We Learn Nothing Read online

  On the two occasions I can remember being left in Uncle Lee’s unsupervised company, he was ticketed for speeding and suborned me into littering. “Yeah, this thing’ll fool ya,” he told the cop who’d pulled him over, waving at his pickup’s speedometer. Not even I, at age eight, was buying it. On the other occasion, when I asked him what to do with my candy bar wrapper, he shocked me by saying, “Just toss it on the ground—somebody’ll pick it up.” This was in the mid-seventies, when visible pollution was our most pressing environmental concern, and I had been trained by the weeping Indian and Woodsy Owl campaigns to see litterbugs as low types. But because he was the grown-up and I was the kid, I doubtfully tossed my wrapper on the ground. He once brought my sister and me a working nickel slot machine from a defunct casino as a present. His visits were like a whiff of cigarette smoke in church.

  The Somebody’ll-Pick-It-Up philosophy was evidently a governing one in Lee’s life. The fact that all these overdue bills, bounced checks, and delinquent bank accounts ended up in my father’s hands suggests that the mess of Lee’s life was routinely turned over to him to tidy up. These scraps of paper sketch out a semilegitimate existence perpetually on the verge of disintegration: an envelope with a logo for “Accurate Scale & Equipment, Inc.,” with the street address crossed out and “General Delivery” written in over it; a note to one of his girlfriends (addressed to “Honey Bunny”) that reads, “Lots To Do Today But It’s Raining And Mosquitoes Bit Badly Last Night In Truck Guess I’ll Have To Use The Spot Up Camper & Put Up Mosquito Netting If I Can Park Less Charges.” There is also, curiously, a bankbook for a savings account, created in April 1979, recording a deposit of fifty dollars. It isn’t clear why this item was in my father’s possession, as it is not in the name of my uncle, Lawrence Kreider, at all, but rather that of another person altogether, a foreign gentleman perhaps, by the name of Lorenzo Von Kreidler.

  I should probably mention my uncle’s handwriting here. It reminds me of a phrase used by mental health professionals: “floridly psychotic.” Without reading a word of these letters you can see just from looking at them that my uncle is a lunatic. I’m just noticing, as I look at his writing, that it’s not unlike my father’s distinctively elongated and flattened hand—more like an architect’s than a doctor’s—but as if my father had taken mescaline about an hour before sitting down to write. Every word is capitalized, the capitals embellished with elaborate flourishes and curlicues, emphases added with double and triple underlinings, all conveying an affect of demented grandiloquence. Some of the O’s are filled in with little faces, like the grotesques that adorn rococo architecture.

  In a letter dated Easter Sunday of 1979, after an arrest on more serious charges—carrying a handgun and a concealed switchblade, assault, larceny of two postage meters, and “unauthorized use of a 1958 Studebaker”—my uncle charges my father with the responsibility of getting him out of jail. “I Will Eventually Return The Favor Including All Costs,” he promises. “Now’s Your Chance To Prove You Are A Man & A Brother. Try It, Lee.” It’s hard for me to imagine being anything other than disgusted by this pathetic hectoring, but here’s a draft of a letter from my father to parties unknown—presumably Lee’s lawyer, or perhaps the plaintiff—clarifying which of his brother’s expenses he was prepared to assume and which he was not. “The family, having gone through a very similar ordeal twice in the past, finds this expense even more frustrating and extraordinarily costly.” He assures them that Lee would be returning to a psychiatric facility immediately upon his release from prison. “I am enclosing a statement which I trust will be helpful in conveying our assessment of Lee’s need for continued long-term psychiatric care and supervision.” In a note that appears, from its raindrop-spattered ink, to have been left under a windshield wiper, my father gives his brother explicit instructions and conditions for the loan of a pickup truck, taking a rather more peremptory tone than you’d normally expect from one adult to another: “IT’S IMPORTANT THAT YOU MAKE TRIP TO WOODBROOK [the mental hospital] TODAY + BE RESTED WHEN YOU CHECK IN TOMORROW A.M.” A letter from Lee’s lawyer a month and a half later expresses surprise at learning that Lee has discharged himself from this facility, which was to have evaluated his competency to stand trial. A bill from the hospital was forwarded to my father.

