St. Louis Riverfront Times

Tag: News Feature

  • The Champ

    The Champ

    The village of Champ sits on a plot of land overlooking the busy interchange where Interstates 70 and 270 meet in a tangled web of concrete. It isn’t much. There’s a massive limestone quarry carved into the hillside, owned by Fred Weber Inc.; a sprawling set of buildings belonging to Grace Church; and, beyond a metal gate bearing a faded “No Trespassing” sign, four neatly kept ranch-style houses lining one side of a street. A fifth home is under construction.

    Champ is so small, in fact, that with just 14 residents, it ranks as the tiniest municipality in all of St. Louis County. There are no signs delineating its boundaries, no City Hall. And Champ’s five-member board of trustees, which governs the village, comprises half of the adult population.

    More than four decades ago, when Champ was officially incorporated, the village’s founder, Bill Bangert, pictured more. Much more. In his mind’s eye, he could imagine a massive 115,000-seat domed stadium that could accommodate virtually any sport — baseball, football, track and field, swimming and diving, basketball or hockey — and the largest of conventions. His vision included a huge restaurant with enough seats for 1,500 people, suspended nearly 400 feet in the air at the apex of the dome and accessed by moving sidewalks 600 feet long. His sports center would include a shopping mall with 2 million square feet of retail space and a 27,000-car underground parking garage that could be converted into a fallout shelter large enough to accommodate 600,000 people.

    This wouldn’t be just any stadium. “METRO,” as he called it, was meant to be an Olympic stadium, an $87 million behemoth grandiose enough to lure the Pan American Games and the Summer Olympics. As a former mayor of Berkeley who’d founded a successful road-building company, Bangert was an imposing man who figured anything was possible. This was a man who had literally dodged a bullet fired through his car window and once competed in a national shot-put competition at Madison Square Garden while blind in both eyes, finishing in second place. He figured he could overcome the odds with his planned municipality, which he hoped to pay for using an unusual bond-financing scheme. He eagerly promoted his grand plan, taking a scale model of his stadium to meetings with potential backers in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and even far-away Yugoslavia. “I can’t miss, absolutely,” Bangert said in 1959, the year the village of Champ was incorporated. “I believe construction will start this spring, that it will be in operation by 1962.”

    But the stadium Bangert envisioned was never built, and numerous obstacles meant that Bangert would never develop his 300-acre village or adjoining industrial park, either. His 4,800-square-foot home built in the village was foreclosed on, and he was forced to file for bankruptcy. In the late 1970s, his personal and professional life in shambles, Bangert moved west to California to get away from it all. But the village of Champ remained on the map.

    More than two decades passed before Bangert returned home to Missouri. He now lives in a comfortable frame home with a big front porch in rural Marthasville, more than 40 miles from Champ. And so much time has passed that his idea of a domed stadium is no longer futuristic; nor is his proposal to develop the vast floodplain, now called Riverport. Bangert, now 77, figures his timing was off. “They accused me of being 30 years ahead of my time, and they were just about right,” he says, chuckling. But Bangert isn’t sitting around reflecting on the past. He’s still throwing the shot put and the discus and winning medals across the country, and his mind continues to churn out unusual ideas, albeit on a smaller scale — from staging a “commemorative Olympics” in St. Louis in 2004 to displaying a long-forgotten religious painting at Busch Stadium.

    The seeds for Bill Bangert’s dream for the village of Champ were planted long before he took steps to incorporate the swath of farmland near the site of what was to be a major interchange of two highways. Athletics had long been important to Bangert, a man who stood 6-foot-5 and weighed 265 pounds then, and he dreamed of becoming the first athlete to compete in the Olympics in both boxing and track and field.

    Bangert played football and baseball at Berkeley High School and, later, at the University of Missouri, where he established a reputation as a top track-and-field competitor as well, winning the NCAA discus throw in 1944 and 1945. He was also an accomplished singer, a baritone who attended his final year of college, at Purdue University, on a glee-club scholarship. He later met his wife, a former Muny Opera singer, while both were soloists at Central Presbyterian Church in Clayton.

    Bangert continued to compete after college, holding the Amateur Athletic Union championship for the shot put in 1945 and 1946. He gained fame as a St. Louis Golden Gloves champion and hoped to qualify for the Olympics in boxing, but he lost in the semifinals of the Olympic Trials.

    Bangert’s family owned a successful road-building company and St. Louis County Transit Co. In 1947, he started Bill Bangert Construction Co. as a one-man hauling venture, but he would later go into business with his two brothers, including his twin, in Bangert Bros. Road Builders Inc. And he ventured into politics: Elected mayor of Berkeley in 1950, he served for more than six years. For Bangert, that time was punctuated by tremendous swings of fate.

    At age 28, Bangert lost sight in his left eye because of a disease that caused recurrent hemorrhaging in the microscopic blood vessels surrounding his retina, resulting in scar tissue that caused the retina to detach. The disease soon affected his right eye as well, resulting in total blindness. He feared he’d never see again, until surgery in the spring of 1952 miraculously restored vision in his right eye. Bangert was able to see his daughter, 16-month-old Sharon, for the first time since shortly after her birth.

    In 1954, Bangert decided to run for Congress as a Republican, promising the “singingest campaign you ever heard.” When he received a threatening note warning him to “lay off the labor men in this campaign,” it made the newspapers, though Bangert publicly dismissed the threat as the work of a crank. But two weeks later, in a bizarre incident, Bangert told Berkeley police that his car had been struck by a bullet as he was driving home around midnight, shortly after dropping off a babysitter. To this day, Bangert is unsure whether he was an intended target or the victim of an errant gunshot, but the .32-caliber bullet entered his left front window, hit a metal molding and ricocheted onto the seat. Splinters of glass from the window lodged in his left eye, requiring surgery. Luckily, Bangert says, his left eye was his blind eye.

    Bangert lost the race for Congress, but he wasn’t discouraged. He continued to serve as mayor of Berkeley until 1957, when he resigned after voters eliminated the mayor’s seat and opted for a council/manager form of government. In 1958, he left his job at Bangert Bros. and announced his plans for the village of Champ.

    Bangert had hatched a plan for what he described as a “controlled municipality.” Combining his interests in government, business and sports, he came up with his idea for the domed stadium at the intersection of what was then the Mark Twain Expressway and a proposed circumferential highway — what St. Louis now has in I-70 and I-270 — about five miles west of Lambert Airport.

    His idea was a novel one. He wanted to legally incorporate a small village of about 300 acres on undeveloped farmland, where the stadium would be built, and issue tax-exempt revenue bonds to finance construction of the stadium and a massive shopping mall. Rentals to businesses occupying the facilities would go to retiring the bonds, and the rent payments could be written off by the businesses as operating costs, resulting in a savings in federal income taxes.

    The municipality would provide no fire or police services and would have just a skeleton crew of residents, including Bangert and his family — just enough people to form an official municipal body to oversee the stadium and surrounding businesses. He hired an architect to draw up plans and brought a scale model to a meeting at the Chase Hotel of city and county business and government officials. He hoped to lure the 1964 Summer Olympics.

    Bangert built a large four-bedroom French colonial for his family, complete with a circular drive surrounding a removable aluminum flagpole. Bangert sometimes tossed the flagpole like a caber — he actually used it in several track meets. Naming the village was easy. He called it Champ. He explains: “Because of the connection to sports and athletics. It was the epitome of sports, so that’s why I chose it.” Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not — depending on whom you ask — it was also the last name of one of Bangert’s early partners in the venture, Norman Champ, who served on the Berkeley Board of Aldermen when Bangert was mayor and was owner of Champ Spring Co. Champ the businessman bought 120 acres of what became Champ the village.

    “I went to the [Missouri] Legislature and asked to incorporate the village, and they did, and the [St. Louis] County Council did, too,” Bangert says. “It wasn’t easy. We really incorporated mainly to build the stadium, the enclosed stadium. At that time, all we had in St. Louis was Sportsman’s Park at Grand and Hebert in North St. Louis, and it was very obsolete.”

    “The idea caught on right away,” Bangert says, “a restaurant 350 feet up in the dome, surrounded by a shopping center. Back then, all we had were the beginnings of shopping centers. This was one big giant mall that would have been bigger than any mall in the United States, even today. We had a lot of people excited about it. The shopping was combined with the stadium, so someone who didn’t want to watch a football game could go shopping.”

    Back in 1959, when Champ was incorporated, then-County Supervisor James H.J. McNary called the project “a great thing for St. Louis County, its neighbors and the entire metropolitan area of St. Louis,” according to newspaper accounts. George Halas Jr., son of then-Chicago Bears owner George Halas, was among the celebrities who attended dedication ceremonies. “It’s a magnificent project and I hope it is built,” he told the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “These huge stadiums must come eventually.” Representatives of five businesses declared their intentions to locate at the facilities once they were built. They included the president of the Chase Hotel and Edward and Donald Schnuck of Schnuck Markets.

    But not everyone was enthusiastic. Much of the opposition came from downtown St. Louis interests: “They thought it would relocate the center of gravity of St. Louis and disturb Downtown Inc., etc., and they weren’t going to have [a stadium] out in the county, that’s for sure.” Bangert says environmentalists also opposed development in the floodplain. And by the summer of 1959, Champ — with a population of 14 residents, half of them Bangert and his family — was dealt its first blow when Gov. James Blair vetoed a bill, approved by two-thirds of the Legislature, that would have allowed the village to issue $87.5 million in revenue bonds to build the stadium and shopping center. After that, things began to spiral downward.

    Bangert, and others, say his talk of a domed stadium in the county spurred downtown businessmen to pursue more vigorously the idea of an open-air stadium in downtown St. Louis (Busch Stadium opened in 1966). And because of that, Bangert began to shift his focus somewhat, pushing to create an industrial park on the floodplain next to Champ. But even those plans were dealt one setback after another. The County Council refused to allow the annexation of 3,100 acres in 1961 and suggested that Champ disincorporate because its plans for the stadium were not materializing. A grand jury was convened to look into whether steps should be taken to dissolve the village, and the next year, Thomas Eagleton, then the state’s attorney general, started legal proceedings to dissolve the village — a case that ended up before the Missouri Supreme Court twice.

    Eagleton says he can’t recall all the details, but he describes Bangert as a “real promoter who concocted all kinds of pipe dreams that I deemed to be unrealistic.”

    The Supreme Court later ruled that although the village was legally incorporated, it could not annex the 3,100 acres, finding that the village was “not equipped to supply any services to the annexed area.” But Bangert wouldn’t give up, and in 1965 and 1967, Champ attempted to annex about 1,000 acres. Bangert continued to cling to his dream, going to New York in 1967 to bid for the 1971 Pan American Games. In 1968, he competed in the Highland Games in Scotland. He made a run for lieutenant governor, filing as a Democrat, with a platform that included bringing the Olympic Games to Missouri in 1976 and promoting horse racing as a means of subsidizing the school system and reducing taxes. Once again, Bangert lost the race.

    In 1969, the Missouri Supreme Court again ruled against the annexations. The long court fights doomed Bangert’s efforts to develop Champ. “When the Supreme Court denied our annexation, what could I do with the land?” Bangert says. “I couldn’t sell it as industry. I couldn’t develop it. I couldn’t do anything with it.” And although the R.C. Can Co. relocated to Champ, no other industries followed. Bangert filed for bankruptcy in 1971, listing debts of $3.3 million. He lost his home, the French colonial where he and his wife raised their five daughters, and every bit of land he owned in Champ.

    Bangert acknowledges that his scheme was troubling to some. “In my case, it was the solo enterprise they objected to, so I was my own worst enemy,” he says. “They felt no one person should have control of 3,000 acres and develop it with public financing.” Still, he has no regrets: “I think I did all I could.”

    Norm Champ Jr., whose father bought 120 acres of what became Champ, describes Bangert’s plan as a “house of cards” built on other people’s money. He says his father got involved with Bangert when the family’s land, near Lambert Airport, was being taken for use by the expanding airport: “They kept taking our land away and our land away, and when they do that, you can reinvest, and we bought this land and sold it for a profit. [Bangert] came up with this proposition to create Champ, Mo., and to build a stadium and incorporate it into a city and invite the Olympics. We got involved,” Champ says, “because Champ is a more Olympic name than Bangert.”

    But it all fell apart. Bangert, Champ says, never had the money to exercise the options on the adjoining 1,500 acres and gave one landowner $30,000 in earnest money using a worthless check, telling him: “Don’t cash it — it will bounce.” In another instance, Champ says, Bangert “had this trench dug, and he was going to have a canal in from the river, and I said, ‘Bill, how did you afford to get this trench dug?’ and he said, ‘I gave him an option on the land,’ and I said, ‘Bill, you don’t own the land.’” (Bangert says he did write a $30,000 check to the landowner but says it wasn’t supposed to be cashed unless he exercised the option. As for the trench’s being paid for with an option, Bangert says, Champ “has got something mixed up.”)

    Champ says a combination of factors killed Bangert’s dream. “When the state declared it couldn’t be incorporated and the county fought this thing of building the buildings and having them be tax-free, it was just beat down,” he says. “There were too many people against it. It ended with Bill filing for bankruptcy. Bill’s fun, he’s interesting, he has great ideas. He’s a character out of this world. But I have a saying about a lot of people, especially in politics: If they tell me the sun’s going to come up tomorrow morning, I’m going to check, because, odds are, it won’t.”

    Champ does believe the stadium was a good idea. And he credits Bangert’s domed stadium with pushing downtown forces into action. “The timing was such [that] it really put Busch Stadium on the map. It really moved them to go ahead with Busch Stadium. It is what finally pushed them over the edge, and I give him credit for that.”

    For Bangert, the professional losses took a toll on his personal life and nearly ended his marriage. In the late 1970s, he headed west to California to get away from it all. “It was pretty tough,” he says. “After a while, a certain bitterness sets in. I felt if I were going to get on with my life, I had to get away from this whole thing and start over.” He moved to Anaheim, managed commercial properties and lived in the shadow of Disneyland.

    He continued to take part in shot-put and discus competitions, and he and his wife regularly sang together in Christian operas and, once, on Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power. He wrote a screenplay based on his life and his lifelong romance with his wife, figuring he might as well while he was so close to Hollywood. He pitched it to Disney.

    Bangert describes his story: “It was the idea of staging the Olympic Games; I was a national champion in track and field and boxing — that and the romantic angle of my wife and I and our singing together in opera. I think it carries forth a lot of romance,” he says. “It could make a very romantic story. I see a lot of junk on television today that has no storyline whatsoever. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out there is a lot of human interest in that.”

    Disney wasn’t interested.

    Over time, road-builder Fred Weber Inc. bought up much of the land in Champ and continued digging in what is now a massive limestone quarry. Champ remained a municipality — one of more than 90 incorporated small cities in St. Louis County — and though the village’s population has fluctuated over the years, today it stands at 14. It is still governed by a five-member board of trustees. Mary Kinsella, who has lived in Champ for 18 years, is the clerk. Her husband, Matthew, is the chairman. He works for Fred Weber, and they rent one of four homes in Champ, also owned by Fred Weber.

    “The thing about the village,” Kinsella says, “is, it’s like living in the country but being in the suburbs. We have deer, coyote, wild turkeys in October. It’s kind of removed from the city atmosphere, yet it’s right here at 70 and 270,” she says. “We still function as a village; we have a monthly meeting with the board of trustees, and business goes on as usual. We just keep plodding along.” After elections, Kinsella says, it isn’t unusual to get calls from the media inquiring about Champ’s 100 percent voter turnout. But with 10 voters, getting good turnout isn’t that hard, she says.

    Anyone driving by Champ might miss it in a blink. “How would you know you were in Champ?” Kinsella asks. “It doesn’t have any distinguishing factors that would say, ‘I just went through the village of Champ.’ There are no signs that say you are in the village of Champ. You wouldn’t know you were in something different,” she says. Kinsella, in fact, doesn’t even tell people she lives in Champ. “Goodness, no,” she says. “Then I have to explain it to people, and they just stare at me.”

    Most of Champ today is, quite literally, a hole in the ground, and what may be most remarkable is the massive development that has sprouted up around it, including the hotels and office buildings of Riverport, Riverport Amphitheatre and other Earth City development. As for Bangert, there’s nothing in the village he founded that honors him, but Kinsella says residents have heard of him: “I never met Bill Bangert, but I knew about him when I moved back up here; people in general know about him, from reading about it.” Out of curiosity, she says, “I looked up stuff in the Post from way back when.”

    Back in the late ’50s, many questioned the wisdom of Bangert’s idea of commercial and industrial development in that floodplain — yet that is precisely what occurred in the years after Bangert left. “They said I was 30 years ahead of my time, and it was about 30 years before it took off,” he says. “There is no way I could have held onto it that long, but if they’d left me alone, it would’ve taken off like a house on fire!” Bangert says his proposed form of financing for constructing new facilities — municipal bonds paid for by the leases of the business that occupy the facilities — resembles today’s tax-increment financing (TIF). “It’s all based on the same thing, that taxes generated from that project go to the city for a specific purpose, and that’s what they’re doing.” Bangert was among the region’s first advocates of urban sprawl — he proposed a massive shopping mall 20 minutes from downtown long before malls had sprouted on the suburban landscape, and his idea for a domed stadium preceded the country’s first, the Houston Astrodome.

    Because of his seemingly outlandish ideas, Bangert “wasn’t treated very nicely by the media,” says Carl Stifel, who was involved in some of the real-estate deals involving Champ. “He was ahead of his time in his ideas, but a lot of them were very, very good.”

    Former St. Louis County Executive Gene McNary remembers when Bangert ran against former County Supervisor Lawrence Roos. “I remember the debate, because Bill Bangert was quite a character. He had gone to the Scottish Highland Games and was some kind of he-man discus-thrower or shot-putter. I think he was exceptional, and he went away with a medal. I don’t know the whole story, but he was famous for that, and he talked about it in the debate — how he’d won all these medals and he was happy about it but he’d really be happier if he was elected county supervisor.” Bangert lost.

    But, McNary says, as crazy as some of Bangert’s ideas may have seemed decades ago, they don’t seem so crazy now: “It was so far off, and, yet, where is the village of Champ? That’s where Riverport is. Today there is an amphitheater there, and that’s where I was going to put a domed stadium in order to keep the football Cardinals in town. So Bill Bangert wasn’t so far off with his ideas, but he sure was pretty far ahead of his time.”

    After an absence of nearly 20 years from Missouri, Bangert and his wife, Rosemary, returned in 1997 to be closer to two of his five daughters, one of whom now lives down the street from him and another who lives in OFallon, Mo. At his home in Marthasville, he still works out for at least an hour every day, throwing a discus in the yard that his dog, Jake, fetches for him. He exercises on a treadmill, ski machine and stationary bike in his basement. More than three dozen medals hang on the wall — all of which Bangert won after he turned 70. He says it is athletics that has helped him get through his many defeats. “Competition has been an antidote for me to deal with all these problems,” he says. “I could come home and work out for an hour and get rid of all that tension. Athletics really saved my life.”

    He has kept busy competing in events across the country and in Canada, in senior and masters games, regularly finishing in first or second place. Rosemary was recently Mrs. Senior Missouri. Bangert takes some credit for it: “I was competing in an event in Columbia, and I heard about this contest, and I said, ‘Do you mind if I enter my wife?’ She was visiting my daughter in Florida, and I called her up on the phone and said, ‘I entered you in this contest for Mrs. Senior Missouri.’ She said, ‘Oh my goodness.’ She wasn’t too happy about it.” But Bangert notes that she took home the big trophy, now prominently displayed in his basement workout room. “I won my event, and she won hers.”

    In 1998, Bangert ran unsuccessfully as a U.S. Taxpayers Party candidate for Warren County presiding commissioner, saying he hoped to become the oldest elected official to win a world championship in the World Veterans Games. And he has continued to churn out ideas. One involved creating a 200-acre island at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers with a massive fountain that could shoot a stream of water more than 1,000 feet in the air, a monument to the bicentennial of the 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition. “People come from all over to see things animated,” he says. “People are always interested in fountains and things like that.” The idea got him a story in the Post-Dispatch, but that’s about it.

    Bangert has also written letters with his idea for a “Commemorative Olympics” he would like to see staged at Washington University in 2004 in celebration of the centennial of the 1904 Olympics held in St. Louis. The games, he says, would be senior games but open to anyone in the world who wanted to compete. He figures the medals could be created to look like the medals won in 1904. Besides, he hopes to compete in those games. He’ll be 80 years old.

    The idea that has really captured Bangert’s fancy is one he believes could rectify a 97-year-old slight to a Polish artist who came to America in 1904 to show his work at the World’s Fair.

    Bangert learned about the artist, Jan Styka, about 10 years ago, while still living in California. He and his wife were invited to give a concert on the life of Christ, based on African-American folk songs, at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, Calif. They performed in front of a massive painting, called “The Crucifixion,” that was 195 feet long and 45 feet high.

    According to a history of the painting compiled by Forest Lawn, the painting took seven years to complete. Styka received an invitation to display that painting, and others, at the 1904 World Exposition in St. Louis. But when he arrived in New York, he was told there was no facility at the fair that could house a painting as large as “The Crucifixion.” He left the painting at a warehouse in New York and traveled on to St. Louis, where, on the last night of the fair, all of his canvases were destroyed in a fire. When he returned to New York, he learned customs officials had seized his huge painting for nonpayment of duty. He never saw the painting again.

    Years later, Hubert Eaton, who founded the Forest Lawn Memorial Parks in Southern California, heard about the painting and began searching for it. In 1944, one of Eaton’s representatives found it in a Chicago warehouse, wrapped around a 60-foot telephone pole. He bought it, brought the painting to California and built a special building to house it.

    Bangert believes St. Louis citizens should get a chance to see the painting. “Nobody knows of this,” he says. “It’s sort of a hidden venture, and the only reason it was not shown was it was too big to be seen, so it lay in a warehouse.” His idea involves creating a smaller replica painting measuring about 20 feet long that could be displayed at Busch Stadium in a 10-inch-deep lightbox with a pedestal describing the painting’s history. The painting’s actual dimensions could be marked off with some kind of tape so people could see just how big the actual painting is. “It could be done very cheaply,” he says, “and it would draw people downtown and from all over the world.” Bangert has written and spoken to representatives of St. Louis 2004 about his idea, but, so far, it hasn’t gone far.

    “I got a price on having the original [reproduced], and it was less than $10,000. It’s a pittance, and I suggested it to 2004 committee. I said I’d arrange to get financing for it, from athletes and such interested in such a thing, if only they would get permission from Busch Stadium to put it there. They’re going to tear it down anyway a year or two after 2004 anyway, if their plans go ahead.” But he hasn’t gotten much response from officials with 2004. “They said they wished me luck on it, and so forth.”

    Peter Sortino, president of St. Louis 2004, is unfamiliar with the details of Bangert’s idea but says the proposal sounds “very interesting.” As planning for a 2004 celebration moves forward, Sortino says, it will be given some consideration. “There are going to be a lot of people involved in the celebration — it’s much bigger than me considering it,” he says. “There are going to be a lot of ideas, and they have to be vetted to a certain degree. This is one idea that could possibly be something.”

    Displaying a replica of a long-forgotten religious painting is likely Bangert’s last grand idea. And this is a man full of unusual ideas. When he dies, for instance, he wants to be cremated and to have his remains put into the objects that represent the track-and-field events he’s competed in — such as a shot put — and given as “a memento” to his daughters.

    But of all his ideas, Champ remains his favorite. Every time he drives into St. Louis, Bangert says, he makes a point of cruising by the village. All that is left of his home is a driveway leading to a precipitous drop-off at the edge of the quarry. Still, Bangert views Champ as his greatest accomplishment.

    “It will always be there,” Bangert says. “They may have wiped me out, but they can’t wipe away the history of it. It’s there. I started it, and I don’t care who reaped all the profits — they can’t deny that it’s there.”

    And Bangert says he has no bitterness over the way things turned out. “There was a time when I felt an injustice in not necessarily sharing in the wealth it created but in sort of the propriety of seeing it through,” he says. “But I found out a long time ago, as an athlete, you have to lose before you can become a real champion. You have to experience losses. That was one of them. And, at 77 years old today, I don’t have any regrets at all. God has been very good to me.”

  • See No Evil

    See No Evil

    In a quiet South St. Louis neighborhood near Lindenwood Park, Denise Wolff rounded a corner and headed toward her tidy two-bedroom home on Bancroft Avenue. She was behind the wheel of her brand-new, loaded Chrysler Cirrus LX — fresh off the dealer’s lot just days earlier.

    As a card dealer at the President Casino on the Admiral, Denise usually worked the overnight shift from 8 p.m.-4 a.m., and on this warm summer morning, July 17, 1997, she’d clocked out at 4:09 a.m. She’d been in an unusually good mood. She chatted with a co-worker who drove her to the lot where she had parked under the Poplar Street Bridge, plucked off her car a note written by a man she’d been having an affair with and, still a bit giddy over the relationship, told her friend she had a “pocketful of them.” Denise then drove off. She stopped briefly at the drive-through of a Hardee’s on Hampton Avenue to pick up a breakfast sandwich. It was still dark outside, and as Denise neared her home, only the mercury-vapor street lights cast a faint glow on her surroundings.

    The 39-year-old mother of two was terrified of the South Side Rapist — a notorious serial rapist who wasn’t caught until late 1998 — so much so that she had had a motion-activated floodlight installed near her driveway. When she came home before dawn or after dusk, she would almost always pull her car straight into the garage. This Thursday morning, Denise did not. Instead, she got out of her car, walked down the driveway and — perhaps toward someone or something — across the sidewalk in her frontyard. She made it past only a few squares of concrete before a sudden burst of gunfire brought her crashing to the ground. The bullets pierced the garage door, the trim, the frame of a front window. They ripped through Denise’s legs and torso.

    The noise roused slumbering neighbors up and down Bancroft and on nearby Wenzlick and Prather avenues, many of whom peered out their windows and called 911. They reported the sound of gunshots, and most of them also described seeing a gray or silver conversion van driving away from the scene with its headlights off, heading east on Bancroft, then north on Wenzlick.

    Denise lay crumpled on the sidewalk, her body riddled with bullet wounds. Her pink Bic lighter and a pack of Salems were scattered around her, along with her keyring and a brown paper bag containing her uneaten Hardee’s breakfast. Clutched in her fingers were the handwritten notes from her lover, a married man who also worked at the casino.

    The first person to reach her was a neighbor, an off-duty police officer who awoke at 4:37 a.m. to the sound of gunfire — two controlled shots, then a rapid succession of 10 to 15 more. He found Denise lying facedown on the sidewalk, bleeding from numerous wounds. There wasn’t much he could do.

    A police officer dispatched to the scene was told Denise’s husband lived about 100 yards away in a house at the corner of Bancroft and Jamieson avenues. He knocked at the door, and Larry Wolff, a city plumbing inspector who’d been legally separated from Denise for seven years, quickly answered, wearing a pair of boxer shorts. He told the officer he hadn’t heard a thing.

    Paramedics arrived within minutes, and as they struggled to stabilize Denise’s condition, her husband stood in front of the ambulance. The police officers noted that his gaze seemed focused away from his wife, bleeding on the ground. Denise was transported, alone, to Barnes-Jewish Hospital. A doctor pronounced her dead at 5:41 a.m. The bullets had lacerated her kidney, colon, spleen, bowel and bladder, fractured several bones and caused massive bleeding.

    It was a sudden and violent death for a woman who had led a rather unassuming life. Even in those early hours of the investigation, however, all of the signs suggested Denise was targeted for death, not the victim of some chance shooting. “This was a purposeful, vicious crime,” St. Louis Police Capt. Dave Heath would later say, addressing the television cameras. “We are not looking at this to be a random act under any circumstances.” Outside Denise’s home on Bancroft, police officers and crime-scene technicians strung up yellow crime-scene tape and placed a brown paper silhouette of her body on her sidewalk. This was a homicide investigation, and the questions on their minds were obvious: Who killed Denise Wolff? And why?

    By all accounts, Denise was a devoted mother to her two girls, who were born 13 years apart in separate marriages. Jennie, who lived with Denise, was 10; Angie Erickson was married, with a 3-year-old son, and her belly was bulging with another child. Denise’s second grandchild was due at the end of September, and she couldn’t wait.

