Dennis McDougal
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The Lethal Legacy of Randy Kraft - Part Four
Kraft on death row
When he was 13, Dietrich Carpio-Timmerman went to a matinee near his mother’s apartment in the L.A.suburb of Cudahy. It was February, 1980, and Disney’s Return to Witch Mountain was showing – a kid flick he wanted to see badly enough that he didn’t mind going by himself. What followed was cautionary at best, nightmarish at worst. After Carpio-Timmerman bought his popcorn and settled in, an older guy – mustached, paunchy, shaggy – began circling, getting up, moving to another seat again and again until he was right next to Dietrich. “There were dark circles all around his eyes, like he hadn’t slept for days,” Carpio-Timmerman recalled a quarter century later. “He looked like a sinister version of a stuffed toy raccoon I had as a child.” The man’s whispered dialogue was classic predator. Did Dietrich have a girlfriend? Why wasn’t he at the movies with her? Why was he alone? Did he like boys instead of girls? Carpio-Timmerman was polite, deferential and naïve with the persistent stranger. When the questions grew more insistent, more suggestive and finally, flat out lewd, Dietrich excused himself and said he had to use the restroom. He fairly ran to the lobby where he searched out the manager and told him what had happened. Shaken to the point of tears, Dietrich waited with a concession clerk while the manager did a short reconnaissance. He returned to announce that no one matching the stranger’s description was among the largely kid-only audience, but that a side exit down near the screen was wide open, and hadn’t been shortly before the film began. After his mother picked him up outside the theater, she half-listened to her son while she hummed along to Crystal Gayle on the radio. Forget about it, she counseled. A harrowing experience perhaps, but no harm, no foul. Flash forward to June. Dietrich and his mother are watching the nightly news when the face of a newly-arrested suspect in a string of ghastly thrill murders flashes on the TV screen. “William George Bonin” read the name beneath the mug shot. Dietrich gasped. That was the man who had tried to seduce him, he told his mother. But if he was looking for sympathy, he’d come to the wrong place. His mother lectured him on the difference between boys and girls. If it had been a bobbysoxer who’d barely escaped molesting, there might have been cause to go to the police. But Dietrich was a strapping young man who could have and should have protected himself. Besides, the last thing she needed as a single mother was to get involved in a homicide investigation. “I cried for days when I found out more and more details of Bonin’s crimes, but in my family that was it,” recalled Carpio-Timmerman. “My mother would never speak another word about it, not that she ever really did. She even tried to make it seem like it never happened. However the fear was always there and many times I’d go into the bushes at the back of our apartment building were I had built a fort, and just cry alone so no one would know. I had two sisters, but only my older one lived inLos Angeleswith my mom and me. Neither of my sisters ever knew what had happened until I was 34 years old. Silence and deception were the keys to our family’s very foundation.” 
William George Bonin would go down in L.A.infamy as The Freeway Killer, though that turned out to be something of a misnomer. He was the chieftain of a tribe of freeway killers as it turned out. Carpio-Timmerman followed every sordid detail of the case clear to its end, though he knew better than to share his horror and fascination with his family. A few months after Bonin’s arrest, his interest ratcheted up again when it turned out that one of Bonin’s victims was a kid just slightly older than Dietrich who also happened to be the younger brother of one of Carpio-Timmerman’s teachers.
As prosecution got underway, Carpio-Timmerman took steps to face down his own demons himself. Without tipping off his mother, he climbed aboard a city bus armed with a newspaper story that identified where Bonin lived in the nearby city of Downey. He got off near Bonin’s house, appropriately located on Angell Street. “I don’t know what I thought I would accomplish by doing this,” he recalled. “As I stared at it I began to well-up. The front door opened. I quickly began walking down the street as I saw a man emerge and get into his car. I headed back to the bus stop with my heart in my throat. The car passed me and turned down a street in the opposite direction. I cried all the way back home.” Three more years would pass before Carpio-Timmerman and the rest of L.A. came to understand that Bonin and his deranged disciples were not the only Freeway Killers. In fact, Bonin was a distant second to the biggest predator of all. Carpio-Timmerman never went to the movies with Randy Steven Kraft, but when he met him face to face, he felt the same chill that William George Bonin gave him on that long-ago afternoon when he went to see Return to Witch Mountain. With sinister irony, Bonin and Kraft not only came to know each other; they would eventually become Death Row bridge partners inside the walls of San Quentin with two other serial killers completing the foursome. It was in pursuit of answers that Carpio-Timmerman began writing letters to all of the bridge players. By the time he mustered the nerve to request visitation, it was too late to confront Bonin. He was executed in the gas chamber in 1996. Asked in a radio interview days before his death if he had any regrets, Bonin said without a hint of irony that he had always been a pretty good bowler in his teens and did feel some remorse that he hadn’t gone on to be a professional. Bonin was long gone, but Carpio-Timmerman was still able to ask Kraft the same question he’d wanted to put to Bonin – the question that had haunted him for nearly 25 years. Why? The answer he got from Kraft was no better than a bowling trophy. “Randy was one truly deranged man,” Carpio-Timmerman recalled. “He is not only the ultimate sociopath and most psychotic human being I’ve ever had the displeasure of getting to know, but for all his sweetness, he is the scariest man I have ever met. All of this I learned quite by accident because, initially, I was only interested in what he could tell me about Bonin.” (To be continued) The Lethal Legacy of Randy Kraft - Part Three