  “If he doesn’t get himself into the awfulest situations,” my grandmother wrote my father a few months later. “Am wondering what is going to happen next.”

  “ACCUSED” was the headline in the Delaware State News on August 30, 1981. “[THREE] PERSONS AWAIT TRIALS FOR THEIR ALLEGED ROLES IN SMYRNA COUNTY SLAYINGS.”3

  It’s strange to read luridly detailed newspaper accounts of a story I only ever heard in the vaguest, most evasive terms. Prosecutors described the three suspects in this case as “an assortment of social misfits.” Ed Quarles was a nineteen-year-old who’d been discharged from the navy and was wandering on his motorcycle when he’d met Lee in Florida, who’d invited him to stay with him at his house in Delaware. When they arrived at Lee’s house (which Ed later described as “a dump”), they found all the pipes frozen and burst. They went to do a load of laundry at Lee’s friend Ilene Locklin’s house and ended up crashing there indefinitely. From the first time Ed met her, Ilene talked about how much she hated her husband, a golf pro at a local club. By her account he was an abusive husband who’d beaten her, pulled out hanks of her hair, and violated her sexually with objects. (Ed later wondered, from prison, whether these stories had been true.) Ed, Lee, and Ilene would sit around Ilene’s kitchen table at night, drinking beers and idly talking over murder plots they’d seen in movies and TV shows. They seem never to have explicitly agreed to kill Ilene’s husband; they just casually drifted into discussing how best to do it. My uncle Lee suggested Ed, who had military training, for the job of offing him. Lee later assured prosecutors he would have gone to the police had he taken this talk seriously. While testifying against his co-conspirators, he said, “I guess you might say I sort of went along with it in a noncommittal way, as a friend of Ilene.”

  The murder was a black-comic fiasco out of a Coen Brothers film. The three conspirators had made several failed attempts on Locklin’s life, including a staged mugging that their intended victim foiled by using his wife as a shield. Their final plan, elegant and foolproof, was to drug his food, bludgeon him to death in his sleep, and then place his body in the bathtub to make it look as though he had slipped and struck his head. Ilene crushed six Valium into a macaroni salad she served her husband along with peas and fish sticks. She left him asleep in bed to go let Ed into the house, but declined to stay and watch the murder. Ed clubbed Locklin over the head with a bottle in a paper bag, which instantly shattered and also woke him up. Ed, now armed with a bag of broken glass and confronted with a drugged and angry man, switched to the backup plan, pulling a knife and stabbing Locklin twenty-eight times. Then, reverting to the original script, he filled the bathtub with water and dumped the body in.

  The police, finding a corpse with twenty-eight stab wounds in a bathtub, suspected foul play. Ed Quarles was arrested back in his home state of Minnesota two weeks later and made a full confession, trying to spare what he still thought of as his friends from implication in the crime. It was only when he learned that Lee was testifying against him that he began to understand that he had been used. The local papers made Quarles out to be the patsy and my uncle Lee the real villain. One article referred to him as “the mustachioed Kreider” and described him as appearing in court wearing a brown corduroy suit with an open vest. The same article noted that Lee refused to swear on the Bible, “saying he did not believe in the Bible.” (This was not godlessness but a show of piety—Mennonites, citing Matthew 5:33–37’s injunction against oaths, do not swear on the Bible in court but simply affirm the truth of their statements.) At my uncle’s bail hearing, the deputy attorney general called him “a shiftless individual with no local ties and a tendency to violate parole and probation provisions.” In a let
ter my uncle protested, “I Believe Someone[ . . . ]Should Point Out How Diligently I Was Working Towards Becoming A Well Respected Citizen Of Delaware.”