    As a single mom who’d been legally separated from her husband for years, Denise had gone to dealer’s school because it seemed like a fun way to make a decent living without investing huge amounts of time or money in training and education. She’d made her family and friends play cards every night when she was enrolled in dealer school, shuffling and shuffling until she got it just right. She was a night owl, so the first chance she got, she asked for the overnight shift. It also gave her more time to spend with Jennie. Denise stood about 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed about 140 pounds. Of Lebanese descent, she had dark eyes and hair that she dyed a shade of red. She spent her nights working at the President Casino, earning more than $40,000 a year dealing cards at blackjack tables and spinning the roulette wheel. She loved the lights, the sounds, the slot machines, the people, the excitement of it all. “It’s like going to a party every night,” she’d say. Denise had worked on the Admiral about three years after first breaking into the business at the Casino Queen.

    When Denise wasn’t working, she was almost always with her family, whether she was bass fishing or playing bingo with her mother in Washington County near Potosi or taking her grandmother, who lived a block away from Denise, out for a day of shopping and French onion soup at Famous-Barr. She liked to putter around her gray frame home, making sure it was “just so,” tending to the zinnias in her garden or her multicolored rosebush, splashing around with the kids in her backyard pool. On her days off, she’d have pajama parties with Jennie — an evening of popcorn and movies, just the two of them huddled in front of the VCR. If Johnnie Brock’s had a new shipment of Beanie Babies in, Denise could be found waiting in line, because Jennie loved them. Every Christmas, she showered her daughters with gifts, racking up charges on her credit card no matter how tight the family finances. It was her favorite time of the year. She’d have the tree up and decorated the day after Thanksgiving, without fail. She favored holiday sweaters, much to her older daughter’s chagrin, especially a green one with a snowy landscape scene. She could be incredibly soft-hearted, and her generosity extended beyond her family. One year Denise took in a young girl and her mother who’d ended up at a Salvation Army shelter, buying the child a heap of presents that she could scarcely afford. When one of her friends, also a single mom, was struggling at Christmastime, Denise handed her one of her credit cards and instructed her to shop. “Pay me back whenever you can,” she told her.

    Denise’s birthday was creeping up on her — her 40th would have been in August — and she was dreading it. At the same time, though, family members had begun noticing a surge of confidence and optimism in Denise that they hadn’t seen before, or at least in a long time. At Angie’s urging, Denise got a different haircut, a more up-to-date style. She was going to a tanning booth occasionally, getting manicures, talking about the men at work who flirted with her, such as a St. Louis Blues hockey player who repeatedly asked her out. Denise was flattered by the attention. She was also proud of the career she had carved out for herself, and she cherished the rewards of her hard work, trading her old Ford Escort for the white 1997 Chrysler Cirrus complete with the gold trim package. In the car, Denise listened to the same kind of music as her daughters and kept up with the latest tunes. In July, she and Jennie went out and bought a Third Eye Blind CD with the song “Semi-Charmed Life.” “She used to say that was her life,” Angie recalls. “She’d say, “This is the life I live, a semi-charmed kind of life.’”

    It certainly hadn’t been an easy one.

    Denise grew up in South St. Louis the eldest of four daughters. Even as a child, Denise could be outspoken, hot-tempered and strong-willed. At 16, she insisted on moving out, dropping out of high school and marrying her high-school sweetheart. Her mother, Sandy Cantrell, described that time as Denise’s “hippie stage.” She was pregnant two months later and gave birth to Angie at 17. But the marriage was rocky, and Sandy says her daughter moved back home when she was pregnant. Denise and her husband gave it a second try when their daughter was 3 months old, but it didn’t last. The marriage ended in divorce.

    Denise married a second time when Angie was a toddler. But that marriage was also short-lived. It lasted about a year-and-a-half until Denise met, and fell in love with, Larry Wolff, who was a friend of her second husband’s. They married in 1983 at a ceremony at City Hall. The wedding made the television news. “I didn’t even know she was getting married; I tried to talk her out of it,” Sandy recalls, describing Larry, back then, as a man with long hair who wore chains and boots with big heels. “Denny says to me, “Mom, you ain’t gonna believe this, but watch Channel 4. We got married on TV.’ City Hall had just decided they were going to do small ceremonies, and they wanted to do a little advertisement of what they were doing,” Sandy says. “They had a cake and everything. It was bizarre.”

    That marriage was often rocky. Both Larry and Denise could be stubborn and hot-tempered, Sandy says, and when they had a big argument, the two would race to get home first and move all the furniture out of their house or apartment. Things seemed to settle down somewhat after a few years, and their daughter, whom they named Jennifer Sue, was born in 1987.

    By 1990, the couple had moved into a double-wide trailer in Robertsville, Mo., near Pacific, where Larry’s parents owned 3 acres. Denise felt isolated and bored there with no money and no car. Cathy Hatton, one of Denise’s younger sisters, says Larry would often stay at Cathy’s house in St. Louis, because he was working for the city as a plumbing inspector and had to have a city address, but often, when Denise called to speak to him, Larry wasn’t home, Cathy says. “He stopped buying groceries and paying the bills down there, and he wasn’t coming home,” she says. Denise’s older daughter, Angie, from her first marriage, also did not get along with Larry. Family members disagree on precisely what the final straw was, but eight months after moving to Roberts-ville, Denise called Cathy and told her to rent the biggest U-Haul she could find and help her move out of the trailer while Larry was at work. Cathy did.

    Soon, Denise filed a petition for divorce from Larry. But Larry persuaded her to settle for a legal separation instead, and she agreed.

    Within a few years, Denise bought the home on Bancroft with the help of her grandmother. Larry bought a house a short distance down the street, on Jamieson. Some of Denise’s friends and family members questioned the wisdom of such a move, particularly if Denise ever decided to go through with a divorce, but she told them she figured it was best for their daughter. “When he moved down the street, I said, “You’re nuts. What happens when you’re done with this guy and you want a boyfriend?’” Cathy recalls. “She said, “This is perfect. This way, he can keep Jennie.’” The arrangement seemed to work, at least for a while. Over the years, Denise struggled to make ends meet, working as a waitress at the downtown Radisson Hotel and the Missouri Athletic Club, going to cosmetology school but then deciding hairdressing did not pay enough, cleaning houses and, ultimately, attending dealer school. With their homes so close, Jennie could sleep over at Larry’s when Denise was working nights at the casino. The two maintained an unusual relationship, relatives says. Though they were separated, Larry sometimes slept over at Denise’s and, up until about a year before she died, they occasionally had sex. From time to time, he’d help with the bills, and he regularly cooked meals for the three of them. On holidays, they were together.

    In the six or seven months before Denise’s death, however, things began to change. Denise told her older daughter and her sisters how she was yearning for independence. She told her mother she was tired of having “no life” and needed to find herself a husband she could get along with. She talked about divorcing Larry. And in the few months before she died, she talked about her new lover.

    If Larry knew of any of the changes going on in Denise’s life, he certainly didn’t let police know in the hours after his wife’s murder. Larry told police he didn’t have a clue. He knew of no problems Denise was having; he had no idea why anyone would want to hurt her.

    Angie, Denise’s older daughter, was at Larry’s house, in the same room with him, when police questioned him. A detective asked her to step outside for a brief interview. Who could have done this to your mother? the officer asked. Angie, visibly shaken and crying, motioned with her head back toward Larry, who was inside the house. Her mom had been trying to divorce Larry, she said. They’d been fighting a lot. She’d been dating a man she worked with on the Admiral.

    Other witnesses provided additional tantalizing details. Detectives spoke with Scott Baird, a financial planner with the Travelers Group, who had been working with Denise on obtaining a debt-consolidation loan. He had met with her one week before she was killed; she had told him she was in financial trouble. She was in debt, with a new car and a house payment, and she had cosigned for her husband on his $9,000 car loan, but he hadn’t made payments in more than a year. She also told him she was planning to finalize a divorce from her husband. The loan was approved on July 16, but the financial planner hadn’t been able to reach Denise to give her the news.

    Some family members offered a variety of possible theories that did not point to Larry.

    Denise’s sister Cathy told detectives that Larry fixed Denise meals almost every day, helped her with bills and, even though Denise treated him badly at times, he stuck around and loved her. She said Larry had never shown any signs of violence and that it was Denise who had the short temper. She told police she suspected Denise’s “big mouth” might have had something to do with her murder.

    Another sister, Sue Doetzel, told detectives that although Larry and Denise were separated, she felt they loved each other. They had keys to each others’ homes and, when they were getting along, Denise would ask Larry to help around the house and ask him for money. When Denise was mad at Larry, Sue said, she would tell him she wanted a divorce, and though she had been telling Larry that for several years, she hadn’t actually made an attempt to get one. There was never any violence between the two, as far as she knew. Sue knew of her sister’s affair, and she asked Denise what she would do if Larry found out. “She said she was separated,” Sue recalled, “and it was her house and she could do what she wanted.”

    Sandy, Denise’s mother, says she had her suspicions about Larry, but she wasn’t ready to tell detectives. Instead, she spoke about the casino: Could it have been a disgruntled customer who lost money there? Could it have been related to a complaint her daughter filed against the casino with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? Sandy told detectives that Denise had been demoted from supervisor to dealer, which meant a cut in pay. Denise’s father, Roy “Buck” Cantrell, told detectives the same thing. “He believes the murder was somehow tied to the boat,” a detective wrote in his report.

    Kandi Maier, a friend of Denise’s and her co-worker at the President, told detectives that Denise had been seeing a male co-worker, John DeBoer, at the casino for about three months and that he was Denise’s first boyfriend since she and Larry separated seven years earlier. Kandi said she had tried to get Denise to date before but that her friend always refused, telling her that her husband “would kill her if she dated another man,” according to police reports. Denise had begun complaining to Kandi that Larry seemed to be watching her every move, so much so that she had begun parking at the rear of her home and entering through the back door to avoid detection. She told Kandi she thought Larry knew of the affair; during a recent phone conversation, he walked in and demanded to know to whom she was talking. When she told him it was none of his business, according to police reports, he replied: “It’s either Kandi or John.”

    Another co-worker and friend, Joyce Jeraldine, told police that Denise told her she and Larry argued all the time, though he did not physically abuse her. On one occasion, Jeraldine said, Denise described how Larry put a gun to her head, then pulled the trigger. She told her friend Larry was doing it “just to scare her. The gun was empty.” She said Denise told her that if Larry learned of her relationship with John, he would “blow her fucking head off.” Denise was falling in love with John, she told Jeraldine, and about two weeks before the murder she had given him an ultimatum: Leave his wife or end the relationship. She said he told her he needed time to decide what to do. And recently, Jeraldine added, Denise’s attitude toward Larry had changed. She was bolder. She told Jeraldine: “Fuck him — I don’t care about what he thinks.” She said she wished Larry would find a woman and get on with his life.

    Detectives questioned John DeBoer, Denise’s lover, at length, and he was told he was a suspect in the murder. A former New Jersey police officer who was married with children, DeBoer told police that he had been seeing Denise for about six to eight weeks. During that time, DeBoer said, Denise had spoken at length about Larry and their marriage, how they once had a lot of good times but had grown apart. She told him she wanted a divorce from Larry, that she hadn’t loved him in years. She told him Larry lived across the street, which is why she always wanted DeBoer to come in the back door and park his car on Wenzlick. She told him that at times Larry had a violent temper and that he had once pointed a gun at her head.

    The night Denise died, DeBoer said, he got off work at 1:30 a.m., left a note — the latest of three he’d written her that evening — on her car and went home. He said he woke his wife, spoke to her around 4 a.m. and didn’t leave home after that — which his wife later confirmed. He was asked to take a polygraph, which police later told him he failed. DeBoer was surprised. DeBoer, who says he was upset and scared when he took the test, said he was telling the truth, and he denied killing Denise.

    Days later, DeBoer spoke to police again. He said he remembered another conversation with Denise, about a month earlier, in which she told him Larry had found her new birth-control pills. He was angry, she had said, and accused her of having an affair. DeBoer said Denise told him that she fabricated an explanation, claiming her doctor prescribed them to regulate her period. For about a week afterward, DeBoer said, Larry drove Denise to and from work.

    Through the early days of the investigation, Denise’s family, for the most part, stood by Larry. Denise’s mother and sisters were reluctant to say anything that might implicate him. They wanted to give Larry the benefit of the doubt.

    Over time, that would change.

    For police detectives trying to solve a homicide, time is often the enemy. The more time passes, the less likely it becomes that a murder case will ever be solved. In the case of Denise Wolff, police had no murder weapon. They were unable to find the van seen driving away from the crime scene. If there were any eyewitnesses to the crime, none had come forward.

    But such a violent shooting was an uncommon occurrence in the neighborhood near Lindenwood Park, and it was an area where many police officers lived with their own families. Numerous detectives canvassed and re-canvassed the area, searching for witnesses and hoping for a break. Detectives Ralph Campbell and Timothy Kaelin were among them.

    It was Sunday, July 20, 1997, three days after the murder. As Campbell and Kaelin began a re-canvass of the neighborhood, two other detectives told them that they’d gotten information from a tipster who suggested that they talk to a woman who was known to walk her dog between 4 and 5 a.m. in the area of the murder.

    The two detectives went to the apartment building at 3934 Jamieson, and Campbell and Kaelin began knocking on doors. There was no answer at apartment 2-South, but they could hear dogs barking inside. As they were leaving the building, a woman walked out of that apartment. She identified herself as Laurie Lynn Chirco. She acknowledged that she had walked her dog the morning of the murder, around 4 a.m., but denied hearing any gunshots. She said she had no other information.

    The two detectives weren’t satisfied. They asked her to come downtown to the police station. Reluctantly, she agreed. Inside Interview Room No. 2 downtown, she told detectives that she woke up around 3:50 or 3:55 a.m. Her dog was standing at the front door, wanting to go outside. She put on some clothes, put a leash on her dog and walked out to the front of the apartment building. When she left, she noticed the time on the digital clock in her living room was 4:07 a.m. She estimated she was outside for 5 or 10 minutes, then came in, made a glass of tea, turned off her alarm clock — set to go off at 5 a.m. — and left her apartment at 7 a.m. to go to work. Her 13-year-old daughter, asleep in the apartment the entire night, told Chirco she heard the air conditioner making a popping sound during the early-morning hours. Chirco again insisted she never heard any gunshots or police sirens.

    The detectives didn’t believe her. In their reports, they wrote that she exhibited “non-verbal communication signs” indicating that she knew more. She told detectives she was worried about the safety of her daughter, that she didn’t want to get involved. They say they told her that her identity could remain anonymous, that she would be afforded protection if she was a witness. They showed her five photos, including pictures of Larry Wolff and John DeBoer. They said she scanned the photos and stared at Larry’s, shaking her head back and forth as a tear streamed from her eye.

    Then her story began to change, the detectives wrote in their reports. She told them she hadn’t been truthful and that on the morning of the murder, she had actually walked her dog south on Jamieson, on the east side, toward Bancroft, and when she was two buildings south of her own, she saw a man standing at the northeast corner of Bancroft and Jamieson. She thought he matched the description of the South Side Rapist, and the man — white male, stocky build, wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans — began walking east on Bancroft, in the direction of Denise Wolff’s house. Chirco said she then turned around and headed home, reaching her apartment around 4:20 a.m.

    She told the detectives she believed the man she saw was Larry Wolff.

    If Laurie Chirco’s statement seemed like a big break in the case, that break would turn out to be rather tenuous, and it wouldn’t last for long. Something happened between the two detectives and Chirco inside Interview Room No. 2 — though precisely what happened may forever remain in dispute. So instead of cooperating with police after that day at the station, she hired a lawyer and filed a complaint with the police department’s Internal Affairs division, alleging she’d been mistreated by the officers. She then went on KTVI-TV (Channel 2) — identified as “Mary,” with her face slightly out of focus — to describe the detectives’ behavior and to publicly disavow witnessing the murder. She said detectives told her she was “playing with the big boys now,” and that they’d given her name to the prime suspect. She said she had decided to go on TV in case something happened to her.

    At the time, Chirco was a 33-year-old nurse case manager for a hospice. She lived in an apartment with her daughter, and in January 1997 she had married Marcello Chirco, a Sicilian immigrant who worked as a meatcutter at Schnucks. They did not live together. Police noted that Marcello Chirco owned a gray GMC full-size van with a silver stripe and a red Ford Escort, in addition to a Chinese SKS rifle — similar to the gun used in the Denise Wolff shooting. Several witnesses reported seeing a gray van the morning of the murder, and a couple of others reported seeing a small red car. Marcello Chirco agreed to a search of his van, and he turned over his gun for tests, according to police reports. He was questioned by police — though it is unclear whether he was ever seriously considered as a suspect — and at least one witness viewed his van and said it was not the same one he saw driving away from Denise’s home the morning of her death.

    In depositions taken more than a year after the murder, Chirco said she told the officers who showed up at her apartment building that day in July that she had seen nothing. When they didn’t believe her, one stood in the doorway of the building and told her, she said, “We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way.” Though she said she voluntarily agreed to go to the station, once there she continued to tell them she had seen nothing and asked to leave “more than 30 times.” When she asked to go to the bathroom, Chirco said, one of them handcuffed her wrist to a table.

    About two hours after she arrived, the interview became more and more contentious, Chirco said. Campbell, she said, told her he was getting fed up with her and that “I was no better than the person who pulled the trigger. That this woman had suffered, and that I was a bitch.” She said he also remarked that he “wondered what my priest would think of me.”

    Campbell left the room and returned with pictures of a woman at the morgue. Chirco recalled: “He said, “Take a good look at that.’ He said her legs looked like Swiss cheese and the photographer didn’t do her justice….” Chirco described a variety of good cop/bad cop tactics used by the officers. Soon, she said, they brought in a series of photographs of men.

    “I looked at them,” Chirco said, “and said that the man, well, at first I didn’t say anything. Then Detective Campbell started slamming his fist on the table … saying that I nonverbally identified somebody in the photographs.” Eventually Chirco told them the man in the first photograph — Larry — “looked like someone” she saw on the corner that morning while she was out with her dog.

    She had asked to leave again, but the detective, Chirco said, told her that her husband was “in bed with another woman right at that time.” Throughout the interview, Chirco said, she was subjected to a barrage of verbal abuse. She said the detective, at one point, threatened to pick up her daughter and put her in foster care. She had mentioned a prior miscarriage, she said, and the detective told her she must have been having so much sex that she caused it herself. At one point, she was accused of “screwing” Wolff. Throughout the ordeal, she said, she was not allowed to leave or use the telephone. When she insisted that the most she saw was a man on the corner, they were not satisfied: “When I told them that was all I saw, and that is all I told them that I saw at the time, then as time went on, it got worse. The longer I was there, the worse it got.”

    Chirco also insinuated that something physical occurred in the interview room. She described how one detective insisted she take off her jewelry, her wedding band, her belt. She asked why. She asked for a female officer. She was told to take it off now, Chirco said:

    “Campbell says: “Look at how quick she can get that belt off. She is used to taking her belt off and taking her pants down.” He mocked the baby she miscarried, Chirco said, and told her “I didn’t deserve a child.”

    After Chirco agreed to give a taped statement, she was released. It was 11 hours after she had first been brought to the police station. She complained about her treatment to Mayor Clarence Harmon. She filed a complaint with Internal Affairs — though in February 1998, Chirco was notified by mail that her complaint had been ruled “not sustained.”

    In the days and weeks after being questioned by police, Chirco said, she was repeatedly contacted by various police officers, asking her to meet with them, asking for more information. One, she said, told her she was “hindering prosecution” — a felony punishable by 10 years and a $10,000 fine. Another stuck his card under her door, told her of a reward, apologized for what the other officers had done. One, she said, told her police could take away her child and turn the girl over to the state until she cooperated. Chirco refused.

    In September, Chirco said, she got a call from a sergeant. She told him she thought she had been followed in her car by someone she believed to be Larry Wolff. She said he told her police couldn’t offer her any help: “If you can’t help us, we can’t help you.” She hung up on him. And not long after the murder, she moved out of her apartment on Jamieson.

    As police pushed forward with their investigation, the family of Denise Wolff struggled to deal with their grief — without much success. And their feelings toward Larry began to change.

    Sandy didn’t want to point a finger at Larry in the early hours of the investigation. “For the first couple of days, we tried to act like, you know, somebody else did it, till we knew. You can’t jump to conclusions,” Sandy says. “But after a couple of days, we knew. Everything that come out of his mouth was a lie. First he said he was sleeping so sound he didn’t hear anything, when people three blocks away heard it. First he said his dogs didn’t bark, then he said the dogs did bark, and he went out to see the dogs. Then he told my niece, “I heard it, but I just lay there in bed.’ Then he told someone he was under a window air conditioner, but he has central air — the air conditioner is on his sun porch. He wasn’t sleeping out there; he was in his bedroom.”

    She began replaying scenes in her mind, the way Larry acted strangely at a fish fry Larry and Denise attended at Sandy’s house the week before Denise’s death, and how he told her he wished Denise would drop this “talk about a divorce.” She began thinking about the way Larry could be possessive — how he raised two dogs from pups and, Sandy says, chose to kill them rather than give them away when he and Denise were moving from one rental property to another. “Someone said, “Why don’t you give those dogs away?’” Sandy says. “And he said, “They’re my dogs, and no one is going to have them but me.’ He took them out and beat them with a crowbar and a hammer,” she says.

  • Anatomy of Desire

    Anatomy of Desire

    She’s not unlike anyone working in the cubicle next to yours. She may be a data-entry person (which she is). Attractive, middle-aged, divorced (which she is as well) — you can imagine the details of her appearance any way you like: blonde, brunette, redhead. Shapely, plump, stout, thin — she won’t be described with specific details, because the risks to the life she has imaginatively, and determinedly, created are too great. Her family doesn’t know; her son doesn’t know. If her identity were revealed in these pages, she’d lose everything — that life she has constructed is delicately secured. So imagine her as you will — her business is fantasy, after all — but don’t make of her someone extreme, the mental picture that comes with the word “dominatrix.” She’s not who you would expect (“I’m not Elvira,” she says), just as the corporate CEO, the lawyer, the former NFL star sporting the Super Bowl ring — some of her clientele — are not the people you would expect to be into bondage, cross-dressing. You would not expect them to be the sort who would ask — no, beg — to be whipped, to be verbally humiliated, to be spanked, and then head home to their wives and children, feeling restored.

    Think of her, at least superficially, as a typical Midwesterner. She was born and educated in the city, raised in a large Catholic family, but don’t make any assumptions about abusive priests or sadistic nuns, or some perverse childhood interpretation of the wine and the chalice, the robes and the incense. She wasn’t that kind of Catholic girl. “Why do people want different things?” she asks, rhetorically. “Some can say, ‘Back in childhood such-and-such happened.’ There is nothing in childhood I could look at and say, ‘This is why I enjoy being in control so much.’”

    Adolescence, as with most people, was a time of exploration. The adolescent quest for meaning or significance shows itself outwardly in clothes, fads. A profile of youth culture in St. Louis in the late ’70s would include the fading-out of disco, the first punkers and hip kids catching the new wave. The more intimate discoveries aren’t so easily stereotyped.

    Her boyfriend was open to exploring different fetishes, she says: “We played with areas of bondage, sensuality, role-playing.” But, as with most people, those teenage years of adventure and daring became a memory. She grew into adulthood and did what adults do: married in her early 20s, gave birth to a son, lived a family life. “The marriage was completely vanilla,” she says, and adds, “and vanilla is good, too. Everything was fine; the marriage went its course. My desire for fetish didn’t have anything to do with my divorce.”

    With the dissolution of her marriage, once the pain subsided, she realized new possibilities, a world beyond the boundaries marriage had imposed. She remembered happier days, more free-spirited days, and those teenage forays into kink: “When I was married, and that wasn’t available, I didn’t actually miss it, but once marriage was over … ”

    Once marriage was over, about five years ago, she checked out the Internet. The desire for control — or, more crucially, the pleasure of control, which she had experienced since childhood — she found on the kinkier filaments of the Web.

    If people with fantasies for handcuffs and butt plugs, for wooden canes and leather paddles, for playing the role of slave or master — if they found themselves isolated and assumed themselves alone, abnormal, deviant in the seemingly kinkless Midwest, the Internet revolution was their invitation to reach out and flog someone, and right here in River City.

    She began discovering information, the kind of information she didn’t know existed. She uncovered a local chapter of a national organization, People Exchanging Power (PEP), a group that meets monthly at a hotel near I-270 for informal discussions. Coaxing herself to attend her first meeting was difficult, she says: “I didn’t have any idea what to expect. When I got there, I realized they were very friendly people, welcoming me.”

    There were about a dozen participants, mostly men. “Women tend to come with other men,” she says, “or they don’t come at all.” One couple led the group discussions. It could have been any civic organization gathering to share ideas about pertinent issues, drinking sodas, munching on vegetables and dip, wearing name tags — “Hi, my name is ….” For her, the surface banality of it all provided a jolt of recognition: “I wasn’t as abnormal as I thought I was.”

    She was understandably shy at her first PEP meeting (or ” PEP rally,” she jokes, “black-and-blue pompons”): “The first time, I just sat and didn’t talk about anything.” Books were discussed, some how-to info was provided — imagine a Tupperware party, except the fetish material of choice is leather rather than plastic.

    “As I got to know some of those people better, I was introduced to more private groups,” she recalls. People who met at PEP splintered into groups “to have more play, to have something more than a book club.” You can’t develop dexterity with a whip by reading a manual, she says. And then these groups became couples. “That’s where community starts,” she observes, “a community of like minds.”

    “Community” is a word that’s often used, but rarely with precision. She believes there is a BDSM (bondage/domination/ sadism/masochism) community in St. Louis: “We don’t have enough people into BDSM for a Yellow Pages. We don’t have restaurants. We don’t have our own bars. A jazz lover can go to a jazz club. I don’t see Fetish Night at the Galaxy as being an accurate view of the average BDSM participant.

    “Yet without those things, there are social groups, educating groups, play groups — people who have gotten to know each other, who have scenes with each other.” Perhaps the strongest bond they share is that, when they’re together, “we don’t have to live with this giant secret.”

    A noticeable change comes over people who have found something wholly their own, when a self that’s been locked away is released. You see it in people who have experienced religious conversion or spiritual illumination, people whose sexual identity has heretofore been closeted — you see in such people a new self, a self liberated through its own recognition. You see them newly confident, radiantly so.

    She realized that her desire for control could not only be fulfilled but that she had an instinct for domination. She was good at it — submissives she played with told her so. She felt she was good at it. “I can throw a single-tail whip with the best of them,” she brags, “but I can get the same effect by whispering in their ear at just the right time.”

    She began to explore the possibility of becoming a professional dominatrix, or “prodom” for short. A prodom who was involved in the local BDSM scene even before there was a scene “took me under her wing. We talked a lot. She recommended books, and she started including me in a few of her sessions, first letting me watch and then letting me participate.” She took on a moniker of her own — let’s call her Mistress Kali, because many prodoms take the name of “Mistress” or “Goddess” connected to a powerful female name, sometimes with a reference to myth. Mistress Kali’s tutor we’ll call Lady M.

    Lady M, Kali says, is recognized as a pioneer of the local scene: “She takes people into her life like members of a family. She makes friends and keeps them for years. She’s one of the most generous people I’ve ever met.

    “She’s one of the first women allowed in the gay men’s leather scene. She was the first one.” Mistress Kali says there has been a history of segregation between different outsider groups, between gays and straights, women and men. “Lady M allowed for different groups to cross.”

    Lady M also devoted herself, her knowledge and her body, to Mistress Kali for the novice’s tutelage. “Because Lady M’s been on both sides,” both submissive and dominant, Kali says, “she was able to tell me what the experience is like from both sides. I was able to practice on her. What I learned about myself was that I can push my own boundaries. The first time I ever threw a flogger on somebody’s shoulder, I thought I couldn’t possibly do this, but he responded with such happiness and such eagerness. The more I did it, the more he liked it.”

    Mistress Kali began to take on clients of her own, which meant gradually acquiring pieces of equipment and, just as important, costumes. “I love putting on a corset,” she says, “thigh-high boots. It’s different from my normal life. I love the feel of leather. It’s a powerful feeling.” She loves shoes with 6-inch heels, loves shoes in general. “I’ve been into shoes since puberty,” she confesses, and she has at least 75 pairs tucked away in closets — not quite Imelda status but still a significant personal inventory.

    The timing of her entry into the profession proved fortuitous. She quickly tired of hauling her various apparatus and costumes to motel rooms. Then Lady M chose to go into semiretirement and sold Mistress Kali her “dungeon” for a flat fee. “My dungeon is a renovated loft downtown — very quiet, very clean, very subtle. No one’s in there except my clients and me.”