“Can I have my attorney present please?” asked Randy Kraft. He kibitzed a bit with his Death Row counselor while Haney fidgeted nervously, regarding the clipped but articulate words that spilled from his mouth. He looked more like the aging computer analyst that he once had been that the man regarded by many in law enforcement as the nation’s most prolific serial killer. Judging by a self-portrait he’d sketched in jail decades earlier, when he was still awaiting trial, he thought of himself as quite handsome, though his eyes then, as now, were fathomless. Following his powwow with the counselor, he remained adamant about what he would and would not say to the visitor. “Please contact my attorney,” he said. “You won’t give me five minutes, Randy?” asked Haney. “No, I won’t give you any time,” he answered. “Contact my attorneys please.” “Five minutes?” He shook his closely-cropped, balding noggin. “That’s it. That’s my answer.” “You don’t want to help?” “You don’t wanna help me,” he fired back. “Contact my attorneys and help them.” “I would like to help you,” Haney pleaded. “No you wouldn’t.” Not true, Haney told me a few weeks later. If there were some way to help Randy Kraft step back from the abyss he’d created for himself nearly half a century ago, she would be among the first to volunteer. Atoning for multiple recreational homicides committed over a dozen years or more is not likely. But as long as a human being is still walking and talking on this side of the deathly hallows, there’s always a chance. Apparently not with Randy though. Haney had brought a letter with her guaranteeing Randy immunity from prosecution if he would only speak with her. All she wanted was confirmation that Kraft had done in a 19-year-old Marine fromDes Moinesnamed Oral Stuart back in 1974, but she was never able to even get that far in their conversation. She wasn’t looking to add another felony to the 18 upon which he had already been convicted. In fact, she told him, he didn’t even have to talk. All he had to do was listen. “Randy, this is about someone who we are just trying to close the file on for this 80-year-old woman, for her son,” said Haney. “There is zero criminal liability for you. I promise. I have the documentation. We’re just trying to close the Navy file. That’s all.” “No.” “We’re just trying to close the deserter file.” “No.” “It’s a chance for you to do something good.” “You can do something good and call my attorneys…” His voice rose from irritated to angry. The room was close, Spartan and painted an institutional urine yellow. While Haney and Kraft’s counselor were separated from the agitated convict by a small rectangular table, the NCIS agent still felt threatened. She wondered briefly if it might not have been a better idea to have asked the guards to cage him in the black mesh restraining apparatus at one side of the room rather than sit facing him separated only by air. His eyes, thought Haney. His eyes were dead eyes that quickened only when he snarled. “I’d like to be nice to you,” she persisted. “You’re the people who put me here,” said Randy in his escalating voice. “I’m not the people who put you here,” said Haney. “I’m an American citizen, if that’s what put you here, then that’s it. The Navy had nothing to do with putting you here.” “That’s not true.” “I’m surprised you won’t just sit there and listen and not say anything,” said Haney. But Haney was new to his world. All she knew was what she’d read about his years of secret sadism and the various psychological theories as to how he’d evolved from a freckle-faced kid growing up in the Orange County suburb of Westminster into an unspeakable monster. She didn’t know Randy himself because he would never allow that to happen. The slight 66-year-old male who sat opposite her in crisp, tidy prison denim and starched chambray shirt had once sanctioned a website managed by his older sister, but beyond bucolic blogs about his youth, there was nothing to reveal how and why he became the most notorious thrill killer in the annals of California crime. Despite overwhelming evidence, he still maintains to the present day that he was framed. He keeps his waning appeals alive through the federal public defender’s office inLos Angeles and trusts no one, least of all a government agent like Julie Haney. Everyone was out to get him and he would not risk even sitting silent to listen to her plead Oral Stuart’s case. “It’s the same as being on the stand at trial,” he snarled at her. “You can draw your own conclusions from reactions and stuff. I don’t wanna be, ‘He’s making reactions and stuff,’ you know. Then you can say, ‘Well, he did it because the eyebrows went up.’ You know, ‘He breathed heavy.’” Less than 10 minutes after her interview began, Kraft was on his feet demanding to be escorted back to Death Row. Had Haney been male, meek and gay, like Dietrech Timmerman-Carpio, things might have turned out differently. 
Randy Kraft self portrait
The Lethal Legacy of Randy Kraft - Part Two
Randy Kraft at 1989 trial
A lingering Randy Kraft fallacy is that he preyed only on gays; that he killed with impunity at a time when most homosexuals remained closeted and cops didn’t care whether they lived or died.
