Furthermore, wrote Kerze, he intended to commit suicide. He declined to give a reason. But he understood how deeply it would hurt those he loved, and for that he expressed regret.
“Take heart,” he continued, “because if just one person is better off for having known me, my life will not have been wasted.”
The next day, two days after Kerze was last seen, police found the family’s van abandoned by the side of the road in Itasca County in northern Minnesota, about 20 miles north of Grand Rapids.
And yet: all these years later, no one can say with certainty what happened. When Kerze left the house, he took the shotgun but not the ammunition. No traces of him have ever been found—not the shotgun, not his glasses, not his clothes, and not his body. And, as Ernie Allen said, “He could’ve changed his mind. The reality is he is missing until he’s found.”
The uncertainty is, for Jim Kerze, both hope and torment. But he hasn’t given up. “My pipe dream is that Christopher works for a little company in Cleveland, is married and has three kids. He’s a very quiet employee. He’s not a person who would lead the charge. He’s one of those guys in the back to hold the place together.
“Smart, could do the job, hold the place together, be very relied on. But you wouldn’t want to ask him to try to sell stuff to the public because that’s not his personality. His personality is the other way.”
He paused. “I know that the reality, intellectually, is probably a lot different. But you have to have some way to hope.”
Originally published by MEL magazine, November 2016
The True Crime Story Behind a 1970s Cult Feminist Film Classic
By Sarah Weinman
They met in New Orleans just before Mardi Gras, in 1959. He was part owner of a French Quarter bookshop. She was looking for a job. He was 30. So was she, though she claimed to be three years younger. He said his name was Don Reisinger. She gave hers as Alma Malone. His name was fake. Hers was, too, in a way; she hadn’t used her birth name, Stephens, in a long time.
She didn’t get the job. She did, however, get the guy.
Alma and Don made a strange couple. He was short—five foot four without his customary elevator shoes, and 110 pounds on a good day. He tended to squint at the light or when something didn’t suit, but was rarely photographed with glasses on. She was taller, rangier: a natural brunette with an elegant neck.
Don tended to disappear for days or weeks at a time. Alma never had warning before he’d take off, and even less when, in early September, he told her they were leaving for Cleveland. She didn’t have anyone to alert, anyway, being estranged from her family.
That family included a mother and a younger sister, back in her hometown of Salina, Kansas, both of whom she refused to write. Her father played no part in her life; his repeated molestation of her had driven her to juvenile delinquency, a stint in a Kansas City convent, and a permanent grudge against her mother. She wasn’t in contact with her 11-year-old son, Robert—who lived with his father—either, nor with any of her four ex-husbands, the first of whom she married when she was only 14 years old.
Alma and Don arrived in Cleveland on September 7, 1959. Once there, Don revealed that his real name was William Ansley. (He also operated under the aliases Shannon Ansley, William Shannon, and Robert Shannon.) He had drifted into New Orleans two years earlier, after finishing up probation and a suspended sentence in Philadelphia for armed robbery.
That sentence stemmed from an earlier, more serious one in Boston, when William decided to hold up the Northeast Airlines offices at the Statler Hotel. It didn’t go well. William bungled the robbery, nearly killed a cab driver, and received a 9- to 12-year sentence for both crimes.
But William had a new plan, as he explained to Alma: the newspapers were full of reports about someone who had tried to heist the Lorain Avenue branch of the Cleveland Trust Company bank. William would do one better. “He said if I would help him he could do it successfully, but if anything did go wrong, we could die,” Alma later told reporters. “I kept stalling the job. I suppose I wanted to live, even though I didn’t have much to live for.”
Alma and William spent the next two weeks planning the job. She bleached her brown hair blond and pretended at pregnancy, thanks to a maternity dress and foam-rubber padding. William bought a blond wig of his own to conceal his bald head, as well as all the equipment they would need for a successful bank heist.
By the morning of September 23, William and Alma were ready. He affixed the wig on his head. She threw on a shabby blue gabardine dress and a pair of faded black loafers. He made a list of 15 steps to follow to the letter, and put the list in his pocket.
What happened in no way resembled what they had planned. It did, however, end up immortalized on film.
WATCHING WANDA, BARBARA LODEN’S 1970 DIRECTORIAL debut, is a revelation. The pace is languid, until it isn’t. Grimy and washed-out, the film makes a point of being naturalistic.
Wanda Goronski, played by 38-year-old Loden herself, is drabness personified—a Rust Belt housewife barely awake, listless about cooking, cleaning, and her employment status. She lies on the couch, absorbing her sister’s pointed criticism about her state of apathy. She drifts into bars and mediocre sex. She is robbed while asleep in a movie theater and barely reacts.
“I’m just no good,” Wanda declares in court as she loses custody of her two children to the husband she’s divorcing. She soon takes up with Mr. Dennis, who she meets in a bar, endures his physical abuse, and goes along with his criminal plans, because she has nowhere else to go.
The filmmaker herself could relate. “I used to be a lot like that,” Loden explained to the Los Angeles Times a few months after Wanda was released. “I had no identity of my own. I just became whatever I thought people wanted me to become.”
Loden was an ex-Copacabana showgirl with a heavy North Carolina accent who was transformed by Method lessons into an actress of note. (Her Marilyn Monroe–inspired performance in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall won her a Tony Award.) She landed juicy film roles, including one as Warren Beatty’s sister in Splendor in the Grass, and a famous director husband, Elia Kazan, to whom she was married until her premature death in 1980 at the age of 48.
Loden’s marriage to Kazan came after she spent years as his mistress, an affair begun while she was still married to the father of her two sons, Leo and Marco. She endured a heavy dose of public humiliation from Kazan’s depiction of her in his 1967 roman à clef The Arrangement, made even worse when Loden was passed over for a role in the film adaptation in favor of Faye Dunaway. Kazan later tried to take credit for Wanda’s initial script—though he claimed, with mock gallantry, to have stayed out of his wife’s way as she shot the film in and around Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Loden’s internal strife provided the emotional motivation for her to write, direct, and act in the film. But the seed for Wanda—which manifests, in the second half of the film, in a bank robbery that goes awry—was planted a decade before the film’s limited release: Loden had chanced upon a March 27, 1960, newspaper story called “The Go-for-Broke Bank Robber,” which described a duo’s failed bank heist in Cleveland that led to the death of the lead robber. Loden seized upon the story of the accomplice, a woman who later thanked the judge for her long prison sentence.