    The décor of a dungeon is as individual as the people who use it. Kali figures there are about five prodoms with dungeons working regularly in St. Louis. She knows of at least 10 private dungeons: “For some people, it’s just putting hooks on the wall; for some, it’s getting a spanking bench. Some people have full setups in their basements.”

    What goes on in those spaces is as full of variety as the human imagination can contain. The St. Louis scene motto, one promoted by the BDSM group Leather and Lace, one that appears in Different Loving: The World of Sexual Dominance and Submission (a kind of primer for the novice), sets the requirements of “safe, sane, consensual.”

    “If you don’t have all three things, you shouldn’t be playing,” says Mistress Kali. “All scenes are negotiated beforehand. Limits and guidelines are discussed. ‘Safe’ words are established — words a submissive can use to stop a scene at any time.” For example, a word such as “stop” or “don’t” might actually serve to intensify a scene, so words outside the context of torture are employed.

    “As you explore this loving exchange,” she notes, “you start to learn their needs, their reactions, to the point you don’t even need a safe word anymore.”

    A phrase often voiced in the BDSM community is “It’s about pleasure, not pain,” but Mistress Kali finds this to be more jargon than real observation. “For some people, pain is pleasure. Everyone has a different fantasy, and motivations are all different. I’ve seen people who are true masochists, who can take an extraordinary amount of pain — and moan with pain — but they may not understand verbal humiliation at all. A person who wants to worship a woman’s feet cannot understand why anyone else would want to be tied up.

    “BDSM is not always about sex,” she adds. “It’s about fetish. It’s about fulfillment. It’s about pleasure.”

    And it’s about transformation and release, Kali says: “I see that in my work. I see that in people who walk in — lawyers in three-piece suits who have been in high-pressure, high-powered jobs, all they want is an hour of escape. They don’t want to make a decision for the next hour — that is relaxation, that is a vacation. I see people who want to be cross-dressed, who feel like a different person, who feel comfortable and natural, who have women’s names, who have fantasized about that — and that’s where they’re comfortable.

    “For most people, it’s a way of expressing themselves. It’s a huge relief. Most of my male clients who are happily married men, they just have to have a void filled in life. They feel they can’t go to their wife, or they’ve brought it up in subtle ways and been rejected.” Or they don’t want these interactions with their spouse, don’t want this to be part of their everyday intimacies.

    A reciprocal relationship exists between dominant and submissive. She wants control; he wants no responsibilities. She wants to rule; he wants to surrender. There are submissives who so desire to escape the pressures of adulthood that their dominants diaper them like infants.

    Mistress Kali doesn’t involve herself in infantilism, but she participates in the stripping away of a personality, then aids in reconstructing that veneer before the client heads out the door: “It’s funny, because it’s tiring but exhilarating, too. I put out a lot of emotional energy, as does my client, or anyone. It’s a lot of intense communicating between two people.”

    When the session is over, she says, there “should be a cooling-down session, just reconnecting.” After an especially profound scene, where role-playing has “taken them completely away from who they are, I slowly bring them back to, say, Eddie Silva, writer, making contact physically, and send them out the door.”

    She talks about these forms of intimacy with great candor, sitting in a St. Louis Bread Co. as others come and go from their tables, talking about other things. There’s the impression she’s testing how explicit she can be — the interview process its own exploration of boundaries between two people. She offers an invitation to explore her dungeon at a later date. Then, after talking about everyday matters, the various positives and negatives of a writer’s vocation, she asks, “Do you ever wish someone would just tell you what to do so you didn’t have to make so many choices?

    “That’s what all of my clients want.”

    The people directing the downtown-loft-restoration boom don’t have this sort of space in mind.

    In a building in the heart of the city, up the elevator and down an empty corridor, Kali unlocks the door to her dungeon. She’s been in ahead of time, arranging the setting for full effect, lighting white candles on two black-iron candelabra. Just as she has described it, the wide room is subtle, clean and spare, yet at the same time warm. The lighting is soft, full of shadows. The most remarkable object in the room is a wooden throne, covered with symmetrically patterned spikes. The sharp points are actually pencil stubs, she reveals, pulling one out of its hole — 1,200 pencils altogether. The throne is custom-built — as is most of her equipment — the design “based on a torture chair I found in a medieval book. It’s functional, but I don’t use it. It’s a piece of art.”

    The walls are exposed brick; ventilation pipes are visible on the ceiling. The floor is carpeted in a thick brown weave. The stereo is tuned to Classic 99.

    There’s an antique wooden altar, engraved with the words “In Remembrance of Me.” There are a couple of framed prints: one with a white-faced, masked figure, the word “Reality” written beneath the image; the other, a print labeled “Bizarre No. 10,” features a woman with orange-red hair, gagged, a look of fear or anticipation — or both — on her face.

    Across one wall is a row of long, thin mirrors, and shards of mirror. A firm leather chair with a slender back sits alone in the room. The St. Andrew’s cross hasn’t been set up yet. Hanging from the ceiling is an ominous metal hook to a 1-ton hoist.

    Mistress Kali sits on the bondage table, a solidly constructed piece of custom-built furniture, specially designed to hold an array of binding equipment — handcuffs, ropes.

    Wooden stocks, strangely appealing in a purely aesthetic sense, stolidly take up one part of the room. There’s a spanking bench. Tools of the trade hang from a wall — paddles, whips, canes, clothespins, clamps, a German gas mask, something that looks like salad tongs.

    In one corner of the dungeon is a dog cage, with a cushion on top where a person can sit.

    “Bad dogs go in there,” she notes.

    “This reflects me,” she says of her private workspace/playpen. “I’m comfortable in this room. I don’t want fake stones painted on the walls. It’s just what I’m comfortable with.” Regarding the warmth of the space, she says, “It’s been my experience that there are a lot of prodoms who feel they need to be mean and cold to be effective. I don’t believe that. Maybe that is reflected in the environment.”

    Sitting beside her on the bondage table is a white box, opened to reveal five metal objects, each tapered to a sharp point. These are talons that fit onto the fingers and thumb, made of hammered nickel.

    “One of the things I like is the tactile sense,” she says, slipping the talons on her fingers. “Imagine being blindfolded and feeling this on your bare back,” the warmth of the flesh of her hand and then the cold, threatening metal. “I have a lot of toys, very tactile things.” She says she first saw talons in use at a private play party. She got the phone number of the novelty store in New York where they came from and called immediately: “Send me some of those. I must have them!” She laughs at her mock exuberance.

    A criticism of BDSM culture — other than the standard judgment that its participants are just sick — is that these are pathetic people, so desensitized that they need to go to extremes to experience any sensation. Yet as Mistress Kali describes the “tactile sense” she explores, there’s the impression of a sensualist attuned to the illogical pleasures of the body. She handles a paddle — leather on one side, fur on the other — and describes how she’ll spank a bare bottom until it’s pink and highly sensate, then rub the fur across it.

    “Clothespins are one of the basics of SM,” she says, “on genitals or nipples or anywhere on the skin.” Lock a clothespin on flesh, leave it for some time and then remove it — the blood rushes back, she says, “and it really hurts.”

    She talks about the cross-dressers, whom she adores: “For the most part they haven’t shared this with anyone, their desire to do this. I find two main reasons that men want to dress as women: It feels good to wear silk panties; also, humiliation — to be treated as a bad girl, as a slut.

    “The cross-dresser who wants to feel the silk panties, and spend time and money on his wardrobe, buying his own wig and falsies …. I enjoy the first time a man has mascara put on him, heavy on the eyelids; put lipstick on and it’s slippery on the lips. That’s sensation.

    “It’s the opposite of being desensitized, from where you don’t feel anything to becoming ultrasensitive. It’s like becoming more alive.

    If there were a BDSM lobby, she’d be an influential advocate: “I think I’m doing a service for my clients. I did a lot of introspection before I started doing this professionally. If I was somehow preying on another person’s weakness, I couldn’t sleep at night. I still ask this question (of myself) occasionally, and if I found I was taking advantage of someone, I’d stop doing it.”

    Although the idea of giving the boot to some CEOs and lawyers might be inviting to a lot of people who would otherwise never consider themselves to be into BDSM, Mistress Kali says class distinctions aren’t part of her work: “I have a variety of clients, from blue-collar to corporate. They all get treated the same. They all get my same sneer and haughty attitude. ‘On the floor, you slave!’” she bellows good-naturedly.

    She won’t play the role of a Nazi, though, and with one client, the issue of race became problematic: “I played with a young black man one time, a submissive I met with other people. I had a hard time whipping him. He desperately wanted it, and I couldn’t do it.”

    She has a list of don’ts: no blood, no feces or urine, no permanent scarring, no kissing, no sex. She gives prospective clients a questionnaire on which they indicate their level of interest, zero through five (zero means no interest, five means intense interest), in various activities: affectionate discipline, cock-and-ball torture, face-slapping, humiliation, pony training, smothering, spreader bars, and so on. She’s learned to avoid “someone who’s looking for sex, or someone who has an interest in everything — everything from binding to genital torture to affectionate discipline. Nobody wants it all.”

    She charges $250 an hour. “Clients vary,” she says, “about a half-dozen regulars who come for at least one session every six weeks.” She may see no one for a week, then on another week schedule four sessions. She no longer advertises in the RFT “because there are too many fruitcakes.” There’s an exclusive journal for serious devotees, the Domination Directory International, in which she places the occasional ad.

    The legality of her practice, she says “is debatable.” Prostitution is defined in Missouri as one person providing sexual gratification, with body or an object, to another person for money. “I don’t have sex here. I tell them no sex, no kissing, no hand jobs.” Yet, she admits, “If somebody called the vice squad — I don’t want to think about it. I’d just have to be arrested, have the place dismantled. The worst thing is, my son would find out about this.”

    What occurs during a session varies, depending on the relationship between dominant and submissive. Kali isn’t interested in ritual; she prefers surprise, improvisation, all with a tinge of menace. She prepares herself with a few leg stretches, music. Then, she says, “I’ll get into full costume — the makeup, the clothes — that transforms me mentally into really being ready. I start inventing a scene I want to create, especially if it’s a repeat client and I know him.” With a new client, it’s more a matter of spontaneity, she says. “I like the sense of improvisation, the sense of the unknown.”

    Her clients are men, although in personal play she enjoys women, too: “They’re very responsive.” It’s Kali’s theory that fewer women pay for play because “a man can’t go up to a woman and say, ‘I want to be spanked.’ Women don’t have to pay for kink — it’s too readily available.”

    If Kali’s meeting with a new client, she says, “I have his questionnaire all ready. I don’t like people coming off the street. I want someone to think about it for several days. When they come in, I have them remove all their clothes and put them on a chair in the corner. I meet them in full fetish attire,” so the client is immediately alerted to the fact that he is moving into a very separate theater from the one he performs in daily.

    “I sit with him at my feet, and I put a collar on him. I tell him the rules of the dungeon — no sex. Another rule is my safe word, and they can use it at any time to stop a scene. They have the power to stop it.

    “I go over the questionnaire. I might have specific questions about what is on it and what’s not on it.

    “When here, they refer to me as ‘Mistress.’ They are to speak loudly and clearly. By this time I’ve probably taken them by the collar and paraded them in a big circle, just to help get them in the mindset of being on the floor, naked at my feet. I might have them stomp around on all fours.”

    She’s sure to probe into any medical conditions ahead of time: Are the client’s knees strong? How’s the lower back? The heart? What medications does he take? If there were ever an emergency, she says, “I’d drag them out in the alley and then call 911.”

    Depending on a client’s physical capacities, Kali says, “I may get on their back and have them take me for a horsy ride. I may pull the hair on the back of their head. I slowly dehumanize them. With a new client I would start out very slowly. I might play with some of these things” — she gestures toward an antique travel chest with drawers containing dildos, vibrators, plastic wrap “and other playful items.” She might choose to wear leather gloves. She might force the client to “keep knees and ankles apart, which makes them very vulnerable.

    “Most guys are very visual,” she continues. “Their eyes will follow me around. I’ll take a blindfold: ‘It’s very rude to stare. I’ll put this blindfold on you.’

    “It’s such an individual thing — putting on wrist cuffs and ankle cuffs. I can help someone get into that very submissive state. I don’t do much rope bondage. I enjoy it because it’s very beautiful, but (the clients) are time-sensitive. I have to respect that there’s only so much time they can stay.” Sometimes she’ll recognize there’s only 15 minutes to go, and if the client doesn’t have to be anyplace soon, she’ll tell them, “I’m not finished with you yet.” Then they’re off the clock and on Kali’s time.

    She explains the various implements on her wall display, which features a variety of riding crops and her two favorite whips. Whipping isn’t an activity you can learn in a continuing-ed course. She started “with a man from Chicago who was submissive to me. He gave me my first whip and taught me how to use it. It’s really just a matter of practice.

    “I can draw it across your skin like a butterfly kiss.”

    There’s a leather horse’s bridle for “part of the dehumanization.” She finds these things on travels to larger cities at weekend events, buying from specialty vendors. She shows off a new mink glove with metallic claws hidden in the fur.

    The safety shears are for emergencies. To “cut through anything, to be able to get undone very quickly,” is important. She picks up a metallic object called a Japanese clover clamp, which attaches to the flesh — the nipples, say — and, when pulled, tightens and clasps more firmly.

    There’s a plastic spatula for “scraping off wax.” The salad tongs, or what look like salad tongs, are for “testicle torture.”

    In a basket are spools of veterinary wrap, used to restrain limbs. Kali says it won’t pull hair yet it clings to the skin: “It’s really great. It’s good stuff.”

    The room next door is spare — she uses it for changing — but she’s considering setting up a medical table in there: “I get calls for that. It’s a big fantasy, I want to tell you.” In such scenes, Kali would literally play doctor to the bound, frightened, aroused patient.

    The allure of the exotic paraphernalia can distract from understanding of their purpose, Kali cautions. “There’s so much more to picking up a paddle and spanking someone’s bottom with it,” she says. “I think if people don’t know that, then they don’t understand the communication that goes on between a submissive and a dominant.

    “It’s filling an emotional void. It’s all about emotion to me. Giving up control and allowing yourself to be vulnerable is a very difficult thing to do. To be able to just surrender to another person is refreshing — that’s not a good word — restorative.”

    Her life wouldn’t be very different, she imagines, if she didn’t have to keep her fetish behind closed doors: “I don’t think I would be a different person. I would still be very private, because that’s just who I am. I would have the same friends.” She doesn’t necessarily long for the openness she might enjoy in New York City or the Bay Area.

    She wishes, sometimes, that she could call her sister and tell her how psyched she felt after three days in New York attending whip seminars, or about that former NFL player, who arrived in “6-inch stripper shoes” and a bad wig and then threw a fit because he forgot to put his pocketbook in his purse.

    She’d like to brag about her skills as a businesswoman and about how clients who have tried other prodoms have come back to her, “but I can’t take that chance. So I let my family imagine that I’m an extremely dull person.”

    But she isn’t alone. There are local organizations such as PEP, Leather and Lace, FLOG. The novelty shop Barbdwyr supplies implements and custom-made apparel — and a discreet backdoor through which to enter and exit. A weekend event, Beat Me in St. Louis, is held each spring, filling a local hotel with some 400 participants from Kansas City, Omaha, Chicago and Detroit, as well as country folks from the rural Midwest. For the holidays, Spanksgiving’s coming up.

    Even in conservative St. Louis, people find ways to overcome the stigmas and perceptions: that they are sick, pathetic, the perverse offspring of abusive parents.

    Before she became Mistress Kali, there were years of married life, raising a child, full immersion in the American mainstream.

    But the fantasies of control, the teenage experimentation — those returned to her consciousness like an invitation to a new life.

    “Desire,” she discovered, “doesn’t go away.”

  • Plight of the Gypsies

    Plight of the Gypsies

    They excite the hatred of the bourgeois even though inoffensive as sheep…. that hatred is linked to something deep and complex; it is found in all orderly people. It is the hatred that they feel for the bedouin, the heretic, the philosopher, the solitary, the poet, and there is fear in that hatred.

    — Gustave Flaubert in a letter to George Sand, written after a visit to a camp of gypsies at Rouen, France


    Stand, very quiet, on the corner of Meramec and Gustine, and listen. You’re deep in scrubby-Dutch country, where people live on one street their whole lives and order trumps pleasure every time. But if the wind blows right, you’ll hear the wild, sad strains of the Roma violin, the shimmer of the tambourine-drum.

    It’s about the only way you’d know they are here.

    We don’t recognize the Roma — some have dark, finely drawn Indian faces, whereas others are “white gypsies,” pale as a northern European. They don’t have Roma surnames; they have names straight from the tortuous Balkan history that drove them here. They’re not quick to announce themselves, either; if they meet someone American-born, they just say they are Bosnian. But they speak Romani — and often five or six other languages — and they are indeed “gypsies,” the old derogatory term many still use themselves as a shortcut for the gadje who know no better.

    Gadje is Romani for the rest of us, anyone who is not Roma. The word itself is pretty neutral, taken from the Sanskrit word for “civilian.” But for these immigrants, it’s a bruised and wary reference to the other immigrants from Bosnia-Herzegovina, the ones they say despise them.

    To the Roma, religion, race and ethnicity matter about as much as whether a man takes cream in his coffee. They scorn dogma, ignore bloodlines, protect no homeland. And in the past decade’s fierce Balkan wars, they paid a price for this neutrality. Some were drafted at gunpoint, some tortured or killed as traitors; some camped amid sewage in Macedonia, ignored by refugee agencies, and at least 100 drowned in the dark waters off the coast of Montenegro, trying to reach Italy. Those who stayed put fared worse. In Kosovo, they were first forced to dig graves for ethnic Albanians murdered by the Serbs, then branded collaborators by the Kosovo Liberation Army, then asked by United Nations officials to dig graves for the Serbs because there was no one else left who would.

    For the gadje refugees, war was hell, too. Familiar lives shattered, they streamed into western Europe, then St. Louis and other American resettlement centers. But for the Roma, Eastern Europe has ceased to be hospitable, and most of Western Europe is refusing them entry, suspecting motives more economic than political. Until a recent panic, the United Kingdom was the gentle exception, allowing Roma to enter and then shooing them from town to town or building “accommodation units” in old industrial parks. But now even England is lifting the drawbridge.

    So they are here, a tiny, rocky, hidden cove in the sea of 22,000 immigrants from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Roma rent flats next door to their countrymen, drink the same strong sweet boiled coffee, listen to music at the Sarajevo restaurant on Chippewa every Saturday night.

    But here, like everywhere else they have been, they know exactly what the gadje think of them.

    “In Bosnia, gypsies are people who didn’t have a house, who live in tents and don’t work,” offers Senada Delic, who was born in the southern part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. “A lot don’t know writing, don’t know reading. They go to every house and say, ‘Give me money, give me bread,’ and people do, because God sees.” In her work for a long-distance-telephone company, Delic has noticed a lot of Romani voices lately; she says “they speak Bosnian but not true,” and her tone is disapproving. “Gypsies like to sit down; they like a lot of music. They are very happy people; they care about nothing.”

    Amir Hotic, president of BIH Travel here in St. Louis, remembers watching the gypsies dress up grizzly bears to dance while people threw money from the balconies of Zavidovici. “That is how they lived,” he says. “We were always afraid of the gypsies. After the Sunday matinee, the gypsy kids always fought with us. And if you were bad, your mother would say, ‘I’m going to give you to an old gypsy woman, and she will take you to Italy.’”

    Ron Klutho has heard these stories, too. A lanky, gentle English as a Second Language teacher who coordinates refugee services at St. Pius V Church on South Grand Boulevard, he learned that hundreds of Roma were living nearby and wanted to help them. “Bosnians would tell me, ‘Don’t waste your time — they don’t want to work, they’re not educated, they’re lazy,’” he recalls. “They would lick a finger and put it in the air and say, ‘The gypsies are like this. Whatever it would behoove them to be today.’”

    When Klutho started meeting Roma families, he felt as if somebody had poured the pieces of two jigsaw puzzles into a single box. Some pieces fit what he’d heard — the apartments on Spring Avenue and Delor Street where he saw children playing outside on school days; the adults who came to St. Pius pleading for money they didn’t need and jobs they wouldn’t keep. “I got one couple jobs at a cafeteria, and the guy said they worked really well — and four days later they quit and moved to Florida,” he sighs. “They’ll be back; before, they moved to Kentucky for a while, and then to Minnesota, and just here in St. Louis they moved from to Ohio to Halliday to Roger to Spring to Ellenwood. I’ve run out of spaces in my address book!”

    Klutho tried not to generalize, but those were the pieces that fell into place fast, making a recognizable “gypsy” border. Then he met more families — like the father who came here to get education and a good safe life for his kids, and Avdija Huskic, who’s working full-time at a church and just bought a four-family flat. Those pieces made a completely different picture.

    Hafidza Osmic grinds the day’s home-roasted coffee with resigned patience, the brass-topped cylinder of the grinder resting in her lap as she slowly spins the crank. Her two grown daughters do most of the talking, showing none of the legendary gypsy secrecy … except that Osmic is not their real name. “I am not afraid,” insists the younger daughter — call her Mirela. “But here there are more Bosnian people, and maybe in the night somebody might….” She pulls her 18-month-old up onto her lap and smooths the little girl’s hair unnecessarily, a mother’s fidget.

    “Our grandpa, he’d been everywhere in the world,” inserts Mirela’s older sister, Sanela. “He told us if you put one gadjo on the table and another under the table, whatever the guy on the table thinks, the one under the table will say. So,” she concludes firmly, “you cannot trust gadje.”

    Hafidza nods once, and her silence carries the full dignity of a matriarch. But it’s a role she never envisioned playing from a cheap apartment off South Kingshighway, walls decorated with Japanese fans from Family Dollar. As a girl, she met her husband the traditional way, during the evening korzo, when Europeans stroll their public squares. The couple raised their children in Sanski Most, a small town filled with flower boxes and surrounded by the mountains of the former Yugoslavia. Then, eight years ago, her husband died, and war tore the town into bloody shreds, and Hafidza had to leave with her daughters and two grandchildren. She does not like the way they must live now, “three women alone, always nervous, worried about paying the bills.”

    “Papa took care of everything,” explains Mirela. “We never had to work.” She sometimes comforts herself by imagining how appalled he’d be to see them in these straits. “We would have everything if he was alive. He spoke seven languages; he had friends who were doctors and policemen. He knew a lot about the world.”

    When Mirela talks about her own absent husband, that ease vanishes. Facts drop scant as bread crumbs: He is dark-skinned. He is a Rom. He was born in Serbia, to parents from Albania and Macedonia. He is now in “Italia” with her brother. Finally Hafidza wrinkles her nose and pronounces the husband “not good” — not good, at least, for her daughter, whose oval face is lovely enough to carve into a cameo.

    Sanela, 39, with a teenage son, is more Picasso than Modigliani — strong features, hooked nose and flashing eyes. “In 1982 I make finish with my husband,” she says crisply, clapping her hands twice to indicate finality. “The man I loved, my family did not approve.” The sisters talk in turn about growing up in Sanski Most, which they miss desperately. “We lived a normal life,” insists Mirela, “working, not stealing. My father was a tailor; he made clothes and we sold them at the market. We lived well — except that the gadje treated us like animals. Still, we went to school. I always thought if I got to school, maybe one day I’d be something.”

    Like a changeling who has learned she has royal blood, Mirela is quick to emphasize who her family really is, carefully distancing them from the world’s assumptions. “There are two kinds of gypsies,” she says. “Cergary, they like to change cities all the time. Some have a good life, some bad, but they live outside. They go from place to place because they are begging and they wear out their welcome.” At this, Hafidza sets down the grinder, wraps a towel around her hand and slowly brings her arm up, twisting it to show how cergary pretend to be disabled. Later, when a neighbor drops in, Hafidza greets her and chats — and, the minute she leaves, whispers distastefully, ‘Cergar.’”

    Mirela brings a tray of bubbling coffee and pours it into small handleless cups, gracious as a British peer’s daughter. While she’s spooning sugar, Sanela produces the family photo album, pointing first to a black-and-white shot that looks like a still from an Ingrid Bergman movie. It’s their parents, about 40 years ago, on holiday in Italy. Pages flip; the photos take on color; you see weddings and holidays and finally, a little house in the hills. Tension fills the room. “Muslims destroyed,” explains Mirela, murmuring the words beneath an angry cascade of Romani from the others.

    “When I was small, I was playing with Serb guys and Muslims,” volunteers Sanela’s 16-year-old son, Elvis, drawn into the living room by the smell of coffee. Tall and skinny, he slumps into the sofa, gulps coffee and leans forward. “I was about 8 years old when the war started, and I thought I would die. People did die; I saw soldiers hit you if you just said something. But I was lucky: If I’d been this age then, I would have had to fight; I couldn’t say no, or they would shoot me. It happened to a Rom I knew.”

    Asked whether it was Bosnians or Serbs who made the boy fight, Elvis shrugs eloquently; he neither knows nor cares. “First the Serbs conquered our town,” he explains, “and then the Muslims came in ’94 and said, ‘You guys were fighting with the Serbs against us,’ and destroyed our house. We were already gone — in ’93 we went in a convoy to Croatia. Everyone with a Muslim name had to leave.”

    “We had to sign papers giving up our rights to our property,” says his mother. “In Croatia, we went to churches for help and the priests said, ‘Nothing for Muslims.’ I said, ‘We are not Muslim, we are gypsies,’ and then one priest gave us food. But there was no life there for us.” The family paid a hefty chunk of their savings to a Croatian man who promised to smuggle them to Belgium in his van. At each border — Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Belgium — they climbed from the back of the van and sneaked breathlessly across streams and woods, meeting the driver at a prearranged spot safely beyond the checkpoint. To survive in Belgium, they had to beg, says Sanela, thrusting out her hand and looking disgusted. “Moroccan people gave us money. Belgians did not. We were always on the run, sleeping in streets, going on interviews to see if we could stay someplace.” Finally they made their way to the Netherlands, where they lived in a camp and Elvis was able to go to school. “I had many friends there,” he says proudly. “It was like camp — corrugated walls, a room about this size for us” — he gestures at the tiny living room. “We were there two or three years. I wanted to stay; the time for me was really fast there. But they didn’t give us status.”

    His mother wanted to stay, too, mainly because the doctors were kind. She’d started having problems with her nerves in Belgium, when so many days went by without their finding a place to stay. At night, nightmares of war exploded one after another, relentless as machine guns. Sanela still takes strong medicine for depression. She brings the pharmacy bag to demonstrate, handing it over with a worried look. “The medicine is too strong because she is so thin,” her sister explains, and Sanela confides that sometimes she gets dizzy and it scares her. “But I have to take it, or — ” she makes her hands shake convulsively. “One time in Holland,” she adds casually, “I take all medicine to kill me.”

    Elvis’ eyes are cast down, fixed on the glossy red Job Corps folder in the middle of the coffee table. He left it there on purpose, because it makes his mom happy to talk about his future, which could be bright if he’d stay in school. He already speaks eight languages, picks them up easy as breathing. But all he really wants is to be a mechanic and have a car. “He sleeps, he thinks about car,” sighs his mom, and Elvis sighs like a burdened parent himself: “I like cars much too much.”

    Even a Mercedes wouldn’t drive away the nightmares, though: Sanela jerks her upper body to show how her son wakes at night. Hafidza, too, has nightmares, but she refuses to talk about them. “Why people sick like that, it’s because they think too much of what is past,” she says, glancing at her daughter before rising to clear the cups.

    The original “gypsies” came from several different ethnic groups, gathered into a band to fight the Muslims. Scholars have narrowed their origins to northern India but haven’t yet figured out why so many left at the end of the 10th century. Slowly making their way up through Iran (one Romani legend says they flew on the wings of a turkey), they arrived in Europe around 1100. They announced themselves as exiles from Little Egypt. Promptly, mistakenly, they were christened “gypsies.” The newcomers had no territory, no wealth, no allies or political authority, no place to seek refuge. Swept to the margins of each society they entered, they were burned in medieval pogroms, enslaved in Romania, banished from Napoleon’s France, ordered by the king of Hungary to give up their dress and language.

    Asked what he knows of his people’s history, Elvis shrugs. “Some say we came from India,” he says finally, and Mirela nods eagerly. “If you see Indian people, same dances, same life,” she says. “They like to eat, drink, dance. Music — music is something beautiful to us.” She looks at her nephew expectantly, and he rises to play a cassette of mournful Roma music. “Only Roma can understand what is pain and soul,” he says, his eyes daring you to contradict him. Then the music quickens, its spirit lifting his. “Show the dance,” he urges, and while the older women dissemble, Mirela’s toddler sways her hips unsteadily, curving her hands forward with perfect grace.