While the second half of the premise may be accurate, the first isn’t. Randy Kraft was an equal opportunity sadist. Twelve of his known victims were as straight as the United States Marines or, as Eleanor Roosevelt once famously described them, “underpaid, oversexed teenage killers.” Oral Alfred Stuart met those qualifications when he disappeared. The blonde six-foot-one 180 pound PFC from Des Moines would have been Randy’s unlucky 13th Marine and living proof that Kraft didn’t just favor gays … living proof, that is, until the weekend of Nov. 9, 1974, when the one-time Iowa farm boy went AWOL, never to be seen alive again. Oral Stuart wouldn’t have been the first serviceman to turn a weekend pass into a run for his life. During the Vietnam era, America’s least popular war created over 50,000 deserters –nearly as high a number as those who died in combat overseas. Stuart was deemed to be just the latest Marine to light out for parts unknown, until his body showed up some time later on a deserted highway a long way from Camp Pendleton. The local medical examiner ruled out foul play. “How could he do that?” asked Julie Haney, the NCIS cold case investigator who has taken up Stuart’s cause more than a generation later. “He had bite marks on his neck! And ligature marks! How’d they get there?” It was a plea from Stuart’s mother who is now in her 80s, that sent Haney to San Quentin to question Kraft. Many of his victims were military and even though Stuart was not on the original list of almost 50 kills attributed to Kraft, there was one other clue. As one of the most prolific serial murderers – if not the most prolific – in American history, Kraft kept a handwritten list in the trunk of hisToyota with 62 coded entries. Law enforcement called it his “scorecard” and matched most of the one or two-word names to tortured and maimed bodies left on display at the side of roads inCalifornia andOregon over a 13-year period. But some entries never did find their matching corpse. One in particular stood out to Haney: Haney became convinced that the 19-year-old kid fromDes Moines who’d been condemned as a deserter for decades was, in fact, one more entry on Randy’s tally sheet. She decided to pay Kraft a visit. What was more, it got her to thinking about the dozens of other deserters that she and her colleagues had tried tracking down over the years. Most turned up, either living or dead, but there were always a few who never did. How many hitched a ride to eternity with Kraft? How many lonely, loaded enlisted men looking for a little weekend sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll never made it back to the base courtesy of the so-called Scorecard Killer? During the last week of November, Haney made the trip from San Diego to the moldering medieval prison at the north end of San Francisco Bay. As a visiting investigator, she was accorded some courtesies, but a maximum security fortress like San Quentin is often harder to break into in its own way than it is to break out. Death Row is even worse. By the time Randy’s counselor guided her into a tiny, windowless conference room, she’d been waiting for awhile. Kraft was none too keen on speaking with her. He was none too keen on any official visitor. Randy, you see, is an innocent man. Julie Haney knew what she was up against when the door finally swung open and a fit but frowning 67-year-old prisoner was escorted inside. The first thing she noticed was his eyes. There once may have been someone there behind them, but the dark shining pupils that stared straight at her were as blank as a shark’s. “Where are you from” he demanded. And things went downhill from there. (To be continued) 
Randy Kraft on death row today
The Lethal Legacy of Randy Kraft - Part One
Thus read the lead of a story in today’s Los Angeles Times, but that very same opening sentence could have run 30 years ago in the same newspaper, been just as accurate, and might have saved half a dozen lives or more in the bargain. But that story of the search for Randy Steven Kraft did not run in the Times or any other paper, and as a result, the classic mild-mannered computer programmer with a side career of serial murder went undetected for another year. Kraft continued drugging, raping, murdering and dumping corpses of young men alongSouthern California’s vast freeway system for 17 more months, until he was arrested in the spring of 1983. Sometime after midnight on May 14, 1983, two CHP officers pulled a late model Toyota over on the San Diego Freeway. The driver had been weaving a bit and they ordered him out of the car for a field sobriety test which he failed. When one of the officers went around to the passenger side to ask the guy sitting there if he wanted to drive his buddy’s car home, he found Terry Gambrel, a dying Marine who expired within the hour despite the best efforts of EMTs and the emergency room staff at a nearby hospital. Besides ingesting lethal doses of prescription drugs laced in a bottle of Moosehead Lager, Gambrel had also been strangled with his own belt and laces from his shoes. When the CHP officers opened the passenger door, they found his pants down around his ankles and his tortured genitals exposed. A Camp Pendleton boot who left a grieving family back in theMidwest, Gambrel would be the last of Randy’s dozens upon dozens of victims. “A lot of people in law enforcement believe he’s the worst serial killer in U.S. history,” said Julie Haney, a career investigator for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “There’s the Green River Killer, then Randy, and nobody else – not Ted Bundy, not Jeffrey Dahmer — nobody even comes