  My father retained counsel for his brother in May 1980. On the back of one of the legal firm’s envelopes are several lists, jotted in his quick, precise writing. My father was an inveterate list maker—there’s still one of his to-do lists on the brown paper backing the medicine cabinet door in my mother’s house. His lists evidence a mind crackling with ideas, brainstorming, attacking problems from every angle. His notes on the meeting with Lee’s lawyers include questions (“Why no preliminary hearings? Why were rights waived?”), potentially damaging information about Lee’s codefendants (“Army/Navy—Paratroop Boots, Soldier of Fortune Magazine”), and ideas ranging from the immediately practical (“FAMILY SUPPORT—constant, personal, organized—a single strategy in coordination with a lawyer”) to the less so (“60 Minutes [last resort]”). Most touching is his hope to rewrite the official story that made his brother out to be a reprobate: “Can newspaper image of ‘drifter’ be replaced with ‘responsible, clean-cut Mennonite of good family’?” I doubt my father had any illusions about his brother’s innocence (though who knows?—we’re all adept at deluding ourselves about the people we love). But, if only for the sake of influencing public opinion, he wanted to try to make the world see him not as a shabby little killer but as an essentially good person who had gone astray, fallen into corrupt company. Gotten mixed up with some bad people.

  “I Really Don’t Know Where To Begin,” Lee wrote my father after his arrest.

  “If It Were Only Possible For Us To Sit Down And Have A Long Heart To Heart Talk. It Is My Wish & Prayer That Somehow You Will Forgive Me For All The Trouble I Have Involved You In The Past Few Years.”

  This contrition would sound more credible had my uncle accepted any culpability or expressed any guilt for the man’s death. Instead he was, as always, a victim of circumstance and others’ bad faith: “It’s So Hard To Believe Anyone I Tried To Help Out Would Do Such a Thing As Involve Me In A Crime I Did Not Commit.”

  “Walt,” he writes, “I Only See Reason For This If I Have Been Called To A Prison Ministry Or Something.”

  “I Know That This Last Year Has Been One Of Searching For My Place To Best Serve. I’m Sure There Must Be A Way To Put To Good Use All I’ve Learned The Hard Way These Past Years. I Wrote To Chuck Colson* To Inquire Of What His Efforts Have Been As His Work Has Been On My Mind For Quite Sometime.”

  Whether this was phony sanctimony calculated to ingratiate himself with his religious older brother or some genuine, if passing, impulse toward repentance is not for me to judge. My mother tells a story about Uncle Lee once taking my father to task for mowing the lawn on a Sunday. Perhaps he was the kind of Christian who’s a stickler for the commandment about the Sabbath but takes the one about killing on more of a case-by-case basis. For the record, Lee did not enter the ministry.

  In December 1980, Lee’s lawyers came to a plea bargain agreement: Lee would enter a guilty plea to the charge of conspiracy in the second degree and turn state’s evidence against his coconspirators in exchange for immunity on the charges of murder in the first degree and possession of a deadly weapon during the commission of a felony. It was an impressively favorable deal for a man who’d been facing a death sentence. However, he couldn’t enter his plea until after his codefendants’ trials, which meant he still had to spend several more years in jail. The letters from Lee over those years include bitter complaints about the incompetence of his lawyer (“I Got A Bill For The Only Collect Call I Ever Made To His Office. Bonafide Jew!”) and the injustice of the state legal system (“I Think It Is Due To Fear And Capital Gain In A Nutshell!”). He wrote a letter firing his attorney that was never forwarded to the firm. There are crude inducements to guilt (“I’ll Not Bore You With The Conditions Here But I’d Venture To Say If It Were You There’d Be ‘Hell To Pay.’ Evidently Apathy To Gross Injustice Is Universal”), sly threats (“If Nothing Else Works I’m Quite Tempted To Arrange Something Of Bodily Harm To Happen To Myself”), and, throughout it all, requests (“Be Sure To Bring Pens Next Visit & Gum, O.K.? $$ Also Helps!”). In a letter from my grandmother to my father, dated in late May 1981, in which she encloses the taxes on Lee’s house, she writes that there’s no asparagus this year, and the blueberries aren’t doing so well (“Pete trained them too much”). An addendum is squeezed into the bottom line of the page: “Thanks for looking after Lee.”

  All this documentation comes from an accordion file folder stuffed full of old articles and correspondence concerning my uncle that my mother gave me when I was in my thirties. This was the first time that anyone in our family had even tacitly let me in on the whole truth about Lee. While he was facing the possibility of death on the gallows, I was preoccupied with The Empire Strikes Back and Blade Runner and making animated films with our home movie camera. At the same time that my father was dealing with this deluge of bills, outstanding warrants, continuances, legal fees, and demented letters, plotting his brother’s defense strategy, and buying him radios and magazine subscriptions, he also bought me a then-state-of-the-art Super 8 camera with a single-frame button and a subscription to Cinefex, the trade magazine of special effects technicians. My sister and I were effectively kept insulated from the whole sordid mess.