    Eventually Sanela leaves the room and returns in a vivid full skirt, bare- midriffed. Lost in the music, she is utterly unselfconscious, taut stomach muscles rippling as she demonstrates their dance. Mirela looks a little uncomfortable. “My people only wear that on Gurgev Dan,” she says hurriedly.

    That’s Gypsy Day, May 6, otherwise known as St. George’s Day. “It was originally a Serbian festival,” says Elvis, “but they like too much the gypsy music, so without us there is no Gurgev Dan. Now,” he adds, “the gypsies alone are making the party. If someone in your family is dead and he is not at the day with you, you light a cigarette for him, for his soul.”

    On a traditional Gurgev Dan, bonfires blaze at dawn and the coffee bubbles strong and fragrant in tin pots. By mid-morning, the sweet crackle of roasting pig has claimed the air. After dinner, the young men, half-drunk, jump the flames, and the poets set candles in Styrofoam and float them on the blackening river. Then the violins start, their music pulling dancers toward a clearing, and the children, eyes filled with the blurred bright colors of their mothers’ whirling skirts, fall fast asleep on the hard ground.

    The custom probably won’t continue here: too many rules about bonfires, and curfew, and river access, and alcohol outdoors. That’s the sort of contrast that makes people romanticize gypsy life, imagining it as a passionate freedom from bourgeois constraints; an outlet for what is vivid, soulful and irrational; a repository of ancient lore and mystery.

    Early in the war, when soldiers showed up in Zavidovici asking to buy four vans, Avdija Huskic knew what to do. Well-schooled in his grandmother’s import- export business, the teenager urged the men to take them for nothing. “I give it to you guys,” he said. “If I live in this place, I want it to be safe.”

    Pleased, the soldiers suggested he come along with them and drive the vans, join in the struggle. The mood changed instantly. “I don’t want to kill nobody, I don’t want to drive nothing,” retorted Huskic, backing away.

    One of the soldiers stepped closer. “You see what is happening,” he said, his voice raw. “Serbs are killing us.”

    “To me,” the boy repeated stubbornly, “everybody is the same.”

    The hate he saw in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now sees here, bewilders him. “Many priests tell me about Adam and Eva, the first people,” remarks Huskic. “You might say that you’re American and he’s Serbian and I’m Bosnian — but we all came from those two people.”

    Born in Zavidovici, he grew up with his beloved grandmother, and when she died in 1985, he struck out on his own, finding relatives in other countries and learning how to buy Italian robes and linens, carry them across borders and sell them at a profit. Then, sensing the impending war — “We know trouble before anybody else” — Huskic tried to get Croatian papers but was refused. Eventually he was found hiding out in a small Croatian town without documentation and sent to a camp on the tiny island of Obonjan.

    “For 17 months, you don’t see cars,” he says, making it as tragic as not seeing the sun. He doesn’t talk abut the violence there or explain why his forearms don’t completely straighten anymore. Instead, he cheerfully describes the size of the “mice,” holding his hands a foot apart. “We shooed them away; we didn’t kill them. I tried to put wood up to block them out; I used — like for a shoe — laces. Everybody was amazed that I made a door. But the wind was really strong and cold, and you only had one blanket, so you put half under you and the rest tried to pull it over you, and made a pillow with your clothes.

    “There were maybe 4,000 people there,” he continues. “They said, ‘How come you have Avdija name? That is Muslim name,’ and I said, ‘We don’t have gypsy names, we have Serb or Muslim or Catholic — we have those names. Then a policeman said, ‘If you are close to that Serb, I will break your leg.’ And I said, ‘The man is the same to me as you. He is just a man.’”

    While confined on Obonjan, Huskic watched his friend steal the police ferryboat he’d just washed and head, like so many others, for Italy. “I hosed the boat, put the keys back and left, and he came inside, took the keys and made a run for it. The police boat could make that 45-minute ferry crossing in three minutes. My friend had been beaten by the Croatian police, so he told the Italians, ‘Go ahead and arrest me.’ Later he called me on the phone and said he’d gotten papers as a refugee.”

    With the help of an American journalist, Huskic, too, secured permission to leave, arriving in the U.S. on Sept. 7, 1995. He stayed nearly two years in Binghamton, N.Y., then, at age 22, came on his own to St. Louis. Standing in line at the crowded, chaotic International Institute, Huskic — whose thin, sensitive features and smoldering eyes would startle most American women into shyness — met his future wife, also Romani. She came from Prijedor, a city north of his hometown. “I had a really nice suit,” he grins, “and I took my haircut, and I had 1,000 German marks glued under my shoes. So all the time I am checking out my shoes. I saw her walking with her brother, and then I heard her trying to send something to Switzerland, and I offered to write ‘Switzerland’ for her. She said, ‘You’re gypsy?’”

    The couple now has two small children, and Huskic is making payments on a four-family flat big enough to accommodate his wife’s extended family. He’s also making payments on an Infiniti, bought to impress his people because he eventually hopes to be a gypsy king (a position many now accord to his wife’s grandfather). “You have to be straight up to be a gypsy king,” explains Huskic, “and you have to have all the information, go to meetings, politics, that kind of stuff. In Bosnia you have to be rich, too, but here everybody knows we can’t get lots of money.” He works full-time as a custodian for St. Margaret of Scotland, does odd jobs on the side and hopes to rent out the family’s fourth flat. “I want to make sure they are nice people,” he says, holding himself a little straighter. “I like to be clean, put out flowers.”

    He’s a living contradiction of the “dirty thieving wanderer” stereotype, and he knows it. He also knows why: “Lots of gypsies never have any education, but I went to school for eight years.” A math and language whiz, he says the other kids’ taunting finally drove him away. “Everybody call us ‘Gypsy, gypsy.’ First grade they try to bother me, and I start to fight back. I say, ‘Why you can tell me that? I have my name; you can call me my name. You have your own; I have my own.’

    “When I was older, the boys were fighting with me,” he continues, “saying, ‘Gypsy-gypsy-gypsy,’ and one day I take a chair and break the window and throw everything out. The policeman came, and I said, ‘Would you not be mad if somebody tried to make you mad for nothing?’ And then I stopped going to school. My aunt was really young, my age, so I took her with me to the office and said, ‘I got married — I’m not going anymore to school.’ And the principal bought us a wedding present.”

    By the time he left school, he’d had a brush with “gypsy crime”: “One of my friends had a machine and was making no-good money, crazy money,” recalls Huskic. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be in jail for that. Somebody can kill you like a dog.’ He said, ‘You can just drive the car.’ I said, ‘No, I’m just 15 years old!’ — and finally I said, ‘OK, let’s go.’ It had 16 valves, stick shift, really fast,” he adds, the glee still alive. “We stop and sell 3,000 German marks, then go to Sarajevo, and he sells another couple thousand. I said, ‘Let’s go now — don’t do it anymore.’ He wanted to sell it back home. I said, ‘Anybody knows us there — let’s go, let’s go.’ Then a policeman caught us both. I told the truth, everything, and they let me go.”

    Gypsy crime isn’t always so benign: “The Roma I worked with in Latvia were dealing drugs,” notes Barbara Bogomolov, who now manages refugee-health services at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. “In many communities overseas, the Roma are relegated to a criminal fringe role. But I’ve seen no sign of crime in the Roma I’ve worked with here.”

    Europeans would find that hard to believe. Their crime reports throb with a new kind of outrage — not clever-cute warnings of fortune-teller fraud but a bristling fury at the gypsies’ audacity. Roma made headlines Jan. 21 when they cleared 74 acres of forest in the Rumanian village of Afumati, refused to give up the stolen wood and then allegedly attacked the policemen asking them to leave. On Feb. 1, when staff at a supermarket near London were squirted with breast milk by a lactating Romani refugee they’d caught stealing. On Feb. 13 in Tabor, just south of Prague, when they refused requests to leave a restaurant well after closing time. Three were injured in the resulting melee.

    These accounts reek of fear — not so much the traditional fear, of being exploited by thieves and tramps and fraudulent fortune-tellers, but a more primal fear, of the wild strangers who intrude on civilized society and shatter its rules. Roma are quintessentially Other: They pay no heed to conventions of home ownership, propriety or churchgoing morality; they have no stake in society, no mortgage or stock portfolio, few relationships of mutual respect with gadje. So until recently, they’ve had little incentive to stick around, fill out the census form, sign up to bring a casserole, show up for Little League.

    Now economics and social pressures are forcing the issue.

    In August 1996, Disney Adventures magazine wrote whimsically about a condition called “gypsyitis,” its symptoms being “an urge to run away from it all and dance among the dandelions.” Taken aback by protests, the editor insisted that this was “a positive portrayal of the Gypsy spirit.” But outside the Magic Kingdom, the Roma are more focused on survival than on dandelion-dancing.

    “No sign here of that romantic roving life,” announced Richard Blystone, broadcasting for CNN from Usti nad Labem. “Most of East and Central Europe’s 6 million gypsies have forgotten it, we were told, and don’t really want it anymore — but haven’t been accepted staying put.”

    The nomadic life started out of necessity. When the Roma arrived in Europe, they didn’t own property but weren’t serfs, so they had no position in which to stay anywhere for any length of time. Rivers became their bathtubs, and they developed a strict taboo against contamination, or marime. (Ian Hancock, a scholar who has written extensively about his Roma heritage, remembers being taught with utter disgust that the gadje washed clothes and vegetables in the same bowl and let dogs eat off their plates and sleep in their beds.)

    Gradually the travelers developed trades natural to a caravan: shoeing horses, peddling wares, performing. They were accused of shiftlessness, yet they could whisper horses, exchange currencies without a calculator, carve treasures from scrap material, turn a violin into theology. “Their music pulls your soul to cry,” says Amir Hotic, adding, “Maybe it is because they don’t have a set house. Maybe they are crying to be settled, crying to be recognized.” He says he hired two Roma at the Marriott West, and that very day a $10,000 LCD projector went missing. The pair were suspected immediately. But management later decided the client had taken the projector with him — and the Roma proved excellent employees.

    “You hear people say they are lazy,” remarks Bogomolov, “but if you look carefully, they are anything but lazy about the issues they deem important. If something is not important to them, even if it’s quite within their capability, it’s rather important for it not to be important. The whole philosophy is that you should not waste your energy and time and precious thought on something that is truly not an issue.”

    Equally misunderstood is the Roma attitude toward “duty” and “possessions” — words that, for years, supposed experts have claimed do not exist in Romani. Exasperated by a mistake that gets picked up, repeated and philosophized every time someone writes about the Roma, Hancock finally compiled a list of 10 words for duty and 15 for “possession” from the language’s various dialects. No one had bothered to check.

    The Roma keep their secrets, that’s the excuse; they refuse to teach gadje their language or the rituals that color their lives. Indeed, history and sociology texts are full of elaborately footnoted, utterly inaccurate explanations of gypsy culture, mischievously offered to amateur scholars who’d made pets of them. The secrecy is mainly self-protection, but it widens the wedge, making alienation not only the core of Roma identity but its curse.

    Trust cancels the curse. So Avdija Huskic has been trying to teach Ron Klutho the ropes — how to roast a pig, how to speak Romani. “To be gypsy, you don’t need to be really fantastic,” he said reassuringly. “You just need to be with the people all the time, have a community, eat together. Five or six people eat from one plate.” Klutho got the message: Americans don’t know how to share, or live in the moment, or enjoy themselves with abandon. In Huskic’s words, “Gadje just eat pita; we eat the whole lamb.” (It’s not just metaphor: The last time Huskic roasted a lamb outdoors on a spit, neighbors yelled, “What are you doing? You killed a dog!”)

    In fairness, though, there is much in Roma culture to confuse an outsider. Until recently, St. Louis’ only real clues came at times of death, when the gypsies’ elaborate rites of mourning caught the media’s attention. Back in 1935, when Queen Lily of the Mitchell tribe died, she lay in state in a tent on the grounds of the Hoffmeister Mortuary at 7814 S. Broadway, clothed in pink and red silk, with clean straw beneath her casket and a lighted gasoline stove in front of it. Six years later, another Roma chief, Gus Stevens, lay in state under a tent at a gypsy camp in Bridgeton, where 30 followers kissed his feet and face and drank whiskey in his honor, pouring a sip on the ground for the Old Man before each drink.

    According to Anne Sutherland, who has written about cross-cultural medicine in the Patrin Web Journal, a repository of information on the Romani culture, “Reporters, physicians, hospital staff, social workers and police are all aware of a great happening when a gypsy becomes seriously ill and dies. When they ask what is going on, they may be told, ‘A gypsy king (queen, prince) has died.’ This reply is a way of satisfying reporters and providing a reasonable explanation to hospital staff and police of why the gypsies are flocking into town in large numbers…. Death is a major crisis in a gypsy family that must be dealt with in ritual.”

    Mourning swallows every other aspect of life; one does not wash or shave or comb one’s hair, and no food is prepared during the intense grieving period. Next, all material ties with the deceased must be burned, broken or sold without profit. “After a funeral, depending on how much money you have, you go to a hotel or someone’s home,” says Huskic. “You put the person down, the family puts a little dirt and then everybody shovels a little, and when you leave, you can’t turn back, or he will pull you down with him. After the funeral, people go directly to wash their hands. And then we eat. Some people go back and bring food to the cemetery. If the man smoked, then you smoke. If he drank, you have to spill a little into the grave and then drink.

    “We have wedding customs, too,” he offers. “Put two thin loaves of bread under the wife’s arms, you have sugar cubes in your mouth — you have to kiss and exchange. Then you put the right hand up outside the door and hit her. If she falls down, she is not good. Then you take glasses and break them. If those glasses don’t break, it is not good also. But I did it different here in America, just going to the judge.”

    His voice is wistful; life seems a little less sacred here, and though, like most Roma, he has little patience for the categories of organized religion, he feels no less religious because of it. “We do believe in God,” points out Sanela. “We don’t see him, but we feel h

  • The Boys from Boonville

    The Boys from Boonville

    When Stanley Joseph was 15, he fell in love with the girl next door, and together they discovered sex. In a New York borough, it would have made for a Philip Roth novel. But these kids lived in St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe housing project, and the year was 1963. “My girlfriend’s mother blamed me for her daughter’s interest in sex,” says Joseph, “and several of her adult male relatives made threats against me that couldn’t be ignored.”

    Joseph didn’t know what to do — and neither did his parents. “They were timid Christian people who were quite satisfied with being able to fade into obscurity,” he explains wryly. “My mother was a housewife and my dad was a mailman, and neither knew how to defuse the situation.” Instead, Franklin and Bernice Joseph quietly began looking for a way to move out of the projects with their nine kids. But in their eldest’s anxious mind, that wasn’t near enough action to counter the menace from the Capulet side of this feud. So he ran away from home.

    His parents knew they’d find him at the home of relatives, but sensing a possible solution, they had him brought in by the juvenile authorities. Then, says Joseph, they begged the judge to keep their boy someplace safe until they could move out of the projects. “The judge said the only way he could detain me for any noticeable length of time would be to send me to the Missouri Training School for Boys in Boonville.”

    At the time, it seemed like an answer. On March 7, 1963, the boy was duly committed to the State Board of Training after a hearing in which, according to juvenile records, it was “alleged that Stanley Joseph has failed to abide by the rules of supervision in that he was truant from school, remained out of the house overnight without parental permission and failed to keep appointment with Court worker.”

    The next day, Joseph walked for the first time through the heavy doors of the Missouri Training School for Boys (MTS). Ninety minutes west of St. Louis, the residence had opened back in 1887 to reform delinquent youngsters ages 10-17. By the early 1940s, its reputation was Dickensian. (“When they wanted to punish the boys, they would put them in solitary and grind up their food into garbage,” recalls Ann Carter Stith of St. Louis, a former Kansas City Star reporter who was eventually galvanized into working for prison reform.)

    Soon after Joseph arrived at Boonville, there was an especially bad fight between a black boy and a white boy. “They tried to say I was involved, but I didn’t know either one of ’em,” he says. “I’d only been there a few days! They came and got me — I was working in the bakery — and they had about eight other black guys, and they took us all to the hole (concrete cells on the top floor of the administration building). They never did say why.”

    Solitary confinement would have been bad enough, but four weeks later, Joseph found himself handcuffed, shackled and thrown on a bus with six other boys. They were being “administratively transferred” to the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, then called “the bloodiest 40 acres in America.” There, the boys were strip-searched, fingerprinted, photographed and assigned inmate numbers.

    There had been no warning, no hearing, no certification of the 14- and 15-year-olds as legal adults and no criminal charges against them, let alone convictions. According to Missouri prison records, all these boys were originally charged with “delinquency,” then transferred to the penitentiary because they were “incorrigible.”

    They were also black. And in the next two weeks, Joseph says, he saw two more groups of juveniles processed into the penitentiary, not a white boy among them.

    On April 19, his group was moved again, this time to the Algoa prison farm, where for the next year Joseph would do manual labor and sleep in an open dormitory with 50 or so young-adult convicts.

    His shocked parents — who first learned of the transfer when he wrote them from the penitentiary — drove to Algoa faithfully every two weeks on visiting day. Except for the first time, though, Joseph’s dad always waited outside in the car. “He was ashamed of his child and himself,” explains Joseph tersely. After that first visit, when they were confronted with a son battered, bruised and indefinably changed, his parents had begun to quarrel bitterly. His mom was desperate for his dad to do something to save their son. His dad didn’t know how — and he was terrified of losing his government job.

    “In 1963,” remarks Joseph, “it was not wise for a black man with a large family to make trouble for powerful state officials.”

    David Wainwright’s earliest memories are the little cakes his mom used to make, and then her lying down one day, when he was about 7, and dying. “At the time, I thought she was just tired and went to sleep, and I started shaking her,” he says. “To this day I don’t know what happened. Nobody ever took the time to explain it to me.” The Wainwrights lived in a semirough part of Kansas City; David’s brothers were all older, and his dad was a big, stern man (“You didn’t quiz him”) who worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. That left David with his new stepmother for long stretches, and at 15, when he started getting “rowdy,” she wasn’t sure how to handle him.

    “One day we were on our way to school,” he recalls. “We wanted to go to this baseball game, at the old Royals stadium, so bad. So I said, “Hey, we can walk from here, from 40th and Prospect down to 18th and Brooklyn, and be there in time for the game.’ We made it inside, and there was this truant officer — I don’t know where he came from. Fat Sundae (his friend Robert Burns, who always had an ice cream in his hand) still thinks I’m mad at him because he got away — I was the one who ran track! But they caught me and took me to school, and that’s when the trouble started. I’ve never been much of a person to like authority, and they started talking to me, and I kind of — no, I didn’t “kind of’ nothing — I got pissed. I said, “This is the first time I done anything and y’all gonna try and suspend me?’ And then I got into a fight in the lunchroom and they did suspend me.”

    Next thing he knew, he found himself at Boonville.

    “I think Dad was trying to make me snap out of being rowdy,” he says wryly. “But it had the opposite effect.” By 1963, there were 459 kids at Boonville and nowhere near enough staff to handle them. School, says Wainwright, “wasn’t pushed” — at least, not if you were sufficiently big and strong to work the fields. Evenings, he spent dodging bullies like the massive “Raspberry,” who’d terrified him from day one, and fighting.

    “They had a little ritual — they’d take you down in the basement and you had to fight the duke of the dormitory,” he recalls. “Either you learned, or you took a whuppin’. At first, I just put my head down and started swingin’; that’s what I thought fighting was about.” Finally another boy taught him technique. “You take a kid 15 years old, and every day you get him in the basement boxing with people, it becomes part of who you are,” observes Wainwright. “We didn’t think about things, we just reacted: “You piss me off, I’ll get your butt.’ The guards used to goad us into fighting with each other, and they’d bet on us.”

    One night, he says, “a guard came downstairs and broke up a fight by hitting us with a steel watchclock, and we fought back.” As punishment, he and several others were sent to the “hole,” which he remembers as “up on the roof, kind of like an old warehouse.” Then he was told that they were being moved. “There was a priest — he’s the one told us,” says Wainwright, his eyes narrowing. “We asked why and he said, “Because you’re mess-ups.’”

    No one else at MTS mentioned the upcoming move, as far as he remembers. “One morning they just came and got us and drove us to Jefferson City. The first thing I saw was a guy being brought out on a stretcher, dead, with a knife in his stomach. Big muscular guy, a grown man.” He remembers whispering to the others, “We haven’t even gotten into the place yet and they bringing out dead bodies.”

    “That,” he says now, “was when we all decided to stick together.”

    The penitentiary had been branded “the bloodiest 40 acres in America” when a 1954 riot left five men dead, scores of guards injured and seven buildings burned. Nine years later, 3,400 prisoners were jammed inside the Gothic limestone, gun-turreted walls, more than double the number it was built to house. “It was a very dangerous place,” concedes Department of Corrections spokesman Tim Kniest. “It was the only maximum-security prison in the state, so they had nowhere else to send people. Now you can home in on how violent they are, and house the most predatory together. But back then they had barely any classifications.” In 1963, the year these boys arrived, three adult inmates were murdered within 24 hours, prompting an investigation by Democratic state Rep. Peter J.J. Rabbitt of Shrewsbury. He called the place a “medieval twilight zone,” noting that in the previous 15 months, there had been 212 acts of violence serious enough to require hospital treatment.

    “They put us all in H Hall,” resumes Wainwright, “but they split us kids up. It was damp and real dark in there, like a cave, and at first I thought they were putting me in an empty cell. I was thinking, “OK, OK, I’m all right.’” Then his eyes adjusted to the 25-watt bulb, and he saw the outline of an older man’s hunched shoulders. Nicknamed “Undertaker,” his new cellmate was probably middle-aged, but to Wainwright he “seemed like an ancient old dude, some fossil sitting there in the dark. He started telling me all these stories, ’cause he’d been there before, back in the ’40s. He told me, “You’re gonna have to fight while you’re here.’ And he kind of looked out for me when they come in with that sexual shit. I wasn’t gonna be no punk (the prison term for a submissive homosexual partner). I had too many fights at Boonville about that shit.”

    Wainwright didn’t have much time to get to know Joseph at Boonville, but necessity soon made them good friends. Wainwright remembers the younger boy as “kind of funny, just a little nerdy kid. We called him Shorty. He was the thinker. He kept us from doing really crazy shit, said, “We can’t never get out if we do that!’”

    According to Department of Corrections records, the boys spent about a month at the pen, then were transferred again. “By the time (President John) Kennedy was killed, we were all shoveling coal at Algoa,” recalls Wainwright. Eight miles east of Jefferson City on the loamy bank of the Missouri River, Algoa was the young men’s reformatory, intended for inmates ages 17-25. The prison farm comprised 776 acres of state-owned land, dotted with a Holstein dairy herd and streaked with the muddy tracks of five bloodhounds trained to track escapees. “‘Goa was actually worse,” says Wainwright, “because it was a lot of young guys, 20, 21 years old. The older guys at the pen were more inclined to look past you.

    “They had fields where you worked,” he recalls. “Told me I’d be bucking hay — I said, “I came from the projects — we didn’t even have grass!’” He laughs out loud, still urban to the core. Then he mutters, “I never knew mules could be that mean. But Stanley made things easier, mentally, for the rest of us. Like shoveling coal: He made it into a game, where it was more fun than work. We’d never thought of it like that.

    “Algoa was hard for me, but it was harder for Stanley,” he continues, his voice softening. “I came from a family of religious people. I’d been raised up not to do certain things, and I could tell right away he had, too. Plus, he was not all that aggressive, and he had a harder time because of it.”

    The older inmates who bunked with them in the open dorms were the new enemies. “I kept fighting,” Wainwright says ruefully. “You had to fight, or the adults would use you. And I wasn’t gonna let anybody do that, not if I could help it. Three of us got … mistreated. I’ve always kept that to myself. You kind of felt responsible — we tried to protect each other as much as we could. But we were just kids, man.”

    What Joseph says about Algoa is that he couldn’t sleep there, for fear of dying or being attacked. “I’d go in the bathroom, see a guy bent over and other guys making use out of him like he was a woman. This was going on every day. A guy’d be asleep, his mouth open, snoring, and they would put Magic Shave powder down his throat to choke him. Some of the meanest people I ever met in my life were at Algoa. They would take a 14-year-old kid and run his face into a concrete wall for sport. And if a guy wanted to have sex with a youngster, the guards would arrange a little privacy for them.

    “If you got sent to the hole,” he continues, “you got two slices of bread and a cup of water for every meal, and one real meal at noon every other day. And you could get sent to the hole if your shoelaces were untied, or your bed wasn’t properly made, or you hadn’t shaved that morning. They even made us kids shave, and we didn’t have nothin’ but peach fuzz.”

    Joseph speaks easiest about what the other kids endured — “Junior Man,” for instance, who was transferred from Boonville to Algoa around the same time, in a different batch of African-American “incorrigibles.” In the dead of winter in 1964, Junior Man “was confined in Building No. 6, the disciplinary holding cell — better known as “the hole,’” recalls Joseph. “The hole was a 5-by-7 concrete nightmare — no bunk, no mattress, no clothes except for your underwear. It had a commode, but the controls were outside the cell and it got flushed once every 24 hours. No lights. You sleep on the concrete floor wrapped in the piece of blanket they give you when they lock you in. One very cold night, Junior Man and other children beat on their doors requesting that the heat be turned up. The noise infuriated the guards, so they took water hoses and sprayed water on the naked children until they were soaked. Then they opened the windows.”

    When the story is recounted to Wainwright, he says incredulously, “That was us that got sprayed. We were those children he’s talking about. He don’t remember that?”

    Joseph says it was decades before he let his mind return to Algoa. Then, in 1995, he woke up after a nightmare and remembered “every minute I’d ever spent in Jeff City and Algoa — every name, every crack in the sidewalk. I could count every brick in the wall.”

    Shards of private memory continue to break loose, but Joseph is reluctant to take hold of them publicly because of his adult sons. “I know nothing that happened there was my fault,” he writes finally, after struggling with a list of questions for more than a month. “But I don’t want to say anything that might cast an unacceptably dim light on me in my sons’ eyes. If that light gets any dimmer, I fear I won’t be thought of at all anymore.”

    In the sepia-toned photos taken in the 1890s, the Missouri Training School for Boys looks like a cross between a Southern military college and a particularly nice insane asylum. Set amid rolling hills and embarrassingly lush orchards, the brick buildings imply restraint, discipline and order. In 1933, a MTS Plant and Needs report described them with a candor that comes only when capital improvements are being sought: “Most of them have good lines and from outside have a dignified and restful effect. Inside they are bleak, bare, unlivable.”

    That report probably won the buildings, at best, a paint job. But with the establishment of the Board of Training Schools in 1948, the institution’s punitive tone did soften, at least in theory. Emphasis now fell on education — which meant that troublemakers had to be plucked from the ranks. Alas, there were no alternative residences for “hardcore” juveniles, and under Missouri’s indeterminate-sentence law, these kids had to be kept until they turned 21 or could be pronounced reformed. So the staff began deciding who the “incorrigibles” were, then shipping them off to adult prisons with neither charge nor hearing.

    In 1967, four years after Joseph’s group was transferred, reporters and legislators began to scrutinize MTS, which was then crowding nearly 600 children into a facility built for 350. “It’s not a rehabilitation center like it should be,” State Rep. E.J. “Lucky” Cantrell (D-Breckenridge Hills) told the St. Louis Globe–Democrat (July 22, 1967). Then he added, with unwitting irony, “I’d say it’s almost as bad as if the kids were put in the state penitentiary.”

    Cantrell, who still lives in St. Louis (and who was himself convicted of embezzling union funds in 1990), says he was never told about the practice of transferring “incorrigibles” to adult institutions. Yet as chair of the House appropriations committee, he spent considerable time at MTS, bringing a fact-finding team to investigate disturbing reports about the school’s operations. “A lot of the kitchen help were kids from the facility,” he recalls, “and kitchen duty was punishment, so they would spike the food — urinate in it, spit in it. The dormitories were overpopulated; they didn’t have enough staff to properly discipline the kids; and their methods — they’d put ’em on work details that were degrading, for an excessive amount of time, for some small infraction. It was … chaotic. I also saw several kids whose problems seemed to be mental, not behavioral.”