anywhere near their numbers.” Officially, theGreen River’s Gary Ridgeway confessed to killing 71 young women over a 16 year period after his arrest in 1998. Randy is believed to have done in at least 67 over 13 years, but he has never confessed to any of them. Special Agent Haney maintains that Kraft’s real number is probably closer to 100. Though he has been sitting in a cell on San Quentin’s Death Row for more than two decades now, Kraft maintains that he is an innocent man railroaded by a legal system that has outrageously blamed him for the savage, sadistic thrill killings of unsuspecting young males in at least three states. The facts, a judge and jury begged to differ. Physical evidence by the boxful, including a so-called “scorecard” encrypted with 62 entries commemorating his most satisfying murders, was found in his car, his home and his office. The only baffling piece of the Randy puzzle that remains is why he is coming up on his 67th birthday this March while the family and friends of his many victims continue to grieve. In the 28 years Kraft has spent behind bars, he has atoned for nothing and seems destined to die peacefully in his sleep. Because the story of Kraft’s killing spree became my first book (Angel of Darkness, Warner Books, 1991), I hear postscripts pretty frequently. I get from relatives of victims, friends, law enforcement emails on average around once or twice a month, all looking for answers: Why did Kraft do it? Why does he continue to deny his crimes? And, most important of all, why does he continue to live in isolated but comparative comfort at state expense despite his conviction of 16 of the many, many monstrous murders that he committed? I try to answer as best I can, but I’m no oracle, no sage. I’m an armchair psychologist at best who undertook Angel of Darkness to try to better understand how a demon like Randy happens in the first place. And yet here I am a quarter century later with no better answer than the one I came up with then, and which Special Agent Haney repeated to me over lunch last month at a restaurant where we met in Long Beach, not far from Kraft’s old killing grounds. “He did it because he likes it!” said Haney. When Haney first called me the previous month, I thought it was a prank call. She identified herself as a cold case specialist for NCIS and I had always half believed that NCIS was an invention of Mark Harmon and CBS. Turns out that NCIS is real enough and Special Agent Haney has been working for them out of Camp Pendleton, El Toro and the USN bases in and around San Diego for the past 15 years. One of her duties is to find out what becomes of Marine deserters who go AWOL and are never heard from again. It was just such a case that brought her to my doorstep – one Oral Alfred Stuart, a Marine PFC who set out on a four-day liberty pass during Veteran’s Day in 1974 and was never seen again. Never seen alive, that is…. (To be continued) Kid Casey, Front and Center!
Star quality can come crawling at you from out of nowhere....
Been waxing nostalgic lately, watching Casey Abrams last week expertly spew “Smells Like Teen Spirit” all over American Idol. It was like watching Patti Smith do Nirvana while wearing a beard. The animated lad who learned to crawl on our kitchen floor damn near 20 years ago really does have star quality and will be one, if he chooses, whether the creaky celebrity machinery of Idol anoints him or not. As a lifelong student of Hollywood, I guess what astonishes me the most about talent like Casey’s is that it can evolve right in front of your nose and you don’t even pay it much heed until it explodes all over the TV set. As an ambivalent “Uncle Dennis,” I’ve literally watched Casey grow up and actually been complicit in nurturing his perverse sense of humor, never once foreseeing stardom in his future. I remember taking him and my grandkid Austin fishing for the first time when they were 12, beaming like a proud father figure as the two youngsters beat a half dozen trout to death, only to refuse to eat them once we got them cleaned, baked and backed with a nice Chardonnay. Ira and I ate while Casey and Austin played video games and discussed soft core porn up in Casey’s room. And then there was the time I drove up Mt. San Jacinto to visit Pam and Ira, the boy’s oddball parents and my lifelong buds, while playing a new release by the Fountains of Wayne on my CD player. It was long, long ago, perhaps even before the discovery of the iPod, and the hit single off the album was “Stacey’s Mom.” When I got to Idyllwild, Casey latched on to the CD and closeted himself in his room, playing it over and over. Because “Stacey’s Mom” is about a youngster who lusts after his girlfriend’s mother, Pam accused me of warping the boy’s morals while Ira just beamed the way I once had done when Casey and Austin pounded the crap out of the fish they’d caught. Pam and Casey came through Memphis a couple years ago on the obligatory cross-country odyssey to determine which college to pick for her high school graduate. It warmed my heart to see how Casey had grown. His apple cheeks were whiskered and there was a fine fur beneath his nostrils, but the Seth Rogan bush was still a year or so away. He left his beloved bass fiddle back in Idyllwild, but made frequent use of my Gibson, fingering “Stacey’s Mom” (no pun intended, Pam) as well as grunge, jazz, classic rock and punk tunes I’d never heard of in addition to loads of folksongs I had. The Casey I had remembered -- trading slobber with his galumphing long-haired oaf of a dog, whining about having to shovel snow out of the driveway or weaseling permission for a sleepover