  I think my mother finally divulged all this sad family history as an unsubtle warning because, three years after my father died of cancer, Uncle Lee had started writing to me. The return address on his letter was a suspiciously long post office box address in the middle of nowhere, Florida. In the first paragraph, after a cursory inquiry into how I was doing, Lee got right to his main reason for writing: “I’m In A Bit Of A Bind At Present.” “A Bit Of A Bind” proved to be something of an understatement. “I’m In Jail (Politics) The Good Old Boys Didn’t Want Me Running Against Them.” Further explanation was added in the margin: “So They Are Trying To Ruin Me. I Was Running For Sarasota/Bradenton Airport Commissioner (A Very Good Position).”

  He really had been running for the Sarasota Manatee Airport Authority, it turns out. (“Candidate’s been in trouble before,” reads a story in the local paper.4) But there was a little more substance to the matter than “(Politics)”; the formal charge was twelve counts of attempted murder by arson. This episode had apparently begun as a rental dispute, wherein the tenants of a building Uncle Lee owned had collectively protested what they considered unacceptable conditions and long-neglected repairs by withholding their rent. Lee had boldly escalated the conflict by setting the building on fire. Twelve people were in the building at the time, hence the twelve counts. As with the assassination of the golf pro, it was not the work of a Dr. Moriarty; Lee, who had fled the scene, was living in his pickup truck with a couple of pit bulls when he was apprehended at a gas station, suffering from second-degree burns and reeking of kerosene. If convicted, he faced a sentence of twenty to fifty years.

  “I Must Admit I Was Quite A Bit Disappointed When I Found Your Mother & Lynn [my father’s sister] Both Refused To Send Enough Monies To Retain An Attorney For Me,” he wrote. “Actually I Have No Idea Who Else I Could Ask. There Is No Way I Can Get To Bank Properties Or Anything Til I Get An Attorney.” He claimed to own several boats, automobiles, furniture, jewelry, “Many Heirlooms,” etc., in Florida that could be liquidated to provide for his defense.

  It Would Be Extremely Helpful If Someone Like Yourself From The Family Could Come And Help. It Would Not Take Long To Get Everything Straightened Out. I Would Have Been Out Yesterday If I Had An Attorney. Timothy, I Need Help Badly!

  He gave me the names and phone numbers of a couple of women from his church whom I could call to coordinate our efforts. In a postscript he wrote: “I Started 9 Books Since Inside Writing 15/20 Pages Daily. Need To Ask You Info. On Publishing, Etc.”

  My mother was appalled when she learned I’d been in contact with Lee. “Tim,” she told me, “do not try to help your uncle.” This
was the same tone of voice she’d use to tell me not to go near a hot burner when I was a child. “It’s very compassionate of you to want to try to help him, that’s a good quality, write him letters if you want, but do not get involved with his life. He is just . . . so crazy—your father and I tried to protect you from his craziness, and I guess we did too good a job of it, because you just don’t know how crazy he is. Believe me—he will make you crazy trying to help him.” Mom still tells the story of how I put my hand on a hot burner even after she’d told me not to.

  I think I tried to help my uncle not because my father would’ve wanted me to—in fact he would likely have forbidden it—but because it’s what he would’ve done himself. My mother, in explaining why she’d never remarried, once called my father “a hard act to follow.” Even among my friends, “Walt,” as everyone but me called him, had had an image as a supremely capable fellow who’d appear in a crisis and fix everything with brisk élan. Once, years after my father’s death, a friend of mine was complaining at a party about painful periodontal problems he couldn’t afford to get fixed, and, before considering whether there might be a better time to make the offer, I blurted out, “Jesus, I’ll pay for it. You can pay me back whenever. Just get them fixed!” I was embarrassed to have made such a thoughtless show of magnanimity in front of a group, but he later told me, “It was very Walt-like.” Trying to help Uncle Lee made me feel grown-up and competent, more like my father.