    After photos of cots jammed 2 inches apart hit the newspapers, public officials began saying MTS should be replaced by smaller schools so that intensive counseling (the great new hope) could replace uselessly harsh punishment. “Courts are apparently using the institution only as a last resort,” reported the St. Louis Globe-Democrat on Dec. 18, 1967, noting that in the preceding year, the average number of juveniles sent to MTS each month had dropped from 48 to 26. There had been no corresponding decline in the juvenile crime rate; instead, it had jumped 30 percent. But judges were refusing to send kids to Boonville. They complained about inadequate aftercare, and, indeed, MTS had only 12 placement officers to supervise 800 boys on parole. But W.E. Sears, the director of training schools, quickly pointed out that Boonville had no place to segregate the older troublemakers from the younger boys they were trying to rehabilitate.

    For those “troublemakers,” there were “adjustment units”: 14 small, dingy cells — no mattresses because the boys would tear them up, no ventilation to move the foul air. Two of these cells had no beds or bathrooms; they were reserved for youngsters “who go berserk,” an officer told the Globe, whose reporter investigated further and found a 15-year-old who’d violated an institutional regulation locked in an adjustment unit simply because the other cells were filled.

    Bureaucrats made noises about reform, but nothing much happened — until one of the boys transferred from Boonville filed a lawsuit.

    Back in April 1966, 14-year-old Frank Allen Boone had been found “delinquent by reason of petty larceny and trespass” and sent to Boonville. MTS records indicate that he was a “Negro.” They also say that in late July, “as the boys were going downstairs to change clothes for church, Frank was involved in a fight.” The school’s Classification Committee promptly recommended that he be transferred, “should his aggressive and assaultive behavior continue.” In September, Boone “created a disturbance in the dormitory after bedtime” and “threw pillows at the supervisor when another boy turned off the lights.” The Classification Committee again recommended transfer, calling him the “ringleader” in “gang activities.”

    Despite the request, Boone stayed at MTS through the winter of 1967. Then a more serious incident was logged: A staff member said that some of the boys said Boone had tried to force them into sodomy. On Feb. 3, the committee voted unanimously to transfer him, saying “all efforts have failed” and insisting he be kept in restriction until he was transferred.

    Boone was sent to Algoa, transferred to Moberly, transferred to the Missouri State Penitentiary. From there he wrote Phillip Fishman, then a 28-year-old lawyer with the St. Louis Legal Aid Society. Fishman opened the pencil-scrawled, misspelling-riddled letter — and decided to take the case.

    Judge James T. Riley of Cole County sat through Fishman’s arguments, asked, “Do you have anything more?” and waited. When Fishman said, “No, Your Honor,’ Riley pounded his gavel. “You lose.”

    Fishman appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court. “One week after the appeal was lodged,” he says, “I got a telegram saying the court had taken the matter on en banc (all nine judges would hear the case) and sped up the calendar.” Why the urgency? “The significant issues,” Fishman retorts. “There were 37 other kids in the penitentiary who didn’t belong there.”

    Boone’s lawsuit named a long list of state corrections officials, including John C. Danforth, Missouri’s attorney general at the time, as the formal representative of the Department of Corrections. Danforth was only nominally involved and says he doesn’t remember the case, but he cosigned a brief arguing that Boone’s case was moot because he had been released from the penitentiary; that the Legislature hadn’t provided enough resources to handle incorrigibles within the system; and that “something has to be done to isolate these incorrigibles from the others.”

    Fishman had great fun responding, using everything from related U.S. Supreme Court precedents to common sense (“How do you send a kid to the penitentiary for a pillow fight?”). On Feb. 8, 1971, the Missouri Supreme Court found “administrative transfer” unconstitutional, calling it “a denial of equal protection and due process.” Writing the majority opinion, Justice James A. Finch Jr. added that the Board of Training Schools had exceeded its authority by sending juveniles to institutions where the juvenile court could never have placed them.

    The decision was close — a 5-4 split — and it set an important legal precedent nationwide. Missouri wasn’t the only state transferring “incorrigibles”: Iowa, Tennessee and several other states followed the same practice (although their criteria for incorrigibility may have differed). Massachusetts, on the other hand, expressly forbade it, and at least seven other states required a judicial hearing before such a transfer. Because the U.S. Supreme Court had yet to address the question of constitutionality, other states avidly read the Missouri Supreme Court decision, which stopped the practice cold.

    No one mentioned the odd coincidence that, although Boonville’s population was reportedly more white than black, the boys branded “incorrigible” were nearly always black. (Disproportional punishments continue: In California, researchers recently found that minority youth were much more likely than white youth to be transferred to adult courts and more likely to be sentenced to prison for comparable crimes.)

    At MTS, Wainwright says, “They used to send white kids into T Company (a dormitory building for black boys) when they wanted to punish them, but they never transferred them.” Joseph vividly remembers one white boy getting transferred to Algoa: “He became one of us. We were all just kids, and we had to stick together.”

    Joseph also remembers hearing the MTS staff rail about the civil-rights protests gathering strength across the nation and says “they made no attempt to hide or repress their racist ideologies.” The staff was predominantly white (183 of 200 employees), and five of the six board members had been criticized since the late ’60s as rural white old-timers, clueless about the racial tensions of urban life.

    After the Supreme Court decision, half the MTS board was asked to resign, and the short sentence about transferring “incorrigibles” was deleted from the standard MTS entry in Missouri’s Official Manual. By September of 1971, Danforth was urging the immediate closing of MTS and the abolition of its board, proposing “a new philosophy” that would bring the kids back home and place them under probationary supervision.

    Meanwhile, Fishman was still trying to reach Boone, to send him a copy of the victory. Before the case concluded, the boy had been released from prison, and all Fishman had was the prison address from his original letter. “He never did write to say thank you or anything,” notes the lawyer, sounding hurt.

    Maybe he never knew the case had been tried and won, suggests Wainwright, who had never known there was a Supreme Court case. Trying to absorb the news, he asks over and over, “Why didn’t anybody ever tell us? Nobody ever said anything to me about it until now. Why didn’t anybody tell us?”

    In 1973, a full decade after Joseph’s and Wainwright’s incarceration, the Board of Training Schools was asked to develop a comprehensive strategy for Missouri’s delinquent youth. The resulting Confidential State Plan said that although “traditional training schools may have at one time been effective,” they could no longer meet the needs of a complex society. The Plan applauded MTS staff for realizing, back in 1967 when there were 692 boys at MTS, that many “were being damaged beyond any possibility of emotional repair” and setting out to find alternatives.

    In other words, they’d shaved their population down to 150 boys. Now, the plan was recommending that Boonville be “phased out.” Group homes began opening across the state, siphoning the boys from Boonville.

    Ironically, the place had never run better. “They’d gotten rid of the more hardcore youth, sent them to the Department of Corrections, and started doing more treatment,” explains Glenwood Einspahr, who came in 1970 as assistant director. “Our average age was 15.8, average length of stay was less than six months, and there were never more than 200 boys there at a time. The old methods — the old behavior modification with token reinforcement — were phased out.” Instead, the state contracted with Positive Peer Culture, a group-therapy program developed in New Jersey. Soon there were “cottage treatment teams,” and if kids got into fights, “it was the group’s responsibility to hold ’em down. They were taught how to restrain somebody without hurting him, until he got himself in check.”

    With fights neutralized, what were the new criteria for transferring a boy to the penitentiary? “Well, you’d have to refer ’em back to the courts, and that never happened very much,” says Einspahr. “In fact, after the group-therapy program came in, I can’t remember that ever happening.”

    Ten years later, MTS had obediently phased itself out of existence and Boonville had become an adult correctional facility.

    Had Joseph and Wainwright been born a decade later, they might never have seen the inside of the state pen, or the likes of Donald “D.W.” Wyrick, the legendary figure who strode its halls from 1959-1985. Wyrick had grown up rough on a rocky farm in the Ozark hills, in a little town called Tuscumbia on the Osage River. His dad was a bootlegger, and Wyrick saw “a lot of stabbing and killing back in those hills. It was a way of life.” He saw more of the same when he played banjo in honky-tonks — and then he saw a new kind of combat, disciplined and procedural, when he steered amphibious landing craft onto the beach of Guadalcanal at the end of World War II.

    Wyrick thrived in the Army and sorely missed its regimentation. Then one day he played a baseball game inside the prison walls, sensed the same kind of structured intensity and decided he might like working there. Starting as a guard, he rose to become warden, then the director of the division of adult institutions, and he remembers plenty of teenagers come through in the late ’60s and early ’70s. “Fourteen- and 15-year olds? Sure. Some were as young as 7 and 8. A big bunch of my inmates came from Boonville. A lot of ’em didn’t have any family life to speak of. The teachers couldn’t do anything with ’em, the truant officer couldn’t do anything with ’em, and then I got ’em, and I was supposed to straighten ’em out in two years.”

    Did the 1971 Supreme Court decision change anything? “Yeah, they had to have another hearing and all that. I didn’t pay that much attention to it.” Were the kids a problem, mixed into adult population? “They’d been around. They were as tough as the old-timers were; they could take care of themselves.”

    Wyrick was tough himself, paternalistic, as impulsive as the inmates and often surprisingly fond of them. His initials were carved by inmates into a handmade leather wallet he carried for 16 years; his full name appeared in scores of brutality lawsuits. He used to bring his kids to the pen for piggyback rides on the inmates’ broad shoulders; he also brought his dog, a German shepherd-Doberman mix named Hitler by his first owner. Wyrick never changed the name. “Never had a thought of fear in my life,” he remarks, describing with relish the time he was taken hostage in the prison yard. “Sept. 19, 1959, 1:30 p.m. I’d been watching these three or four inmates moving from person to person, and then I saw ’em digging something out of the ground. I went to a couple other officers and said, “Let’s go get those guys and shake ’em down.’ They said, “Wait till they do something,’ but I wasn’t gonna.”

    He went after one of the men, and three others emerged to block him. “One put a straight razor under my jaw, one put a big knife in my ribs, and Rollie Laster put a homemade gun against my back. He and six other guys had gotten life for killing an inmate, a snitch, in the 1954 riot; they caved his head in with a sledgehammer. Rollie’d kill you in a flat minute. In later years we got to be friends, though. He’d aged, mellowed — I saw it happen hundreds of times.

    “Anyway, the tower officers saw what was happening, and two or three guys came down with shotguns, shot a couple of ’em all to hell. One of ’em, I took care of him myself, knocked his teeth out. He picked ’em up and put ’em in his pocket. That’s the way things were in those days.”

    In just one year, Wyrick was promoted and sent to the dining hall, a hot spot prone to riots. “One day I saw a man come in with a rolled-up newspaper,” he recalls. “I made a mental note to remind him, after the meal, that newspapers weren’t allowed. And then I saw him pull out a meat cleaver, walk over to an inmate who’d threatened to kill him, and slice straight down into his head, then again crosswise, quartering it.

    “What people don’t know is, a lot of times in prison, it’s kill or be killed,” he finishes. “People have lost their lives over a pack of cigarettes in there.” Wainwright uses almost the same words: “I’ve seen people get their necks broke over a fuckin’ pack of cigarettes.” A bitter rage coils beneath the second man’s words, but for Wyrick, trying to thwart the violence was “kind of a game. You had to use every trick you could think of. We would never knowingly let two homosexuals live in the same cell, but what I did do — and I was criticized for it — I’d let their punk move next door.” Then, if Wyrick needed information about drugs or a violent incident, he’d move the guy away in the middle of the night.

    He also used what he calls “the carrot and the stick,” improving recreational programs, food, health care, education and visits. Gradually, the violence ratc

  • PSYCHIC STEALING

    PSYCHIC STEALING

    Most experiences with psychics, whether at a psychic fair or a psychic house party, are fun, droll, hopeful, but likely viewed as a lark — not something that might worm its way into your head and fester like gangrene. The experience of Tina and her mother was not a lark.

    One day in May 1997, 19-year-old Tina found a flier on her windshield. “Sister White,” it read. “Psychic Readings. Advice on Business, Marriage and Love Affairs. Bring your problems to me — I will help solve them.” The flier, which featured small pictures of an open red palm and a disembodied hand holding a set of playing cards, gave an address on Butler Hill Road in South County. Tina had never been to a fortune-teller, but the flier intrigued her. It had been just three months since her father, only 43, had died suddenly of a heart attack — and Tina was still searching for an answer, hoping someone could pull back the curtain and explain. She went to see Sister White. At first, the visit was unremarkable.

    “I felt comfortable,” she recalls. “The office was neat and carpeted. There was a big-screen TV in the waiting area.” Sister White — a small woman in her early 50s with dark hair and dark eyes — appeared. There were open sores on her face and neck, about the size of quarters, as if the skin had been chafed with sandpaper. “We went into a backroom, and she took my hands and gave me a reading,” Tina says. “It lasted 15-20 minutes. (It was) nothing exciting.”

    Tina then told Sister White about her father and asked the fateful question: “Is my dad all right?”

    At this point, says Tina, Sister White’s demeanor took a turn. “She said she got a “bad feeling’ about my father. She said he had been cursed by somebody our family knew, someone jealous of him. She kept saying “curse’ and that our family had been put under a spell. I was mesmerized and scared by all this. I wondered if this was another side to why my father passed away.” The woman told Tina she needed to bring in her mother to “talk about this curse.” She was emphatic about that. But Tina’s mother, Kathy, 42 years old and newly widowed, was not keen on talking to a psychic about her dead husband.

    Tina won out, however, and two days after Tina’s initial visit, mother and daughter went back to the neat modern office on Butler Hill Road. Kathy went in by herself while Tina stayed in the waiting area. In the course of her reading, Sister White again gave dire warnings of a curse on the family. But this time, she got specific: The curse was on her husband’s lifetime earnings — once he had reached $500,000, a “deadline” would be met, and he was destined to cash out. Permanently. But the curse was still in effect, explained Sister White, the money still tainted. Unless something was done, Kathy and her daughters would suffer the consequences. It would tear them apart.

    Over the next two months, Kathy would become intimately involved with Sister White. She began going on her own, as many as a dozen times, more frequently than even Tina knew. “She would come home very upset, scared to death,” recalls Tina. “She cried every night.”

    One day, Tina says, Sister White told Kathy to come into the bedroom in the rear of the office. She instructed Kathy to remove her clothing and lie on the bed. Kathy did. An egg, a cloth and some other things had been placed on a dresser. Sister White rolled the egg around on Kathy’s abdomen. She talked of removing the bad spirits that had collected inside Kathy. Then, says Tina, Sister White took the egg — which, like a superabsorbent paper towel, had supposedly sopped up all the icky psychic residue — and “when she cracked it open, there was black stuff inside.”

    Other exercises that Sister White required of Kathy included stuffing as much as $2,000 cash in her clothing; sleeping with large amounts of cash in her bed; and collecting a picture of her husband, along with his work clothes and shoes, and burying the items in the frontyard with the shoes facing the house. That was two years ago. As far as Tina knows, the mundane talismans are still there.

    THE CITY OF ST. LOUIS DOESN’T TOLERATE SISTER WHITE or any of her mystic cohorts. Interestingly, lawmakers validated psychic activity long ago by prohibiting it. The city’s “Seer Law,” city ordinance 15.86.010 (circa 1912), actually prohibits “foretelling knowledge of future events of another’s life or affairs.” Violating the ordinance is a misdemeanor offense.

    Thanks to the ordinance, all practitioners of the “crafty” arts hang their shingles (neon signs, in some cases) outside the city limits. And although it’s likely that many are doing business, by word-of-mouth and personal reference, a check of the Southwestern Bell Yellow Pages under “Psychics & Mediums” shows 33 listings. Most are national hotlines with a get-acquainted 800 number leading to a pay-per-reading 900 number. Among these are celebrity-endorsed psychic readers, including LaToya Jackson’s Psychic Network, Connie Francis Love Enhancement Psychic Line and Brigitte Nielsen’s Witches of Salem: “Talk live to authentic witches. If you enjoy talking to psychics, you’re ready for the next level. You’re ready for witches.”

    Six years ago, then-28th Ward Ald. Dan McGuire tried to repeal the ban on fortune-telling in the city. “Some constituents wanted to operate a pushcart at Union Station,” he recalls, “selling horoscopes, and when they went to get a business license, they were told, “Sorry, you can’t do that.’” McGuire says he didn’t see the harm in such an enterprise, and he attempted to persuade his fellow aldermen to permit a bit of harmless chicanery. It was not to be. Says McGuire, now director of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Forestry, “Some of my Catholic colleagues were quite opposed to lifting the ordinance, (Ald. Michael) Sheehan in particular, and the proposed repeal was voted down.”

    If you call yourself a parapsychologist, you can get around the ordinance. The Rev. H.B. Woolcock, 88, a “God-Sent Man from Jamaica” who claims to have a Ph.D., has kept offices on North Grand since 1956. Judging by the lingo in his regular ads in the Evening Whirl, he offers the same sorts of services as would a psychic: “Are you becoming uninterested in THIS LIFE? UNHAPPY MOST OF THE TIME? Do you know the CAUSE? Do you feel at times that there are STRANGE forces holding you back? Do you “see things’ “hear voices’ or feel haunted by the DEAD?” But the Rev. Woolcock’s approach seems to be more Norman Vincent Peale — “Power of Mind, Rightly Directed,” his motto — than the mystical stylings of a Sister White or even a Papa George, the Haitian worker of spells who routinely advertises in this newspaper. The upshot of all this is that the Rev. Woolcock has a St. Louis business license for his Parapsychological Counseling Service.

    Of the local practitioners listed in the phone book are several who claim to be “genuine,” “92% accurate” and “nationally recognized.” Given all of these claims, how does one go about shopping for a psychic? All there is to go on are their business cards, promotional brochures and ads in such New Age fishwraps as Pathfinder. And such variety! To be truly flummoxed, try to taxonomize today’s hodgepodge of mystic dilettantes. The veritable Pandora’s Box of characters includes intuitive consultants, psychic readers, astrologer/psychics, tarot readers, iridologists, numerologists, stone wrappers, aura readers, psychometrists and medium/ channelers. To further complicate matters, a strand comprising disparate practices and beliefs — hypnosis, miracles, Sufism, angels, shamanism, UFOs, therapeutic massage, feng shui, Morris dancing — seems to run through it all like some cosmic twine.

    There are the touchy-feely, bathed-in-light, ultrasensitive psychics who work out of New Age salons such as Mystic Valley and Pathways. (“I can’t talk to you anymore,” one flustered woman uttered during an interview. “My energy doesn’t blend with your energy.”) And then there are the old-school, evil-eye, fortune-teller psychics, the ones with the sign of the red palm out front who usually employ titles — often quasi-religious — such as “Madam,” “Sister,” “Reverend” or “Mrs.” before their surnames. Members of the Adams family — no, not Gomez and Morticia; that’s the Addams Family — fall in this category, police say. Among these Adamses is Laura Adams, who as Sister White preyed on Kathy and Tina.

    This Adams family has been locally active as psychics at least since 1975, when Dorothy Adams was arrested for attempted theft by deception. That case was dropped when the victims declined to pursue prosecution. She was arrested again on the same charges a year later; again, the victim or victims declined to press charges. But in 1985, after a nine-month investigation by undercover officers, four psychics operating out of their St. Louis County homes were rounded up, and this time the charges stuck. The arrested psychics were telling people they had problems or conditions that they really didn’t have, from hexes to cancer, then accepting payment for “solving” these problems. According to news accounts at the time, one victimized family had paid one of the fortune-tellers about $1,000 for her services. “One daughter, who had complained of headaches, was told that she had cancer, which would be cured if she paid $150 and bathed in salt water,” the St. Louis Post- Dispatch reported.

    Three of the women who were arrested were members of the Adams family: Dolly Adams, who did business as the Rev. Mother Taylor on Page Avenue in Pagedale; her daughter, Theresa Adams, who did business as the Rev. Mother Tina on Natural Bridge Road in Bel-Ridge; and the irrepressible Dorothy Adams, operating as the Rev. Hilton in a big white house on Watson Road in unincorporated St. Louis County, just west of the St. Louis city limits. Though boarded up and vacant these last 14 years, the property on Watson — now a pigeon hotel — is still registered to Dorothy Adams in High Pointe, N.C.

    It’s unclear how Laura Adams, who declined numerous invitations to comment on this story, is related to the other Adams women, but police are confident “Sister White” is part of the large group of affiliated, and sometimes nefarious, fortune-tellers. “It’s almost like a big network,” says St. Louis County Police Detective Kevin Cavanaugh, who was in on the Sister White bunco investigation from start to finish. “They’re all intermingled, but it’s hard to say who’s into who.” Paul D’Agrosa, the lawyer who represented Laura Adams, also isn’t sure how all the Adamses are related. “I don’t even to this day understand the relationship, whether they’re related by marriage, by blood or both.”

    Madam Mae, a longtime palmist in the Wellston Loop, was no fan of the Adamses. “Granny used to call them up and curse them out — she could curse like a sailor — for stealing her cut,” says Phyllis, Mae’s granddaughter, who has taken over the business since the passing of Mae in 1989 at age 92. A “cut” was what Madam Mae called her topographical map of the palm, which she had used in advertising since her traveling-carnival days as Madam Mezola. Never mind that she did not have a copyright on the old symbol — the Adams had no call to appropriate it for their own ads in the weekly papers.

    Elizabeth LeJeunesse, a former parapsychologist and psychic consultant who now runs a center for abused women, has also observed the Adamses over time. “I’ve watched those women for 20 years,” she says. “They’ve been very much around, working under different names at different times at different locations. They’ve always skirted the law, and they’ve always had a lawyer.”

    Their M.O., says LeJeunesse, is to “take a minimum amount of information — the rings on the fingers, the kind of car (a client is) driving — and extrapolate a maximum of data. They’ll do a “cold reading’ — that is, they make a general statement, watch for the reaction, and go from there. Some of these readers are so powerful in their convictions, they can make someone believe they really are under a dreadful spell, and the reason he can’t get his girlfriend back or can’t get an erection or can’t hold a job is because of this spell. For a price, they will burn so many candles to lift this spell, and of course their candles are the only ones that work. Once they’ve got their tentacles in you, it can be addictive, this need for advice, direction. Some people can’t even pick a restaurant without consulting their psychics — just incredible! And these poor, gullible people who come to depend on their psychics are just as addicted as any heroin junkie. I don’t know that these Adams people are psychic, but they’re very shrewd businesswomen, and they’ve made a ton of money.”

    Kathy Worley, a professional psychic located in West County, says she has heard several tales about the Adamses: “You ready for this one? One of my regular clients suddenly stopped coming, and about a year-and-a-half later she called to explain. She said, “Kathy, I feel guilty telling you this, but I went to another psychic out on St. Charles Rock Road, and she told me there’d been a curse put on me and that I could get my boyfriend back if I gave her money.’ It turned out she had given this psychic almost $2,000, and this woman makes minimum wage. Then she said, “Kathy, she also told me that you put a curse on me and that I should stay away from you, and that’s why I haven’t been around.’

    “Well, what the reader was afraid of is that I would tell this poor woman the truth, that she was being ripped off,” says Worley. “I have heard countless stories — how they make snakes come out of eggs, turn eggs rotten. What they do is switch the eggs. Oh, they do terrible things to people who are going through vulnerable times. It just makes you sick. What I don’t get is how when one human being sees another human being is in a lot of pain, they not only dupe them, give false hope, but they take their money, too. I just tell people that if you see the red palm, or if they have a lot of religious articles around them, or they say there’s a curse put on you, run like hell, because basically they’ll rob you blind.”

    SISTER WHITE DIDN’T ASK KATHY FOR money until the seventh visit. At that time, says Tina, “she needed as much money as Mom could bring to her. In cash — it had to be in cash. She was going to pray over this money, bless it and remove the curse once and for all.” Kathy offered the figure of $20,000. Sister White insisted that that sum was not enough. Says Tina, “Mom said she told her that the more cash she brought, the better this thing would work. Sister White said it was a very deep-rooted curse.”

    The plan devised by Sister White was simple enough: Go to the bank; withdraw cash; first bring it to their home (where Kathy would “meditate on it” for a period), then bring it to Sister White. The psychic, says Tina, had assured Kathy that she was not going to take any of the money — just perform some incantations on it and give it back.

    “She lied,” says Tina, ruefully.

    Tina and Kathy went to the bank and took out $82,000 in cash, about half of the family’s life savings. They went into one of those counting rooms that you see in the movies. “There were stacks of bills lying everywhere,” says Tina. “I remember thinking, “This is my college tuition — what are we doing?’” They boxed the money up and brought it to the car. Kathy’s other three daughters, incidentally, were unaware of what was taking place. “What are those boxes?” they asked as Mom and Sis spirited the cash into Kathy’s room. Later that day, they went to Sister White’s place. Kathy went in with the money; Tina stayed in the car.

    “That was the first time in my life I ever fell asleep in a car,” says Tina, “and an hour-and-a-half later I was awakened by my mom, who was sobbing and saying, “Let’s go, let’s go!’ I asked her, “Where’s our money?’ and she said, “Don’t worry, just go, everything is fixed.’ I don’t know what happened in there, but it was devastating to my mom. Sister White had told my mom that she had to take the money to a church, that she could better pray over it there.” Kathy was told to come back the next day and get the de-cursed stash.

    “Mom went back the next day alone,” says Tina. “Sister White told her, sorry, she had to burn the money. There was too much anger surrounding it. If the money wasn’t destroyed, the family would never again be prosperous.”

    In hindsight, Tina believes that after the first visit Sister White had researched the family through the obituaries. She knew there were four daughters; she knew their names. She suspected, correctly, that Kathy’s husband, an assembly-line worker at the Chrysler plant, had left the family in a healthy financial state.

    Kathy went to the police, but not right away. She had handed half of the family’s life savings to a virtual stranger. It took time for the hurt and anger and embarrassment to set in. Meanwhile, Sister White kept calling: The curse wasn’t quite removed. She exhorted Kathy to return for more sessions — and that was her downfall. Detectives tapped Kathy’s phone and eventually recorded enough incriminating statements to charge Laura Adams with felony theft. She was arrested on Oct. 9, 1997. Bond was set at $5,000. The warrant reads: One count “stealing $750 or more by deceit.” Laura Adams (the name she was charged under) enlisted the legal services of Wolff & D’Agrosa, a well-known Clayton law firm. And during the period between her arrest and her sentencing, the psychic turned to psychiatry.

    On May 27, 1998, Adams was voluntarily admitted to St. Mary’s Health Center by her psychiatrist, Dr. Raymond Knowles (who, interestingly, specializes in helping victims of psychic addiction) with a diagnosis of “major depression with psychotic features.” On July 14, she was readmitted to St. Mary’s with the same diagnosis by the same doctor. On July 30, Laura Adams and her attorney filed a motion to stay proceedings until Adams underwent a court-appointed psychiatric examination and the results could be evaluated. Prosecutors objected to any postponement, noting in a court filing that Adams appeared to “become depressed two to three days prior to the dates she is scheduled to appear in court.”

    Adams eventually pleaded guilty in November 1998, and sentencing was set for February of this year. After months of delaying the inevitable, the fortune-teller finally got her comeuppance. On July 9, Circuit Court Judge Larry Kendrick suspended imposition of a sentence and placed Adams on probation for five years. Adams already had made partial restitution to Kathy to the tune of $40,000, but as a special condition of probation, Kendrick ordered Adams to make the remaining $42,000 restitution payable to Kathy at the rate of $754 per month. That’s a lot of palms to read.

    To Tina, the slap-on-the-wrist sentence amounted to a slap in the face. “I feel like the judicial system failed,” she says. “People get put away two, three years for passing bad checks; she gets off on five years’ probation, pays half the money back and is still practicing her spells. The humiliation and embarrassment this lady put us through will never leave me.”

    Who knows how many other people, trusting and gullible, Sister White has bamboozled? People may be reluctant to come forward out of fear of appearing foolish. One woman, an Indochinese immigrant, alleges that in 1996, one year before Kathy’s ordeal, Sister White took her savings of $36,000 in the very same way. The difference is, the woman never filed a criminal complaint but instead sought to reclaim her money by hiring an attorney and filing a civil lawsuit. Her lawyer, Tim Hogan, says she chose this route because she would be mortified by the spotlight of publicity. That lawsuit, at present, is moving along the judicial conveyor belt.

    Detective Cavanaugh understands this skittishness and believes it’s all the more reason to praise Tina and Kathy for bringing the situation to the attention of police. “You know, a lot of these things don’t ever come to court,” he says. “It’s tough getting the victims to come forward, they’re so embarrassed that it happened in the first place.”