at some pal’s house on a school night – was long gone. In his place was a prodigy who out-chorded Uncle Dennis the way Slash might have out-chorded Tennessee Ernie Ford. We drove by Graceland on that visit (like a Muslim to Mecca, I’ve always held that you can’t call yourself an American unless you’ve been to Graceland at least once) and spent an afternoon on Beale Street, lusting through the showroom of the Gibson Guitar Factory. We cruised through the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum and the following day, Pam and Casey hit the road. It took a week to clean up the mess Casey left behind in the guest room, which means to me that he felt right at home. He should. He was. And if the next eclectic number he chooses to belt out for the Idol judges turns out to be “Stacey’s Mom,” I won’t feel the slightest bit pissy that he never gave me the CD back. Go, Casey. Now’s your time. Don’t let it pass. Prologue from The Candlestickmaker
She stepped backward. “You like?” He nodded. His mustache gave his face the look of a sad-eyed orangutan in bifocals. A mustache covered a multitude of insecurities. He remembered when first he grew it, as dark then as it was now silver. The thick line of fur was permanent: as certain a personal I.D. mark as the scar on his shoulder blade. She bent back into her work, attacking with scissors and comb. Brigham squinted at the fine print of her framed license above the mirror. Annie Pak. Probably Korean but could be any of a number of Asian nationalities. Brigham bought his morning coffee from a Cambodian donut shop, serviced his Lexus at a Vietnamese-operated gas station and lunched half the time on sashimi, Szechwan, Pho or Thai. Once home only to burgers or tacos, L.A. had evolved into a cosmopolis. He examined Annie Pak for crow’s feet. She could be 30; she could be 60. To an aging round eye, she was as inscrutable as her temperament. As he climbed from the chair, Brigham said, “I knew a girl named Annie once.” “A woman?” He pondered a moment before turning up his newly-trimmed mustache into a smile. “A girl,” he repeated. “It’s coming up on the Year of the Rabbit, isn’t it?” Her eyes lit up. “Yes. A lucky year.” “But beware the luck, eh?” The crimson smear of her mouth revealed a toothy smile. “Yes,” she giggled, “Watch out!” He tipped her $10 and pushed through the front door, recalling a less fortunate year when he had far more hair and his mustache was as fine as a camelhair brush. The Year of the Monkey. Never so brave as a Tiger in the year just passed or as tentative in his good fortune in the Year of the Rabbit to come, but as roguish and temperamental as all the other animals combined. As he guided his car into traffic, Brigham turned on the news. “Associated Press is reporting three more deaths near the southern Afghani city of Kandahar this morning, including one U.S. soldier… Brigham switched to a classic rock station and caught Jim Morrison in mid-riff. “…you know that I would be a liar, if I was to say to you: ‘Girl we couldn’t get much higher’…” Brigham joined the chorus at the stoplight, “The time to hesitate is through.” He turned the radio off and rode the rest of the way in silence. Six years had passed since the last Year of the Monkey. The year of Brigham’s divorce. The year everything went wrong. The year of reckoning. Brigham pulled into his parking slot, gathered up his briefs, motions, and file folders, and he hummed Light My Fire as he pushed through his office door. A black woman whose obvious bulk was shrouded by a great red and green cotton caftan sat in the reception area. “Mr. Brigham,” said Linda, the bright young law student he’d recently hired as a secretary. “This is Miss Jones. She insisted on waiting to see you.” He frowned at Linda, who had been instructed a dozen times to send walk-ins packing. Brigham’s soft touch reputation among thieves, meth dealers, drunk drivers, hookers and the occasional innocent had made him a favorite of the newly accused. What he saw in Miss Jones was yet another aging single welfare mom come to rescue her baby from yet another felony rap of which the youngster was totally innocent. He managed a smile. “Miss Jones.” He opened the door to his inner office and held it for her. She pushed herself to a standing position then labored mightily to shuffle through the door. She gripped a handbag like a football beneath one arm, while arthritic hips aggravated each step, but she kept her head high. As she passed, they made eye contact. “Ernie Brigham,” she said. “That right?” Her eyes were determined and she smelled of rosewater. Brigham smiled at her familiarity. A more businesslike “Ernest” would prevent future billing problems. But her face was pained and pleading, and there was ineffable nobility about the woman which Brigham seldom saw among the disenfranchised heirs of LBJ’s Great Society. “Sure,” he said. “I am Samantha Jones,” she said, offering her hand. He took it expecting a flounder but found a vise. “I am Wilson Jones’s aunt.” Brigham flushed. His hand remained paralyzed in her grip. “Jonesy?” he said. “We never called him that,” she said. “Bashful,” said Brigham. She smiled and relaxed her hand. “You knew him then.” “I did.” “I have to sit.” She moved to a chair beside his desk and gently settled her great bulk. “Those are yours?” she asked, pointing at a pair of framed photos on the desk. “They’re my daughters,” he said. “Julie Anne’s a psychologist and Lea’s in P.R. Works for Sony, actually.” She picked up the frames and studied each portrait. “They’re way beautiful,” she said. “That’s what my own babies would say. Way beautiful.” She glanced at