelled it,” Dr. Logan explained; he was “so attached to her memory, he stated he would like to be buried with her.”
The family’s history of mental illness also begins with Grandmother Carrie, Dr. Logan said. After the death of a child, she “suffered a major depression” from which she “never recovered,” a condition that probably caused her “to drink heavily and abuse pills.” Carrie’s husband, Reuben Blumberg, also had a family history of mental illness, including a paternal grandmother “who had been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.”
Dr. Logan outlined other family problems, including the depression of Dr. Henry Blumberg. “He saw a psychiatrist while he was in medical school, [has] had suicidal thoughts, [and has even] considered killing Stephen as well.” Henry Blumberg saw action in both the European and Pacific theaters during World War II “and had nightmares and some evidence of a post-traumatic stress disorder which occurred periodically.”
With Blumberg’s mother, Jeanne, there was “conclusive proof” of “demonstrated emotional instability,” according to Dr. Logan, including “major psychiatric records” dating back to the early 1970s that diagnosed her as “schizophrenic or schizoaffective,” for which she required “psychotropic medication.” Dr. Logan described Jeanne Blumberg as a woman who “believes that the radio and TV have special messages for her.” Her son, Stephen, moreover, had been a “frequent target” of his mother’s “rage” since childhood. His mother sometimes expressed anger by burning her son’s and husband’s clothes, and once she attacked Henry Blumberg with a knife.
As an adolescent in grade school, Blumberg found he “could begin to escape some of the things around him” in books, and he grew especially fond of an elderly teacher who encouraged his reading. “He was very isolated, very withdrawn, basically no peer relationships at all,” Dr. Logan said. Enrolled in a private Catholic high school twelve miles from home, Blumberg’s grades began to decline. It was during this period when he found it necessary to “walk back and forth” that he began to develop an interest in antiques, Dr. Logan said. “Particularly, he had to walk around the construction of Interstate 94,” which goes through Minneapolis and St. Paul and required the demolition of many old houses.
After a year in the Catholic school Blumberg transferred back to public school. He started spending more time away from home and “looking at old buildings.” His personal appearance began to decline, he was more hostile, and he seemed resentful of a younger sister. Dr. Blumberg was so concerned that in 1965 he took his sixteen-year-old son to a psychiatrist, who admitted him to St. Mary’s Hospital in St. Paul. Shortly after his release, Stephen’s continued “disturbing” behavior prompted his father to file a petition requesting that his son become a ward of the Ramsey County Juvenile Court. A judge ordered a second hospitalization at St. Mary’s Hospital that lasted for six weeks. The psychiatrists who examined him diagnosed a “personality moving in a schizophrenic direction,” and concluded that Blumberg’s “thinking was unusual enough” already to support a characterization of “delusional.” They recommended that he be “in a treatment program for the severely emotionally disturbed.” A third evaluation in 1965 by “a whole team of people” at the Menninger Clinic supported the finding of schizophrenia, and also recommended “inpatient hospitalization.”
In 1966, Blumberg underwent another series of evaluations, beginning at the Ramsey County Hospital Psychiatric Unit in St. Paul, where he remained for eight weeks. Doctors described him as “an anxious, depressed kid who has an absolute obsession about collecting and going into old homes and getting things.” Later that year, treatment at a state hospital was recommended, and Blumberg was admitted to the Minnesota State Hospital in Anoka for two and a half months in 1966. Dr. Logan said that at one point Dr. Henry Blumberg went to the hospital with his attorney and “confronted the psychiatrist” over reports that his son “had been locked in a seclusion room” for a period of time. “Stephen eventually wound up running away from the facility,” said Dr. Logan, and fled to Chicago, where his father “eventually retrieved him.”
In 1967, Blumberg was admitted to the Harding Hospital for Psychiatry and Neurology in Worthington, Ohio. After six weeks of evaluation there, he was
judged to have an “adjustment reaction” consistent with a person who is “developing schizoid and compulsive tendencies,” a diagnosis that Dr. Logan explained referred “once again” to an obsessive “accumulation of things.” Blumberg spent another seven weeks at Hardy Hospital in 1968 followed by two more weeks in 1969, producing further corroboration of the earlier examinations and resulting in a “guarded prognosis.”
Dr. Henry Blumberg decided finally that perhaps the best course of action would be to set Stephen up in his own apartment in Minneapolis. Though his son agreed to attend Marshall High School in St. Paul, he participated in no activities, made no friends, and “remained very withdrawn and passive.” Blumberg did graduate in 1968, but sat in the back of the auditorium with his father during ceremonies and would not go up on the stage to receive his diploma.
It was at about this time, Dr. Logan said, that Blumberg started “to create his own Victorian world” in his apartment. “In many ways, he felt discarded and unappreciated by his parents and other people,” and began to identify with “these beautiful stained-glass windows or Victorian doorknobs or other objects, the lamp shades we find in these homes. His whole idea was to preserve or to rescue these materials from what he believed was destruction.”
And it was also at about this time, said Dr. Logan, that Blumberg began his raids on libraries. “Basically he had begun to explore books about Victorian architecture. In the process of doing that, he went into the rare-book stacks at the University of Minnesota. His primary focus at the time was on architectural digests from the 1800s. How he would use these would be, say, to take an architectural digest relating to the city of St. Louis. He would go down there using the description of the building that he found in that book to locate which buildings had not been demolished and see if they were in the process of disrepair or abandonment. If so, he would then explore them.”
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 62