    CHICANERY AMONG PSYCHICS IS HARDLY A new phenomenon. Magician Harry Houdini, in his fervent attempt to communicate with his dead mother, wound up debunking psychics and mediums during the 1920s. It became a public crusade. He was disappointed at the cheap parlor tricks — hidden microphones, “floating” orbs, stage whispers — that passed for the actual thing.

    Seventy years later, Houdini is likely rolling in his grave, because psychics in America seem to be enjoying a new round of popularity. And although there may be fewer “spirit mediums” in the phone book, fewer Ouija boards in the closet, a new kind of psychic — the media-savvy “intuitive consultant” — is insinuating herself in the pop-culture marketplace, she and her sisters popping up like mushrooms after a good downpour. Same old wine in a brand-new bottle? Perhaps, but the demand is intense. Try booking a psychic during the “witching month” of October — it’s like trying to find some red roses on Valentine’s Day. Psychic house parties are certainly in vogue. Ditto psychic fairs and a general embrace of things otherworldly, as the summer’s offering of clairvoyant-witch movies attests.

    At a mini-psychic fair at Mystic Valley, a New Age bookstore, boutique and coffee bar located in the Deer Creek Shopping Plaza in Shrewsbury, sports-radio personality Howard Balzer is in line with all the other believers who were waiting to buy healing crystals, Zen alarm clocks and books on working one’s lower chakras. Mystic Valley, with its incense, bells, chimes and other dingle-dangles hanging from the ceiling, is the kind of place where the Age of Aquarius has not only dawned but is peeking over the rooftops and casting shadows in the backyard. Balzer is there on the overcast Saturday afternoon to buy sage after an out-of-state psychic told him burning the herb would create positive energy (and thereby remove negative energy) around the Rams. It’s sure as hell working — at the time, the team is 3-and-0, soon to be 4-and-0.

    “This was right after Trent Green (the quarterback whose place was assumed by the heralded Kurt Warner) got hurt and people thought the team was cursed,” Balzer explains. “We burned the stuff before the first game, and look what happened. We’ve burned sage before every game, and now we’re on a roll. We talked it up on the show. Now, all sorts of people are burning sage around the Dome before game time, chanting, “You gotta believe.’” At that moment, someone else in line pipes up. “Hey,” she calls, holding up what looks like desiccated weeds, “I’m getting this sage for the game tomorrow, too.”

    “Amazing,” says Balzer. “I’ve started a movement.”

    The event at Mystic Valley is billed as a mini-psychic fair because only six psychics are present — among them a couple of tarot readers; a geomancer, who uses “an old form of divination”; and a person who scans auras with her “third eye” and draws them with colored pencils. Like waiters in a Hollywood restaurant, no one here seems to do just one thing — this one is a tarot reader and medical intuitive, this one a psychic consultant and “rebirther” (for those who didn’t get it right the first time). The readings for this particular event are out in the open, with tables situated in corners of the small store and in the aisles, making it easy to eavesdrop: “I only go six months out,” cautions one. “I see you having lower-back problems,” intones another. “You’re going to be famous,” prognosticates one in a loose, flowing skirt, “I believe in the next few years, possibly due to an act of heroism on your part.”

    “Woo-hoo!” whoops the paying client. She thinks for a second and queries, “But I’ll be all right, won’t I?”

    “It tickles your senses; it’s just another form of entertainment,” says Cate Houlihan, a hairdresser and occasional attendee of psychic fairs. “Basically, you hear what you want to hear. You may think it doesn’t pertain to anything in your life right now, and then something happens down the road, and you think, “Oh, she told me that would happen.’ They tell you positive things; they make you feel good for your $50. It’s like going to a shrink, but it’s cheaper. Sometimes I think that’s all people need, to be told by a total stranger that everything’s going to be OK.”

    Nancy Miller has come to the event with friends and daughter in tow. Miller, a trim, athletic-looking woman in her 40s, says she has been to many clairvoyants and readers — “some uncannily accurate” — and has been “doing tarot” for 25 years and still doesn’t quite comprehend it. Does she follow the leads, the advice of the psychics, steering her life in certain directions because of what they have said? “You don’t take it to heart,” she replies. “It’s kind of a hobby. There’s not a lot of reasoning to this, but there is a lot of spirituality in this.”

    In fact, you hear that over and over from psychic-goers: that readings are to be used as a tool, perhaps to be considered a snapshot preview to looming possibilities. But why do people even want to be told what’s going to happen in their lives? “Added insight,” says Trudy Barr, a hospital technician and self-professed reading junkie. “If someone is at a point where they need to make a choice, this is where psychics and intuition should be added into all the other information they have. It shouldn’t be, “My psychic told me to sell everything I own and invest in ABC stock.’”

    For instance, a psychic supposedly told actress Linda Evans to postpone marrying Yanni; then one of them lost interest and the wedding never happened. “If one of them lost interest, it wasn’t meant to happen,” declares Barr. “You have to use your psychic and your own gut feeling. Like if your best friend says, “Watch out for this guy — he’s a weasel,’ that can be good advice, too, though no one listens,” she chuckles. “I’ve told people things that were just as good as anything they’ve ever gotten in a reading, and 90 percent of it is common sense. You cannot factor out common sense.”

    Though Barr believes that the psychics at Mystic Valley are among the best she’s consulted — “They’re intuitive; they’ve studied their craft and developed their skills” — she is concerned about the current crop of novitiates. When Barr first began seeing psychics, sometime around 1982, the pickings were slim, she says. “They just were not around. You had to know someone, and I happened to find a woman who introduced me to this remarkable society. Once I got interested, I stayed interested. I would get readings from any reader who would hold still.

    “Now, it’s quite different. It’s like psychics are coming out of the woodwork. And I don’t feel that all of them are ready. They may be talented, they may have some ability, but I think they’re rushed into being a “reader’ too soon. You cannot buy a tarot book, a deck of cards, and call yourself a reader any more than you can read a chapter on appendectomy and go do it on somebody.”

    A glance around the store indicates that almost all of the patrons are women. “Women are more inclined to intuition,” Miller hypothesizes. “They feel more; their emotions are on the surface. Men, it’s hard for them to grasp this. Not that they can’t be intuitive,” she adds hastily, “but they don’t have time or inclination to fool with this. In my entire life, I haven’t met a man who thought this was interesting. My husband thinks it’s hogwash.”

    Miller’s husband is not alone. LeJeu-nesse, who patronizes a dry cleaner in Deer Creek Plaza, casts a critical eye on the burgeoning commercial psychic enterprise next door: “You go to Mystic Valley weekdays after noon and watch the women who go in there with high heels and uniforms of the business world, who are looking for advice on their lunch hour and getting this advice from some common housewife with a deck of cards, telling them what to do with their future. My God, it’s frightening and it’s sad.”

    Other observers of the trend see the attraction to psychics as the corollary of a deep-seated need to believe in something. “You can write critically about psychics and mediums all you want,” says the Rev. Woolcock in the dim, dusty confines of his office on North Grand. “These things have always happened and always will happen — oh, you should have seen all the gypsies and fortune-tellers along 42nd Street in New York during the ’50s. You cannot discourage the public from seeing them, because people need something to believe in, and if they can’t get it in church, they know where to go.”

    If a fascination with psychic fairs and the paranormal is on the rise — and judging from the volume of books on subjects ranging from practical witchcraft to locating your spirit guide, it is — Mary McLeod, a saleswoman at Mystic Valley, can understand why: “People are becoming more aware that it’s not just what you see in front of you that makes up life. People come in who have experienced dreams and visions, new sensations, which they’re curious about, and they are feeling more free to ask and to understand. Then they see there are so many ways to seek out these answers. Some want to erase old patterns, become better people or get closer to God. But I think ultimately what they all want is a greater perception on life.”

    Peter R. Phillips, professor emeritus of physics at Washington University and a member of the Society for Scientific Exploration, a professional forum for debate on topics outside mainstream science, believes some people may have psychic ability, though he concedes his is not a widely held view among scientists. “You talk to most scientists and you get the response that there’s no good evidence for psychic ability and that sensible people should not believe in these things. On the other hand, there is a minority of scientists, including me, who believe that there is strong evidence for at least some of these phenomena.”

    “We’re trying to establish the truth,” says Phillips. “There’s no omnipotent figure who is going to hand us the truth, and so we have to work it out between ourselves, and we just disagree on controversial issues like these.”

    Jerry LeClerc, a licensed professional counselor in Clayton, agrees that leaving open the doors of perception, even a crack, cannot hurt and may even help. “There are many things I can’t explain that seem to come from some other form of energy,” he says, “and there are some people, who seem to be in all ways reliable, who talk about their dreams’ being very meaningful and predictive. I’ve had clients who meditate to improve their mind. Previous to doing this, they said, “I don’t see the value in this exercise,’ but after they have meditated for some time, they then say, “I don’t see how I could not have done this.’ The same observation is there for psychic ability: that if I look at it as a serious thing, a possibility, maybe I would see something. But if I’m looking with skeptical eyes, I might not see it, I might not experience it. I may not click in. Like people who come to a hypnotist and have no belief in hypnosis more often than not will not be hypnotized. Just because you can’t prove something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

    AMONG THE SKEPTICS, THE GUYS AT THE Shell station on Butler Hill Road guffaw at the mention of Sister White. Across the street stand her former digs, a modest white frame building, neat as a pin, now serving as a realty office. Ask what became of her, and they’ll say, “Why, she moved out after she

  • BODY OF EVIDENCE

    BODY OF EVIDENCE

    The window tables at the Casa Gallardo restaurant on St. Charles Rock Road don’t ordinarily offer much of a view — a couple of bushes and a yucca plant surrounded by rocks in a small landscaped strip. But around noon one steamy Thursday, two TWA flight attendants walked in for lunch and were seated at the window table overlooking the bushes. Something caught their attention amid the greenery, peeking out from beneath the yucca plant.

    It was a human skull.

    It wasn’t the pearly color of an anatomy-class specimen or haunted-house prop. It was a shade of ocher, with bits of dirt lodged between its teeth. The face of the skull, jawbone askew, was aimed directly at the window on the building’s east side.

    Whether the flight attendants ever finished their lunch is unclear. The discovery was so startling and strange, one of the women thought it must be a prank. She called the manager over and pointed it out. Worried that other patrons might lose their appetites, the manager immediately pulled down the blinds, then called the Bridgeton police. It was 12:47 p.m. on June 28, 1990.

    It wasn’t a prank. Within the hour, crime-scene investigators were taking photographs, and the skull was sent to the St. Louis County medical examiner’s office. An anthropologist concluded that the bones were of “recent origin” and bore markings more consistent with an adult female than a male. Not much more could be determined.

    Walter Mutert, now Bridgeton’s police chief, remembers that the source of the skull was a mystery. At the time, a lot of digging was going on near Lambert International Airport, including the wholesale moving of cemeteries to make way for MetroLink, he notes. “There were problems with that airport cemetery, with remains coming up.

    “There was no reason to believe at that time there was any foul play,” Mutert says. “There was nothing for us to go by.”

    Police classified the case as “found human remains.” The cranium and jawbone were stored on a shelf at the county morgue, a skull with no name.

    In the 5-by-7-inch photograph, 27-year-old Linda Sue Sherman grins at the camera. Her head is cocked to the side, and her brown hair has the sort of long, layered look so popular in the mid-1980s. She’s wearing a blue turtleneck with eyeshadow to match.

    She was born in 1957 and spent her entire life in North St. Louis County, growing up on Dadebridge Court in Ferguson and attending McCluer High School, never straying far from the area she called home. Outgoing and athletic, Linda was the youngest daughter of Walter and Elenora Lutz — carpenter and homemaker — a churchgoing couple determined to see each of their children receive at least a high-school diploma.

    Linda almost didn’t graduate. She was 17 and pregnant when she exchanged vows with McCluer High classmate Donald Sherman during a small ceremony at Christ Memorial Baptist Church in Cool Valley on Feb. 10, 1975. The wedding wasn’t fancy. Linda wore a blue dress with a high neck and poufed sleeves. The groom sported a turtleneck sweater beneath his powder-blue jacket. They celebrated with their guests afterward at Noah’s Ark Restaurant in St. Charles.

    The newlyweds continued to attend McCluer High while renting a house next door to Linda’s parents, and Don, a senior, graduated a few months later. After giving birth to a daughter, Patricia Marie, in August, during her summer break, Linda began her final year of high school while her mother watched the baby. They called the little girl Patty.

    Don Sherman says those early years weren’t easy. The couple struggled to make ends meet while raising a child. Linda worked a few part-time jobs — altering suits at Sears, key-punching at Site Oil Co. — before settling into work in data entry. He worked briefly as an assistant manager at a gas station before becoming a machinist — a career he has stayed with ever since.

    One of Linda’s older brothers, Dennis Lutz, remembers trouble in the Sherman marriage. “I know they moved in next door to my mom and dad, and I know there was a lot of conflict at that point,” he says. “Her husband, Don, was a very jealous person. He didn’t even want her talking to people — other guys, that is.” Although Dennis moved to San Antonio, he saw Linda when he returned home for visits. “When we were home, we kinda did things together,” Lutz says. “He was even jealous about that. I said, “This is my sister. We’re going to go have lunch together.’ He would just have a fit.”

    By October 1977, the Shermans were separated, and Linda filed for divorce. She wanted custody of their daughter and the couple’s marital property: an assortment of furniture, some dishes and silverware, a sewing machine, a black-and-white television. Linda didn’t follow through with the divorce. In March 1979, a judge dismissed the petition for “failure to prosecute,” a legal term for lack of activity in the case.

    That same year, Linda and Don Sherman reconciled, and the young couple bought a modest five-room brick bungalow on a quiet dead-end street in Vinita Park, a small bedroom community of middle-class, mostly blue-collar families.

    In the early 1980s, while the couple struggled to make their home — and their relationship — work, Linda suffered a miscarriage and afterward was told she had epilepsy. She suffered from seizures, and, because of her health problems, says Don Sherman, the couple decided they would have no more children.

    Their marriage continued to have problems. In 1982, Linda moved out again, this time into an apartment in St. Ann, taking 7-year-old Patty with her. Apparently tensions between the couple had escalated. In September of that year, Linda filed for an order of protection against her husband, claiming he had threatened her and Patty and had “tampered” with her car. She described Don as “mentally unstable,” adding that he had threatened to take his own life “and possibly that of my daughter and myself.”

    Don Sherman admits an “instance” with his wife’s car. “The vehicle was in my name,” he says. “I just disabled it so it couldn’t be driven.” But he says those memories are too old to recall in detail. “I’m not sure what my reasoning was then. It was a long time ago.”

    A judge granted the order of protection and also ordered Don to pay $20 a week in child support.

    That separation didn’t last, either. Within a month, Linda notified the court that another reconciliation was in the works and that the protective order was “no longer necessary.”

    “Please acknowledge the fact that my husband, Donald E. Sherman, and myself, Linda S. Sherman, are presently working things out,” Linda wrote the judge on Oct. 21, 1982.

    Not long after the couple’s 10th wedding anniversary, in the spring of 1985, Linda was planning to leave Don again. She filed a petition for dissolution in St. Louis County Circuit Court on April 11. Frank Vatterott was her attorney. “I just remember her as being very nice, very polite, and an attractive lady,” he says. “She was not sophisticated or anything, but I think she was kind of classy…. I remember her as having class and being a person of stature.”

    Though the petition was filed, Don would not be served with the court papers for a few more weeks. Linda continued living with him at the house on Monroe Avenue in Vinita Park.

    “It was a little rocky right then at that time,” Don Sherman says. He was working the day shift at a machine shop; she worked evenings at the U.S. Government Records Center on Page Avenue. He says he had growing suspicions that his wife was having an affair: She had started smoking again after quitting years earlier. She didn’t come home from work on several occasions, and when he called her at home from work, she wouldn’t be there, he says.

    And then one day in the early spring of 1985, Sherman says, his suspicions were confirmed when a truck driver who worked with him saw Linda and one of her co-workers from the records center.

    It wasn’t the first time his wife had cheated on him, Sherman claims. She’d worked as a cocktail waitress at a Flaming Pit restaurant, and “that changed her in some ways.”

    In any case, Linda and Don’s relationship had soured, and tensions were high by April 1985. On April 22, after she worked her usual evening shift at the records center, Linda signed out at 2:16 a.m., went home and slept on the couch. Though Linda usually took Patty to school in the morning, on this day Don drove her to school. That evening, Don says Linda left for work around 6 p.m. She was wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes and a blue jersey emblazoned with the number 76, he says. Linda did not report to work.

    She never would again.

    That spring, Linda’s older sister, Fran, who lived in nearby Hazelwood, had begun talking on the phone with her sister almost every night. The conversations revolved mostly around the problems Linda was having with her husband. The phone calls stopped on April 22, and then Fran and her husband, Sam, learned that Linda hadn’t shown up for work. They began to worry.

    “She was getting ready to leave her husband for good,” remembers Sam Miller, a retired engineer, “and so she took certain steps. She talked to Fran about this a lot over the phone.” Fran nods her head. “She was trying to move out of the house and into an apartment somewhere.”

    Linda had filled out a change-of-address form at the local post office, directing her mail to her sister’s house on Coachway Lane in Hazelwood. Her last two paychecks came to the Miller house after Linda disappeared.

    One check is inside a manila folder Sam Miller keeps, the envelope still sealed. The folder contains old newspaper clippings, faded court documents and a small ad offering a $1,000 reward for information about Linda’s disappearance. Fran says Sam can remember all kinds of important names and dates, thanks to that folder. Memories fade. It’s been 14 years since they last saw Linda.

    Nestled among the papers in the folder is the 5-by-7 photograph of Linda.

    She’s not alone in the picture. Her husband is seated beside her on a brown flowered sofa. But when the Millers needed a photo for the missing-person poster, for the police file and the newspaper, they enlarged the part of the picture with Linda’s smiling face. They cut Don out entirely.

    Inside the small brick building on Midland Avenue, behind Vinita Park City Hall, Lt. Michael Webb keeps the same picture of Linda Sherman in a manila file folder. Her case fills two entire drawers in the metal cabinet in the corner of his office. The room is neat. On a nearby shelf, sandwiched between various law-enforcement titles, are books on botany and crime-scene archaeology.

    A seemingly unflappable man with a solemn voice, Webb, 48, has spent most of his career in Vinita Park, except for a single year as a patrolman in Charlack. He spends his free time at the St. Louis County Library headquarters on Lindbergh Boulevard, researching through ribbons of microfilm for details about organized crime at the turn of the century in St. Louis. Someday, if and when he retires — “They’ll have to push me out of here; I’ll be in a walker,” he says — Webb figures he might write a book about local mob history.

    Webb was a patrol supervisor back in 1985, and he remembers reading Linda Sherman’s missing-person report. He read all the daily reports as a patrol supervisor, and Linda’s report stood out. “There was just something that didn’t sound right,” says Webb, a sandy-haired man with a mustache who has since traded his police uniform for a crisp shirt and tie. “We have missing persons reported all the time. Generally, within a few days, there is contact with someone, especially a loved one like a child.”

    That’s what just about everyone said about Linda’s disappearance: It didn’t sound right.

    Linda’s parents, her brothers and her sister and brother-in-law insisted there was no way Linda would leave her 9-year-old daughter, under any circumstances. Her co-workers and friends agreed. Linda, a doting mom, wouldn’t do such a thing, they said.

    Don Sherman told police that an overnight bag and other items appeared to be missing from the house. Because Linda had left him twice before — both times emptying their home of furniture — he says he thought she’d left him again. On both of those occasions, however, she had taken Patty with her. This time, she did not. Sherman says he can’t recall what he made of his wife’s disappearance at the time. “I don’t remember exactly what was going through my head,” he says now. “It’s way too long ago to remember that.”

    As each day passed with no word from Linda, the Millers grew increasingly alarmed. They posted fliers offering a $1,000 reward for information on her whereabouts. They spoke to co-workers at the government-records center where Linda worked.

    Four days after Linda disappeared, Sam Miller says, he lay awake in bed, thinking about a musician whose car had recently turned up at Lambert Airport after he was murdered. They hadn’t looked for Linda there, he realized. He woke his wife; they got dressed and drove to the airport. They had rounded the first turn in the short-term parking garage when they saw what they were looking for: Linda’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle, her schoolbooks from a computer class inside, a hat tossed on the back seat. They called for an airport-police officer and waited for him to pop the trunk, worried they might find Linda’s body inside. The officer opened the front compartment of the Beetle, where the trunk is located. But there was no trace of Linda.

    Soon after, the Millers met with Vinita Park police, and Lt. Webb was officially assigned to the case.

    He interviewed co-workers, family members, Linda’s husband. He pinpointed the time she’d signed out of the records center. He learned that the airport kept track of cars parked in the garage longer than 24 hours, and that Linda’s car had been noted on April 24. He checked the passenger lists of airline departures from Lambert. No Linda Sherman.

    Within a week of her disappearance, Don Sherman reported that he’d seen Linda riding in a van with someone else — and that she ducked. He told police he tried to follow the vehicle but that it got away from him and he wasn’t able to write down a license-plate number.

    The lieutenant tracked down dozens of leads throughout the state of Missouri. None checked out. Linda wasn’t the type to have enemies. Webb could not find any. He checked out the male co-worker that Don Sherman says she had been seeing, but that man had an alibi and was ruled out as a suspect.

    Months passed with no sign of Linda, and police decided to go public with a plea for help in the case. Linda’s disappearance — and her family’s concerns about foul play — were described in a July 15, 1985, article in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “We’re at an impasse,” Vinita Park Police Chief Robert Hartz was quoted as saying. “There’s little more we can do without a break.”

    The break didn’t come.

    While everyone worried about Linda’s whereabouts, Don Sherman says he tried to move on with his life. About a year after Linda disappeared, he filed a cross-petition for divorce stating that Linda had abandoned both him and their daughter. His lawyer was Frank Anzalone, a prominent Clayton criminal- defense attorney, whose clients included people accused of serious felonies such as rape and murder. Sherman is reluctant to talk about why Anzalone handled his divorce, except to say that Anzalone has always been his lawyer and that he had first met him when Anzalone was a public defender and represented Sherman’s mother in 1974.

    “My mother killed my father,” Sherman says matter-of-factly.

    It was after midnight on Feb. 25, 1974, when police arrived at the Sherman home in Cool Valley and found 47-year-old Charles Sherman, an unemployed watchman, shot dead at the kitchen table. Audrey Sherman, his wife, and all five children said they awoke to a loud bang. Police officers searched the house and found a .38-caliber gun stashed in a heating duct. Audrey was later indicted for first-degree murder. Four months after the wedding of her son Don, she pleaded guilty to manslaughter. She served six months in the county jail.

    “She put a bullet in him as a result of one of their arguments,” Don Sherman says. “They were both alcoholics.”

    Sherman says he, too, turned to drinking in the years after his wife disappeared. “It took a long time for me to deal with it,” he says, “to come to terms with it. And a lot of alcohol.”

    By 1988, three years after Linda’s original divorce petition was filed, Anzalone’s office had had the case placed on the docket of uncontested divorces.

    Frank Vatterott, who was hired by Linda Sherman to handle her divorce, objected. “It would be impossible for me to consent to an uncontested dissolution,” he wrote in a June 21, 1988, letter to Anzalone’s office. “I have not heard from the family of Linda Sherman for approximately one year. I presume she is still missing.”

    Vatterott says he had intended to take Don Sherman’s deposition earlier in the divorce case but decided it was futile. “Anzalone, who was his lawyer, said, “We will just plead the Fifth,’” Vatterott recalls. “So I didn’t take it.” Anzalone could not be reached for comment.

    In June 1989, with Linda nowhere to be found, a judge dismissed the divorce case, thereby leaving the Sherman marriage legally intact.

    One year later, on June 28, 1990, a skull appeared outside the Casa Gallardo restaurant in Bridgeton.

    Don Sherman was there that day. He says the restaurant’s bar was his regular place to go for drinks. And when the skull showed up that day, he recalls, “It was the talk of the restaurant.” As for where the skull came from or its identity, Don Sherman says he had no idea.

    Neither did the Bridgeton police.

    Fourteen months later, an unusual piece of mail arrived at the Vinita Park Police Department. It was Sept. 6, 1991, and among the batch of letters that the administrative clerk was sorting was an unsealed envelope with no return address. Inside was an eight-month-old Super Bowl flier from the Casa Gallardo in Bridgeton. One side of the orange sheet described the promotion — cheap cocktails and free nachos to customers watching playoff games at the restaurant. The other side contained a single sentence, stamped out in purple ink:

    “THE BRIDGETON POLICE HAVE L. SHERMAN’S SKULL.”

    Lt. Webb, careful not to touch the note and envelope, was incredulous at the message inside. Could it be true? he wondered.

    “I hadn’t heard anything about Bridgeton police finding a skull,” Webb recalls. “I felt they were going to laugh us out of the place when we went in there.”

    But when Webb talked to a patrol sergeant at Bridgeton, he was told about the skull discovered a year earlier outside the restaurant. Webb delivered Linda Sherman’s dental records so that they could be compared with the “found human remains” stored away on a shelf at the county morgue. The next day, a forensic dentist confirmed that the skull was Linda Sherman’s.

    Clearly the letter-writer was someone who knew about the skull found more than a year ago and wanted Vinita Park Police to know that it was Linda Sherman’s. It could have been the killer who sent the letter. Then again, it could have been someone who merely had some knowledge about her death.

    The letter deepened the mystery and raised nagging questions for the police and for Linda’s family. Who, after police failed to identify the skull as Linda’s, sent them a note to make sure they did? Why send the note on a Casa Gallardo flier? More important, where was the rest of the body?

    That last question left the Millers both puzzled and horrified. “Whoever did this went to where they buried her and dug up just the skull and left the rest of her body there,” Sam Miller says. “We couldn’t figure out why somebody would have done that.”

    Patty Sherman, who had just turned 16 at the time her mother’s skull was identified, was living with her paternal grandmother during the week and spending weekends with her father. She remembers that she was doing her homework when two police officers knocked at her father’s door to deliver the news.

    “I wouldn’t answer the door. I had a feeling something bad was going to happen,” she recalls. She woke her father, who spoke to the police. “All he told me was, “They found your mom.’ And I just bawled. He said he didn’t know a whole lot. And he went back to his room.”

    She would learn the details later, from her cousin. “I was really upset,” she says. “We live in such a sick world that after she was dead, someone dug her up and put her somewhere, put half of her somewhere. How could somebody do that to her?”

    At the Vinita Park Police Department, the Linda Sherman missing-person case had turned into a homicide investigation. Lt. Webb scrutinized the old reports. He re-interviewed the original witnesses, six years after Linda vanished. “It was pretty difficult,” he recalls. “The trail is cold by then.”

    He forwarded the note and envelope to the FBI crime lab in Washington, D.C., but the author had been meticulous: There were no fingerprints on the letter and no saliva on the envelope. Webb requested information about the rubber stamp used to create the message and learned that it was the type widely available at office-supply stores.

    Webb shipped the skull to the University of Missouri-Columbia, where an archaeologist studied the traces of soil and a botanist examined the plant material adhering to the skull. Those examinations offered no meaningful revelations. The soil probably came from a rural setting, such as a wooded area, Webb was told, a tidbit of knowledge that didn’t come close to narrowing down where the rest of Linda’s body might be buried. The plant material was of the morning-glory species; the purple-flowered vines are common throughout Missouri.

    Webb developed his own theories about the case, but many of the details seemed to defy rational explanation. Some theories he will share; others he will not. “It seemed pretty obvious to me someone wanted us to identify that skull,” Webb says. “Why else would they send us a note telling us where to find it, helping us along, so to speak?”

    But why? “I hesitate to really speculate,” Webb continues. “There are some people, killers, who like to taunt, who think they are of a higher mentality than police — who like to play a little game.”

    Webb pressed on with his investigation. He contacted the FBI’s behavioral-sciences unit in Quantico, Va., but they didn’t have much to go on. In November 1995, he attended the national convention of the International Homicide Investigators Association, where hundreds of detectives had gathered in St. Louis. The conference drew experts who had worked on famous cases: O.J. Simpson, Ted Bundy, the Green River murders in Washington.

    Webb used the opportunity to hit people up for advice. “People I really admire, I ran into there,” he says, “very experienced homicide investigators, the experts in their field. Anybody I could I would pull aside and say, “Hey, look, I got this case — do you have any suggestions?’” For the most part, they were things he had already tried.