Brigham’s naked left hand. “Divorced,” he said, covering the left with his right. “So you’re Auntie Sam. What brings you to see me, Mrs. Jones?” “Miss,” she said. “Never got myself married.” Her eyes wandered, coming to rest on a pair of framed drawings past Brigham’s left shoulder. He twisted in his seat to see where she was looking. “The one on the right is Mt. Fuji,” he explained. “And the other is your nephew’s. ‘Three Men in a Tub’ by Wilson O. Jones.” Aunt Sam rose with effort and moved to the drawing of a Vietnam era aircraft carrier with its odd collection of antennae rising like a small forest from one end and three sailors – one black and two white – standing in the foreground. She ran her fingers over the glass. The signature in the corner read ‘Hamza Hassan’. “Tha’s my baby,” she said, recognizing the artist’s name. She shook her great jowly head. “My babies is all my sister’s children and grandchildren. I pretty much raised ‘em up after she died.” She rummaged in her purse and located a snapshot of a man with shy downcast eyes. He wore a Marine uniform and a thoughtful frown. “Tha’s Tyler. He the youngest.” “I remember. Jonesy …,” he began, but caught himself. “Wilson used to talk about him. And you.” “He was a good boy,” she said as she fished inside the purse. She produced a folded envelope, withdrew its contents and smoothed out the letter on the desktop. Brigham could see the address was the Veterans Administration. “This come in last week’s mail.” The envelope was addressed to Mr. Wilson O. Jones, but the form letter inside was to A Mr. Peter Chandler. Beneath the name was a reference line that read: Re: Department of Defense 1968 tests SHAD, project 112 off the coast of Vietnam. Dear Mr. Chandler: As a participant in Operation Babylon, you have been accorded certain benefits under a recently enacted Executive Order. You are urged to contact your nearest VA administrator or facility, or write care of the Naval Medical Research Institute. Bring or attach a copy of this letter when making contact. No signature appeared, but there was a second page – a form to fill out – and an address in Bethesda, Maryland. “I called ‘em up and got the runaround,” said Aunt Sam. “The lady I finally get says they don’t take no inquiries on the phone. Says I gotta write back ‘cuz they gotta verify who they talkin’ to – make sure I be Wilson’s aunt. I try to find out about this Operation Babylon, but she ain’t sayin’. I tell her about the mix up with the names and she still don’t tell me nuthin’. Just fill out the form and send it back, all she say.” Brigham scanned the questionnaire, which seemed the sort of mini-medical history a life insurance company might require. Several questions regarding mental health – breakdowns, institutionalizations, drug dependence. “I try callin’ every Peter Chandler in the phone book,” she continued. “I know he was one of you three always stuck together while you was in the Navy ‘cuz Wilson was always writin’ home about you. Nobody knowed what I was talkin’ about.” “Peter lives outside of Washington D.C.,” said Brigham. “At least he did five years ago.” It made little sense to give her the rest of the address. Even if Chandler were able to answer, it wouldn’t be what she wanted to hear. “Well, I wouldn’t pay it much mind except I don’t know what benefits they talkin’ about,” she said. “Lord knows we could use us some benefits. I checked Wilson’s papers and that service number and Social Security number that they print under Peter Chandler’s name is sure enough Wilson’s. So’s the address. It come right to my house, maybe ‘cuz I ain’t never moved in 40 years. But how they get his name so wrong?” Brigham’s brows narrowed. “I can’t say,” he lied. “I could look into it.” Her face brightened. “Could you?” “Sure. No charge,” he said. “Not for Auntie Sam.” She beamed. “You a saint, Mr. Ernie Brigham,” she said. “How’s Tonette?” he asked. “She dead ten years now.” “I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. “How?” “Accident. She drivin’ home from Water and Power where she workin’.” “Jesus. Tonette. What about ...” Auntie Sam smiled. “Little Ernie? He mine now. I tol’ you all the babies gets to be mine sooner or after. All growed up, finish UCLA on a athlete scholarship. He a wrestler, you know. He the one tell me I need to come find you.” “I…” Brigham began, and words failed him. He froze as if a witness in a murder trial, when all his rehearsed sound bites fled and left him speechless before a jury of his peers. “You busy,” said Aunt Sam, scribbling her phone number on a scrap of paper and struggling to her feet. “No, I just…” “It’s all right,” she said. “I know a man when he busy. You jus’ call when you find out somethin’. That okay?” He nodded. Leaving the phone number and form letter at the edge of the desk, she helped herself to one of his business cards then made a crescendo of “thank you’s” as she backed out the door. Brigham meant to follow but found his legs no more functional than his tongue. After she’d left, he swiveled and stared for a long while at the painting of Three Men in a Tub. He was unsure how much time had passed before his intercom burped. “Your 11 o’clock is here,” said Linda. Brigham slapped the button. “Cancel,” he said. He switched on his computer and Googled “Operation Babylon.” The first dozen entries detailed a recent battle involving Taliban insurgents, where the blood and mud and horror was reminiscent of firefights and rage and rice paddies a generation earlier. Three pages into his search, he found the Wikipedia entry he was looking for: In the late 1950s, Dr. Nicholas Bercel became the Timothy Leary of Sunset