    Webb came to obsess about the case. It wasn’t just that Linda Sherman’s was the only unsolved murder case in Vinita Park. It was that he now knew her family. “We all have very much of a closeness to this case, anybody who’s been here for any period of time,” Webb says. “It’s been with me since 1985. Even though I didn’t personally know Linda, I’ve gotten to know several of her family members quite well…. I feel some obligation to the family that this case be resolved.”

    There was something else, too. “You hate the idea that someone committed this crime and has gotten away with it for so long,” Webb says. “I want him or her to know that it’s not going to be forgotten. Any new development in forensic science or some type of lead will be followed up. It’s my job. It’s something I have to do. She’s not here to speak for herself, so somebody has to speak for her.”

    Webb never eased up on the case. Thirteen years after Linda Sherman was reported missing and eight years after her skull turned up, Webb still had little to go on except the skull itself.

    “My idea has always been, the key to this case is the recovery of the rest of the remains,” Webb says. “I feel if we could find that original burial site, we could glean a lot more evidence, even after all these years — evidence that might help convict the killer or help identify the killer.”

    Then, for the first time in several years, Webb had some reason for optimism. At a conference on crime-scene archaeology held in Weldon Spring last year, Webb listened to speakers describe advances in soil science. An FBI agent and a college professor told Webb that the tiny amounts of dirt on Linda Sherman’s skull might provide a break in the case.

    That was all Webb needed to hear.

    Three months ago, on the morning of Aug. 19, with Sam and Fran Miller watching, a backhoe shoveled the dirt on Linda Sherman’s grave in Steedman Cemetery near Fulton, Mo., and unearthed the 18-inch-square concrete vault containing her skull. FBI agents supervised the exhumation and shipped the skull in a wooden crate to Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa.

    At the college’s Archeological Institute, Professor James Adovasio spends most of his time applying high-tech principles to archaeological sites in such places as Israel, the Ukraine and the central part of the Czech Republic. But he has also put his skills to work as a sort of high-tech soil sleuth in archaeological-theft cases prosecuted by the federal government.

    With the use of X-rays and powerful electron microscopes, one sample of sediment can be distinguished from another almost to the level and precision of a fingerprint, Adovasio says. He has examined soil in seven federal cases involving prosecutions under the U.S. Archeological Protection Act.

    The Linda Sherman case will be Adovasio’s first murder case. The technology is both costly and time-consuming, making it impractical for most routine criminal cases, he says, adding that it’s a rare case in which dirt is the best available evidence. Adovasio will compare a sample of dirt from Linda’s skull with seven samples provided by Vinita Park police, who suspect her body may be buried in an area of Missouri that measures several hundred acres. Vinita Park police are not saying exactly where that area is.

    The analysis could rule out that area entirely — or it could help narrow down where to look more closely.

    Adovasio explains. “If you went into your frontyard… we could take a sample from one end and another end and find broad similarities to it,” he says. “But the samples will be sufficiently different that if you buried an object on one end of your yard and then an object on the other end, I could say with a certain degree of statistical certainty that the objects came from the same yard but definitely not the same hole.”

    The technology available today is far more advanced than it was in 1985, when Linda Sherman disappeared, Adovasio says: “With the advent of computer-controlled scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-rays, we can actually count individual grains of sediment and find out what the chemical composition of a grain of sediment is. And you couldn’t do that 15 years ago.”

    Adovasio expects the final results on the tests of soil taken from Linda Sherman’s skull to be in shortly before Thanksgiving.

    One of Adovasio’s colleagues, anthropologist Dennis Dirkmaat, will be examining the markings and indentations on the skull. Dirkmaat has consulted on 250 criminal cases. He will be looking for clues to determine where the skull has been. “We’ll look carefully at subtle bits of evidence,” Dirkmaat says. “Is there evidence the body decomposed on the surface or was buried or in water?

    “One of the thing we will want to look at is trauma to the skull… I saw that some of the bones were broken. We’ll do a more detailed examination of what may have caused the trauma: Was it perimortem — at the time of death — or postmortem, and what may have caused that?”

    Patty Sherman Harvell, now married and living in Attica, Ind. with her husband and 4-year-old daughter, is waiting for news about the soil tests on her mother’s skull. Now 24, she last saw her mom when she was a fourth-grader at George Washington Elementary School. “I couldn’t even close my eyes and tell you what she looked like if I didn’t have pictures,” Patty says regretfully. “I think about her all the time. I think about what I missed, about how my daughter is going to grow up without her grandma. It was really hard growing up without a mother.

    “I wish I knew her. People tell me I look just like her — everybody tells me that — and I wish I knew her.” In the past several months, Patty has grown increasingly interested in finding out what happened to her mother all those years ago. She wants to find the rest of her mother’s body “so we can put her to rest,” she says.

    “It’s been a long time not knowing. Maybe I’ll have some type of closure on it,” says Patty, who has a recurrent nightmare about her mother. She sees her sleeping on the sofa at their home in Vinita Park — the way she did on the last day Patty saw her mother alive. Patty is leaving for school, but her mother fails to kiss her goodbye. Patty always wakes up in tears. She’s not sure what it means.

    “I just want to know what happened to her,” she says. “I just wish I knew.” Patty begins to cry. “I want somebody to pay for taking that away from me.”

    It’s an awkward situation, because she knows who police suspect. It’s her father.

    And he’s known it for 14 years.

    When his wife first disappeared, police called Don Sherman down to the station and asked him questions. They asked to take a look around his house. They asked about that final day he spent with his wife. They asked about the couple’s marriage.

    They kept asking questions.

    “It used to be a regular thing,” Don Sherman says. “They used to come by and say, “Well, can you come down to the station….”

    “I’m pretty much the only suspect they have,” he adds.

    Don Sherman still lives in the same house on Monroe Avenue. Now it’s decorated with candy-corn lights and stickers in the window and other signs of his 6-year-old daughter, a child with his second wife, whom he married in 1994. He’s 42 now, a tool-room supervisor for a company in Belleville, Ill.

    Sherman is willing to talk about his first wife, but he does so on the front porch. His current wife is inside, and he’s worried it might be uncomfortable. He wears blue jeans and a black T-shirt with the big face of a bald eagle. He sports a full beard and hair that falls halfway down his back.

    “I’ve long stopped worrying about it,” Sherman says about the police suspicion. “I didn’t do anything. It’s been, what, 14 years? A lot of things have happened in my life since then. Till this new thing, the new technology, I hadn’t thoug

  • Burned

    Burned

    Ellen Reasonover worried that her former boyfriend, Stanley White, was angry. He looked mad, anyway, when they placed him in the holding cell next to hers in the Dellwood police station on Jan. 7, 1983, and because she hadn’t seen him since her arrest, she didn’t know what kind of mood he was in.

    In fact, she hadn’t seen White since the month before, when she called the police on him after he pulled up in the parking lot of her apartment building in a large, dark car and broke the window of her own automobile because of an argument they’d had earlier.

    Maybe he was still mad about that. Maybe he was just scared. She was a little worried, too, about being accused of robbing and murdering that young white boy at the Vickers service station on Jan. 2, but she knew the police didn’t have any evidence against her and figured they’d hold her a little while and then let her go home.

    The fact that White was here now, though, that wasn’t a good sign. She hadn’t told the police he did it, even when they showed her the awful photographs of the crime scene and accused her and White of beating up 19-year-old James Buckley and then shooting him seven times with a .22-caliber rifle until he was dead. Not even then, looking at those pathetic pictures, had she rolled over on anybody, least of all Stan.

    Maybe he was just mad about being hauled in. Maybe he thought she really had told the police he was involved when they pressured her, threatened her with life in prison and showed her those terrible, terrible photos, or maybe, just maybe …

    “Stan?” she asked from her cell.
    “What?”
    “Did you rob that Vickers place?”

    It was a question she felt she needed to ask. Her own life hadn’t exactly been a session in slapstick, but neither she nor Stanley White had ever been convicted of anything before, and robbing and killing a young white boy like that, well, that was something serious.

    “Babe, you know I been here but ain’t done no shit like that,” White said.
    She told him she figured as much.
    “You know one thing I can’t understand?” White asked.
    “What?

    “They, they, they really trippin’ and everything, and I ain’t did a motherfuckin’ thing.”

    “These motherfuckers is crazy,” she assured White, “think you gonna rob and kill a, a young white boy, kill him, take his life.”

    “You know me better than that, sister.”
    “Yeah, I know you ain’t done no shit like that.”
    “You know what?” White asked.
    “What?”

    “I’m gonna tell you somethin’. If I knew somethin’, I would tell the motherfuckers. I don’t know shit, and I’m not lyin’.”

    “I’m tellin’ you. I mean, gosh, Stan, you know, if I had somethin’ to do with that shit, I’da snitched on you and everybody else that I thought was involved.”

    But she hadn’t. The day after Buckley was found dead on the floor of the Vickers station on West Florissant Avenue, Reasonover called the Dellwood police and told them she’d been at the Laundromat next door that night and had gone to the service window of the station to get change. She said that when she got there, she saw a young black man inside, and it dawned on her that he looked like someone she’d met somewhere before, someone she couldn’t quite place. But when she knocked on the window to get his attention and he didn’t respond, she told the police, she drove her AMC Hornet down the street to a 7-Eleven to get change there instead.

    As she began to pull out of the Vickers parking lot, Reasonover said, she saw a police car cruise by, and because her Hornet was missing a taillight, she waited until it drove past — she didn’t need a ticket, especially because she had been warned about the light earlier.

    At the 7-Eleven, Reasonover told police, she saw the same man she saw at the Vickers station, but with two other people — one in a green army jacket — in a large, dark car, maybe a Buick or Cadillac, with whitewall tires and another tire on the trunk. She said she didn’t think much about it until the next day, when her mother saw a report about Buckley’s murder on TV and told her daughter to call the police and tell them what she saw.

    Reasonover said she didn’t want to call anybody and tell them anything, but after her mother asked, “What if that was one of your brothers who got killed? Wouldn’t you want a witness to come forward?” she agreed, but only if she could give the police a fake name so that, in case the man she saw was someone she knew, she wouldn’t have to worry about any trouble down the road. The next day, she went into the Dellwood police station to look at mug shots, and when Capt. Dan Chapman asked her for identification, she admitted that she had given a fake name. She then picked out two men from the mug shots who she said resembled the men she saw the night of Buckley’s murder.

    But the two men Reasonover picked out were in jail the night of the crime, so the police asked Reasonover to look at more photos, and she picked one of a man she knew named William Love. But Love passed a psychological-stress test administered to him by the police, so Chapman figured Reasonover was trying to throw suspicion elsewhere. She was arrested as a suspect in Buckley’s murder. Having used a fake name didn’t help her case very much, and because the car she described seeing William Love in at the 7-Eleven — a big, dark car with whitewalls and a wheel on the back — was similar to the car Stanley White drove the night he smashed her windshield, they hauled White into jail, too.

    “It sure looked like William Love’s ass,” Reasonover told White when he was put in the cell next to hers. “Sure the fuck did. But if I ever do see that dude again with the green army jacket on and he’s out there, man, I ain’t gonna tell them motherfuckers shit. I was trying to help them.”

    “If you seen somebody, baby, you tell them,” White said.
    “I told them who I thought I seen, but they don’t believe me.”
    The police — and, later, Reasonover’s prosecutors — didn’t believe her even after they listened to the hourlong conversation between Reasonover and White that day in the Dellwood jail, taped secretly with a recorder hidden in their cells.

    In fact, the tape was considered so lacking in evidentiary value, as prosecutors later claimed, that it was somehow “misplaced,” and neither Reasonover’s defense attorneys nor the jurors at her trial knew that it existed. Indeed, the tape — and other recently discovered evidence allegedly withheld by prosecutors — wouldn’t be seen or heard for another 16 years, long after Reasonover was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to prison for the rest of her life.

    She was convicted in late 1983, despite the fact that there were no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence — no murder weapon, no fingerprints, not one strand of hair. Instead, she was convicted because two jailhouse snitches — who later received light sentences for their crimes — told the jury Reasonover confessed to them that she killed Buckley. The prosecutor, Steven H. Goldman, acknowledged in court that one of the snitches was promised a reduced sentence in exchange for her testimony. The other, Reasonover’s attorneys now allege, was also offered a deal that was kept from the jury — just like the secretly taped conversation.

    But now, 16 years later, Chief U.S. District Judge Jean C. Hamilton has granted Reasonover’s request for an evidentiary hearing at which the tape — and other evidence Reasonover’s attorneys say should have been presented to the trial jury — is being examined. The hearing began Monday.

    One of Reasonover’s attorneys, Cheryl Pilate of Kansas City, argued in her filing for the hearing: “Her case in fact provides a stunning example of how the suppression of exculpatory evidence and repeated prosecutorial misconduct can lead to the conviction of someone who is totally innocent.”

    The prosecutor in question, Goldman, who is now a St. Louis County circuit judge, did not respond to our request for an interview.

    “Lemme ask you, can these motherfuckers do anything?”
    “Hell, yeah, they do it all the time, Stan, lock motherfuckers up for shit they didn’t do.”

    “You know, they need to call in somebody special an’ check into this shit.”
    “I’m tellin’ you. A specialist.”

    Ellen Reasonover sits across the table in the Chillicothe Correctional Center, in northwest Missouri, as her caseworker paces back and forth across the room. She doesn’t seem to notice, even though the caseworker stops occasionally, folds his arms across his chest, and sighs. The air conditioning is out as well — across a yard fenced in barbed wire, the repairman can be seen, working on a distant roof — but the 41-year-old woman at the table doesn’t seem too concerned about the heat, either, focusing instead on the upcoming hearing in St. Louis. It may be her last chance to get out of this place.

    Like many of the inmates around her, Reasonover’s life before confinement wasn’t a twilight walk across manicured lawns. After dropping out of Soldan High School in the 10th grade, she received her GED and went on to work as a cashier at a Vickers service station. She dated two men who were later found shot to death — one on a street corner, the other handcuffed in a vacant lot — and both of her brothers went to prison, one for killing his girlfriend and the other for robbing a Schnucks supermarket. In 1980, Reasonover gave birth to her daughter, Charmel, and two years later, while working in a massage parlor for a month before the holidays so she could buy Christmas presents, she married a man in the U.S. Air Force.

    At Chillicothe, Reasonover keeps mostly to herself and doesn’t commune much with the other women here. Because she has trouble sleeping, she works the prison’s night shift, cleaning toilets and mopping floors; when she is around the others, she says, she tries to keep peace. One prison employee who oversees her notes, “Despite all the negativity in this place, and there’s quite a lot of it, Ellen has stayed pretty much positive, pretty much unchanged.” She’s soft-spoken but doesn’t seem shy or reserved. Her eyes throw off the occasional artless glances of a very young girl but don’t wander the walls or the floors looking for an escape. She repeatedly apologizes for words she can’t pronounce or names she can’t remember.

    She recalls the descent when she first became a murder suspect and then the accused, beginning with the fateful night James Buckley was murdered:

    On that night, Reasonover says, she waited to put 2-year-old Charmel to bed before she went out to do the laundry. What happened in the next few days and weeks, she says, destroyed the slim faith she had in fair play to begin with.

    “When I first went to the police, I told them I couldn’t positively identify anybody, because I really didn’t get a good look at the guy,” Reasonover says of the night she viewed more than 250 mug shots at the Dellwood police station after Buckley’s murder. “But they told me, and I remember this to this day, they told me, ‘Look at the nose, the eyes — if anything looks familiar to you, pick him out, and we’ll check into it.’

    “Well, I picked out a lot of photos. Then they turned some of them over in front of me, and Mr. Chapman, he said, ‘That’s OK if you can’t positively identify them, but just for the record, on the back of these pictures, write that you did positively identify them.’ I remember this specifically,” Reasonover says as she leans forward in her chair, “because I couldn’t spell ‘positively,’ and I asked him how, and he told me.”

    That day Reasonover picked out two photos, of men named Isaac Scott and Herman Staples. That same day, another person who was at the Vickers station the night of the murder, Kenneth Main, also described seeing a black man wearing a green army jacket, blue jeans and black boots. Main, in his late 20s at the time and working at the St. Louis County’s Sheriff’s Department, chose one of the same mug shots Reasonover had picked, the one of Isaac Scott.

    But Scott and Staples were in jail on the night of the Vickers robbery, so the next day, Reasonover looked at more mug shots and picked out one of William Love, who later passed a stress test, during which he said he wasn’t at the scene. Because of these three mistaken identifications, and because Reasonover’s description of the car she saw at the 7-Eleven was similar to that of the car Stanley White drove, Chapman decided to bring White in for questioning as well.

    Chapman, like many of the people involved with this story, says he can’t comment about the case now because of the federal court hearing, but transcripts from Reasonover’s trial in late 1983 quote Chapman as saying he never told Reasonover that she should just pick out any mug shot that looked familiar.

    Though that may or may not be so, it is clear that not everyone who was unsure about who they saw that night became a suspect in Buckley’s murder.

    For instance, White was placed in a lineup for Kenneth Main to view. According to Main’s trial testimony, when he looked at the lineup and tried to identify the man he saw at the Vickers station that night, “The first two wasn’t him, the third kind of looked like him, but the fourth resembled him pretty much.”

    The fourth man in the lineup was Stanley White.
    “I was pretty positive,” Main testified, “but there was something about him that I couldn’t say that I was positive that it was the man.”

    Main then submitted a voluntary statement to the police stating, “Number One and Number Two were not the men I saw at Vicker’s. I remember the man having a tall, lean build, like suspect Number Four. Number Three’s face somehow reminds me of the man I saw, but I can’t be sure. Number Four’s build reminds me of the man I saw and his profile reminds me of the man, but I only glanced at him at Vicker’s and can’t be sure it’s him.”

    Unlike Reasonover, whose fruitless identifications made her and Stanley White suspects, Main was asked to undergo hypnosis the day after viewing the lineup. After the 20-minute hypnosis session with a psychiatrist, Dr. Jon Tek Lum, Main again viewed White in a lineup and positively identified him as the man he saw in the Vickers service station. In a later interview with John Hoogstraten, a private investigator, Main said the detail that “clinched it” for him was that after the hypnosis, when he saw White’s profile in the lineup, “the muscles popped out on his jaw.”

    On the afternoon of Jan. 7, while with her friend Valerie Clark, Reasonover was arrested, and Clark was also brought in for questioning

    According to an interview Clark had with Hoogstraten later: “Valerie said the police had them in separate rooms and they kept coming into Valerie’s room and saying, ‘We know that you know she did it.’ At one point Valerie said the police came into her room and said, ‘You know, there’s a $3,000 reward. If you put her away you can get it.’ At another time (Valerie Clark) said that a policeman said, ‘You can get $3,000. All you have to do is change your story.’”

    Earlier in the week, when Reasonover first came to the police, she was given a polygraph test, which she passed. After her arrest, Reasonover was given a second test, which she failed.

    “I took the test, and they say I was lyin’,” Reasonover told White that day. “‘Don’t give me that bullshit, talkin’ ’bout you ain’t gonna see your daughter no more. Your daughter see you, she be 50 years old and you be 100.’”

    She tried to laugh it off.
    “That ain’t funny,” White said.
    “I know.”

    Soon after Reasonover’s taped conversation with Stanley White, in which they both denied killing Buckley, several other women, including an undercover policewoman who was wired, talked with Reasonover in jail, and during the conversations Reasonover maintained her innocence. One cellmate, Marquita Butler, said in a later interview with Hoogstraten, “In all the time that Ellen was in that cell with us that night, I never heard her confess to doing any kind of murder or robbery. As a matter of fact … she was convinced she was going home, because she didn’t do anything wrong. She was convinced they would let her go home soon.”

    After Butler was released, she told Hoogstraten, the police came to her house: “They wanted me to say I heard Ellen admit to killing someone at the Vickers station. The police told me they’d give me money if I’d testify to that. They offered me a reward.

    “I was desperate for money then,” Butler said, “The police gave me information I needed to lie, and I started to feed it back to them. But finally I caught myself. I told myself it would be wrong for me to lie about Ellen. The police were very, very angry with me.”

    In an earlier 1984 interview with reporters from the Washington Post — who also interviewed five other cellmates who said they never heard Reasonover confess — Butler told the newspaper what she later told Hoogstraten. And Dan Chapman told the Post that he never coerced Butler or anyone else into lying about Reasonover.

    The next day, both White and Reasonover were released for lack of any evidence tying them to Buckley’s murder. One month later, though, three people — two men and one woman — robbed a Sunoco service station on Olive Boulevard. According to published reports, two attendants described the female robber as dark-complected, weighing 150 pounds and standing 5-foot-10, with short, curly hair. The next day, when police showed them both mug shots, including one of Reasonover — who had light skin and straight, shoulder-length hair and weighed about 135 pounds — one attendant positively identified her; the other attendant could not.

    The police were once again knocking on Reasonover’s door. “After they took me, I never went home again,” she says.

    “Them motherfuckers,” White said. “Hey, you know what they’ll do?”
    “What?”
    “They, they, they’ll trick you and shit. They gonna lie to you and tell you somethin’, and you know the motherfuckers be lyin’ to you. They some slick motherfuckers.”

    “Motherfuckers lyin’,” Reasonover said.
    “Why they do shit like that?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

    When Rose Jolliff took the stand at Ellen Reasonover’s trial in late 1983, she was asked by the prosecutor, Steven Goldman, whether anybody else in the courtroom was with her in jail earlier that year, on Jan. 7. “Yes, there was,” Jolliff said, pointing toward Reasonover, seated with her attorneys. “Ellen … the lady with the blue on.”

    Every day, for 10 months that she was in jail, Reasonover says, she expected to be released for lack of evidence in Buckley’s murder. After all, White had been released for lack of evidence, and if he was her supposed accomplice, and if no one saw her at the Vickers station that night, and if there was no physical evidence linking her to the crime, then surely she’d be going home soon, too.

    “Now, she had some conversation with you after she came into the cell?” Goldman asked Jolliff.

    “Yes.”
    “What did she tell you?”
    “She told me, she asked me had I heard about the Vickers Station robbery, murder. And I said I heard about it a little, but not very much…. She said that she had been the one that had did the Vickers Station robbery and murder, and she went on to say how it was done and how it was supposed to have been.”

    “Did she say how they went about doing it and what, if anything, did she say about this?” Goldman asked.

    “She said she was supposed to, someone was supposed to have went up to the window, one of the guys, to distract the boy at the window and something supposedly went wrong. She was supposed to have went in, but something went wrong. So when something supposedly went wrong, she had to shoot him.”

    Reasonover says now that when Jolliff took the stand that day, she realized she was being framed. Earlier, another witness, a woman named Mary Ellen Lyner, testified that she, like Jolliff, heard Reasonover’s confession in a jail cell she shared with Reasonover, after Reasonover’s arrest for the Sunoco robbery in February. During that trial, held during the summer, Lyner testified — as she did in the Buckley murder trial — that Reasonover told her she’d shot Buckley. Because of the Sunoco attendant’s positive identification of her and because of Lyner’s testimony, Reasonover was sentenced to seven years in prison for the Sunoco robbery.

    But during this trial, the one for Buckley’s murder, Lyner also told the jury that Goldman promised he’d recommend to the court that her own sentence be reduced in exchange for her testimony against Reasonover.

    Lyner, who was 35 at the time and working as a secretary for the Clayton law firm Swimmer and Associates, told the court that, beginning in 1978, she was convicted for a long string of bad-check and stealing counts. In fact, by the time of her testimony that day, Lyner had been convicted of 12 felonies and one misdemeanor, and when she shared a cell with Reasonover in February of that year, four more felonies were pending in St. Louis County and at least one other felony was pending in the city of St. Louis.

    “And basically you are testifying that in exchange for these pending cases you had, in exchange for this testimony, Mr. Goldman recommended that you receive a one-year sentence, is that correct?” one of Reasonover’s attorneys, Madeline Franklin, asked.

    “That’s correct,” Lyner said.
    The attorney then noted that when Goldman approached Lyner about testifying against Reasonover, Lyner was in the middle of making a deal with the police in exchange for any information she had about drug trafficking at the jail where she was being held.

    “Now you have testified that you have had 12 felony convictions and one misdemeanor conviction, and I believe your testimony is you have never served one day in the penitentiary, is that right?” Franklin asked.

    “That’s right.”
    “Is that because you have been a snitch and have been going around making deals with prosecutors to stay out of the penitentiary?”

    “No,” Lyner answered. “This is the first time.”
    “So you were looking for a way out of the penitentiary, isn’t that right?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you were looking for a deal?”
    “Yes.”

    “A deal with the State, with Mr. Goldman, would that be correct, a deal with the police, a deal with anybody, as long as you didn’t have to go to the penitentiary?”

    “That’s right,” Lyner said.
    Reasonover says she remembered Lyner from the holding cell but never admitted Buckley’s murder to her. The fact that Lyner herself admitted to making a deal with Goldman in exchange for her testimony allowed Reasonover a little more hope with the jury.

    When Jolliff got up on the stand, however, the landscape of the trial changed dramatically, because Jolliff, 32, previously on probation for mail fraud and passing bad checks, said she hadn’t made any deal with Goldman in exchange for her testimony.

    Jolliff, who pleaded not guilty on Dec. 10, 1982, to three counts of passing bad checks — one for $274, one for $207 and a third for two checks written for $83 and $232, all Class C felonies, according to St. Louis City Court records — was placed in a holding cell with Reasonover on Jan. 7, the same day Reasonover and White’s conversation was secretly taped. She later testified that Reasonover confessed the Buckley murder to her.

    But she swore to the jury that she’d made no deal with Goldman.
    “Did I or anybody else ever offer to make a deal with you in regard to that pending case?” Goldman asked Jolliff on the stand.

    “No.”
    Later, Goldman asked again, “Did I or anybody ever promise your lawyer you would get any deal or you would get any kind of deal on it for testifying?”

    “No.”
    “Were you ever promised that you would get any kind of recommendation on that case at all, or did I ever promise you anything in that regard?”

    “No.”
    Reasonover, who sat watching Jolliff testify, says she remembers feeling, even at that point, that the jury wouldn’t convict her. The prosecution had called no witnesses who said they’d seen her at the Vickers that night, had no fingerprints and no murder weapon, and had produced no evidence that she shot James Buckley other than the testimonies of Mary Ellen Lyner and Rose Jolliff.

    “I was thinking that they would find me innocent … and I knew the judge wasn’t going to let them frame me and take my whole life,” Reasonover says. “I thought everything would be fine, that they would find me not guilty.

    “I didn’t really take any of it very seriously, you know? I didn’t think an innocent person could, you know, get framed. I really didn’t.”

    Among the standard instructions to the jury was, “If the evidence in this case leaves in your mind a reasonable doubt that the Defendant was present at the time and place the offense is alleged to have been committed, then you must find the Defendant not guilty.”

    When Goldman got up before the jurors for his closing arguments and began telling them what a “cold-blooded killer” and “liar” she was — “She intended that he die … took the life of James Buckley … she tells you these lies … she is making all this stuff up … these stories are crazy … she will kill…. ” — Reasonover says she started crying, because the jurors stared at her as though she were Satan.

    Her only hope was that her own attorneys’ closing argument would bring them back around: “Ellen Reasonover became an easy way to wrap this case up and get that publicity off the Major Case Squad and off of Dellwood, and they can report to the news media, ‘Ah, we have got our killer, we are done, the police work is accomplished,’” Forriss Elliott told them.

    “Now, if they had no eyewitnesses, if they got no fingerprints, if they have got no gun, if they have got no other way to put Ellen in this thing, how do they do it? They bring you … con artists who say, ‘I was in a cell with her. She told me all about it, everything you need to know. Just ask me, because in exchange for telling you anything you need to know’ — what is that TV program? Let’s Make a Deal? You know, the emcee is up on the stage, and he says, ‘We are going to make a deal. Rose Jolliff, come on the stage and let’s make a deal. Mary Lyner, come up on the stage and let’s make a deal.’ And of course, they had reason to come up on that stage and try to make a deal with Mr. Goldman.”

    In rebuttal, Goldman told the jury that though he might have made a deal with Lyner, he offered Jolliff nothing, nothing at all. That apparently was enough. Soon after that, the jury returned its verdict: Ellen Reasonover was guilty of capital murder.