Boulevard, a Jungian caught up early on the possibilities of LSD. When Bercel administered the hallucinogen to spiders, they spun asymmetrical webs. Dogs chased their tails for hours until they fell over exhausted. Cats cringed at the sight of a mouse. Fish leaped from their aquariums. A colleague once dosed a bull elephant with 200 milligrams and the beast went stone still then keeled over dead. Bercel published his findings in medical journals and, in March of 1958, he received a call from the CIA. The military had been at work since World War II on a truth serum to extract information from enemy agents. At first known as Operation Chatter… “Babble on.” Brigham smirked. “Clever.” The more he read, the clearer it became. Operation Babylon was intended to extract state secrets from Bolsheviks, but LSD didn’t work that way. So the government had a second request: Could a reservoir be dosed, reducing the populations of entire cities to blithering psychotics, cringing at the sight of troops? Brigham scrolled further down to a declassified Operation Babylon memo, dated May 5, 1965: “…there is also the possibility of contaminating the water supply of a bomber base or, more easily still, that of a battleship. Our current research strongly suggests that LSD-25 will produce hysteria (unaccountable laughing, anxiety, terror) and the consequences on a war ship’s crew would be severe...” Brigham pushed back from his computer and stepped to his bookcase, removing a thin volume which he kept high above his law books three shelves up. He leafed carefully through the USS Argosy 1968 Cruise Book. An array of unfamiliar brown faces grinned beneath a headline reading “Stewards’ Division,” followed by three pages of formal officers’ headshots. They all had first names too which helped to soften their stiff poses, as well as Brigham’s memories. The only uncredited photo in the entire book was back on page 39, and Brigham himself could not remember who took it. Slightly out of focus in their Donald Duck uniforms, all three leaned against the flimsy railing with the migraine sun and the South China Sea at their backs. There were no names, but Brigham didn’t need any. From left to right, he smiled upon the blissed-out faces. Before pulling a bottle of single malt from his bottom drawer, Brigham read aloud the nursery rhyme printed beneath the photo: “Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub And who do you think they be? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker And all of them gone to sea.” He filled his glass with three fingers and sipped it slow. It was not yet noon. Serious drinking usually began late, coinciding with his dark evening brood. Brigham tasted and swirled and shut his eyes. Today would be an exception. Lynwood High Reunion, 2010 Edition: What Really Happened to the Class of '65
Crossroads for Lynwood High's Class of '65
Getting to know anyone well is hard enough and, more often than not, simply downright impossible. We shield our deepest secrets after all, dodging the difficult questions. Make small talk. Change the subject. Freshen that drink. Excuse ourselves for a urinary pit stop. It’s God’s great practical joke that we can often spot shortcomings and über mistakes in others, but have no clue about our own. T’were some gift, a gift he gie us, to see ourselves as others see us. Maybe Robert Burns was attending his high school reunion when he wrote that. It got me to thinking: I’ve been to most of my reunions and wonder at my peers who never show. “Who wants to waste an evening on a bunch of old geezers?” one of them emailed me last week. Others have told me that they simply see no percentage in dredging up memories of four uncomfortable years when their most awkward, humiliating, painful and occasionally tragic moments glared like supernovae. Never mind that most of their classmates instantly forgot or were so self-involved they never even noticed. For many, those moments continued to haunt, often for years afterward. 
The Best Place to Live Best
The Class of ’65 can be proud of itself. It’s a mitzvah to have come this far, relatively intact; to still be able to rock out on the dance floor one more time to “Satisfaction” even if the knees are too sore to go another round. Schmoozing the night away with old acquaintances is both a comfort and a revelation. Most came of age in lily white Lynwood, a blue collar postwar housing development where alcoholism, homosexuality, Negroes, chauvinism, child molesting and spousal abuse didn’t exist. I became an Eagle Scout there and rose to the rank of Master Councilor in the Order of DeMolay. I did everything right and was on the honor roll semester after semester. Lynwood was “the best place to live best” according to the Chamber of Commerce and I was among its anointed. Except I wasn’t. The part of me that stood on stage during the annual Lynwood High talent assembly, strumming “The Times They Are A’Changin’” knew that I wasn’t. I wrote an editorial for the Castle Courier questioning why the barbed wire atop the chain link fence that surrounded the high school seemed designed to keep students in as much as to keep malefactors out. I wasn’t sure what I was driving at, but the principal’s office sure did and I had the first of several run-ins with the administration. The day following graduation I led a half-assed sit-in at Senior Square, leading a drunken chorus of “We Shall Overcome” until some faculty member told us to vacate or else. We grumbled and burped and farted as we left, never all that certain what it was that we wanted to overcome. So much for non-violent protest. 
Bye bye Miss American Pie....