    That wasn’t enough for Goldman. He then asked for the death penalty. “Ellen Reasonover realizes, if she does not get the death penalty, that she is going to go to the penitentiary, gets meals, gets a minimum wage, access to a library and recreation, and for Ellen Reasonover, that isn’t the answer,” Goldman told the jury. “You know what she deserves. No one but an Ellen Reasonover would think that James Buckley didn’t deserve to die. Somewhere in Ellen Reasonover’s life she decided that killing a person is like taking a drink of water for her. That’s what it means for her.”

    Reasonover says she sat in a daze. She was numb. She was no longer fighting for her innocence; she was fighting for her life. As Goldman told the jurors that she’d just as soon kill someone as take a drink of water, Reasonover says she turned to James Buckley’s family behind her and mouthed, through tears, “I didn’t do it.”

    The jury deliberated for three hours but came to no agreement on a sentence. The judge later sentenced Reasonover to life in prison. If she gets no reprieve and if she behaves herself in prison, she has a chance of getting out on parole in 2033, at the age of 75.

    But there was hope, Reasonover was told, because the evidence was weak and the appeals process lay ahead. Besides, this sort of thing only happened in the movies, she thought, and in the end, when justice was served, the innocent got to go home.

    “What was you thinkin’ when you came in here and looked at me all mean and shit?” Reasonover asked. “What the fuck was on your mind?”

    “I don’t know, baby,” White said, laughing, “motherfuckers tellin’ me about the gas chamber …”

    “What, you think I had, what?”
    “I don’t know, baby, I …”
    “I know you knew I couldn’ta told on you or nothin’, ’cause I ain’t got nothin’ to tell … that motherfucker tryin’ to get me to lie. I say, ‘What the fuck you want me to do, just lie on the man and say he did somethin’?’ Well, I say, ‘You’re wrong, baby, I ain’t gonna lie on no motherfucker, say somethin’ that man didn’t do.’”

    “If it were true, baby, you know, why, I don’t blame you if you tell,” White said. “You know that?”

    “Yeah,” Reasonover replied, “if it was the truth, I, I’da beat you and then told.”

    They laughed.
    “But you know what?” White asked.
    “What?”

    “I’m tellin’ you …. I ain’t never been in no shit this motherfuckin’ deep.”

    “I’m tellin’ you, boy,” she answered. “It hurt me when I heard it happened, too, cause it happened around from my corner, and plus they showed me those pictures, boy, and that really fucked me up. I told them, ‘Hey …”

    “Those motherfuckers.”
    “It don’t make me no motherfuckin’ difference, he could’a been red, white, black, blue, he’s a young boy and he got killed.”

    Like most people traversing the unknown terrain of the judicial system, Reasonover followed her appeals attorney’s lead, figuring that he, an NAACP lawyer from New York City, would find the right way out. But the appeal fell flat when the right paperwork wasn’t filed on time, and Reasonover says she felt almost as devastated as when she first heard her verdict.

    Then Reasonover started writing the letters — letters to the pope, two presidents, their wives, their children, Jesse Jackson, Nelson Mandela, state legislators, reporters and just about anybody else she could get an address for to tell them she was innocent.

    Then she read a magazine article about Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit group in Princeton, N.J., that works to free innocent prisoners.

    “I wrote to them that I was innocent and would they help me, too?” Reasonover says. “They wrote me back and told me they had a full caseload, but I kept on writing; I wrote every week until I think they got tired of getting letters from me — I was like pleading, pleading, pleading with them — and they finally got in touch with my mom and asked her to send them the transcripts. Then they agreed to help me.”

    Then, in 1996, an investigator from the organization made an astounding discovery when he interviewed Kenneth Main, one of the witnesses at Reasonover’s trial. The invest

  • Easy Money

    Easy Money

    At dusk, the mist wreathes halos around the headlight beams of the cars whooshing up the westbound entrance ramp onto Highway 30 from Route 141. The harried travelers come in waves: wheels whirring, wipers wiping, racing through the gathering darkness, with windows rolled up against the damp, chill air.

    None of them hear the spring peepers on the far side of the guardrail, down the embankment among the shallow stands of flood water. In the fading light, they can’t see Fenton Creek running brown, either, as the stream carries away the topsoil from the barren hillside that looms over this crossroads. Behind the First Baptist Church, where the Wednesday-night prayer meeting is in progress, twisted clumps of forest debris are all that remain of the trees that once grew here.

    That the wooded hillside survived almost into the new millennium is no small feat. But in this case the 28.5-acre slope has been clear-cut not for logging purposes but for retail sales. The groundbreaking for the new Fenton Crossing shopping center, which will be anchored by a Dierbergs supermarket, took place on April 15.

    To develop this area, the hill itself will be sawed in half and the creek bed relocated. Plans call for excavating 640,000 cubic yards of earth, with more than half of those materials to be hauled from the site. By next year, much of the ground will be graded and covered with asphalt. The work entails blasting a series of rock terraces into the incline. An architectural rendering of the finished product depicts a manmade palisade towering 100 feet over the strip mall.

    The cost of this project is estimated at $23.8 million, with more than $6.7 million of it to be publicly subsidized.

    Another way to view the site is to drive farther west on Highway 30 and double back on Country Home Road. Once beyond the Summit Heights subdivision and the monolithic Solid Rock Ministries church, with its bank-style time-and-temperature display, the road narrows into the kind of lane that its name denotes. Traffic thins out here and rural mailboxes still line the shoulder, but things are about to change. Nearby, the road abruptly ends at a sign that says: “Welcome to the City of Fenton, pop. 3,343.” Behind the sign, two yellow bulldozers stand idle in the mud.

    After the city recently annexed this area, it took the land of one property owner through eminent domain. As a result, Joe Murphy’s property is now within spitting distance of the new development. The Murphy homestead is situated near the crest of the hill, about a quarter-mile off of Old Smizer Mill Road. Murphy, 69, lives there with his wife, Joyce. English ivy climbs one corner of their shake-shingled cottage; conifers tower in the background. There are a screened-in porch and a toolshed out back.

    “They kind of ruined it. That will be a cliff soon,” says Murphy, referring to the adjacent area that has already been clear-cut. “I imagine we’ll be able to see the tops of some roofs. There will probably be some noise and some lights and so forth. It’s just heartrending to see the bulldozers. A tree that’s been sitting around for 150 years they can knock over in about 15 seconds.

    “We’ve owned the place for 72 years,” he continues. “I was born here. My dad bought it in 1927. I’ve always said that the law was for the rich and the poor. The little guy in the middle is the guy who really gets screwed.”

    Murphy is alluding to the tax-increment financing (TIF) statute. Under the state law, a municipality can designate a redevelopment area as a TIF district if it meets certain criteria. This allows the city to issue bonds that pay for the necessary infrastructure improvements to spur new development, including the purchase of property. In addition, the money can be used for everything from constructing roadways to paying for legal and consulting fees. The debt is then amortized — for up to 23 years — by earmarking half the increases in applicable sales and property taxes generated by the new development.

    TIF, which originated in California decades ago, became sanctioned in Missouri in 1982. The framers of the law intended for it to stimulate economic growth in the inner city, not realizing that statute loopholes would allow for its eventual misappropriation. After federal tax credits shriveled up during the Reagan era, private developers began to seek other ways of capitalizing their ventures with public funding. They hit on TIF because it provides for up-front financing rather than tax breaks later.

    As a result, TIF use has soared in the last few years for all the wrong reasons. Instead of helping neglected urban settings, the law is frequently used nowadays to promote suburban retail projects. Sometimes, as in Fenton, the public subsidy triggered by the law is used not to clean up abandoned areas but to “straighten out” natural phenomena such as hillsides.

    More often, it is used in the inner suburbs to finance the acquisition of residential property. In these cases, TIF employs a carrot-and-stick approach. Developers, with the assurance of TIF backing, will routinely acquire options to buy housing at above-market value. But their enticing solicitations to homeowners come with an implicit threat. Under the law, the city can invoke eminent domain and expropriate the property. The dubious public-private alliance also allows for the blighting of entire neighborhoods for the scantiest of reasons. Once an area is marked for such redevelopment, it tends to freeze any financial investment, and home and commercial improvements are placed in abeyance. Disinvestment becomes the rule, not the exception, which ultimately leads to further decline.

    In short, TIF has become a form of corporate welfare, pumping public money into private projects where subsidization is unwarranted. Moreover, it’s a growth industry that provides not only lucrative business opportunities for developers but also further enriches the lawyers, consultants and construction contractors who do their bidding. Losers in the TIF game are the consumers, who are forced to subsidize the projects through sales taxes, and school districts, which are deprived of the increased tax revenues generated by TIF projects.

    There are about 40 TIF proposals currently on the books in St. Louis County, according to the county planning department. They are spread across the map from Bel Ridge in the north to Valley Park in the south. Nearly half of these publicly subsidized projects are retail developments and several more fall into the mixed-use category, which includes a large percentage of retail space. Some projects have been completed, whereas others are yet to be approved (see chart on page 20). Although a few TIF projects deserve accolades for stimulating growth in economically depressed neighborhoods (see sidebar on page 22), economists, regional planners, politicians and lawyers interviewed for this story believe that TIF — as it is now being applied — is widely abused.

    In part, the abuse of the law stems from its ambiguity. “The problem may well be the flexibility that the statute gives the municipalities,” says Peter W. Salsich Jr., a law professor at St. Louis University. “The concept was that it was supposed to be used to restore blighted inner city and inner-ring suburbs. To me, the key question is (whether) the area is blighted and is in need of this kind of public support in order to get turned around. When people get carried away with these things, there is eventually going to be a backlash.”

    David Merriman, an economist at Loyola University in Chicago, estimates that more than half the states now use some form of TIF. “TIFs are almost always a bad idea,” says Merriman, who has studied the effects of the law. “The research we did was on cities in the Chicago metropolitan area. Our conclusion was that cities that have TIF actually grew more slowly than cities that didn’t have TIF. The reason we think that this happened is that by using TIF you are essentially stealing from the rest of the city to concentrate on a few areas that you’re trying to develop. So it’s actually costly to the city. You’re moving development around in an inefficient way.”

    The Fenton Crossing project is being developed by Sansone Group, one of the most prominent TIF players in St. Louis County. Sansone built the Promenade on Brentwood with the help of TIF. The same developer is currently involved in controversial TIF projects or proposals in Hazelwood, Eureka, Rock Hill and Olivette.

    Last year, the city of Fenton expanded its TIF district to include the hill on the other side of Highway 30. The plan also calls for the redevelopment of the existing Wal-Mart and Shop ‘N Save stores in the old downtown section. Altogether, the Fenton proposal has ballooned to a projected cost of almost $193 million, with more than $50 million in public funds coming from the TIF designation.

    PGAV Urban Consulting, a St. Louis-based firm specializing in TIF-related matters, prepared the redevelopment plan for the city of Fenton. PGAV and other consulting firms have honed the art of defining large tracts of land — hillsides or already developed commercial areas — as blighted or in danger of blight so the areas can be designated TIF districts. As mentioned, the Fenton TIF district calls for the redevelopment of the existing downtown section, and PGAV’s study cited a deteriorating infrastructure — including a cracked Taco Bell sign — as sufficient indication that the area was drifting toward blight. That was deemed enough to justify a TIF-district designation, including the undeveloped hillside near the highway. The proposed plan allocates only about $4.5 million of the budgeted costs to spruce up the Olde Towne downtown section. More than $47 million in TIF, on the other hand, will go toward clearing the land to make way for the new developments on either side of the intersection of Highway 30 west of Route 141.

    The Fenton redevelopment plan writes off the existing downtown area as obsolete, a throwback to the 19th century, and endorses enlarging the city’s commercial strip through westward expansion. “In contemporary terms, attracting commercial and mixed-use development means that parcels of sufficient size with appropriate width and depth dimensions, appropriate site topography, and appropriate access must be available,” according to PGAV’s redevelopment plan. “Such parcels must be located along and have easy access to major roadways and have excellent visibility from these roadways.”

    G.J. Grewe is the other developer involved in the project. Similar to the Sansone’s Dierbergs project, the opposite hillside will be blasted away to create a level area for another strip mall and parking lot. Ironically, the name of the new development is to be Gravois Bluffs.

    James E. Mello, the attorney for Grewe, says that the use of TIF is appropriate in the Fenton development and elsewhere. “There has always been government participation in economic development. TIF doesn’t change that,” says Mello, a partner in the law firm of Armstrong, Teasdale, Schlafly and Davis. “It’s always been there in one form or another. You had tax abatement. You had federal grants. Those programs don’t exist anymore.”

    Mello, a former Ferguson city manager, is a director of the Missouri Tax Increment Financing Association, a group dedicated to the use of the state statute to its legal limits. As a lawyer who specializes in municipal issues, he bristles at the idea that TIF is being misapplied in this case. “I think you really got to look not at the tool that’s being used,” says Mello, “but the public purpose of trying to maintain your economic base and strengthen it. Sometimes it is a public-private partnership that has to be used to accomplish that.”

    Nothing in the law now precludes a city from annexing a proposed TIF district. Nor does the statute prohibit a municipality from subsequently using dynamite to blow away hillsides that stand in the way of economic progress. But is this what the law intended? Salsich, the law professor, issues a caveat in this respect. “My question is (whether) the area is blighted,” he says. “There is nothing wrong with the idea itself. You’re basically using the taxes to pay for infrastructure in that spot. But, if it gets misused, you’re not accomplishing your purpose.”

    By rearranging the geological structure of the area, Fenton has laid rightful claim to the regional frontier of TIF development.

    In the inner-ring suburbs of St. Louis County, TIF subsidies are used for another questionable purpose, the buyout of homeowners at exorbitant prices. The law allows for the artificial inflation of property values at taxpayers’ expense. By manipulating residential-real-estate market forces, TIF creates a different kind of upheaval — the displacement of human populations. The proposed project in Olivette is a good example of this unacknowledged diaspora.

    According to plan, Chickasaw Drive is crumbling a little bit at a time, like the chink in the pavement under the front left tire of Irv Zeid’s red Toyota.

    In 1956, when the street was new, Zeid and his family moved into their ranch-style home in Arrowhead Park, shortly after the Olivette subdivision opened. In those days, he commuted to work at the family-owned furniture and clothing store in North St. Louis. At home, his wife and he raised two sons, who attended nearby Hilltop Elementary School. The school acted as a common bond for residents of the neighborhood, and Zeid became more involved in the community as a subdivision trustee. Later, he ran successfully for a seat on the city council. The license plates on his Toyota identify him as Mayor Z, in honor of his one-year term as municipal leader between 1975 and 1976.

    At 70 years of age, Zeid looks back on his civic career with pride. He has served on every conceivable municipal board or panel, and confronted an array of local issues, from annexations to potholes. “I still have a constituency,” he says, seated in the dinette of his Arrowhead Park residence. The half-drawn drapes allow natural light to filter through a cracked picture window. In the living room, oversized ceramic lamps harken back to an earlier suburban era, as does the chandelier, which resembles an inverted space-age menorah. Mayor Z, as he refers to himself, says he would like to buy new carpeting and furniture and replace the gutter and rotting fascia on the front of the residence. He would like to fix up the house, but his plans for renovating have been put on hold for nearly two years.

    It’s not altogether clear how long Mayor Z’s self-proclaimed constituency will remain intact, either. Like those of his neighbors throughout Arrowhead Park, Zeid’s life is in limbo; the same uncertainty faces residents of the adjacent subdivisions of Hilltop Woods and Fairlight Downs.

    As he explains his predicament, he leans his elbows on the pile of newspapers on top of the dinette table and describes how the stress has taken its toll. For more than an hour, a half-filled cup of black coffee is left untouched as he continues to talk. The man sitting at the dinette table looks older than the one in the family portrait on the wall. With each new tale, it becomes more evident that Mayor Z, in his current role of subdivision trustee, is facing the most disturbing quandary of his political career.

    “It’s made me sick to my stomach,” says Zeid. “I’ve now got a spastic colon. From day to day, it can cause me a lot of problems.”

    Zeid, who has devoted a lifetime to his community, now favors wiping his neighborhood off the map, including his own house. He is not alone. His views are shared by the vast majority of the nearly 300 homeowners located on an 85-acre tract of land north of Olive Boulevard between Interstate 170 and Price Road. All of these residents have been persuaded to sell their homes because the TIF subsidy allows the developer the luxury of buying the property at prices far above the going rate.

    As in Fenton, the Olivette development is being driven by Sansone Group — in this case, through a partnership with THF Realty. The proposal includes building a Wal-Mart, Sam’s Wholesale Club, Shop ‘N Save and a Lowe’s or Home Depot.

    Last month, the city finally signed a memorandum of understanding with the developer to permit up to $38.9 million in TIF financing for the proposed Wal-Mart project, which has a total projected cost of between $107 to $111 million. In other words, more than a third of this private development will be financed with public funding. The Olivette TIF Commission will next meet on June 9 to consider approving the proposal.

    Requesting TIF assistance has become a routine operating procedure for developers like Sansone. But there is a continuing debate over the efficacy of the law. As one St. Louis County municipal official put it: “I believe there have been abuses of TIF in St. Louis County. In this day and age, every developer comes to town with his or her hand out. They’re looking for that subsidy that is known as tax-increment financing.”

    Supporters of TIF, on the other hand, argue that the law allows economic development in areas that would otherwise go begging. Zeid, for example, defends the Olivette TIF proposal on the grounds that the city has no other way of increasing its tax base because there is no room for it to expand further. “The city needs the money,” he says. “The only way to do it is to get commercial in here.”

    The developers concur with Zeid, arguing that the expense of building shopping centers mandates governmental assistance. “If it were not for TIF,” says Jim Lewis of THF, “these projects would never come close to happening. You can’t buy 280 homes and make the numbers work for any type of a shopping-area development. You’re subsidizing private development because the numbers would never work without a subsidy.” Lewis’ statements sound reasonable except for a crucial detail — the TIF statute was designed to address blight, not to buy out perfectly livable residential property.

    In attorney Mello’s view, the rationale for defending TIF may change with the terrain or the clientele, but its rewards remain immutable. In Fenton, where he represents a developer’s interests, the Armstrong-Teasdale lawyer asserts that the city needs to expand its borders to pursue its economic destiny. In Olivette, where he represents residents aching for a buyout, a neighborhood is worthy of condemnation to accommodate market forces. TIF can be equally exploited in both locations.

    But critics maintain that suburban retail TIF developments don’t really create new economic activity. Instead, they purloin a portion of the pre-existing tax base from neighboring cities. With municipalities throughout St. Louis County vying for their share of sales-tax revenue, TIF has become an incentive for competing cities to snatch a bigger piece of the pie.

    To Lee Brotherton, an Olivette resident, TIF is a bane to the St. Louis-area economy. “It seems to me that the city of Olivette ought to pay a little more attention to the debate that’s been going on in this region now for at least a decade about trying to eliminate the pointless, unproductive profit system between the municipalities, the simple tax grabs that don’t benefit our community,” Brotherton told the Olivette TIF Commission at a hearing in April.

    Brotherton is a former aide to St. Louis County Executive George “Buzz” Westfall; he currently serves on the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, the regional planning agency. “Where is this new revenue that is going to be captured coming from?” asks Brotherton. “Is it coming from Overland? In the long run, (this) is not going to be a benefit to the people of Olivette or to the people of the St. Louis area. It’s bad public policy and it’s bad government.” Brotherton adds that there are ample shopping outlets within minutes of the proposed Olivette development, including the Target store in Brentwood — another Sansone TIF development.

    Following his public comments, Brotherton expanded on his criticism of the Olivette TIF proposal. “It’s clear that the people running the city government decided long ago that they were going to have a TIF development,” says Brotherton. “It is also clear that they made absolutely no effort to weigh whether or not this was good for the area in general. As an Olivette resident, I care about Overland and I care about the other surrounding communities, and this is short-term gain and long-term loss. It’s really insulting to propose this development. I mean, we have the opportunity to have a Wal-Mart? Now a Wal-Mart by any other name is still a Wal-Mart. We don’t need another big, ugly warehouse in our community. We need a stronger regional economy. That’s the bottom line.”

    Whether cash-strapped cities see TIF as a panacea or a necessary evil, the results are the same: Established neighborhoods are being destroyed, falling prey to TIF subsidies, which allow Sansone, THF and other developers to buy out property owners at above market value.

    To be decreed a TIF district, the law requires the area be designated an economic-redevelopment zone and be declared blighted or tending toward that end. Arrowhead Park falls in the latter category, having been defined under TIF to be a “conservation area.” To qualify as a “conservation area” under the TIF statute, 50 percent of the housing stock within the TIF district must be 35 years of age or older. In the aging, inner-ring suburbs of St. Louis County, this criterion can be easily met. It is a loophole in the law large enough to drive a bulldozer through.

    When a municipality becomes bent on pursuing a TIF project, the whole process becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. All investments are put on hold. Home sales halt. Roofs are not replaced. Houses aren’t painted. Additions aren’t built. Normal life comes to a standstill. Years may pass.

    Meanwhile, property taxes get spent elsewhere, as everyone waits for the deal to go down. Each inaction reinforces the next. The Olivette TIF proposal, for instance, points to the deteriorating streets — the chink in the street in front of Zeid’s house — that the city itself has refused to repair. Since signing options to sell their properties, many homeowners have already relocated and rented out their former residences. The Olivette TIF proposal cites the increase in decaying housing and rise of rental units as another sign of deterioration. The neighborhood is in the process of destroying itself, with the assistance of the city and TIF.

    Zeid finds himself caught in the middle, having taken on the role of a behind-the-scenes negotiator. “I’m kind of frustrated because I think the developers are using me, as well as the city,” he acknowledges. “The city knows I’m in contact with the developers, and they can use me to try and get their points across and vice versa.”

    It all began in July 1997, says Zeid. While he was busy carrying out his duties as an organizer for Olivette’s annual Summerfest celebration, Sansone Group, through a third-party real-estate agent, was quietly obtaining options to buy the houses on the 30-acre tract that fronts Olive Boulevard. The Sansone proposal would have left Zeid and his neighbors surrounded by commercial and industrial property.

    After word of the deal was leaked by St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Jerry Berger, Zeid and his fellow subdivision trustees convinced the Olivette City Council that Arrowhead Park should be included in the development. The subdivision then hired Mello. Meanwhile, a competing effort was under way by THF Realty, which contacted the Armstrong-Teasdale law firm and started buying options on houses in Arrowhead Park, says Zeid. Ultimately, the two competing developers formed a partnership to develop the entire 80-acre tract.

    “When the city was starting to negotiate with both developers, they were trying to play one developer against the other, trying to get the best deal for the city,” says Zeid. “Nobody ever thought they would merge, because these guys were known not to have a fondness for each other.”

    The partnership, indeed, seems to be a marriage of convenience. Sansone Group possessed the bulk of the sales options on the front half of the needed property but had failed to include Arrowhead Park in its proposal. This left THF an opening. Michael Staenberg and E. Stanley Kroenke own THF. The latter developer holds an interest in the St. Louis Rams football team. More important, he sits on the board of directors of Wal-Mart, and his wife is the niece of the late Sam Walton, the founder of the retail behemoth. Forbes magazine recently estimated her worth at more than $600 million.

    That Kroenke is married into the Walton family is merely a coincidence and has nothing to do with his realty company’s efforts to build a Wal-Mart in Olivette, says Lewis, the spokesman for THF in St. Louis. “We have no tie to Wal-Mart other than we’ve developed a lot of shopping centers with them,” he says.

    Using TIF money to raze hundreds of houses to make way for a Wal-Mart is an idea that astonishes Merriman, the Loyola economist. “That’s insane. If people are living in the houses, there is no way I would think that (possible),” he says. “A lot of times TIFs have moved very far from the original intent. That’s one of the things that I find disturbing. You start out with this law that makes some sense, even (that’s) debatable, and then the way that it’s implemented makes no sense.”

    In a position paper released in April, the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, the regional-planning agency, acknowledged the problems endemic to TIF. “In the mobile regional marketplace, many local governments are vulnerable to pressure from private developers to make tax increment financing available in order to ‘win’ new jobs, retail activity, and associated sales tax revenues,” says the report. “In the absence of other tools and enforcement standards regarding its use, TIF districts are cropping up throughout the region in areas in which evidence of blight and distress is scant or non-existent. Nor is it always defensible that public sector intervention in the market is necessary in order for the redevelopment to occur.

    “If the region is going to stabilize the industrial and commercial areas which are truly blights on the economic landscape, TIF must be targeted to its originally-intended use. Individual local governments acting alone cannot make this happen. It requires both statutory and procedural changes and a long-term commitment to more sweeping reform.”

    East-West Gateway recommends the following changes to the TIF law:

    *Blighting for TIF developments should be restricted to economically distressed areas.

    *Public-sector-intervention standards should be established and enforced.
    *TIF proposals should be approved by an objective third party.
    *TIF-district boundaries should not extend beyond the area found to be blighted.

    *Cost-benefit-analysis requirements should be more stringently applied.
    Anthony F. Sansone Sr., the patriarch of the Sansone Group, will never be displaced or disturbed by a TIF project. The 73-year-old developer is far from the bulldozers’ roar, ensconced in the tony St. Louis County suburb of Huntleigh, where, according to St. Louis County property records, he occupies a 15-room mansion that has seven baths and a market value of almost $1.5 million.

    Reaping TIF benefits is but the latest good fortune to befall Sansone, whose financial affairs have flourished in the gray realm where private interests and public policy come together. Over the years, newspaper accounts have alleged a litany of improprieties from which Sansone Sr.’s business interests have reportedly profited. Many of the accounts contain references to associations with political and organized-crime figures.

    For instance, in 1964, Sansone acted as campaign manager for his business partner, Alfonso J. Cervantes, who successfully ran for mayor of St. Louis that year.

    Once in office, Cervantes named Sansone Sr.’s brother to the influential post of city assessor. Prior to this appointment, Joseph C. Sansone was a partner with Anthony Sansone Sr. in the family’s real-estate business. By 1967, Sansone Realty Co., then located at 4705 Hampton Ave., had its property taxes rolled back by more than 50 percent, according to a story in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

    A 1970 Life magazine story, by former Globe-Democrat reporter Denny Walsh, focused national attention on Cervantes’ relationship with Sansone Sr. The story told, among other things, how Sansone arranged a 1964 campaign-strategy session between his father-in-law, Jimmie Michaels, then head of the Syrian organized-crime faction in St. Louis, and Cervantes. After Cervantes won the mayoral primary, the Life story reported that Sansone Sr. later attended another strategy meeting with Michaels and Anthony “Tony G” Giordano, then the leader of the St. Louis Mafia. After publication of the Life story, Sansone denied in news accounts that the meetings took place.

    Sansone’s associations drew additional scrutiny in 1972, when he appeared as a witness in a federal anti-racketeering trial in Los Angeles. Under oath, he testified that in 1967 he had withdrawn a $150,000 investment in the Frontier Casino in Las Vegas, after being notified he would be required to apply for a Nevada gaming license. Federal prosecutors had alleged that Mafiosi in St. Louis and Detroit were trying to gain illegal control of the casino. Sansone, the prosecutors alleged, traveled to Las Vegas with Giordano to make the investment. Sansone denied the charge but testified that he was acquainted with Giordano through family ties.

    With the passage of time, however, these eyebrow-raising headlines have been mostly forgotten, and the Sansone Group, as it is now known, goes about its business with little publicity. News stories that chronicle TIF projects are buried in the business section of the daily newspaper or relegated to the pages of the neighborhood weeklies. At the same time, the abuse of TIF keeps pressing the envelope of legality.

    In Hazelwood, Sansone is involved in the redevelopment of the Elm Grove Plaza on Lindbergh. The proposal includes the demolition of 10 houses, with a TIF subsidy of $2.5 million on a $12 million project. In Eureka, Sansone has teamed up with Prime Retail Inc. and is set to begin building an outlet mall with a $35 million TIF subsidy. In Rock Hill, Sansone has been given the go-ahead for a 25-acre development at the intersection of Manchester and McKnight roads. The proposed $24 million mixed-use TIF project would raze 125 middle-income housing units and replace the existing neighborhood with a strip mall and luxury condominiums costing from $200,000-$300,000 each.

    “Development is our business,” says Doug Sansone, a spokesman for Sansone Group. He declined any further comment, saying that members of the family-controlled company didn’t want to be quoted for fear that they would be portrayed in a negative light.

    Space exists at a premium in the retail-development world, a world measured in dollars per square foot. “Big box,” “mega mall,” “power center” and “category killer” are all part of the real-estate jargon that describes the alterations that society is undergoing to fit the expansion of the market economy into the next millennium.