The torch may have been passed to a new generation, but few of us knew what that really meant until we put on a uniform. The first casualties of the Class of ’65 came out of that stupid, useless war. I never much cared for his preening swagger during Mr. Dequine’s sixth period P.E. class, but Ron England didn’t deserve to die at 19, and neither did the 55,000 other kids that assholes like LBJ, Nixon and Henry Kissinger sent to perdition for the sake of … what? To save the world from Godless Communism or to secure Indochinese rubber plantations for Goodyear and Firestone and preserve Indonesian oil fields for Exxon and Shell Oil? If the price had not been so high, the cost-benefit analysis would be a cosmic joke. Ron England died so draft dodgers like Dick Cheney and George Bush could run the country into the ground. After Vietnam I bought a “Question Authority” bumper sticker for my VW bug. If I knew where I could get one today, I’d buy another and put it on the back of my Lexus. Less than 5,000 returned from Iraq in body bags – a fraction of the kids who were murdered in Vietnam. I suppose some might see that as progress, but I see it the same way I saw that first colonial war 35 years ago, during my first Lynwood High reunion. Life is meant to be lived, not sacrificed to the state, and patriotism is, indeed, the last refuge of scoundrels – apparatchiks who don’t think twice about cutting short the lives of children. You didn’t see Bush on the front lines of Iraq and you won’t see Obama on the front lines of Afghanistan. My contempt for the masters of war is bipartisan and unforgiving. I trust that karma will treat them all accordingly. Hell is too good for them. 
...and may we stay ....
I was shocked and saddened to see Karen Koch listed among those who’ve left us. A statuesque beauty, Karen was nonetheless as big a misfit in high school as I was. She was too tall a girl just as I was too short a boy. Perhaps that’s why we got along. Everything eventually evened out after graduation, but in some ways it was too late. The wounds we suffer in adolescence scar over, but they never disappear. I straddled the fence during high school, hanging out with jocks and delinquents, eggheads and wastrels. I fancied myself a rebel without a cause and counted both dropouts and honor students among my closest amigos. Some are gone now. Russell Cline simply stopped breathing one afternoon in front of his TV set. I still remember fondly the time we were busted for underage drinking and his mother refused to leave our confiscated six-pack behind with the cops when she came to bail us out. Russell quit the planet over 20 years ago and now makes his home at Rose Hills Memorial Park, but I remember him. I remember them all, and reunions bring them back to life, if only for a song or two. That’s why reunions are important. 
...forever young.
My favorite geezer of the moment is Bob Dylan who will turn 70 next year. When I first made his acquaintance, he was as full of strum and drang and protest as me. I was a misfit high school freshman and I followed his career for all the decades that followed. It wasn’t until ten years after the Class of ’65 crossed the threshold into the wider world that Dylan wrote what I’ve always thought of as the perfect reunion song. He supposedly penned it for his wife on the occasion of their long, painful and hugely expensive divorce, but when I played it loud on the CD player of my rented car driving home from the most recent convocation of Lynwood High’s aging Knights & Ladies, it sounded just about right. All these people I used to know They’re an illusion to me now, Some are mathematicians Some are carpenter’s wives. Don’t know how it all got started. I don’t know what they do with their lives. But me I am still on the road Heading for another joint. We always did feel the same We just saw it from a different point of view. Tangled up in blue. Things Have Changed -- The Lives of Bob Dylan
So here's the first page of the first chapter of the first draft of "Things Have Changed"
Hibbing "I believe there is iron under me. My bones feel rusty and chilly." Frank Hibbing, January, 1893 Teetering at the brink of the deepest iron ore pit mine on earth , the North Country hamlet where Robert Zimmerman evolved into Bob Dylan remains nearly as remote an American outpost today as it was when he left half a century ago. Some 250 miles north of the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Hibbing was small town America writ large and in primary colors: the summer sun cut flat like a bloody red disc against a vast azure horizon, and emerald forests rising from rusting hillocks of crimson slag that still stretch for miles, decades after being exhumed -- a vibrant visual reminder of Hibbing’s past. During the long, deep winters, street lights and smoking chimneys stand vigil against five-foot high snow drifts that blow off of Lake Superior, out of the Canadian arctic. Wind howls over the immigrant population of northern Minnesota thrashing them incessantly until the suffocating winter skies finally give way to a colossal spring, completing the cycle of seasons that transform Bob Dylan’s hometown once more into as vivid and improbable a setting as any ever imagined by Norman Rockwell or Thomas Kincade. 
It's been awhile since I've been here...
But enough about me...A little homage to one of my early influences, the journalist, raconteur, man of appetites to beat the band, Stanley Leppard...
The late, great Stan Leppard swearing off tobacco for the 43rd time. (Curt Johnson photo)
The Girls
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Fiction
Three sailors aboard a U.S. spy ship during Vietnam learn a dirty little military secret...the hard way.
Selected Works
"Part biography, part dysfunctional family chronicle, and part institutional and urban history, with generous dollops of scandal and gossip." --
The New Yorker
"McDougal makes Nicholson’s everyday life just as fascinating as his films in Five Easy Decades"
--Publishers Weekly
“Engrossing”
--New York Times “A bombshell!” --New York Daily News “Tough and adversarial” --Los Angeles Times
The true Hollywood nightmare and tragic love story of Robert Blake and Bonny Lee Bakley. |
